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Tesla will assist Chinese authorities in investigating a dramatic Tesla Model Y crash in Guangdong, China, which killed two and injured three. But rumors have been flying on social media with potential causes of the crash, most of which are untrue or impossible.

The accident happened on November 5, and video has been circulating on Chinese social media. The CCTV video shows (warning: graphic) a Tesla Model Y attempting to park, then speeding off on a two-lane road, swerving between lanes at high speed, sideswiping cars and motorcycles before eventually crashing into a storefront about 30 seconds and 2.6 kilometers later.

An unnamed family member of the 55-year-old male driver stated that the driver had issues with the brake pedal when he was about to pull over in front of the family store, as reported by Jimu News. As best we can tell, the driver survived with injuries.

Tesla, as is often the case, has claimed that vehicle logs show that the brake pedal was not applied during the incident, and that the accelerator pedal was pressed for a significant portion of the event, and cautioned against people believing “rumors” about the incident. CCTV video shows that the brake lights were not illuminated in rear shots of the car, though they appear to turn on shortly at about 23 seconds after the start of the incident.

Police in Guangdong will work with a third-party agency to assess vehicle logs and CCTV footage to determine the truth about the incident.

(Warning: people die in this video, though it is not immediately clear from the footage. squeamish people may nevertheless not want to watch)

Tesla has faced other accusations of malfunctioning brake pedals in the past, including from a Chinese customer who staged a protest at their Shanghai Motor Show booth claiming that an accident she was in was a result of a brake failure. These accusations are not just limited to China, Tesla has also received many complaints in the US, which it responded to in a blog post claiming “there is no ‘unintended acceleration’ in Tesla vehicles.”

These complaints were examined by the NHTSA which found that incidents of sudden unintended acceleration in Teslas were a result of driver error, and not due to any design flaw in the vehicle. The NHTSA reminds drivers that there are 16,000 preventable crashes per year in the US due to pedal error and cautions drivers to be aware of this problem.

This didn’t stop social media from swirling with rumors about the latest Tesla crash, though. Both on Chinese and English-language social media, there have been many posts suggesting various causes without evidence, most of which do not stand up to basic scrutiny.

Some have claimed that the vehicle was attempting to autopark and then went haywire, running off at high speed. But the type of swerving, hard-accelerating behavior shown in the video is not characteristic of Autopilot, much less autopark, and both would have been disabled by a tap on the brake pedal at any point.

Others stated that the vehicle’s motor is too strong for the brakes to overcome, but given that the brake lights were not on and vehicle brakes are designed to overcome the force of the motor/engine, this explanation is not satisfactory either.

The accusations are similar to those that have happened with other vehicles. Famously, Toyota faced a “sudden unintended acceleration” recall in 2009-2011, where the automaker recalled various parts of their vehicles in response to an uptick in reports of unintended acceleration. While design flaws in floor mats or accelerator pedals may have contributed to some cases, most cases were found to be issues of driver error – and were more common among elderly and unskilled drivers. Increased reports tracked media coverage of the problem, with more reports coming in as media coverage intensified.

China is Tesla’s second-largest market. The company recently started pulling demand levers, including cutting prices, as a response to falling sales in the country.

Electrek’s Take

While it is entirely possible that there is some unexamined cause here, it’s almost certainly the same cause as it always is in these situations: someone pressed the wrong pedal, and then kept pressing it when they panicked.

This doesn’t mean there can’t be a design flaw involved. I’ve noticed first-time Tesla drivers getting the pedals crossed (i.e., accidentally pressing both pedals at the same time) perhaps more often than I would expect in a vehicle. It’s possible that the position of the pedals is a little closer than they should be, though I am not an engineer with particular expertise in pedal safety regulations, so take that with a grain of salt. Also, whenever this happens, the car has popped up a warning about crossed pedals and automatically cut power to the accelerator, favoring the brake over the accelerator – so that couldn’t be the cause of this crash.

But crediting this to Autopilot just doesn’t make any sense. This is clearly not Autopilot behavior, as anyone familiar with the system (and aware of its downsides) can tell. I’d bet that the third-party investigation will find that the driver was just pressing the accelerator the whole time, and that this was human error, as is the case in many crashes. So why so much discussion of this Tesla crash specifically?

Tesla is a popular topic on social media – it’s a high-profile brand, it’s different, and it drives a lot of traffic for various reasons, one of which due to its firebrand CEO who loves to be the center of attention. Whenever anything happens with Tesla, people talk about it – there are deadly crashes in various cars every day, most of which do not generate nearly as much social media discussion or articles (such as this one, sigh) about them. People just always have something to say about Tesla.

The presence of social media rumors can especially be expected right now, given that it is quite popular to “dunk on” Tesla CEO Elon Musk lately, due to his recent behavior and the dumpster fire associated with his purchase of the very social media platform where many of these rumors are circulating: twitter.

Twitter has long been a source of rapidly-spread disinformation, which Musk himself has participated in. He has routinely spread COVID-19 disinformation, among other topics, while promising that his purchase of the company would result in the removal of guardrails intended to protect against disinformation on the social media site. For example, he recently tweeted (and later deleted) that “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” echoing a false and bigoted conspiracy theory about a violent attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

This sort of active disinformation spreading from the CEO of Twitter and Tesla naturally leads to public resentment that the world’s richest man would spend so much of his time and effort on polluting information streams instead of fixing his companies. So some number of people will be uninterested in seeing “his side” of the story, and will actively distrust anything that he or Tesla has to say, since he is spending so much public effort spreading disinformation lately.

If Tesla’s mission is to “accelerate the advent of sustainable transport” – and they are the company most responsible for electrification currently – then it doesn’t seem particularly productive for the CEO to spend so much time spreading social media disinformation, turning public opinion against him and his company and its mission. We’d like to see less of that.

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Global energy giant RWE halts US offshore wind because of Trump

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Global energy giant RWE halts US offshore wind because of Trump

Global renewable developer and energy giant RWE has halted its US offshore wind operations “for the time being” because of the “political environment” the Trump administration has created.

RWE, Germany’s biggest electricity producer, said in March that it had dialed back its US offshore wind activities. But now, CEO Marcus Krebber said in a speech transcript, which he’ll deliver at the company’s Annual General Meeting in Essen on April 30, that its US offshore wind business is now closed (but it wasn’t all bad news): 

In the US, where we have stopped our offshore activities for the time being, our business in onshore wind, solar energy, and battery storage has so far been developing very dynamically. At the start of this year, we reached an important milestone when our US generation capacity hit the 10 gigawatt mark. The construction of a further 4 gigawatts is secured.

He went on to say that renewables have created regional value and jobs, but that the company remains “cautious given the political developments.” RWE has introduced more stringent requirements for future US investments:

All necessary federal permits must be in place. Tax credits must be safe harbored and all relevant tariff risks mitigated. In addition, onshore wind and solar projects must have secured offtake at the time of the investment decision. Only if these conditions are met will further investments be possible, given the political environment.

About half of RWE’s installed renewable capacity is in the US, where it’s the third-largest renewable energy company through its subsidiary, RWE Clean Energy. RWE holds the rights to develop US offshore wind projects in New York, Louisiana, and California.

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RWE paid $1.1 billion for the New York lease area in 2022, where it’s meant to develop the 3 gigawatt (GW) Community Offshore Wind with the UK’s National Grid. Community Offshore Wind was projected to come online in the early 2030s and expected to power more than a million homes.

The developer paid $5.6 billion for the Louisiana lease in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023 as the lone bidder for development rights, and the Canopy Offshore Wind project off Northern California was not expected to be completed for another decade.

Read more: Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build


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Trump’s memecoin dinner contest earns insiders $900,000 in two days

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Trump's memecoin dinner contest earns insiders 0,000 in two days

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and his allies have raked in nearly $900,000 in trading fees over the past two days from the president’s $TRUMP cryptocurrency token, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain data company. 

The surge came after a Wednesday announcement in which the top 220 holders of the token were promised dinner with the president.

“Have Dinner in Washington, D.C. With President Trump,” reads a message on the front page of the Trump coin’s website. The event, which is black tie optional and hosted at the president’s private club in the Washington area, is scheduled for May 22, with a reception for the top 25 holders. A “VIP White House Tour” will take place the following day, the site says. The website also hosts an active leaderboard displaying the usernames of top buyers.

The $TRUMP memecoin jumped more than 50% on the dinner news, boosting its total market value to $2.7 billion. It was met with fierce criticism from some of Trump’s political opponents who said the move was further evidence that the president was using crypto to enrich himself. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a prominent Trump critic, wrote on X that the sale was “the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Roughly 80% of the $TRUMP token supply is controlled by the Trump Organization and affiliates, according to the project’s website. Since its launch in January, trading activity has generated about $324.5 million in trading fees for insiders, Chainalysis found. These fees are generated through the token’s built-in mechanism that routes a percentage of each trade to wallets controlled by the project — wallets that, according to the website, are linked to the coin’s creators.

Memecoins, often referred to as meme tokens, are a subset of digital assets that use blockchain technology and derive their value largely from internet culture, memes and social media hype rather than from an underlying utility or asset. The originators of memecoins can make fees when their coins are bought and sold.

They have grown in popularity in recent years as speculative assets, with some coins including dogecoin and fartcoin amassing total market values in excess of $1 billion.

Most of the $TRUMP supply remains locked under a three-year vesting plan, with coins gradually becoming available over time. Lockups like these are meant to protect investors by preventing insiders from cashing out all at once — a scheme commonly known in the crypto world as a “rug pull.” Vesting schedules aim to give retail buyers confidence that early holders won’t overwhelm the market and tank the token’s value.

Still, the dinner contest is being viewed by critics as an unusually explicit attempt to monetize presidential access. 

As CNBC reported Friday, Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are urging the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate whether the promotion constitutes “pay to play” corruption.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The company behind the memecoin also did not respond to a request for comment.

Delaney Marsco, the director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit focused on campaign finance and government accountability, told NBC News the coin and dinner contest amounted to an unprecedented ethics breach — though it is unlikely to be illegal.

“Criminal conflicts of interest statutes don’t apply to the President,” she said. “That has allowed him to go against decades of of norms that every modern president since Carter has adhered to, which is to divest your financial interests, rid yourself of your businesses, and kind of go in to the presidency with a clean financial slate so that no one could accuse you of manipulating policy decisions or using your position in order to enrich yourself.” 

“The fact that he is not barred by the law from having these financial interests like this meme coin allows him to engage in a lot of seemingly corrupt activity. It has the appearance of a pay to play, so the President is apparently selling access to himself,” Marsco added.

Molly White, an independent crypto researcher, told NBC News that the leaderboard only shows top $TRUMP holders — and then only by their chosen screen name, making it difficult to identify who is paying to potentially join the dinner.

Schiff and Warren have cited public reports showing that some $TRUMP investors have ties to foreign exchanges or received funds from crypto platforms banned in the U.S., including Binance.

White also noted that at least one top $TRUMP owner has an account on Binance, a cryptocurrency company that doesn’t allow American users.

Trump was elected with significant help from the cryptocurrency industry, which poured tens of millions of dollars into the 2024 election, outpacing corporate donations from traditional sectors like banking and oil. After opposing digital assets during his first term, Trump pivoted in 2024 to campaign as a champion of cryptocurrency, casting Democrats as hostile to innovation and as advocating for tighter regulation. 

The $TRUMP token itself offers no product or service, according to the project’s website. It is part of a broader push by the Trump family into digital assets, despite the market’s volatility and regulatory risks.

In addition to the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, the family is backing World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance venture that has raised $550 million across two token sales since last October. Buyers are barred from reselling their tokens and receive no share of profits — but a Trump-affiliated entity is entitled to 75% of net revenue, including token sale proceeds.

Together, these projects have created new streams of revenue for Trump and his inner circle at a time when regulatory oversight of cryptocurrency has weakened sharply under his administration.

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Drive Electric Earth Month, continues this weekend, get your EV Qs answered

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Drive Electric Earth Month, continues this weekend, get your EV Qs answered

It’s that time of year again, time for events across the country to show off electric vehicles at Drive Electric Earth Month.

Drive Electric Earth Month is an offshoot of Drive Electric Week, a long-running annual tradition hosting meetups mostly in the US, but also occasionally in other countries. It started as Drive Electric Earth Day, but since not every event can happen on the same day, they went ahead and extended it to encompass “Earth Month” events that happen across the month of April. It’s all organized by Plug In America, the Sierra Club, the Electric Vehicle Association, EV Hybrid Noire, and Drive Electric USA.

Events consist of general Earth Day-style community celebrations, EV Ride & Drives where you can test drive several EVs in one place, and opportunities to talk to EV owners and ask them questions about what it’s like to live with an EV, away from the pressure of a dealership.

This month, there are 158 events registered across the US and 1 in Mexico (including one online webinar about things to consider when purchasing an EV).

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Events have been happening all month, but the biggest weekend is this upcoming one, APril 26-27.

One really neat event was the Asheville event, which showcased the resiliency of EVs in an area devastated by Hurricane Helene, which was made more severe by climate change. That event was attended by the Rivian R1T which famously got dragged 100 feet submerged in mud and came out running fine.

But the bulk of the events happened on the weekends surrounding Earth Day, April 22, so there were several last weekend and will be even more this upcoming weekend.

There are plenty of events in the big cities where you’d expect, but Plug In America wanted to highlight a few of the events in smaller places around the country. Here’s a sampling of upcoming events:

  • Big Island EV – Cruise and Picnic in Waimea, HI on April 26, 10am-1pm – EV drivers will congregate in various places around the Big Island (Kona, Waimea, Waikoloa and Hilo), then drive up Saddle Road to the Gil Kahele Recreation Area on Mauna Kea for a potluck and a chance to talk about the experience of owning EVs on the Big Island.
  • Santa Barbara Earth Day 2025 and Green Car Show in Santa Barbara, CA on April 26-27, 11am-8pm – This is part of Santa Barbara’s Earth Day celebration, which routinely attracts 30,000 participants and is one of the longest-running Earth Day celebrations on the planet. The Green Car Show includes ride & drives and an “Owners Corner” where owners can showcase their EVs and attendees can check them out and ask questions.
  • Earth Day’25 – EV’s role in a sustainable future in Queretaro City, Mexico on April 26, 9am-4pm – The sole Mexican event, this is a combined in-person/online seminar at the Querétaro Institute of Technology.
  • Norman Earth Day Festival in Norman, OK on April 27, 12-5pm – Another municipal Earth Day festival, with hands-on activities for kids to learn about the environment. A portion of the parking lot reserved for an EV car show for EV owners who pre-register to show off their vehicles.
  • Oregon Electric Vehicle Association Test Drive & Information Expo in Portland, OR on April 27, 10am-4pm – This one is at Daimler Truck’s North American HQ, and will have several EVs for test drives, owner displays (including DIY gas-to-EV conversions), and keynote presentations by EV experts. They’ll even have a 1914 Detroit Electric EV available for test rides!
  • And, we at Electrek want to give a shoutout to Rove’s EV Drive Days in Santa Ana 10am-3pm April 28 – ROVE is the company behind the “full-service” EV charging concept that we’ve talked about several times here on Electrek, and we like what they’re doing for EV charging. They’ve hosted a few community events, and this is their contribution to Earth Month.

Each event has a different assortment of activities (e.g. test drives won’t be available at every event, generally just the larger ones attended by local dealerships), so be sure to check the events page to see what the plan is for your local event.

These events have offered a great way to connect with owners and see the newest electric vehicle tech, and even get a chance to do test rides and drives in person. Attendees got to hear unfiltered information from actual owners about the benefits and trials of owning EVs, allowing for longer and more genuine (and often more knowledgeable) conversations than one might normally encounter at a dealership.

And if you’re an owner – you can show off your car and answer those questions for interested onlookers.

To view all the events and see what’s happening in your area, you can check out the list of events or the events map. You can also sign up to volunteer at your local events, and if you plan to show off your electric car, you can RSVP on each event page and list the vehicle that you plan to show (or see what other vehicles have already registered).


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