There were a few typos in part 1; please excuse them and register the somewhat obvious edits in your mind. People make mistakes.
For this part, I’ll attempt to bring you up to speed with respect to what I referred to in the last part: a direct threat made to me by Tesla managing counsel Ryan C. McCarthy.
Apparently Mr. McCarthy believes he has a firmer grasp on the relevant legal statutes at play here than I do. I should like him, and Tesla, to prove that.
As best I can determine it, corporations have taken control of this country. Big business does what it pleases almost whenever it pleases, and no one yet has figured out a way to — metaphorically speaking — punch it straight in the mouth.
I am actually quite well positioned to do that, however, and so I’ll tell you what is going to happen. It ought to already be obvious, but I’ll tell you anyway.
Starting from roughly the beginning:
- I gathered sufficient expertise in the electric vehicle field and sufficient contacts to gain a unique perspective on it, and useful insights about what it needs and where it’s going.
- I attempted on countless occasions to deliver the fruit of those insights and experience to people positioned well enough to take action on them. All across the country, and thrice including Puerto Rico.
- My constructive input went unheeded, and largely unanswered. Because I’d vetted the suggestions I had through almost a dozen industry-specific PhD’s, I thought the reason for this might be because of financial interests. It does generally cost something to implement suggestions.
- As a result of #3, I reluctantly offered my work for free, reasoning that there would hardly be objection on financial grounds if I just gave it up in the interests of environmentalism.
- Due most probably to the principle, “what doesn’t have a price tag isn’t valued” my work went largely unreviewed.
- I then sold everything of value that I owned and completed the second portion of my field research using a 2017 Chevy Bolt I leased through the Maven program out of Washington, D.C.
- After completing that second 43,000 mile second 48-contiguous state capitol road trip, and receiving no feedback from Maven or GM, aside from an inert connection to Sigal Cordeiro (Vice President of Urban Mobility & Maven at General Motors), I determined that my second choice, General Motors, would be no more effective than Tesla had been as my first choice of contact.
Bear in mind that I am without question one of the most if not the most experienced electric vehicle road tripper in the entire world. It simply isn’t a boast. I know more about the infrastructure and what is required to sensibly expand it than anyone else alive.
And Tesla won’t even answer my ‘phone calls?’
Despite the fact that founding President of Plug In America and personal friend Paul Scott has suggested that Tesla hire me to help roll out supercharging infrastructure?
How should a person in my position handle such a situation aside from “throwing a Hail Mary”?
Well I threw that Hail Mary.
I sat on Cargurus.com waiting for the perfect opportunity to get a low-cost, high-mileage Tesla Model S for an affordable price. Then I saw Steve Sasman — noted electric vehicle advocate and owner of an S, 3, and X — selling the car he had already taken on two 48-state road trips. He wanted $30,000 for the car,
a 2012 Tesla Model S P85 with about 214,000 miles on it
and it looked to me like a good possibility. People were harassing him and saying the car wasn’t worth the price he was asking. Some said it was “worth $17,000, tops.”
People who know better understand that a functional Tesla with no body damage will be worth more than $20,000 no matter how many miles are on it, and someone like me is more than abundantly clear on that fact.
The car had free Supercharging for life, as well. Which in itself is probably worth $30,000 depending on who owns it. Especially a person like me, who drives like he’s trying to figure out how fast he can wear out a set of tires.
I beseeched my 91 year old grandmother to grant me advance inheritance, and almost shockingly, she did so. She wired the entire amount to an account she made for that purpose, and Steve charged me $26,000 for the car. I picked it up in Scottsdale, Arizona on August 24, 2019 — the fourth anniversary of my first negative carbon road trip.
For now, I will skip over the initial testing I performed on the car. Suffice to say that I drove it over 5,600 miles in a single week and that isn’t a typo. An average of 800 miles a day for a full week, culminating in Hawthorne at the Cybertruck unveiling, which Steve invited me to on short notice as his +1.
By that point, I had resolved to make the third and final installment of the Negative Carbon Roadtrip series be an epic 200,000+ mile trip in the car this year, 2020. I figured that the fact that it’s a leap year gave me a little bit more breathing room — it only required me to drive
546.45 miles per day on average
I was sure the car could do it, and I knew once I finished such a trip that no one would ever doubt Tesla or Elon Musk again. I’d finance the trip through Roadie (a gig package delivery system) and this time I’d just plain do the whole damn thing myself.
Then my car broke down on 12/16/19 due to a software firewall that protects Tesla’s still-under-warranty main traction battery at the cost of my DC to DC converter (essentially the electric vehicle analog to an alternator.)
I had already been training for my trip for four months. I’d lost almost 30 pounds and been running about 50 miles per week, because
the public responds to superlatives
or so says Elon Musk, and thus I planned to run a marathon in every state (they aren’t hosted in every capitol, as I found out) during the process of putting the car through an equivalent sort of marathon.
Mainly because I knew the lot of you would say that such a thing is impossible, right up until the point you saw videotape evidence of it.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Why would a person do such a thing?
Because I’m really just tired of people being so terribly unaware of what they’re doing to this planet, and as God is my witness I do not and will not tolerate it continuing just as long as I‘m still breathing.
I knew Tesla, Elon Musk, Kimbal, Steve Jurvetson, etc. were all deafer than fenceposts, and I knew almost all of the rest of you are, too. But you know what?
I don’t care.
I don’t care because along the course of things, I’ve been able to conclusively determine that if this isn’t some sort of elaborate “Matrix-like” video game, then certainly God or some other higher power must be in control, and also that he/she/it/they is not/are not especially pleased with what the rest of you are doing to this planet.
Ergo, not a single one of you can touch me regardless of what you might think. I know the law quite well, I know the rules of common decency, I know what to say and what not to say when police harass me with a 939 call, and I know that if the lot of you don’t answer to me, you will most assuredly answer to someone whose voice is FAR louder than mine.
I am getting myself out of the way of that particular judgment, because there are only two things I fear:
- dying and winding up facing the judgment of God
- dying and finding out it really is a video game and that everyone who has ever lived is sitting there watching — ready to laugh at the idiocy I see all around me or perhaps clap me on the back for doing the best I could.
Which not a whole hell of a lot of the rest of you ever do.
To continue where I left off:
Tesla took my car into service and botched the job in about as many ways as a company could do so. I couldn’t figure out exactly why they would do such a thing, but I guessed it might be some kind of ninth plane of hell test, and that I just needed to step in the right direction repeatedly to successfully navigate this crazy ass Dragon’s Lair.
But they just would not stop making mistakes.
The latest was a couple of hours ago now, from Ryan C. McCarthy, Managing Counsel of Tesla, who writes the following (much of which is factually incorrect, and probably breaks at least one or two consumer protection laws):
Ryan apparently believes I answer to someone other than I do. I certainly DO NOT answer to him or to Tesla, and I certainly don’t care that he’s threatening to sever my contact with the company, considering that doing so would most assuredly open a multibillion dollar can of worms for it.
No, Ryan, I’m not going to play “war of attrition” with you. I’m not even going to engage in ad hominem attacks or gaslighting, techniques which I assure you have no material effect on a guy like me.
I will tell you, however, if you attempt to alter my vehicle after all that has previously transpired, if you ask anyone else to do such a thing directly against my expressed orders forbidding you to do such a thing and against your previous written agreement to not do so until at least the third of February, you will be taking not just your job but the future well being of your company into your hands.
No one threatens me. Not you, not U.S. law, not Donald Trump, and not the King’s army. I hope you get this straight in your head before I arrive on Tuesday with papers from the New York State attorney general’s office. I hope you at least have the good sense to counsel Elon Musk or the board of directors of Tesla that at this point, the situation ought to be taken far more seriously than the lot of you have up to now.
You have two remaining deadlines.
I’ll extend today’s until 9PM EST to give Elon a chance to cancel his plans for today and visit the Buffalo Gigafactory as I previously and politely requested, but the Tuesday deadline remains in place:
Tuesday, 1/28/20, 4:20PM
will be your final opportunity to handle this situation sensibly before I unleash all my information and let the market do what it will with you.
I thank you for your time and consideration.
Most sincerely,
Brian Kent
P.S. While reviewing this information on my final edit pass, I noted a much easier opportunity for you, since my friend Paul Scott lives right in Santa Monica and I’m sure he’d be happy to negotiate this situation on my behalf. If you should like to take that route, please have Elon go pick him up in the Cybertruck and that should suffice to open the line of communication I have been requesting, quite simply, for quite a while.
I’d be happy to pay for the repairs that I never authorized if you’re willing to at least do that, and it’s a lot more carbon sensitive than flying all the way across the country. Thanks again for your time.
