#tesla transportation service

[redcarpetluxlimo]

Experience luxury in NYC with the Cadillac Escalade ESV, elegant SUVs like the Lincoln Navigator,premium Mercedes Benz, and Tesla. Book your ride today!

[wigoutlet]

[clatterbane]

Oh my. This whole ongoing mess really is crap hilarious.

The ruling is the latest twist in a battle between Tesla and labour groups in Sweden. Union IF Metall put mechanics on strike on Oct. 27, refusing to service Tesla's cars because the company would not accept collective bargaining.

Members of other unions, including dockworkers, electricians and cleaners have since taken action in sympathy.

Tesla has a policy of not signing collective bargaining agreements and says its employees have as good, or better, terms than those demanded by IF Metall. The union says it is vital to the Swedish labour market model that all companies have collective agreements...

Seko, the union that organised the PostNord workers, told Reuters an easy solution for Tesla was to sign the collective bargaining agreement with IF Metall.

So yeah, the agency issuing the licence plates needs to find some way of getting them to Tesla, without any obligation on anyone else to actually deliver them.

It also sounds remarkably like someone at the Transport Agency was being purposely obstructive there too, beyond normal-level dealing with bureaucracies. They also probably did NOT particularly want to piss off the postal workers in question, by trying to circumvent their existing shipping contract while said postal workers were refusing to deliver to Tesla.

A little more background:

So yeah, good luck getting anything done when basically every other industry is refusing to deal with your business, or even deliver its mail. You would think that whoever was actually making certain decisions at Tesla would have learned from the similar Toys 'R' Us debacle in the mid-'90s.

My guess is that they were at least hoping that nearly 30 more years of neoliberal influence might have weakened organized labor enough for them to get away with pulling this shit now. Either that, or 'just' contravening the Being Bloody Stupid Act of 1581. And then freaking Elon did an Elon, and responded to any criticism by doubling down on some terrible choices.

I can only hope that, if this was the line of thinking? That someone was sorely mistaken, and severely underestimated how well the whole Nordic Model has managed to hold up.

[mariacallous]

Swedish workers are uniting against Tesla. From tomorrow, cleaners will stop cleaning Tesla showrooms, electricians won’t fix the company’s charging points, and dockworkers will refuse to unload Tesla cargo at all Swedish ports. What started as a strike by Tesla mechanics is spreading, in something Swedish unions describe as an existential battle between Elon Musk’s carmaker and the conventions they say make the country’s labor market fair and efficient.

The standoff in Sweden is the biggest union action the company has faced anywhere in the world. Sweden doesn’t have laws that set working conditions, such as a minimum wage. Instead these rules are dictated by collective agreements, a type of contract that defines the benefits employees are entitled to, such as wages and working hours. For five years, industrial workers’ union IF Metall, which represents Tesla mechanics, has been trying to persuade the company to sign a collective agreement. When Tesla refused, the mechanics decided to strike at the end of October. Then they asked fellow Swedish unions to join them.

“Collective agreements form the backbone of the Swedish labor market model,” says Mikael Pettersson, head of negotiations at the electricians’ union, which plans to join the blockade tomorrow. “Fighting for the Swedish model becomes even more crucial when it involves such a large company as Tesla.” Negotiations are currently at a standstill. IF Metall spokesperson Jesper Pettersson told WIRED that there are no ongoing talks with Tesla as of Wednesday.

Tesla didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Some unions that joined the blockade are expanding their actions in an effort to be more effective. Since November 7, union members working at four Swedish ports have been refusing to unload Tesla cargo. Tomorrow, the blockade will be extended to all ports in Sweden. “We don’t want to unload any Tesla cars,” says Jimmy Åsberg, who is president of the dockworkers’ branch of Sweden’s transport union and works at Gävle port. “We are going to allow every other car [to dock], but the Tesla cars, they will stay on the ship.”

He hopes Tesla will understand how important this issue is for workers in the country. “Not just dockworkers but for all workers in Sweden.”

The Swedish Building Maintenance Workers’ Union will also join the Tesla blockade on Friday at 12 pm local time, “simply because the [IF] Metall Workers Trade Union asked us to,” says ombudsman Torbjörn Jonsson, adding that the union has around 50 members who clean Tesla locations. Four showrooms and service centers will be affected—three around Stockholm and one in the city of Umeå. “Their workshops and showrooms will not be cleaned.”

Three days later, on November 20, the Seko union, which represents postal workers, will stop delivering letters, spare parts, and pallets to all of Tesla’s addresses in Sweden. “Tesla is trying to gain competitive advantages by giving the workers worse wages and conditions than they would have with a collective agreement,” said Seko’s union president, Gabriella Lavecchia, in a statement. “It is of course completely unacceptable.”

It’s unclear what impact the strike and blockade are having on Tesla operations in Sweden, which is the company’s fifth-largest market in Europe. Local Swedish media report that new Teslas are being unloaded in Danish ports and driven over the border, a claim WIRED was not able to verify.

The last time Swedish unions faced off against an international company over working conditions was when toy company Toys R Us also refused to negotiate a collective agreement in 1995. After a three-month strike that started with retail employees and spread to boycotts by other unions, the company eventually signed.

Stefan Löfven, the country’s former prime minister, said he’ll refuse to take a taxi if the driver is behind the wheel of a Tesla. “It should be obvious for a company to follow the customs that exist in the countries where it operates, but it looks like Tesla has planned to ignore the Swedish labor market model,” he said on Facebook. “Shame on you Tesla.”

[galdrien]

(Sorry in advance, english is not my native language)

I'm mot sure anyone outside Sweden has seen this but 130 Tesla workers in Sweden are on strike 'cause Tesla refuses to sign a collective agreement.

The workers are backed by one of the strongest trade unions in the world, the industrial and steel worker union IF Metall.

If Tesla still refuse to bargain next week the strike will spread to service stations and garages who will refuse service to Tesla cars.

All blue collar trade unions in Sweden will also put pressure on Tesla with different forms of actions to support the workers on strike. The trade union Transport has already warned Tesla that they will stop loading and off loading their cars in the swedish harbours.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

[If you want the report described in this story, here's the link.]

It’s bad enough when a public EV-charging station is out of service. It’s worse when your app doesn’t know that and sends you there just as you’re in desperate need of a charge.

This experience is all too common among the U.S. EV drivers who don’t have access to Tesla’s dependable network, per a new report on EV-charger reliability based on exhaustive data collected from the field.

Unreliable public charging infrastructure and unreliable information on EV-charger uptime have become two of the biggest barriers to the EV transition in the U.S. That’s a problem, as the country needs to shift to EVs fast in order to slash carbon emissions from transportation. But it’s a problem with clear, if complicated to implement, solutions.

So says the inaugural annual reliability report from ChargerHelp, a startup that trains and employs technicians who service and repair EV-charging stations in more than a dozen states. Its analysis of more than 19 million data points collected from public and private sources in 2023 — including real-time assessments of 4,800 chargers from ChargerHelp technicians in the field — finds that ​“software consistently overestimates station uptime, point-in-time status, and the ability to successfully charge a vehicle.” 

That doesn’t mean that the technology under the hood of public charging stations is fundamentally broken, said Kameale Terry, ChargerHelp’s CEO and co-founder. But it does mean that players in the EV-charging industry have to work together — and with the federal and state regulators setting uptime requirements for chargers being installed with the support of billions of dollars of public funds — to solve the root causes of the problems at hand. 

“When drivers say the charger doesn’t work, there’s a complex set of reasons why the charger doesn’t work,” she said. ​“It’s not as simple as a gas station. And to fix something that complex, we need to take a more collaborative approach.” 

[partisan-by-default]

Elon Musk has promised that his EV company Tesla will roll out “fully autonomous” vehicles in the next few years. Musk recently unveiled what he called the “Cybercab” and said that Tesla plans to launch a robotaxi service by 2026, competing with other big-name brands currently operating in the space. However, “fully autonomous,” as Musk has used it, might be a bit of a misnomer. Recent reports show the company is planning to hire a human team to remotely troubleshoot its robotaxi operations.

A recently spotted Tesla job listing advertises a role to build out a remote teleoperations team for the firm’s upcoming robotaxi fleet. “Tesla AI’s Teleoperation team is charged with providing remote access to our robotaxis and humanoid robots,” the listing notes, highlighting an additional need to assist Musk’s nascent line of Tesla robots. “Our cars and robots operate autonomously in challenging environments. As we iterate on the AI that powers them, we need the ability to access and control them remotely,” the listing states.

The job post also notes that such a teleoperation center requires “building highly optimized low latency reliable data streaming over unreliable transports in the real world.” Tele-operators can be “transported” into the robotaxi via a “state-of-the-art VR rig,” it adds.

Tesla would not be the first robotaxi company to use this method. In fact, it’s an industry standard. It was previously reported that Cruise, the robotaxi company owned by General Motors, was employing remote human assistants to troubleshoot when its vehicles ran into trouble (the vehicles appear to have run into trouble every four to five miles). Google’s Waymo is also thought to employ the same practice, as does Zoox, the robotaxi firm owned by Amazon.

[thoughtlessarse]

he US presidential election has not been the only high-stakes date looming for Elon Musk. It has been more than a year since Swedish workers came out on strike against his electric car giant Tesla. Swedish industrial union IF Metall has been demanding better wages, benefits and conditions for mechanics in Tesla repair shops across the country, but fundamentally what is at stake is the Swedish labour market model of collective bargaining which Musk refuses to recognise. It is the first and only strike against Tesla anywhere in the world. And it has now become the longest-running strike in Sweden for a century. In April, six months into the dispute, Musk said: “Actually, I think the storm has passed on that front, I think things are in reasonably good shape in Sweden.” That was not true then, and it is not true now. The past year has been marked by a wave of solidarity strikes by other unions to block the shipping of Tesla cars to Swedish ports, halt the cleaning of Tesla facilities, withhold postal deliveries, including new number plates, to all Tesla offices and prevent Tesla charging stations being connected to the power grid. Tesla has repeatedly lost legal battles against these solidarity strikes, and was recently forced to pay SEK6.5m (£468,000) in legal costs to the Swedish postal service, PostNord. Twelve Swedish trade unions are involved and three Nordic ones, including Norway’s transport union Fellesforbundet and 3F Transport in Denmark. Meanwhile, Tesla has brought in strikebreakers from the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Denmark and many other European countries to cover the 52 striking workers, almost half of Tesla’s mechanics in the country.

continue reading

[wolfliving]

Self-driving urban taxis finding a market niche here and there, sort of

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/autonomous-vehicle-resurgence-transportation-mobility-opportunities/

Autonomous vehicles are back in the spotlight.

Equity funding to the AV space has tripled to $7.5B this year thanks to Waymo and Wayve (with a combined ~90% of funding).

Below, we highlight 3 key takeaways on the autonomous vehicle landscape.

1) Developers are targeting multiple autonomous driving use cases, with robotaxis in the spotlight

This year’s largest funding recipients are targeting multiple use cases.

Waymo (Alphabet subsidiary) is focused on robotaxis — where it’s seeing commercial momentum. The company is now considering expanding into the personal car use case by licensing its technology. Notably, one area it is not investing in is autonomous trucking, which it exited in 2023.

Wayve formed early partnerships with UK grocery retailers ASDA and Ocado, focused on home delivery of groceries. The company is now pushing deeper into robotaxis, including via a partnership with Uber. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai framed Waymo's approach as “multiple paths to market” on the company’s latest earnings call. Waymo hit 150K paid rides per week in October.

2) OEMs are keeping their loss-making self-driving units afloat with fresh capital injections

Despite challenges like safety and delayed commercialization, GM and Hyundai have injected a combined $1.4B into their self-driving units this year.

Tech-native OEMs such as Tesla and BYD are amping up their efforts as well.

Tesla for example is gunning for a robotaxi, although the timing of the Tesla Cybercab launch remains uncertain.

OEMs keep their loss-making self-driving units afloat

3) In China, autonomous driving players IPO at discounted valuations

Chinese autonomous driving companies are leading an exit wave.

Horizon Robotics and WeRide went public in October, and Pony.ai, Momenta, and Minieye all recently filed to do the same.

An AV funding crunch in China (down 90% since 2021) is pushing many of these companies to go public at a discount to their last private valuations.

More broadly, China is also seeing growing adoption of robotaxis.

Baidu‘s Apollo Go service, for example, averaged 75K fully driverless rides per week in Q2’24 (up 26% YoY).

The bottom line

Autonomous driving has arrived gradually, then suddenly.

Robotaxi adoption is pushing some mobility players (like Uber and Lyft) and OEMs to reassess their strategies and recommit after reducing their exposure to the space.

CB Insights customers can dive into implications for transportation leaders in the full brief here....

[mightyflamethrower]

Concerns Mount Over Exploding Electric Vehicles

1 day ago

Guest Blogger

65 Comments

From the DAILY SCEPTIC

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Safety concerns around electric vehicles continue to mount with Australian fire and rescue services in New South Wales stating they might have to make a “tactical disengagement” of a trapped car accident victim if the battery is likely to explode. Australian journalist Jo Nova covered the story, which was first mentioned in the EV blog The Driven, and commented: “They say the first responders need more training as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is they��re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognise when they have to abandon the rescue.”

The Driven, a widely-read blog that seems highly sympathetic to a rollout of EVs, was reporting on recent testimony given to the NSW Government’s Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Batteries Inquiry. The writer suggested that first responders did not have adequate training to deal with electric vehicle collisions, and in the most serious cases, crews could be forced to abandon rescues. One particular area of concern seemed to revolve around the need to extract a trapped casualty quickly after a crash by dragging the person out in a “very undesirable manner”. Fires are a grave risk in any vehicle accident, but they can be quickly brought under control in an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle.

Worries about the potential dangers inherent in EVs is likely to grow as numbers on the roads continue to rise. EV battery explosions can occur very quickly, triggering the release of highly toxic gases. When they roar into thermal overdrive, they create very high temperatures and are very difficult to extinguish. The explosion can occur after almost any collision, or be due to a fault in the initial manufacture. The fire often takes hours to control and it can reignited days after it was thought to be out. With Net Zero fanatics desperate to drive ICE cars off the road in short order, EVs are the only mass private transport solution offered. Many of the issues, including safety, that make them an inferior product compared to petrol-powered combustion cars are often ignored.

Just what can be involved in putting out a fire in an EV was dramatically detailed in a recent press release from the Wakefield Fire Dept in Massachusetts. It was called out to deal with a burning Tesla on a snowy Interstate 95, and reported:

Wakefield Engine 1 and Ladder 1 initiated suppression operations, applying copious amounts of water onto the vehicle. Multiple surrounding mutual aid communities responded as well to support firefighting operations and to create a water shuttle to bring water continually to the scene. Engines from Melrose, Stoneham, Reading, Lynnfield as well as a Middleton water tanker assisted. Firefighters had three 1¾-inch hand lines as well as a ‘blitz gun’ in operation to cool the battery compartment… Lynnfield crews established a continuous 4-inch supply line from Vernon Street up to the highway. The fire was declared under control and fully extinguished after about two and a half hours… The vehicle was removed from the scene after consulting with the Hazmat Unit… The crews did a great job, especially in the middle of storm conditions – on a busy highway.

There is little doubt that EV fires are on the rise. In the U.K., CE Safety runs Freedom of Information checks on local fire brigades and its latest survey shows an alarming rise in conflagrations. In Greater London in the 2017-2022 period, there were a reported 507 battery fires from a number of EV types, but CE Safety found a “gigantic” 219 conflagrations in 2022-23 alone. Lancashire was said to rank second with 15 EV battery fires, but this was 10 more in a single year than recorded in the five years between 2017-2022. Overall “it was concerning” to discover that the number of electric battery fires during 2022-2023 was higher in most areas than the data showed over five years from 2017 to 2022. During that year, 14 buses suffered battery fires.

There was a substantial increase in the number of e-bikes catching fire, with CE Safety noting that lithium is highly flammable and reactive. “Over-charging presents a massive risk to households with lithium-powered vehicles,” the safety organisation observed.

Concern is also rising over the transportation of EVs on car ferries. Recently, Havila Kystruten, which operates a fleet of car ferries around the coast of Norway, has banned the transportation of electric, hybrid and hydrogen vehicles. According to a report in the Maritime Executive, it is the latest step by the shipping industry, “which has become acutely aware of the increasing danger of transporting EV and other alternate fuel vessels”.

Havila’s Managing Director Bent Martini said a risk analysis had shown a fire at sea in a fossil fuel vehicle could be handled by on-board systems. “A possible fire in electric, hybrid or hydrogen cars will require external rescue efforts and could put people on board and the ships at risk,” he said. That of course is the nightmare scenario. If fire breaks out on a ferry making a 20-mile crossing in good weather, the chances of all passengers and crew surviving are good. Less good, perhaps, if fire was to break out and fill the ship with toxic smoke in the middle of a stormy November night while crossing the Bay of Biscay. Chances of survival would be diminished if the high temperatures caused nearby EVs to explode.

Mercifully, we are less and less likely to see such accidents. The list of disadvantages of EVs is lengthening by the day. Environmental concerns about the manufacture and mining of raw materials have been raised, while ‘range anxiety’ is common among drivers. EVs are more expensive than ICE cars, while knackered batteries mean that second-hand values are very poor. For those who would see the back of them, the graph below might provide some comfort.

This shows the recent decline in the share price of the American car hire giant Hertz. Back in 2021, the company pushed ahead with huge purchases of Teslas. In January it dumped 20,000 of them, and last month pushed another 10,000 onto a sagging second-hand market. Out in the real world – the world where people create wealth by providing what other people actually want – fewer drivers seemed willing to hire them. The share price tells its own sorry story. Meanwhile, EV sales across Europe tend to be driven by unsustainable tax breaks, while the cars are mainly popular with wealthy people as a second or third city runabout. An enforced political adoption of EVs is likely to destroy vast swathes of the European car industry, unable to compete with cheap Chinese imports.

If the aim is to take away personal transport for the masses, EVs are an excellent idea. Whether that will ultimately play well at the ballot box is another matter.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

I would not be able to sleep at night knowing I had a ticking time bomb parked in my garage.

[thevagueambition]

Don't have time to translate properly, but here's some very lightly edited google translate of an article about a danish union joing the Swedish Tesla strike

"For several years, according to IF Metall [Swedish union], the mechanics have been trying to get an agreement in place at ten Tesla workshops located around Sweden. In the end, IF Metall put its foot down and issued a strike notice – and the negotiations finally broke down when Tesla said that it is the company's policy not to enter into collective bargaining agreements in any country. [...]

On 27 October, what is now known in several Swedish media as the "Tesla strike" began, and which has attracted attention throughout the world.

130 mechanics were called to strike at Tesla's ten workshops. Since then, the conflict was extended to also cover 470 mechanics who service Tesla cars at other workshops, and the conflict took off in earnest on November 7, when Swedish dock workers refused to unload Tesla cars from cargo ships. The sympathy strike has since spread to several other professional groups: Janitors have refused to clean offices, mail carriers have refused to deliver spare parts and license plates, and electricians have refused to repair charging stations.

But even though the Swedish dock workers have refused to unload Tesla cars into the country, twice as many Tesla cars have been registered in Sweden in November as in October this year. 512 Teslas hit the Swedish roads in November. And this is where the Port of Esbjerg [in Denmark] comes into the picture. On 1 December, the chairman of the Swedish Transport Association, Tommy Wreeth, said that he knew that Tesla cars were being unloaded for Sweden in Esbjerg, and that on that basis he had contacted Danish 3F Transport to ask if they would be included in a sympathy strike. This is the contact that 3F Transport now responds to.

Specifically, Danish port workers will neither unload nor load Tesla cars, and drivers will not receive and transport Tesla cars going through Denmark and to Sweden, says the chairman of 3F Transport, Jan Villadsen. The strike will take effect in 14 days [now 11] unless Tesla signs a collective bargaining collective agreement.

- It is not just the big companies that are global. So is the trade union movement. We are in solidarity with our colleagues, regardless of where they are in the world, so when we get a request from Swedish IF Metall, we naturally support it, he says."

https://fagbladet3f.dk/artikel/det-handler-tesla-konflikten-om

[ladyhoecakes]

I do not understand how people can still use Twitter. Musk is a South African Nazi. I have never seen someone who wants to champion white supremacists the way he does. He has done all the phobics. How can using that site jive with your politics? As if you can't communicate with people through different mediums? All of this shit is documented, and Tesla are ugly. You do not need anything that man is a part of.

Stokely Carmichael said refusing to use something (the Montgomery Bus Boycott) is the most passive form of resistance any one can do. And people can't do that. At least transportation is a needed service. No one needs to tweet.

[rogue-driv3r]

It's been a while since my last rant about automotive industry, but here we go again.

As a premise, i must say that this will probably be more valid for EU than for the rest of the world. Also expect a LONG post. So.

Hybrids and EVs are surely more efficient and "clean" than the average ICE car. But, as a car enthusiast, i'm very aware that technology end efficiency are expensive, definitely not for everyone. Here where i live we get bonuses for changing old cars with brand new "eco-friendly" ones, but only if they are old enough. Bonuses that, anyway, even in best cases will cover less than a quarter of the price of a new vehicle.

Most importantly, and that's something i learned the hard way, no institution will give you a single cent for the running costs - and they're high running costs. And about (stupidly heavy) EVs, electricity now is so expensive that the cost-per-km is the same of regular gasoline, so no real advantage. I remember when the seller told us that the simplicity of the powertrain meant less service costs, it was quite the opposite. Moreover, we were forced to service the car at their shop, at their prices, because they were the only ones who knew how to work on those components. Oh, and it was the only way to keep the warranty valid on expensive parts, too.

I had a (second hand) hybrid, like my parents. But i went from precarious worker to student and i'm unable to find a proper job while i'm studying due to some issues with my mental health, so my income suddenly dropped to zero. Keeping the car is expensive and in three years, when the warranty expires, the value will decrease drastically (a new battery could cost until 8k euros, nobody would buy a car with that risk). So i planned ahead and sold the hybrid car to get a cheaper one with decent quality and safety, reasonable running costs, free from the blackmail of our official dealer and easily fixable by any mechanic.

The problem: the most reliable and most fuel-saving version of that model on the second-hand car market (and well, basically the only one i found nearby) was a Diesel one. And Diesels are EU's scapegoat for the increasing air pollution, so Countries are forced to make laws to stay within certain limits - that's not bad itself. The problem is that private cars, depending on the sources, are only between 10% and 20% of the total greenhouse gas emissions.

But it's easier to wage war against citizens than corporations who are truly responsible for that 80-90%. And i'm not talking about those wealthy citizens who already got their fancy Tesla, but those who literally can't afford a new car (for any reason). This is a class problem.

There are "old" Diesel cars which still require less fuel than modern, high-end Diesels that satisfy the new requirements for mass production. A 10 years old 1.4 Diesel will always require less fuel and pollute less than a 2-tonne mild-hybrid "environmentally friendly" 3.0 Diesel BMW or Audi. Oh wait, it gets better: ironically an Euro 5 Diesel could be stopped from traffic while a brand new 1500 hp quad-turbo W16 Bugatti Chiron can roam around in the city centre on the very same day. But hey, the Chiron is not an evil Diesel. Once again, this. Is. A. Class. Problem.

Forcing people to go hybrid/electric with restrictions is repression against low-income classes. There could be so much more that can be done if private transport really is the root of all evil. Like a bonus that covers 100% the price of a new car (oh btw, an Euro 5 Diesel is old enough to get stopped on certain conditions, but not old enough to receive a bonus). Or investing in bio/synthetic fuels so people can run their older cars with carbon neutral emissions - but that'd make the poor automakers angry as they couldn't sell their new hypertechnological cars. Or provide new catalysts for free to install on older cars - but also that would make automakers quite angry. Or governments could also consider doing something about intensive farming (y'know, that thing that sends methane into atmosphere which is 84 times worse for global warming than CO2), or better public transport, or heavy industry, or invest in nuclear so we can stop burning fossil fuels for energy (i know this is gonna cause a shitstorm lmao, i believe safely stocking radioactive material under layers of rocks in sterile zones is better than keeping on produce greenhouse gases), or anything that doesn't involve the private life of people already struggling with ever-increasing prices of goods.

"B-but there are exceptions to traffic restrictions" sure, but it's hard to satisfy all of the requirements. One of them is quite easy to get anyway: it's a certificate that you're on the route from home to work or viceversa - you can pollute if you produce. Using an old car for free-time? Nope. Getting groceries? Nope. Sounds dystopic as hell, innit?

Don't get me wrong, technology and research are good, hybrids and EVs are fascinating and surely relatively more efficient. But not affordable by everyone, nor a permanent solution for environmental problems: not only for batteries, but also for the energy required to charge them, and the fossil fuels still needed for hybrids. A lot of research is still needed but, while we wait, we should stop pointing the finger at who can't afford to buy and sustain a new car.

Now, i know what you're thinking: "but you could've got another non-Diesel model and save even more money" maybe you're right, but for me the choice of the car is very personal and important, there are many criteria i have, picking any cheap shitbox is not an option for me if i have a decent budget. Laws can change, safety and reliability don't. There are good cars out there which only problem is bad laws made against them. Cars that can perfectly run and could end up in a junkyard only because of these laws, that's the opposite of sustainability, that's forced consumerism. Plus, it's not only about me, but also and most importantly about the millions of people that get screwed everyday and have no fucking choice.

[mariacallous]

Whatever his personal flaws, Elon Musk has been a masterful business builder. Tesla and SpaceX are two of the more successful companies the South African-born entrepreneur has conceived or led. But now Musk has encountered an obstacle both tenacious and effective: Swedish trade unions. Not even the world’s some-time richest man and the world’s most valuable auto brand have been able to dislodge the unions from their long-standing place in the Swedish economy. That’s good news for every country that believes in tempering the market economy with its own national characteristics.

“This is insane,” Musk tweeted on Nov. 23, 2023. He was responding to news from Sweden: The communications workers union had announced that its members would no longer deliver letters and packages to Tesla. That meant, among other things, that number plates for Tesla cars would not be delivered. That, of course, made the cars undrivable.

The communications workers union—known as Seko—was just the latest group to launch so-called sympathy strikes against the American carmaker. The transport workers union had already stopped handling Tesla cars arriving in Swedish ports, and so had the dockworkers union. The electricians union had stopped installing and servicing Tesla charging points. The custodians union had stopped cleaning the company’s facilities. The painters union had announced it was going to stop painting Tesla cars. The construction workers union had announced it would stop work and repairs on Tesla facilities. Since then, Norwegian and Danish labor unions have stopped handling Tesla cargo bound for Sweden and suspended garbage collection at Tesla’s facilities. Since the end of October, more than a dozen unions have launched strikes against Tesla, and the strikes continue.

These workers and their unions don’t have a direct conflict with Tesla: They’ve gone on strike to support their auto-mechanic colleagues who are employed by the global auto giant, because Tesla has refused to allow the IF Metall, which represents a range of groups including factory workers, the right to collective bargaining on behalf of its autoworkers. Tesla’s autoworkers went on strike on Oct. 27 entreaties by IF Metall for collective bargaining went nowhere. (Tesla doesn’t have a Swedish manufacturing plant, but it does have facilities where the cars are serviced.)

Sympathy strikes, where unions suspend work for a company in support of another union, are a powerful but rarely used feature of the Swedish labor market. It is, in fact, a bit of a remnant from a century ago, when Swedish labor market relations were more adversarial than today. For many decades now, however, relations have been largely collaborative. It works like this: Every employer allows trade employees not just to unionize but to represent all its workers, and the unions then negotiate wages and other aspects with the employer on behalf of their worker category.

IF Metall, for example, conducts collective bargaining with Volvo on behalf of the carmaker’s autoworkers, while the custodians union—Fastighets—negotiates with Volvo on behalf of the custodians employed by the company. Under this kind of arrangement, trade unions act with moderation, because the recurring negotiations with the employers allow them to reach agreement on not just wages but also on other issues including sick pay, vacation pay, working hours, termination, and personal fulfillment. Today, Sweden has some 650 such agreements covering 90 percent of the country’s employees.

But Musk doesn’t like unions. “It’s generally not good to have an adversarial relationship between … one group at a company and another group,” he told Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview on Nov. 29. Indeed, Musk has tried to keep Tesla de-unionized, and that seems to have served him well on American home soil: When the United Auto Workers union targeted the Big Three (GM, Ford, and Stellantis) in a massive strike last fall and emerged with pay raises as high as 89 percent, Tesla could keep turning out its cars, unperturbed by any disruption. When IF Metall tried to get Tesla in Sweden to agree to collective bargaining, the answer came back that such decisions are made by Tesla’s headquarters in the United States.

The autoworkers’ strike, and the massive wave of sympathy strikes that have hit every aspect of Tesla’s operations, followed. “When we take action against an employer that doesn’t allow collective bargaining, it’s typically a small workplace, and we get public opinion against us,” Veli-Pekka Saikkala, a former auto mechanic who leads IF Metall’s collective bargaining, told me. “But this time, people’s view is that big Tesla, which is owned by the world’s richest man, shouldn’t come to Sweden and tell us how to do things.” The issue isn’t just about Tesla’s practices; it’s about protecting Sweden’s business and union norms—and a system that most Swedes are happy with and that has produced an extraordinarily well-performing economy.

Christer Thornqvist, a lecturer in business administration at the University of Skovde who specializes in trade unions, told a Swedish publication that Sweden has seen nothing like it since sympathy strikes against Toys “R” Us in the 1990s. In those delirious early days of globalization, the American toy chain arrived, similarly thinking that it could export its labor market practices along with its goods. But Swedish workers would have none of it. The transport workers union stopped transporting goods from Toys “R” Us; the dockworkers union stopped handling its arriving cargo; Fastighets stopped cleaning its shops and facilities; and eventually the American giant relented.

“The strikes against Tesla are, of course, about Tesla’s workers in Sweden, because they deserve the same rights as other workers in Sweden,” said Laura Hartman, who was until last fall chief economist at LO, Sweden’s blue-collar trade union confederation. “But primarily this is about the Swedish model, which is built on the concept that the labor market parties reach agreements. If companies start deviating from it, this will undermine our system and legislate about many workers’ rights.” Sweden, for example, doesn’t have a minimum wage—because unions and employers jointly negotiate such matters.

Back in the ‘90s, U.S. firms rapidly expanded in a dizzying range of emerging market economies, and expanding there often meant that they could also export their way of doing business. Western European companies did the same. There were other hurdles, to be sure, but a solid collective-bargaining system wasn’t one of them. U.S. foreign policy pursued a similar strategy: Other countries were to become more like America. This wasn’t done with malice. American business leaders and policymakers simply assumed that countries opening up would naturally want to become more like the United States. In those exuberant years, it didn’t occur to most American leaders, or admittedly to leaders from other Western countries, that states might want market economies and even democracy—but done their own way.

“In Sweden, we have very few strikes, and that’s because employers and unions work closely together,” Saikkala noted. “This benefits the labor market. The situation may be different in other countries, but it’s strange to assume that a company can use the same model around the world.” Indeed, Musk seems unaware that Swedish unions are different from American ones. In December, Tesla advertised on its careers page for a person with “a proven track record of getting regulatory changes made in the Nordics” to be based in Stockholm or Oslo. The listing is no longer available, though it’s unclear if this is because the person who’s to force the Nordics to change their generations-old labor market system has been hired—or because someone realized it was a bad idea.

Either way, in the Swedish unions, the world’s some-time richest man has encountered what may be the most maddening hurdle of his career. Even though going on strike is expensive for unions and thus their members, the sympathy strikes have kept accumulating. The fate of a few dozen mechanics has turned into a battle between the softer Nordic model and the unbridled capitalist vision of people like Musk. “All of a sudden, people in Sweden and beyond are learning a lot about collective bargaining,” Hartman reflected. “In the long run, this can strengthen unions in other countries. Small trade unions have a tendency to become militant. Large trade unions like we have in Sweden tend to work more collaboratively with employers, and that model is what’s at risk if companies like Tesla refuse to allow collective bargaining.”

Indeed, Tesla has emerged looking tin-eared, and not just because of the job advert. Rather than giving a few dozen Swedish autoworkers the right to collective bargaining, the world’s by far most valuable automaker is—for example—collecting its trash in vans and using a convoluted way of getting temporary license plates. Now 16 Nordic institutional investors with combined assets of more than $1 trillion have written to Tesla headquarters asking the company to work with the Swedish unions. The Danish pension fund PensionDanmark is even selling its Tesla shares over the dispute. As Billy Bragg sang, “There is power in a union.”

[galdrien]

Ok, Tesla is now suing The Swedish Transport Agency over the strike.

It's the fact that no registration plates can be delivered due to the solidarity actions among the swedish postal workers that's got Tesla all rallied up

To be continued

.....UPDATE.....

The swedish court has temporarly given Tesla the right to collect their license plates until a veridict is reached

Tesls has aldo sued the swedish postal service, and I just say, good luck with that one

The Musk must really be losing his marbles over this.