Latest news with #LakeConstance
BBC News
14-07-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Hereford campervan family cheers Lionesses to victory
A family who travelled 800 miles (1,280 km) in their campervan to cheer on England against Wales in the UEFA Women's Euros were jubilant after they won Morris family drove from Hereford to watch the Lionesses book their place in the quarter-finals after their outstanding victory at the St Gallen stadium in Switzerland on Morris, who was in the stadium with his wife, Kelly, daughter, Amelia, 16, and son, Ethan, 13, said the atmosphere was "great".He added: "As soon as the game started, they put on another great performance and blew away Wales." The victory followed England's 4-0 win over the Netherlands last Wednesday. Mr Morris spoke to BBC Radio Hereford & Worcester as the rest of the family caught up on their sleep after a late night getting to and from the stadium, but he said it was "worth it". They are staying in their campervan at Arbon near Lake Constance, which is where the borders of Germany, Austria and Switzerland meet."It was just busy coming out of the stadium, said Mr Morris. "We got on to the one train station, we couldn't get on to the train. The next one came in. We changed for our last train and then just stopped in the middle of nowhere."We were there for about 20 or 30 minutes and we were told to get off and a bus would turn up."A bus did turn up but then it went everywhere, before we got back to where we're staying in Arbon, just on the side of Lake Constance." The family's journey began on 5 July, when they set off for Dover to catch a ferry the next day. Their onwards journey took them to Paris, Courgenay and Zurich, where they watched England play the Netherlands, and then Tuesday, the family will drive their campervan back to Zurich, where they will watch England take on Sweden in the quarter-final on Thursday (20:00 BST) in a repeat of the Euro 2022 semi-final. In that game, England won Morris is optimistic: "I think we can do it again." He said he hoped they would be "lucky enough to get through to see the semi-final", particularly as the family set off on their journey back to Hereford on 24 Lionesses were crowned UEFA Women's Euro 2022 champions with a dramatic 2-1 extra-time victory against Germany to win their first major title in front of a record crowd. Follow BBC Hereford & Worcester on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Automotive
- The Guardian
‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it': the terrifying truth about why Tesla's cars keep crashing
It was a Monday afternoon in June 2023 when Rita Meier, 45, joined us for a video call. Meier told us about the last time she said goodbye to her husband, Stefan, five years earlier. He had been leaving their home near Lake Constance, Germany, heading for a trade fair in Milan. Meier recalled how he hesitated between taking his Tesla Model S or her BMW. He had never driven the Tesla that far before. He checked the route for charging stations along the way and ultimately decided to try it. Rita had a bad feeling. She stayed home with their three children, the youngest less than a year old. At 3.18pm on 10 May 2018, Stefan Meier lost control of his Model S on the A2 highway near the Monte Ceneri tunnel. Travelling at about 100kmh (62mph), he ploughed through several warning markers and traffic signs before crashing into a slanted guardrail. 'The collision with the guardrail launches the vehicle into the air, where it flips several times before landing,' investigators would write later. The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. According to witnesses, the Model S burst into flames while still airborne. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn't unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn. At that moment, Rita Meier was unaware of the crash. She tried calling her husband, but he didn't pick up. When he still hadn't returned her call hours later – highly unusual for this devoted father – she attempted to track his car using Tesla's app. It no longer worked. By the time police officers rang her doorbell late that night, Meier was already bracing for the worst. The crash made headlines the next morning as one of the first fatal Tesla accidents in Europe. Tesla released a statement to the press saying the company was 'deeply saddened' by the incident, adding, 'We are working to gather all the facts in this case and are fully cooperating with local authorities.' To this day, Meier still doesn't know why her husband died. She has kept everything the police gave her after their inconclusive investigation. The charred wreck of the Model S sits in a garage Meier rents specifically for that purpose. The scorched phone – which she had forensically analysed at her own expense, to no avail – sits in a drawer at home. Maybe someday all this will be needed again, she says. She hasn't given up hope of uncovering the truth. Rita Meier was one of many people who reached out to us after we began reporting on the Tesla Files – a cache of 23,000 leaked documents and 100 gigabytes of confidential data shared by an anonymous whistleblower. The first report we published looked at problems with Tesla's autopilot system, which allows the cars to temporarily drive on their own, taking over steering, braking and acceleration. Though touted by the company as 'Full Self-Driving' (FSD), it is designed to assist, not replace, the driver, who should keep their eyes on the road and be ready to intervene at any time. Autonomous driving is the core promise around which Elon Musk has built his company. Tesla has never delivered a truly self-driving vehicle, yet the richest person in the world keeps repeating the claim that his cars will soon drive entirely without human help. Is Tesla's autopilot really as advanced as he says? The Tesla Files suggest otherwise. They contain more than 2,400 customer complaints about unintended acceleration and more than 1,500 braking issues – 139 involving emergency braking without cause, and 383 phantom braking events triggered by false collision warnings. More than 1,000 crashes are documented. A separate spreadsheet on driver-assistance incidents where customers raised safety concerns lists more than 3,000 entries. The oldest date from 2015, the most recent from March 2022. In that time, Tesla delivered roughly 2.6m vehicles with autopilot software. Most incidents occurred in the US, but there have also been complaints from Europe and Asia. Customers described their cars suddenly accelerating or braking hard. Some escaped with a scare; others ended up in ditches, crashing into walls or colliding with oncoming vehicles. 'After dropping my son off in his school parking lot, as I go to make a right-hand exit it lurches forward suddenly,' one complaint read. Another said, 'My autopilot failed/malfunctioned this morning (car didn't brake) and I almost rear-ended somebody at 65mph.' A third reported, 'Today, while my wife was driving with our baby in the car, it suddenly accelerated out of nowhere.' Braking for no reason caused just as much distress. 'Our car just stopped on the highway. That was terrifying,' a Tesla driver wrote. Another complained, 'Frequent phantom braking on two-lane highways. Makes the autopilot almost unusable.' Some report their car 'jumped lanes unexpectedly', causing them to hit a concrete barrier, or veered into oncoming traffic. Musk has given the world many reasons to criticise him since he teamed up with Donald Trump. Many people do – mostly by boycotting his products. But while it is one thing to disagree with the political views of a business leader, it is another to be mortally afraid of his products. In the Tesla Files, we found thousands of examples of why such fear may be justified. We set out to match some of these incidents of autopilot errors with customers' names. Like hundreds of other Tesla customers, Rita Meier entered the vehicle identification number of her husband's Model S into the response form we published on the website of the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, for which we carried out our investigation. She quickly discovered that the Tesla Files contained data related to the car. In her first email to us, she wrote, 'You can probably imagine what it felt like to read that.' There isn't much information – just an Excel spreadsheet titled 'Incident Review'. A Tesla employee noted that the mileage counter on Stefan Meier's car stood at 4,765 miles at the time of the crash. The entry was catalogued just one day after the fatal accident. In the comment field was written, 'Vehicle involved in an accident.' The cause of the crash remains unknown to this day. In Tesla's internal system, a company employee had marked the case as 'resolved', but for five years, Rita Meier had been searching for answers. After Stefan's death, she took over the family business – a timber company with 200 employees based in Tettnang, Baden-Württemberg. As journalists, we are used to tough interviews, but this one was different. We had to strike a careful balance – between empathy and the persistent questioning good reporting demands. 'Why are you convinced the Tesla was responsible for your husband's death?' we asked her. 'Isn't it possible he was distracted – maybe looking at his phone?' No one knows for sure. But Meier was well aware that Musk has previously claimed Tesla 'releases critical crash data affecting public safety immediately and always will'; that he has bragged many times about how its superior handling of data sets the company apart from its competitors. In the case of her husband, why was she expected to believe there was no data? Meier's account was structured and precise. Only once did the toll become visible – when she described how her husband's body burned in full view of the firefighters. Her eyes filled with tears and her voice cracked. She apologised, turning away. After she collected herself, she told us she has nothing left to gain – but also nothing to lose. That was why she had reached out to us. We promised to look into the case. Rita Meier wasn't the only widow to approach us. Disappointed customers, current and former employees, analysts and lawyers were sharing links to our reporting. Many of them contacted us. More than once, someone wrote that it was about time someone stood up to Tesla – and to Elon Musk. Meier, too, shared our articles and the callout form with others in her network – including people who, like her, lost loved ones in Tesla crashes. One of them was Anke Schuster. Like Meier, she had lost her husband in a Tesla crash that defies explanation and had spent years chasing answers. And, like Meier, she had found her husband's Model X listed in the Tesla Files. Once again, the incident was marked as resolved – with no indication of what that actually meant. 'My husband died in an unexplained and inexplicable accident,' Schuster wrote in her first email. Her dealings with police, prosecutors and insurance companies, she said, had been 'hell'. No one seemed to understand how a Tesla works. 'I lost my husband. His four daughters lost their father. And no one ever cared.' Her husband, Oliver, was a tech enthusiast, fascinated by Musk. A hotelier by trade, he owned no fewer than four Teslas. He loved the cars. She hated them – especially the autopilot. The way the software seemed to make decisions on its own never sat right with her. Now, she felt as if her instincts had been confirmed in the worst way. Oliver Schuster was returning from a business meeting on 13 April 2021 when his black Model X veered off highway B194 between Loitz and Schönbeck in north-east Germany. It was 12.50pm when the car left the road and crashed into a tree. Schuster started to worry when her husband missed a scheduled bank appointment. She tried to track the vehicle but found no way to locate it. Even calling Tesla led nowhere. That evening, the police broke the news: after the crash her husband's car had burst into flames. He had burned to death – with the fire brigade watching helplessly. The crashes that killed Meier's and Schuster's husbands were almost three years apart but the parallels were chilling. We examined accident reports, eyewitness accounts, crash-site photos and correspondence with Tesla. In both cases, investigators had requested vehicle data from Tesla, and the company hadn't provided it. In Meier's case, Tesla staff claimed no data was available. In Schuster's, they said there was no relevant data. Over the next two years, we spoke with crash victims, grieving families and experts around the world. What we uncovered was an ominous black box – a system designed not only to collect and control every byte of customer data, but to safeguard Musk's vision of autonomous driving. Critical information was sealed off from public scrutiny. Elon Musk is a perfectionist with a tendency towards micromanagement. At Tesla, his whims seem to override every argument – even in matters of life and death. During our reporting, we came across the issue of door handles. On Teslas, they retract into the doors while the cars are being driven. The system depends on battery power. If an airbag deploys, the doors are supposed to unlock automatically and the handles extend – at least, that's what the Model S manual says. The idea for the sleek, futuristic design stems from Musk himself. He insisted on retractable handles, despite repeated warnings from engineers. Since 2018, they have been linked to at least four fatal accidents in Europe and the US, in which five people died. In February 2024, we reported on a particularly tragic case: a fatal crash on a country road near Dobbrikow, in Brandenburg, Germany. Two 18-year-olds were killed when the Tesla they were in slammed into a tree and caught fire. First responders couldn't open the doors because the handles were retracted. The teenagers burned to death in the back seat. A court-appointed expert from Dekra, one of Germany's leading testing authorities, later concluded that, given the retracted handles, the incident 'qualifies as a malfunction'. According to the report, 'the failure of the rear door handles to extend automatically must be considered a decisive factor' in the deaths. Had the system worked as intended, 'it is assumed that rescuers might have been able to extract the two backseat passengers before the fire developed further'. Without what the report calls a 'failure of this safety function', the teens might have survived. Our investigation made waves. The Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, Germany's federal motor transport authority, got involved and announced plans to coordinate with other regulatory bodies to revise international safety standards. Germany's largest automobile club, ADAC, issued a public recommendation that Tesla drivers should carry emergency window hammers. In a statement, ADAC warned that retractable door handles could seriously hinder rescue efforts. Even trained emergency responders, it said, may struggle to reach trapped passengers. Tesla shows no intention of changing the design. That's Musk. He prefers the sleek look of Teslas without handles, so he accepts the risk to his customers. His thinking, it seems, goes something like this: at some point, the engineers will figure out a technical fix. The same logic applies to his grander vision of autonomous driving: because Musk wants to be first, he lets customers test his unfinished Autopilot system on public roads. It's a principle borrowed from the software world, where releasing apps in beta has long been standard practice. The more users, the more feedback and, over time – often years – something stable emerges. Revenue and market share arrive much earlier. The motto: if you wait, you lose. Musk has taken that mindset to the road. The world is his lab. Everyone else is part of the experiment. By the end of 2023, we knew a lot about how Musk's cars worked – but the way they handle data still felt like a black box. How is that data stored? At what moment does the onboard computer send it to Tesla's servers? We talked to independent experts at the Technical University Berlin. Three PhD candidates – Christian Werling, Niclas Kühnapfel and Hans Niklas Jacob – made headlines for hacking Tesla's autopilot hardware. A brief voltage drop on a circuit board turned out to be just enough to trick the system into opening up. The security researchers uncovered what they called 'Elon Mode' – a hidden setting in which the car drives fully autonomously, without requiring the driver to keep his hands on the wheel. They also managed to recover deleted data, including video footage recorded by a Tesla driver. And they traced exactly what data Tesla sends to its servers – and what it doesn't. The hackers explained that Tesla stores data in three places. First, on a memory card inside the onboard computer – essentially a running log of the vehicle's digital brain. Second, on the event data recorder – a black box that captures a few seconds before and after a crash. And third, on Tesla's servers, assuming the vehicle uploads them. The researchers told us they had found an internal database embedded in the system – one built around so-called trigger events. If, for example, the airbag deploys or the car hits an obstacle, the system is designed to save a defined set of data to the black box – and transmit it to Tesla's servers. Unless the vehicles were in a complete network dead zone, in both the Meier and Schuster cases, the cars should have recorded and transmitted that data. Who in the company actually works with that data? We examined testimony from Tesla employees in court cases related to fatal crashes. They described how their departments operate. We cross-referenced their statements with entries in the Tesla Files. A pattern took shape: one team screens all crashes at a high level, forwarding them to specialists – some focused on autopilot, others on vehicle dynamics or road grip. There's also a group that steps in whenever authorities request crash data. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion We compiled a list of employees relevant to our reporting. Some we tried to reach by email or phone. For others, we showed up at their homes. If they weren't there, we left handwritten notes. No one wanted to talk. We searched for other crashes. One involved Hans von Ohain, a 33-year-old Tesla employee from Evergreen, Colorado. On 16 May 2022, he crashed into a tree on his way home from a golf outing and the car burst into flames. Von Ohain died at the scene. His passenger survived and told police that von Ohain, who had been drinking, had activated Full Self-Driving. Tesla, however, said it couldn't confirm whether the system was engaged – because no vehicle data was transmitted for the incident. Then, in February 2024, Musk himself stepped in. The Tesla CEO claimed von Ohain had never downloaded the latest version of the software – so it couldn't have caused the crash. Friends of von Ohain, however, told US media he had shown them the system. His passenger that day, who barely escaped with his life, told reporters that hours earlier the car had already driven erratically by itself. 'The first time it happened, I was like, 'Is that normal?'' he recalled asking von Ohain. 'And he was like, 'Yeah, that happens every now and then.'' His account was bolstered by von Ohain's widow, who explained to the media how overjoyed her husband had been at working for Tesla. Reportedly, von Ohain received the Full Self-Driving system as a perk. His widow explained how he would use the system almost every time he got behind the wheel: 'It was jerky, but we were like, that comes with the territory of new technology. We knew the technology had to learn, and we were willing to be part of that.' The Colorado State Patrol investigated but closed the case without blaming Tesla. It reported that no usable data was recovered. For a company that markets its cars as computers on wheels, Tesla's claim that it had no data available in all these cases is surprising. Musk has long described Tesla vehicles as part of a collective neural network – machines that continuously learn from one another. Think of the Borg aliens from the Star Trek franchise. Musk envisions his cars, like the Borg, as a collective – operating as a hive mind, each vehicle linked to a unified consciousness. When a journalist asked him in October 2015 what made Tesla's driver-assistance system different, he replied, 'The whole Tesla fleet operates as a network. When one car learns something, they all learn it. That is beyond what other car companies are doing.' Every Tesla driver, he explained, becomes a kind of 'expert trainer for how the autopilot should work'. According to Musk, the eight cameras in every Tesla transmit more than 160bn video frames a day to the company's servers. In its owner's manual, Tesla states that its cars may collect even more: 'analytics, road segment, diagnostic and vehicle usage data', all sent to headquarters to improve product quality and features such as autopilot. The company claims it learns 'from the experience of billions of miles that Tesla vehicles have driven'. It is a powerful promise: a fleet of millions of cars, constantly feeding raw information into a gargantuan processing centre. Billions – trillions – of data points, all in service of one goal: making cars drive better and keeping drivers safe. At the start of this year, Musk got a chance to show the world what he meant. On 1 January 2025, at 8.39am, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. The man behind the incident – US special forces veteran Matthew Livelsberger – had rented the vehicle, packed it with fireworks, gas canisters and grenades, and parked it in front of the building. Just before the explosion, he shot himself in the head with a .50 calibre Desert Eagle pistol. 'This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,' Livelsberger wrote in a letter later found by authorities. 'What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives.' The soldier miscalculated. Seven bystanders suffered minor injuries. The Cybertruck was destroyed, but not even the windows of the hotel shattered. Instead, with his final act, Livelsberger revealed something else entirely: just how far the arm of Tesla's data machinery can reach. 'The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now,' Musk wrote on X just hours after the blast. 'Will post more information as soon as we learn anything. We've never seen anything like this.' Later that day, Musk posted again. Tesla had already analysed all relevant data – and was ready to offer conclusions. 'We have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself,' he wrote. 'All vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of the explosion.' Suddenly, Musk wasn't just a CEO; he was an investigator. He instructed Tesla technicians to remotely unlock the scorched vehicle. He handed over internal footage captured up to the moment of Tesla CEO had turned a suicide attack into a showcase of his superior technology. Yet there were critics even in the moment of glory. 'It reveals the kind of sweeping surveillance going on,' warned David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, when contacted by a reporter. 'When something bad happens, it's helpful, but it's a double-edged sword. Companies that collect this data can abuse it.' There are other examples of what Tesla's data collection makes possible. We found the case of David and Sheila Brown, who died in August 2020 when their Model 3 ran a red light at 114mph in Saratoga, California. Investigators managed to reconstruct every detail, thanks to Tesla's vehicle data. It shows exactly when the Browns opened a door, unfastened a seatbelt, and how hard the driver pressed the accelerator – down to the millisecond, right up to the moment of impact. Over time, we found more cases, more detailed accident reports. The data definitely is there – until it isn't. In many crashes when Teslas inexplicably veered off the road or hit stationary objects, investigators didn't actually request data from the company. When we asked authorities why, there was often silence. Our impression was that many prosecutors and police officers weren't even aware that asking was an option. In other cases, they acted only when pushed by victims' families. In the Meier case, Tesla told authorities, in a letter dated 25 June 2018, that the last complete set of vehicle data was transmitted nearly two weeks before the crash. The only data from the day of the accident was a 'limited snapshot of vehicle parameters' – taken 'approximately 50 minutes before the incident'. However, this snapshot 'doesn't show anything in relation to the incident'. As for the black box, Tesla warned that the storage modules were likely destroyed, given the condition of the burned-out vehicle. Data transmission after a crash is possible, the company said – but in this case, it didn't happen. In the end, investigators couldn't even determine whether driver-assist systems were active at the time of the crash. The Schuster case played out similarly. Prosecutors in Stralsund, Germany, were baffled. The road where the crash happened is straight, the asphalt was dry and the weather at the time of the accident was clear. Anke Schuster kept urging the authorities to examine Tesla's telemetry data. When prosecutors did formally request the data recorded by Schuster's car on the day of the crash, it took Tesla more than two weeks to respond – and when it did, the answer was both brief and bold. The company didn't say there was no data. It said that there was 'no relevant data'. The authorities' reaction left us stunned. We expected prosecutors to push back – to tell Tesla that deciding what's relevant is their job, not the company's. But they didn't. Instead, they closed the case. The hackers from TU Berlin pointed us to a study by the Netherlands Forensic Institute, an independent division of the ministry of justice and security. In October 2021, the NFI published findings showing it had successfully accessed the onboard memories of all major Tesla models. The researchers compared their results with accident cases in which police had requested data from Tesla. Their conclusion was that while Tesla formally complied with those requests, it omitted large volumes of data that might have proved useful. Tesla's credibility took a further hit in a report released by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in April 2024. The agency concluded that Tesla failed to adequately monitor whether drivers remain alert and ready to intervene while using its driver-assist systems. It reviewed 956 crashes, field data and customer communications, and pointed to 'gaps in Tesla's telematic data' that made it impossible to determine how often autopilot was active during crashes. If a vehicle's antenna was damaged or it crashed in an area without network coverage, even serious accidents sometimes went unreported. Tesla's internal statistics include only those crashes in which an airbag or other pyrotechnic system deployed – something that occurs in just 18% of police-reported cases. This means that the actual accident rate is significantly higher than Tesla discloses to customers and investors. There's more. Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged 'less than one second before impact' – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. The YouTuber Mark Rober, a former engineer at Nasa, replicated this behaviour in an experiment on 15 March 2025. He simulated a range of hazardous situations, in which the Model Y performed significantly worse than a competing vehicle. The Tesla repeatedly ran over a crash-test dummy without braking. The video went viral, amassing more than 14m views within a few days. The real surprise came after the experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. 'Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,' Lambert noted. And so the doubts about Tesla's integrity pile up. In the Tesla Files, we found emails and reports from a UK-based engineer who led Tesla's Safety Incident Investigation programme, overseeing the company's most sensitive crash cases. His internal memos reveal that Tesla deliberately limited documentation of particular issues to avoid the risk of this information being requested under subpoena. Although he pushed for clearer protocols and better internal processes, US leadership resisted – explicitly driven by fears of legal exposure. We contacted Tesla multiple times with questions about the company's data practices. We asked about the Meier and Schuster cases – and what it means when fatal crashes are marked 'resolved' in Tesla's internal system. We asked the company to respond to criticism from the US traffic authority and to the findings of Dutch forensic investigators. We also asked why Tesla doesn't simply publish crash data, as Musk once promised to do, and whether the company considers it appropriate to withhold information from potential US court orders. Tesla has not responded to any of our questions. Elon Musk boasts about the vast amount of data his cars generate – data that, he claims, will not only improve Tesla's entire fleet but also revolutionise road traffic. But, as we have witnessed again and again in the most critical of cases, Tesla refuses to share it. Tesla's handling of crash data affects even those who never wanted anything to do with the company. Every road user trusts the car in front, behind or beside them not to be a threat. Does that trust still stand when the car is driving itself? Internally, we called our investigation into Tesla's crash data Black Box. At first, because it dealt with the physical data units built into the vehicles – so-called black boxes. But the devices Tesla installs hardly deserve the name. Unlike the flight recorders used in aviation, they're not fireproof – and in many of the cases we examined, they proved useless. Over time, we came to see that the name held a second meaning. A black box, in common parlance, is something closed to the outside. Something opaque. Unknowable. And while we've gained some insight into Tesla as a company, its handling of crash data remains just that: a black box. Only Tesla knows how Elon Musk's vehicles truly work. Yet today, more than 5m of them share our roads. Some names have been changed. This is an edited extract from The Tesla Files by Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden, published on 24 July by Penguin Michael Joseph at £22. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Automotive
- The Guardian
‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it': the terrifying truth about why Tesla's cars keep crashing
It was a Monday afternoon in June 2023 when Rita Meier, 45, joined us for a video call. Meier told us about the last time she said goodbye to her husband, Stefan, five years earlier. He had been leaving their home near Lake Constance, Germany, heading for a trade fair in Milan. Meier recalled how he hesitated between taking his Tesla Model S or her BMW. He had never driven the Tesla that far before. He checked the route for charging stations along the way and ultimately decided to try it. Rita had a bad feeling. She stayed home with their three children, the youngest less than a year old. At 3.18pm on 10 May 2018, Stefan Meier lost control of his Model S on the A2 highway near the Monte Ceneri tunnel. Travelling at about 100kmh (62mph), he ploughed through several warning markers and traffic signs before crashing into a slanted guardrail. 'The collision with the guardrail launches the vehicle into the air, where it flips several times before landing,' investigators would write later. The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. According to witnesses, the Model S burst into flames while still airborne. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn't unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn. At that moment, Rita Meier was unaware of the crash. She tried calling her husband, but he didn't pick up. When he still hadn't returned her call hours later – highly unusual for this devoted father – she attempted to track his car using Tesla's app. It no longer worked. By the time police officers rang her doorbell late that night, Meier was already bracing for the worst. The crash made headlines the next morning as one of the first fatal Tesla accidents in Europe. Tesla released a statement to the press saying the company was 'deeply saddened' by the incident, adding, 'We are working to gather all the facts in this case and are fully cooperating with local authorities.' To this day, Meier still doesn't know why her husband died. She has kept everything the police gave her after their inconclusive investigation. The charred wreck of the Model S sits in a garage Meier rents specifically for that purpose. The scorched phone – which she had forensically analysed at her own expense, to no avail – sits in a drawer at home. Maybe someday all this will be needed again, she says. She hasn't given up hope of uncovering the truth. Rita Meier was one of many people who reached out to us after we began reporting on the Tesla Files – a cache of 23,000 leaked documents and 100 gigabytes of confidential data shared by an anonymous whistleblower. The first report we published looked at problems with Tesla's autopilot system, which allows the cars to temporarily drive on their own, taking over steering, braking and acceleration. Though touted by the company as 'Full Self-Driving' (FSD), it is designed to assist, not replace, the driver, who should keep their eyes on the road and be ready to intervene at any time. Autonomous driving is the core promise around which Elon Musk has built his company. Tesla has never delivered a truly self-driving vehicle, yet the richest person in the world keeps repeating the claim that his cars will soon drive entirely without human help. Is Tesla's autopilot really as advanced as he says? The Tesla Files suggest otherwise. They contain more than 2,400 customer complaints about unintended acceleration and more than 1,500 braking issues – 139 involving emergency braking without cause, and 383 phantom braking events triggered by false collision warnings. More than 1,000 crashes are documented. A separate spreadsheet on driver-assistance incidents where customers raised safety concerns lists more than 3,000 entries. The oldest date from 2015, the most recent from March 2022. In that time, Tesla delivered roughly 2.6m vehicles with autopilot software. Most incidents occurred in the US, but there have also been complaints from Europe and Asia. Customers described their cars suddenly accelerating or braking hard. Some escaped with a scare; others ended up in ditches, crashing into walls or colliding with oncoming vehicles. 'After dropping my son off in his school parking lot, as I go to make a right-hand exit it lurches forward suddenly,' one complaint read. Another said, 'My autopilot failed/malfunctioned this morning (car didn't brake) and I almost rear-ended somebody at 65mph.' A third reported, 'Today, while my wife was driving with our baby in the car, it suddenly accelerated out of nowhere.' Braking for no reason caused just as much distress. 'Our car just stopped on the highway. That was terrifying,' a Tesla driver wrote. Another complained, 'Frequent phantom braking on two-lane highways. Makes the autopilot almost unusable.' Some report their car 'jumped lanes unexpectedly', causing them to hit a concrete barrier, or veered into oncoming traffic. Musk has given the world many reasons to criticise him since he teamed up with Donald Trump. Many people do – mostly by boycotting his products. But while it is one thing to disagree with the political views of a business leader, it is another to be mortally afraid of his products. In the Tesla Files, we found thousands of examples of why such fear may be justified. We set out to match some of these incidents of autopilot errors with customers' names. Like hundreds of other Tesla customers, Rita Meier entered the vehicle identification number of her husband's Model S into the response form we published on the website of the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, for which we carried out our investigation. She quickly discovered that the Tesla Files contained data related to the car. In her first email to us, she wrote, 'You can probably imagine what it felt like to read that.' There isn't much information – just an Excel spreadsheet titled 'Incident Review'. A Tesla employee noted that the mileage counter on Stefan Meier's car stood at 4,765 miles at the time of the crash. The entry was catalogued just one day after the fatal accident. In the comment field was written, 'Vehicle involved in an accident.' The cause of the crash remains unknown to this day. In Tesla's internal system, a company employee had marked the case as 'resolved', but for five years, Rita Meier had been searching for answers. After Stefan's death, she took over the family business – a timber company with 200 employees based in Tettnang, Baden-Württemberg. As journalists, we are used to tough interviews, but this one was different. We had to strike a careful balance – between empathy and the persistent questioning good reporting demands. 'Why are you convinced the Tesla was responsible for your husband's death?' we asked her. 'Isn't it possible he was distracted – maybe looking at his phone?' No one knows for sure. But Meier was well aware that Musk has previously claimed Tesla 'releases critical crash data affecting public safety immediately and always will'; that he has bragged many times about how its superior handling of data sets the company apart from its competitors. In the case of her husband, why was she expected to believe there was no data? Meier's account was structured and precise. Only once did the toll become visible – when she described how her husband's body burned in full view of the firefighters. Her eyes filled with tears and her voice cracked. She apologised, turning away. After she collected herself, she told us she has nothing left to gain – but also nothing to lose. That was why she had reached out to us. We promised to look into the case. Rita Meier wasn't the only widow to approach us. Disappointed customers, current and former employees, analysts and lawyers were sharing links to our reporting. Many of them contacted us. More than once, someone wrote that it was about time someone stood up to Tesla – and to Elon Musk. Meier, too, shared our articles and the callout form with others in her network – including people who, like her, lost loved ones in Tesla crashes. One of them was Anke Schuster. Like Meier, she had lost her husband in a Tesla crash that defies explanation and had spent years chasing answers. And, like Meier, she had found her husband's Model X listed in the Tesla Files. Once again, the incident was marked as resolved – with no indication of what that actually meant. 'My husband died in an unexplained and inexplicable accident,' Schuster wrote in her first email. Her dealings with police, prosecutors and insurance companies, she said, had been 'hell'. No one seemed to understand how a Tesla works. 'I lost my husband. His four daughters lost their father. And no one ever cared.' Her husband, Oliver, was a tech enthusiast, fascinated by Musk. A hotelier by trade, he owned no fewer than four Teslas. He loved the cars. She hated them – especially the autopilot. The way the software seemed to make decisions on its own never sat right with her. Now, she felt as if her instincts had been confirmed in the worst way. Oliver Schuster was returning from a business meeting on 13 April 2021 when his black Model X veered off highway B194 between Loitz and Schönbeck in north-east Germany. It was 12.50pm when the car left the road and crashed into a tree. Schuster started to worry when her husband missed a scheduled bank appointment. She tried to track the vehicle but found no way to locate it. Even calling Tesla led nowhere. That evening, the police broke the news: after the crash her husband's car had burst into flames. He had burned to death – with the fire brigade watching helplessly. The crashes that killed Meier's and Schuster's husbands were almost three years apart but the parallels were chilling. We examined accident reports, eyewitness accounts, crash-site photos and correspondence with Tesla. In both cases, investigators had requested vehicle data from Tesla, and the company hadn't provided it. In Meier's case, Tesla staff claimed no data was available. In Schuster's, they said there was no relevant data. Over the next two years, we spoke with crash victims, grieving families and experts around the world. What we uncovered was an ominous black box – a system designed not only to collect and control every byte of customer data, but to safeguard Musk's vision of autonomous driving. Critical information was sealed off from public scrutiny. Elon Musk is a perfectionist with a tendency towards micromanagement. At Tesla, his whims seem to override every argument – even in matters of life and death. During our reporting, we came across the issue of door handles. On Teslas, they retract into the doors while the cars are being driven. The system depends on battery power. If an airbag deploys, the doors are supposed to unlock automatically and the handles extend – at least, that's what the Model S manual says. The idea for the sleek, futuristic design stems from Musk himself. He insisted on retractable handles, despite repeated warnings from engineers. Since 2018, they have been linked to at least four fatal accidents in Europe and the US, in which five people died. In February 2024, we reported on a particularly tragic case: a fatal crash on a country road near Dobbrikow, in Brandenburg, Germany. Two 18-year-olds were killed when the Tesla they were in slammed into a tree and caught fire. First responders couldn't open the doors because the handles were retracted. The teenagers burned to death in the back seat. A court-appointed expert from Dekra, one of Germany's leading testing authorities, later concluded that, given the retracted handles, the incident 'qualifies as a malfunction'. According to the report, 'the failure of the rear door handles to extend automatically must be considered a decisive factor' in the deaths. Had the system worked as intended, 'it is assumed that rescuers might have been able to extract the two backseat passengers before the fire developed further'. Without what the report calls a 'failure of this safety function', the teens might have survived. Our investigation made waves. The Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, Germany's federal motor transport authority, got involved and announced plans to coordinate with other regulatory bodies to revise international safety standards. Germany's largest automobile club, ADAC, issued a public recommendation that Tesla drivers should carry emergency window hammers. In a statement, ADAC warned that retractable door handles could seriously hinder rescue efforts. Even trained emergency responders, it said, may struggle to reach trapped passengers. Tesla shows no intention of changing the design. That's Musk. He prefers the sleek look of Teslas without handles, so he accepts the risk to his customers. His thinking, it seems, goes something like this: at some point, the engineers will figure out a technical fix. The same logic applies to his grander vision of autonomous driving: because Musk wants to be first, he lets customers test his unfinished Autopilot system on public roads. It's a principle borrowed from the software world, where releasing apps in beta has long been standard practice. The more users, the more feedback and, over time – often years – something stable emerges. Revenue and market share arrive much earlier. The motto: if you wait, you lose. Musk has taken that mindset to the road. The world is his lab. Everyone else is part of the experiment. By the end of 2023, we knew a lot about how Musk's cars worked – but the way they handle data still felt like a black box. How is that data stored? At what moment does the onboard computer send it to Tesla's servers? We talked to independent experts at the Technical University Berlin. Three PhD candidates – Christian Werling, Niclas Kühnapfel and Hans Niklas Jacob – made headlines for hacking Tesla's autopilot hardware. A brief voltage drop on a circuit board turned out to be just enough to trick the system into opening up. The security researchers uncovered what they called 'Elon Mode' – a hidden setting in which the car drives fully autonomously, without requiring the driver to keep his hands on the wheel. They also managed to recover deleted data, including video footage recorded by a Tesla driver. And they traced exactly what data Tesla sends to its servers – and what it doesn't. The hackers explained that Tesla stores data in three places. First, on a memory card inside the onboard computer – essentially a running log of the vehicle's digital brain. Second, on the event data recorder – a black box that captures a few seconds before and after a crash. And third, on Tesla's servers, assuming the vehicle uploads them. The researchers told us they had found an internal database embedded in the system – one built around so-called trigger events. If, for example, the airbag deploys or the car hits an obstacle, the system is designed to save a defined set of data to the black box – and transmit it to Tesla's servers. Unless the vehicles were in a complete network dead zone, in both the Meier and Schuster cases, the cars should have recorded and transmitted that data. Who in the company actually works with that data? We examined testimony from Tesla employees in court cases related to fatal crashes. They described how their departments operate. We cross-referenced their statements with entries in the Tesla Files. A pattern took shape: one team screens all crashes at a high level, forwarding them to specialists – some focused on autopilot, others on vehicle dynamics or road grip. There's also a group that steps in whenever authorities request crash data. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion We compiled a list of employees relevant to our reporting. Some we tried to reach by email or phone. For others, we showed up at their homes. If they weren't there, we left handwritten notes. No one wanted to talk. We searched for other crashes. One involved Hans von Ohain, a 33-year-old Tesla employee from Evergreen, Colorado. On 16 May 2022, he crashed into a tree on his way home from a golf outing and the car burst into flames. Von Ohain died at the scene. His passenger survived and told police that von Ohain, who had been drinking, had activated Full Self-Driving. Tesla, however, said it couldn't confirm whether the system was engaged – because no vehicle data was transmitted for the incident. Then, in February 2024, Musk himself stepped in. The Tesla CEO claimed von Ohain had never downloaded the latest version of the software – so it couldn't have caused the crash. Friends of von Ohain, however, told US media he had shown them the system. His passenger that day, who barely escaped with his life, told reporters that hours earlier the car had already driven erratically by itself. 'The first time it happened, I was like, 'Is that normal?'' he recalled asking von Ohain. 'And he was like, 'Yeah, that happens every now and then.'' His account was bolstered by von Ohain's widow, who explained to the media how overjoyed her husband had been at working for Tesla. Reportedly, von Ohain received the Full Self-Driving system as a perk. His widow explained how he would use the system almost every time he got behind the wheel: 'It was jerky, but we were like, that comes with the territory of new technology. We knew the technology had to learn, and we were willing to be part of that.' The Colorado State Patrol investigated but closed the case without blaming Tesla. It reported that no usable data was recovered. For a company that markets its cars as computers on wheels, Tesla's claim that it had no data available in all these cases is surprising. Musk has long described Tesla vehicles as part of a collective neural network – machines that continuously learn from one another. Think of the Borg aliens from the Star Trek franchise. Musk envisions his cars, like the Borg, as a collective – operating as a hive mind, each vehicle linked to a unified consciousness. When a journalist asked him in October 2015 what made Tesla's driver-assistance system different, he replied, 'The whole Tesla fleet operates as a network. When one car learns something, they all learn it. That is beyond what other car companies are doing.' Every Tesla driver, he explained, becomes a kind of 'expert trainer for how the autopilot should work'. According to Musk, the eight cameras in every Tesla transmit more than 160bn video frames a day to the company's servers. In its owner's manual, Tesla states that its cars may collect even more: 'analytics, road segment, diagnostic and vehicle usage data', all sent to headquarters to improve product quality and features such as autopilot. The company claims it learns 'from the experience of billions of miles that Tesla vehicles have driven'. It is a powerful promise: a fleet of millions of cars, constantly feeding raw information into a gargantuan processing centre. Billions – trillions – of data points, all in service of one goal: making cars drive better and keeping drivers safe. At the start of this year, Musk got a chance to show the world what he meant. On 1 January 2025, at 8.39am, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. The man behind the incident – US special forces veteran Matthew Livelsberger – had rented the vehicle, packed it with fireworks, gas canisters and grenades, and parked it in front of the building. Just before the explosion, he shot himself in the head with a .50 calibre Desert Eagle pistol. 'This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,' Livelsberger wrote in a letter later found by authorities. 'What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives.' The soldier miscalculated. Seven bystanders suffered minor injuries. The Cybertruck was destroyed, but not even the windows of the hotel shattered. Instead, with his final act, Livelsberger revealed something else entirely: just how far the arm of Tesla's data machinery can reach. 'The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now,' Musk wrote on X just hours after the blast. 'Will post more information as soon as we learn anything. We've never seen anything like this.' Later that day, Musk posted again. Tesla had already analysed all relevant data – and was ready to offer conclusions. 'We have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself,' he wrote. 'All vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of the explosion.' Suddenly, Musk wasn't just a CEO; he was an investigator. He instructed Tesla technicians to remotely unlock the scorched vehicle. He handed over internal footage captured up to the moment of Tesla CEO had turned a suicide attack into a showcase of his superior technology. Yet there were critics even in the moment of glory. 'It reveals the kind of sweeping surveillance going on,' warned David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, when contacted by a reporter. 'When something bad happens, it's helpful, but it's a double-edged sword. Companies that collect this data can abuse it.' There are other examples of what Tesla's data collection makes possible. We found the case of David and Sheila Brown, who died in August 2020 when their Model 3 ran a red light at 114mph in Saratoga, California. Investigators managed to reconstruct every detail, thanks to Tesla's vehicle data. It shows exactly when the Browns opened a door, unfastened a seatbelt, and how hard the driver pressed the accelerator – down to the millisecond, right up to the moment of impact. Over time, we found more cases, more detailed accident reports. The data definitely is there – until it isn't. In many crashes when Teslas inexplicably veered off the road or hit stationary objects, investigators didn't actually request data from the company. When we asked authorities why, there was often silence. Our impression was that many prosecutors and police officers weren't even aware that asking was an option. In other cases, they acted only when pushed by victims' families. In the Meier case, Tesla told authorities, in a letter dated 25 June 2018, that the last complete set of vehicle data was transmitted nearly two weeks before the crash. The only data from the day of the accident was a 'limited snapshot of vehicle parameters' – taken 'approximately 50 minutes before the incident'. However, this snapshot 'doesn't show anything in relation to the incident'. As for the black box, Tesla warned that the storage modules were likely destroyed, given the condition of the burned-out vehicle. Data transmission after a crash is possible, the company said – but in this case, it didn't happen. In the end, investigators couldn't even determine whether driver-assist systems were active at the time of the crash. The Schuster case played out similarly. Prosecutors in Stralsund, Germany, were baffled. The road where the crash happened is straight, the asphalt was dry and the weather at the time of the accident was clear. Anke Schuster kept urging the authorities to examine Tesla's telemetry data. When prosecutors did formally request the data recorded by Schuster's car on the day of the crash, it took Tesla more than two weeks to respond – and when it did, the answer was both brief and bold. The company didn't say there was no data. It said that there was 'no relevant data'. The authorities' reaction left us stunned. We expected prosecutors to push back – to tell Tesla that deciding what's relevant is their job, not the company's. But they didn't. Instead, they closed the case. The hackers from TU Berlin pointed us to a study by the Netherlands Forensic Institute, an independent division of the ministry of justice and security. In October 2021, the NFI published findings showing it had successfully accessed the onboard memories of all major Tesla models. The researchers compared their results with accident cases in which police had requested data from Tesla. Their conclusion was that while Tesla formally complied with those requests, it omitted large volumes of data that might have proved useful. Tesla's credibility took a further hit in a report released by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in April 2024. The agency concluded that Tesla failed to adequately monitor whether drivers remain alert and ready to intervene while using its driver-assist systems. It reviewed 956 crashes, field data and customer communications, and pointed to 'gaps in Tesla's telematic data' that made it impossible to determine how often autopilot was active during crashes. If a vehicle's antenna was damaged or it crashed in an area without network coverage, even serious accidents sometimes went unreported. Tesla's internal statistics include only those crashes in which an airbag or other pyrotechnic system deployed – something that occurs in just 18% of police-reported cases. This means that the actual accident rate is significantly higher than Tesla discloses to customers and investors. There's more. Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged 'less than one second before impact' – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. The YouTuber Mark Rober, a former engineer at Nasa, replicated this behaviour in an experiment on 15 March 2025. He simulated a range of hazardous situations, in which the Model Y performed significantly worse than a competing vehicle. The Tesla repeatedly ran over a crash-test dummy without braking. The video went viral, amassing more than 14m views within a few days. The real surprise came after the experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. 'Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,' Lambert noted. And so the doubts about Tesla's integrity pile up. In the Tesla Files, we found emails and reports from a UK-based engineer who led Tesla's Safety Incident Investigation programme, overseeing the company's most sensitive crash cases. His internal memos reveal that Tesla deliberately limited documentation of particular issues to avoid the risk of this information being requested under subpoena. Although he pushed for clearer protocols and better internal processes, US leadership resisted – explicitly driven by fears of legal exposure. We contacted Tesla multiple times with questions about the company's data practices. We asked about the Meier and Schuster cases – and what it means when fatal crashes are marked 'resolved' in Tesla's internal system. We asked the company to respond to criticism from the US traffic authority and to the findings of Dutch forensic investigators. We also asked why Tesla doesn't simply publish crash data, as Musk once promised to do, and whether the company considers it appropriate to withhold information from potential US court orders. Tesla has not responded to any of our questions. Elon Musk boasts about the vast amount of data his cars generate – data that, he claims, will not only improve Tesla's entire fleet but also revolutionise road traffic. But, as we have witnessed again and again in the most critical of cases, Tesla refuses to share it. Tesla's handling of crash data affects even those who never wanted anything to do with the company. Every road user trusts the car in front, behind or beside them not to be a threat. Does that trust still stand when the car is driving itself? Internally, we called our investigation into Tesla's crash data Black Box. At first, because it dealt with the physical data units built into the vehicles – so-called black boxes. But the devices Tesla installs hardly deserve the name. Unlike the flight recorders used in aviation, they're not fireproof – and in many of the cases we examined, they proved useless. Over time, we came to see that the name held a second meaning. A black box, in common parlance, is something closed to the outside. Something opaque. Unknowable. And while we've gained some insight into Tesla as a company, its handling of crash data remains just that: a black box. Only Tesla knows how Elon Musk's vehicles truly work. Yet today, more than 5m of them share our roads. Some names have been changed. This is an edited extract from The Tesla Files by Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden, published on 24 July by Penguin Michael Joseph at £22. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Times
24-05-2025
- Irish Times
‘It belongs with the books of Kells and Durrow.' Illuminated manuscripts back in Ireland for the first time in more than 1,000 years
Nestled among Alpine foothills and south of the glittering Lake Constance lies the historic city of St Gallen, in Switzerland . Natural beauty aside, the city is home to the Abbey of St Gall, a Unesco world heritage site and unexpected repository of Irish history and culture. Now famed for its impressive library, the abbey was founded in the eighth century on the site of a hermitage established in 612 by one of Ireland's lesser-known saints, an Irish monk called Gall or Gallus. Although the monastery was dissolved in 1805, its library was spared and remains brimming with ancient manuscripts today. Honouring the two countries' shared history, the Swiss library has furnished the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) with 17 of its illustrious manuscripts for an exhibition celebrating the story of Gall's journey to continental Europe. This is the library's largest loan ever; for such an institution to bestow more than a couple of manuscripts at a time is practically unheard of. Words on the Wave: Ireland and St Gallen in Early Medieval Europe is free to visit in the museum's Kildare Street location from May 30th until October 24th. READ MORE 'If you stood out on O'Connell Street now and asked who was Gallus, I doubt you'd get an answer now,' says Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, a recently retired professor at the University of Galway who was instrumental in the exhibition's conception. [ From the archive: Wandering Irish 'outsider' stumbled upon site for Swiss city of St Gallen Opens in new window ] 'But if you asked anybody in Switzerland or Italy or France or Germany, they'd keep you there for hours. They're very happy about their associations with the Irish.' Ó Cróinín recalls the moment he suggested to library director Dr Cornel Dora that the Abbey of St Gall might temporarily spare some of its collection. The loan that followed allows select manuscripts to return to Irish soil for the first time in a millennium. The pair attended a conference together in the British Library in December 2018, shortly after collaborating on an exhibition at St Gallen. The Swiss city of Saint Gallen, with the Abbey of St Gall visible in the centre of the picture. Photograph: iStock 'We were having a cup of coffee during one of the breaks and I said to Cornel, 'Look, the Brits do this thing well. Why don't we do this kind of thing? Would you be interested in letting us have some of your manuscripts?'' Almost six and a half years later, that idea is coming to life. Accompanying the 17 manuscripts, which range from poems and letters to religious texts, are more than 100 objects gathered from NMI's collection. St Gallen was always conscious of the fact it had an Irish connection. Gall was a very popular saint in the region — Dr Cornel Dora The Faddan More psalter, found on a Tipperary bog in 2006, is one highlight. Many recent discoveries are on display for the first time, such as the Lough Kinale Book Shrine and a Viking sword, straight from conservation. 'It is a bit like a dream of mine to do something like this because we have this Irish heritage that is important to us in St Gallen,' says Dora, on a phone call from his home in Switzerland. Gall was one of 12 companions to another Irish saint and missionary, Columbanus, responsible for several monastic foundations including those at Luxeuil in eastern France, and Bobbio, in northern Italy. Image from an Irish Evangeliary from the library of the Abbey of St Gall, part of the exhibition Words on the Wave: Ireland and St Gallen in Early Medieval Europe 'The Irish brought a new fervour into the Christian life here on the Continent,' says Dora of the monks' European mission. Following a dispute between Gall and Columbanus, they parted ways. 'Gall stayed at Lake Constance and took to the wilderness, the forest. He settled and made a cabin, and about three years later he assembled other monks around him and founded an Irish type of monastery there.' It was on the site of this hermitage, where Gall is buried, that the Abbey of St Gall was founded. 'St Gallen was always conscious of the fact it had an Irish connection. Gall was a very popular saint in the region. Pilgrims came and visited his grave,' says Dora. It is a tradition that continues today. 'We have testimonials that there were Irish men here repeatedly. They really wanted to visit their compatriot Gall. It seems the Irish knew there was an Irish saint in St Gallen. We know about four or five Irish monks who stayed here. One was an recluse, who lived in a confinement that had no door.' The manuscripts on loan to NMI comprise a mixture of books thought to be written in Irish monastic settlements, later travelling to Europe with Gall and Columbanus, and texts penned by Irish scribes in St Gallen. Maeve Sikora, keeper of Irish antiquities at the museum, is joined by assistant keeper and exhibition curator Matthew Seaver, as the pair give me a preview of the exhibition space and a sneak peek at its 'aesthetic highlight' – a mid-eighth century Gospel from St Gallen, thought to originate from the Irish midlands. 'It's really in a class of its own. It belongs with [the books of] Kells and Durrow,' says Seaver, as we inspect the text's vibrantly coloured vellum. On one page a barefoot St Matthew – in hues of orange, red and blue – applies a scribal knife or scraper to a page and dips his pen in an inkwell. He is assisted by a dutiful angel. For Sikora, the exhibition is about portraying 'the connectedness' between Ireland and continental Europe. 'People coming and people going. Ideas coming and going. Artefacts coming and going.' The modern European idea shines up for the first time in these letters [from St Columbanus to the pope] — Dr Cornel Dora Manuscripts are complemented by related artefacts, 'so you can see an object that looks just like an illustration in one of the manuscripts,' says Seaver. 'Sometimes a shard of pottery is hard to understand on its own,' says Sikora of the curatorial decision to combine ceramics and works of metal and stone with the manuscripts. Pointing to where some of the objects are soon to be displayed, Seaver describes how their journeys were intertwined with those of Irish missionaries like Columbanus and Gall. 'The ships that are carrying Columbanus and Gall are carrying these pots. They're coming from the eastern Mediterranean, then they're coming from the south of France and toing and froing between Ireland and there in the sixth and seventh centuries. The physical journey is the same as the manuscripts and the people went on, so that's what we're trying to get across.' A Latin grammar book, whose margins are brimming with commentary written in Irish by frustrated monks 'remarking on the writing conditions, how bad the ink is, giving out about making mistakes and begging forgiveness' is on display. [ 'You are only the sixth person to see this since the Vikings': Behind the scenes at the National Museum of Ireland Opens in new window ] 'They write in ogham at one point, saying they are ale-killed, which is essentially hungover,' says Seaver, laughing. The book in question is a copy of the Institutiones Grammaticae of Priscian, well known to Irish scholars in the early Middle Ages. Copies of letters from St Columbanus to the pope make for a timely inclusion in the exhibition. According to Dora, 'the modern European idea shines up for the first time in these letters'. Fragments of the earliest surviving copy of Isidore's etymologiae, written by an Irish scribe in the seventh century and later brought to St Gallen, also make an appearance. The etymological encyclopedia was originally compiled by the influential bishop Isidore of Seville. Another key aspect of the exhibition is a collaborative student manuscript project, which will be on display alongside a short film documenting it. The abbey school in Switzerland was paired up with Irish schools in Ballymote, Co Sligo, Kells in Meath, and Gallen Community School in Offaly. Led by historian and calligrapher Timothy O'Neill, the classes met online where they learned about early medieval culture and how to write in insular script. The students then had the opportunity to express their own ideas on vellum, emulating the scribes of medieval Ireland and St Gallen. NMI's exhibition also traces the journey of one of the abbey's schoolmasters and most famous pilgrims – Moengal, later named Marcellus. Moengal travelled Europe with his uncle Marcus, a bishop. 'They went to Rome and on their return from Rome they went back to St Gallen and decided to stay,' says Seaver. Moengal 'taught a curriculum covering the seven liberal arts to some of the great master craftspeople from St Gallen', leaving a lasting legacy. Words on the Wave: Ireland and St Gallen in Early Medieval Europe is at the National Museum, Kildare Street, Dublin, from May 30th until October 24th.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Germany's underwater energy vaults could be the world's next power storage giant
What if the key to storing solar power isn't on rooftops or in batteries—but hidden deep beneath the waves? That's exactly what researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute are exploring, with plans underway to submerge massive concrete spheres in the ocean, offering a sea-based alternative to land-hungry energy storage solutions. As part of the StEnSea (Stored Energy in the Sea) project, the renowned institute has been investigating how deep-sea pressure can be harnessed to store energy in the short to medium term. Since 2011, the team has focused on deploying giant hollow concrete spheres sunk hundreds of feet beneath the ocean surface to test the waters on this new frontier, according to a report on New Atlas. An empty sphere functions as a fully charged storage unit. When its valve opens, seawater flows inside, driving a turbine connected to a generator that feeds electricity into the grid. To recharge, water is pumped back out against the surrounding pressure using energy from the grid. The institute has conducted successful tests in Europe's Lake Constance. FraunhoferEach sphere measures about 30 feet (9 meters) in diameter, weighs 400 tons, and is anchored at depths between 1,970 and 2,625 feet (600–800 meters) for optimal efficiency. After successful testing of a smaller model in Europe's Lake Constance near the Rhine River, Fraunhofer plans to deploy a full-scale 3D-printed prototype off the coast of Long Beach, California, by the end of 2026, under a $4 million US Department of Energy project. This unit is expected to generate 0.5 megawatts and store 0.4 megawatt-hours—enough to power an average U.S. household for around two weeks. The institute has set an ambitious goal to further scale this technology to handle much larger spheres, approaching 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter. Fraunhofer researchers estimate that the StEnSea system could offer a colossal global energy storage capacity of about 817,000 gigawatt-hours, enough to power nearly 75 million homes across Germany, France, and the UK for an entire year. The institute projects storage costs at roughly 5.1 cents (4.6 euro cents) per kilowatt-hour, with initial investment costs near $177 (158 euros) per kilowatt-hour of capacity. These estimates are based on a model storage park featuring six spheres, delivering a combined power output of 30 megawatts and a total storage capacity of 120 megawatt-hours. The institute plans to deploy a full-scale 3D-printed prototype off the coast of Long Beach, California, by the end of 2026. Fraunhofer According to Fraunhofer, StEnSea's spherical storage is particularly well-suited for stabilizing power grids by providing frequency regulation and operating reserves. It also supports arbitrage — the process of purchasing electricity when prices are low and selling it when prices peak, a strategy commonly used by grid operators, utility companies, and energy traders. In the long run, StEnSea could compete with traditional pumped hydro storage as a means to store excess grid electricity, with no use of valuable land area playing to its advantage. Unlike pumped storage, which depends on having two reservoirs at different elevations to move water through turbines, StEnSea's underwater spheres can be deployed in multiple locations around the globe, enabling vast storage potential. While pumped storage remains cheaper to operate and slightly more efficient over a full cycle, StEnSea's flexibility and scale could make it a vital component of future energy grids.
