Are other drivers safe? Warning other road users about your distractions.

Anthony: You are listening to There Auto Be A Law, the Center for Auto Safety Podcast with executive director Michael Brooks, chief engineer Fred Perkins, and hosted by me Anthony Cimino. For over 50 years, the Center for Auto Safety has worked to make cars safer.

Hey, listeners, welcome to another episode of It Came From The Deep, no, it’s there Ought to Be a Law. Good morning today. Wait, Anthony I have

Fred: a joke that was submitted by one of our listeners. Oh, no

Anthony: listeners. No, go ahead. Yeah, please. Encouraging.

Fred: All right. What and this is appropriate for you, what vegetable do sailors really hate?

Anthony: I don’t know what vegetables, banana

Fred: Lees.

Anthony: Sweet. That’s dad

Michael: joke

Anthony: all the way. Why did Michael think a banana was a vegetable? I, [00:01:00]

Michael: I, I just always hear about boats, bananas and boats. Bananas and boats are bad.

Anthony: Yeah. That’s just an old myth. But that’s not what we’re gonna talk about today.

Airbag Warning and Diagnostics

Anthony: We’re gonna talk about a problem close to home. The other day I started my car and I sent both of you a screenshot of what I saw, not a screenshot of photo. Oh yeah. My, my car came up with a message basically saying, Hey, there’s a some serious fault in your supplemental restraint system. Your airbag, see your dealer immediately.

And it was cool. It had a button I’d call dealer and I hit that and, I got an eight ball. Great. No, just, that’s ridiculous. I have, I’m going to the dealer tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow. Good.

Michael: I’m glad you are. I was worried you were gonna skip that.

Anthony: No way. Okay. Perfect crime maybe, but I don’t know if it’s the passenger or driver’s side airbag that’s disabled.

Fred: Hey to put it into a geek context, that is a great example. Built in diagnostics. We talk about that from time to time, and that’s exactly what it does. It checks the systems to make sure they’re operating okay and warns you if there’s a problem. Despite the fact that you [00:02:00] had a problem, it’s good news that your vehicle was designed to detect that and warn you so you can get it fixed.

Anthony: Yeah I love it. Now is this something that will be covered under warranty or am I gonna have to pay for this?

Michael: How old’s your car?

Anthony: Oh, it’s a 2 20 20. So

Michael: four years, five years. Years. Five years. Did you buy it? It’s gonna matter when you bought it. I’d be surprised if it’s still under factory warranty.

You don’t have the factory warranty. I don’t know what the Toyota is. Three, three to five years, somewhere in there. We’ll find out.

Counterfeit Airbag Parts Issue

Anthony: Anyway the reason I bring up airbags is not just to talk about my issue, but let’s talk about Chinese airbag parts that have exploded and killed six oh. From an article in the Wall Street Journal, I’m quoting the company China-based Ian Province.

Tiano Safety Technology makes airbag inflators, which contain hazardous chemicals that ignite during a crash to rapidly fill an airbag with gas. At least six people have died and two have been injured in crashes after the company’s inflators ruptured and [00:03:00] sprayed shrapnel around the vehicle’s cabin. So NSA’s investigating this sounds similar to Tata issue.

This sounds, we’ve talked about this literally since episode one, where Red ruined my worldview by saying they can use anything as a propellant. And they’re still using anything. And this one is this is horrible.

Michael: These are, these are counterfeit. They can, not only can they now use anything as a propellant, they can use nothing in these airbags because, a lot of these counterfeit airbags could be, stuffed with a sock instead of what you need to deploy an airbag.

But it’s becoming a huge problem. The weird thing about this is that these are coming illegally in the United States, imported illegally into the United States. They’re not, certified to US standards. The company involved. DTNI won’t, I don’t think I, Jill, yeah.

Jillian Province Denu. I think Anthony just tried that, so I won’t, [00:04:00] I’ll skip it. Yeah,

Anthony: I think I did a good job too. DTN

Michael: sounds pretty good. That company doesn’t ship airbags and inflators to the United States. But somehow people in the United States are purchasing them. It’s unclear, I think, at the moment, whether they’re being purchased by, any legitimate repair shops, it could be, private folks who are trying to fix their airbag and buying something off eBay.

We’re not really sure. But it’s interesting because there’s really, DTN is not a, I don’t, there’s a question as to whether they fall under NHTSA’s purview since, they’re in China and don’t intend, at least it appears to ship these airbags to the United States. So I, this is a situation where I think.

There are a lot of problems in protecting consumers against this. I’m worried about the ability of the United States government to do so because beyond, warning the public and maybe, carrying out some [00:05:00] type of pressure campaign against online retailers who are selling these things.

How do you reach DTN even if and there’s a chance, DTN isn’t the responsible party here. It could be, another criminal syndicate in China shipping these things to the United States. And I think we’re, we should all be, rightly s skeptical of the ability of customs, to seize every one of these at the border.

I don’t think that’s what’s gonna happen. We also don’t know, are the installers, being fooled by it? Are they buying airbags that they think are legit airbag inflators they think are legitimate, that aren’t? And then, you have the fact that there’s very little chance of some kind of criminal enforcement on whoever is doing this internationally and sending it to America.

Possibly if there’s someone colluding on the American side, there could be cri criminal enforcement there. There’s somewhat of a, kind of a regulatory and legal void here where it’s gonna be a very difficult problem to stop. And so it really becomes incumbent on consumers in a lot of respects [00:06:00] to learn about the issue and make sure that they’re getting their airbag and crash repairs from reputable repair shops.

People they can trust where they can verify the source of their parts.

Fred: Yeah. Lemme give you a couple more perspectives on this. One is we have long advocated for a certificate, or at least a set of requirements for airbags that are gonna be installed in American cars. And NSA has not stepped up to this and has not.

Set a standard despite the fact that there are military and commercial standards for similar things. So there is the void that could easily be filled. There’s a lot of military standards that could be adapted for this. But Nisa hasn’t done that. The second thing is the company says according to their website, they don’t ship airbags, or assemblies.

The inflator is a part of that assembly. And so there are factors that could influence the rupture that are downstream of the inflator. This is really needs to have some engineering analysis to [00:07:00] make sure that Nitsa understands the source of the problem before it tries to fix the wrong problem.

And for people virtually unable to validate the quality of an airbag that’s being put into their car. The airbag, looks sealed. It could be filled with fluff as some of these are, but how could a consumer possibly know this is a gap that knits and needs to fill? Yeah,

Michael: that’s one of the, one of the only solutions I think I could.

Figure out in all this is not a short term solution, if all safety critical auto parts that go into a vehicle were traceable and verifiable, back to the manufacturer that might be a way to prevent this type of thing. I think even more than that, if the vehicle itself could do a self-check like Anthony’s car and say, oh my God, we’ve got a part here with a number that doesn’t match our system, and so we can’t allow the [00:08:00] vehicle to operate with this, counterfeit safety critical part.

Maybe that’s a solution for the long term. But for now there’s not a lot. I think that, that is going to be able to be done here. Just knowing how Nitsa has struggled with a lot of the online sellers. There are still loads of non-compliant child safety seats and motorcycle helmets and other items that Nitsa has authority to regulate that are being sold on eBay and on other online, tmu and all these other online retailers that don’t really care as long as the part, as long as the item’s moving and selling, they don’t put a lot of restriction on their sellers in terms of, whether or not it’s a compliant motor vehicle part in another country.

They don’t really track that. But so it’s very difficult to address this issue.

Anthony: I like that idea a lot where you said the car can see that this is a valid part. ’cause we see that with computer printers and it’s annoying for customers where you can only use this brand ink. But I think with a.[00:09:00]

Safety feature, a critical thing that’s gonna save your life? I’d I’d be fine with that. Whereas, my car’s nah, this is not a ac Delco airbag. We’re not gonna, we’re not gonna, it’s not gonna work here. That

Fred: true. But even that can be subverted. People put counterfeit chips into devices all the time,

Michael: Yeah, we’ve talked about it before in, in this context of how there are some protections like that built into the SRS systems and that people are still finding a way around it when they’re, putting out counterfeit inflators that aren’t, that don’t even have a propellant.

So I, yeah, that makes sense.

Anthony: Yeah. I’m sure we’ll get more information as this story develops and the investigation continues, and when we do, we will let you know. In the meantime, you can go to auto safety.org and click on donate. All right.

Tesla’s Controversial Driving Modes

Anthony: Let’s jump into the world of dumb Tesla. From our friends at Ars Technica we talked about this last week.

Their Mad Max mode, right? We talked about that. Yeah, we did. Yeah. Everyone and in [00:10:00] our show notes this week, Michael inserted a horrible little photo from the movie Mad Max that caused me psychic trauma. I’ll be filing a tortuous. You don’t love

Michael: that boomerang kid. He was probably the

Anthony: highlight of the entire movie, right?

Yeah. He became Yahoo. Serious. So apparently not only Mad Max mode, they have something called sloth mode which relaxes acceleration and stays in its lane. And so this is just a more update, continued update on that. Tesla’s stupid and it says investigating them, but I had no idea they had a sloth mode.

Shouldn’t that just be normal,

Michael: I don’t think anybody’s hearing about it because, nobody’s buying Tesla so that they can take advantage of sloth mode. Maybe that’s the issue.

Anthony: That could be the issue. Yeah. Hey, any listeners? You got a Tesla? Nope. If you did, you’d let us know if you used the Mad Max mode or sloth mode and then we’d you’d lose your security clearance.

Michael: I dunno. So I don’t know. What’s a little discouraging about this is that, Tesla Beta tested this, I think [00:11:00] six, seven years ago. The man knocked and decided Yeah. And decided not to release it after some outcry. And they’ve clearly, programmed their vehicles to violate traffic laws before that happened, years ago in a recall they had to do around, the rolling stops at stop signs.

So this is something that they know there are safety concerns about. Now this isn’t an open investigation by Nitsa. Nitsa has basically said we are in contact with Tesla to gather some more information on this, but it’s pretty clear that it’s being programmed to drive, it can be programmed to drive over the speed limit.

That’s a problem. However, I think there’s a pretty common argument there that, all of us can probably program our cars to drive over the speed limit using cruise control. But the swerving in and out of traffic and that sort of stuff is a little more concerning. And I’m sure there are state laws around that type of driving behavior [00:12:00] that may not be very well enforced, at least according to my take on driving around in DC traffic.

I also have some concerns about NHTSA’s statement on this. They say they’re in contact with Tesla and then they add that. The human behind the wheel is fully responsible for driving the vehicle and complying with all traffic safety laws. And I think while that might be true, simply because the law hasn’t caught up with technology and computer driving.

I would argue that, there is a shared responsibility both by the human and by the company manufacturing or programming these types of behaviors into computers. And I think that the, that the recent case in Florida that Tesla lost bears that out. Where there is certainly and I think, logically there is a shared responsibility there when you are allowing automations to take over a vehicle and those automations are programmed to violate traffic laws.

Tesla certainly bears [00:13:00] some of the responsibility here. And that statement from n is, I would say a little misleading. Somebody initially,

Fred: so Michael, I just, I’m sorry. I just wanna be clear, Michael, so you think that the idea of self-driving, computer-driven cars exceeding the speed limit and weaving in and out of traffic on interstate highways is a bad idea?

Michael: Yeah I would go so far as to say it’s an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety and, a defect that, that should be recalled. Thanks. I just, in fact, it shouldn’t be put out on the road in the first place. And I think Musk is, and Tesla are just doing the same thing they’ve done before, playing their cat and mouse game, challenging, federal rules and seeing what happens and, it’s a, this is a continuous pattern for years now.

Fred: Oh, I’m sure the people being responsible adults at Tesla would never try to, throw a bright, shiny option into their sales just because their sales are flagging.

Anthony: Wait a second, completely. Are you [00:14:00] being sarcastic, Mr. Perkins?

Fred: Never. I don’t even know the word. Good. Do you know physics?

Anthony: I do know some, yeah.

Okay. So is I have a physics question for you. Is kinetic en energy, is it linear or is it logarithmic? Like the increase?

Fred: I’m not sure I know what you mean.

Anthony: I’m not sure I know what I mean either, but there’s, yeah. Connecticut energy goes up

Fred: as the square of the speed.

Anthony: Okay.

Fred: So 20 miles an hour, you have only a quarter of the kinetic energy that you would have at 40 miles per hour.

Anthony: So a quarter of it. So it’s not, yeah. Okay.

Speed Limits and High-Speed Cars

Anthony: So this is, I think my question, so there’s this guy quoted in this article about the only places on planet earth where you can speed. Do you like to speed, Fred? I’m sorry. Do you like speed? What? Do you like to speed? Do you like to drive fast? Me? Yeah. You. First the thought.

Okay. So anyway, there’s this guy in this article about the only places on planet earth where you can drive, there’s no [00:15:00] speed limit. And he says it’s simple physics, higher speeds result in increased impact force. If you’re going 10 miles per hour and you speed up 20 miles per hour, that’s twice as much kinetic energy.

Is that’s what I wanna know. Is it going from 10 to 20? Is that twice as much kinetic energy? Nope, I didn’t think so. No, it’s more than that. It’s four times. And that young man’s name was Michael Brooks. But it’s a good point. I’m not here to shame you. I’m just, I just wanted to, that’s the linear logarithmic.

Anyway this is a fun article. We have a link to from MSN, it’s in Reader’s Digest, I believe, talking where Michael and someone from AAA are quoted talking about, and actually really only Michael is quoted talking about where you can go really fast on different roads and. Obviously the Audubon we’ve heard of and where else would be the perfect place?

You can go as fast as you want. Come on. The aisle of man is, yeah. Where of course. The aisle of man. [00:16:00]

Michael: Yeah. That was an interesting, that’s, that article is outside of our normal thing. And I didn’t notice that quote in there, but that is clearly wrong. You’re gonna get, I think the ex, there’s an exponential relationship between the force and the impact and miles per hour.

The point is the faster you go, the speed limit that you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be imparting much more kinetic en energy per mile, per hour as you go. Yes. And more faster, more dangerous. Yeah. And this article I gotta say it’s a little, it’s a little too, it leans a little towards the antis safety side, talking about where people can go to find roads with no speed limits, which is, not something we recommend. If you want to get your jollies, go to a racetrack keep it away from other people on the roads. But it is an interesting, there’s some interesting things about speed limits. I that I found when researching for this article, I think the original speed limits were developed.

I think it was in the 17 hundreds that applied to horses and [00:17:00] horse drunk conveyances in Massachusetts. I believe it was before we even had a United States. And some of the first that applied to what we might think of as cars were put in place in Britain, before we really had what you would think of as a modern car, they had something called road locomotives that.

Essentially looked like a locomotive that would operate on the roads. And they had all sorts of very low speed limits for those and that, that were different for the city and the country. And so speed limits had been with us, well before the car. Which is an interesting thing that we’ve, as a society have noticed the problems with speed, over 300 years ago.

Anthony: What some of the interesting takeaways from this article for me were, who would impose a restriction on the American people to say, you don’t have a choice. This is the speed limit. Of course, those damn liberals, that was Richard Nixon. It was Richard Nixon whom owes the first speed limits that mamby pamby liberal [00:18:00] Richard Nixon.

And then who said, Hey, freedom of choice man, go for it. Of course, bill Clinton later on said the states can decide their speed limits. Yeah. Anyway just get your signs correct for the next insurrection.

Anthony: Yes.

Anthony: So we don’t, get things wrong. But this was frightening. From here is quoting currently the Zippit car who used the word ZIPPs.

Currently the Zipp Iest car on the planet with a top speed of 308.4 miles per hour is an electric vehicle called the Yang Wang U nine Extreme. Wow. I want the Yang Wang U nine Extreme, not the U eight Soft. I want the Yang Wang U nine. Come on. Does it come with yang Wang? Everybody have fun tonight, everybody.

Yang Wang tonight. That’s a good one. This is Nah. But yeah, this is crazy. Again, why are you, why are we making street legal cars that go this fast?

Michael: Yeah, that makes no sense. If I were [00:19:00] king you could make those cars all you want, but they would be restricted, and in fact, restricted geofence to race tracks, so you didn’t even have an option to bring them out on the road.

So that’s some technology that I think should be applied to some of the vehicles on the road now. Some of these vehicles that reach extreme accelerations, the Hummer, the 9,000 pound Hummer that can go zero to 60 in three seconds in its fast mode and can be turned on your average roadway.

It comes to mind immediately as something that should be restricted to non-public roads at a minimum. And these, there’s just no point in building street legal vehicles that, go that fast other than to potentially create tragedies.

Anthony: Yeah. And if you were King, bananas would be a vegetable.

Michael: They would,

Anthony: I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Moving on. Oh God, this is awful.

Autonomous Police Vehicles

Anthony: If this is just another reason never to go to Florida. Sorry. To our listeners located in Florida the Miami [00:20:00] Police Force is testing an autonomous patrol vehicle. That’s right. The pug what do they call it?

The police Unmanned ground vehicle patrol partner. Wow, that’s a mouthful. It will allow us to we’ll explore how new technology can keep people safe while making the best use of our resources. Deputies remain at the heart of this mission and the pug is here to support them. How does this help anybody?

Are you gonna get pulled over by an autonomous vehicle? I don’t, yeah. Don’t get it. Yeah. Who’s

Michael: gonna give you the ticket? In that case and they’re gonna be testing it with a police officer in the vehicle for the extended future it appears. But, I’m a little, I don’t really understand why you need this vehicle to do some of the things that it’s doing.

They even say here, the, the biggest trick it has is being able to launch flying drones as needed. Why do you need an autonomous vehicle to launch drones? I personally [00:21:00] think that drones can be an excellent solution to minimizing some of the problems we see in police chases and some of the carnage.

We see the results to innocent parties during police chases. And that drones might be a very important part of the solution there in terms of tracking flee. Criminals who might not, be on a murderous rampage. They might, a lot of chases are initiated because the license plate comes back stolen.

Other crimes that aren’t, immediately threatening to the public. And raise a question of whether a police chase should be initiated. That in that endangers the public in those circumstances, when you could launch a drone to follow the car, launch a drone that, puts a, an air tag or a tracking device of some sort on the vehicle to see where it goes.

I think there are just so many other better options that technology gives us versus racing, 6,000 pound vehicles down the road, in and out of traffic with innocent human beings [00:22:00] being put at risk. So yes, drones, that’s a great idea. But this autonomous police vehicle, I think is itself, I don’t know. I don’t see the use in it right now.

Fred: I think think it’s long. I think it’s long past time. Michael with respect to your opinion that Florida has aircraft carriers available to the police. Just think of it. If you have an aircraft carrier in every Piggly wiggly parking lot in Florida, you’ve got great coverage.

And with all the, armed drone technologies coming out of the Ukraine, you could very easily destroy whatever people are coming out of the Piggly Wiggly with pork chops under their sweaters. I think it’s, no, I think it’s a great idea.

Michael: That’s a heck of a wide load transporting an aircraft carrier over land to a Piggly wiggly parking lot.

Fred: Modern technology, it’s a wonderful thing.

Anthony: The pork chop under the sweater, that’s just the that sounds like it’s happened before, right? That’s a little too random to Yeah, that was a little too specific a story

Fred: to [00:23:00] that but we don’t have time

Anthony: today. Your parole officer will love to hear about it.

Yeah. So that’s, so Michael, what you’re talking about, so this is an autonomous vehicle that will launch autonomous drones, right? That’s what they wanna do with this? No,

Michael: I guess they, they don’t have to be autonomous drones. They could certainly be human controlled drones, but, I don’t know.

They seem to be geeking out on all the stuff they can do autonomously here when, I think that having a police officer in the car and outfit, outfitting police vehicles with the ability to launch drones that would track criminals versus the police car having to race at, dangerous speeds to do makes a lot of sense. And offenders who. Are in that situation, likely wouldn’t even know that a drone was tracking them too. So they’re not going to be driving as dangerously as they would when they know that a cop is hot on their tail. The drones thing, good.

The autonomous patrol vehicle I’m far from convinced that’s something that we need these days particularly, we’ve seen [00:24:00] humans pretty easily be able to outsmart, trick and manipulate the behavior of autonomous vehicles on the road. I can’t imagine that there would be any difference with this thing.

Anthony: Yeah. Miami tell what’s the deal here? I don’t understand. But with that, let’s jump into the world of the gas lighting, because this feels Gaslight ish.

Nvidia’s AI and Autonomous Driving

Anthony: It’s not my gaslight, but Mr. Perkins, would you like to go with your gaslight?

Fred: I’m ready to go. Go Friends and Nvidia gave us a great opportunity to.

Discuss their gaslight. So they published a blog post on October 20th entitled How AI Is Unlocking Level Four Autonomous Driving. So as I will, I went and took a look at that and they voting for them. When the Society of Automotive Engineers established its framework for vehicle autonomy in 2014, it created the industry standard roadmap for selling, driving [00:25:00] technology.

No such organization exists for starters. And the other thing is they don’t have a roadmap for selling driving technology.

Debunking Autonomous Driving Myths

Fred: What they have is a set of words which they’re calling the taxonomy that describes certain aspects of operations if technology were to exist. So there is no roadmap. They go on to say level four autonomous driving.

Enables vehicles to handle all driving tasks within specific operating zones? No, not really. Within an ODD is accurate, but there’s no definition of specific operating zones. Quoting again with foundation models of vehicle encountering a mattress in the road or a ball rolling into the street can now reason its way through scenarios.

No it could only do that if there are huge numbers of very similar and very well constrained examples that are available for the [00:26:00] database to analyze, and that’s just not the case. There’s the additional problem that no, there are no two identical vehicles and no two identical events, so this is not something that’s technically achievable.

They talk about reasoning, vision, language. Reasoning, vision, language action, which they call VLA. Models integrate diverse perceptual inputs, language, understanding and action generation with step-by-step reasoning. What the hell does this mean?

Anthony: I don’t know.

Fred: Context is important. This is a far from satisfactorily demonstrated in life critical hazardous industrial machinery processes.

So then they go on to say, simulation technologies can be used to create interactive simulations. That’s true, but simulations are terrible. There’s so many variables involved in a real vehicle operation that no computer exists that can actually look at all the permutations and combinations [00:27:00] of validating vehicle behavior.

Much less validating the simulation that you’re using to quantify the risk within a lifetime of any human being. So this is. This is just a pipe dream at best and a serving of AI Kool-Aid at worst level four autonomy systematically remove human error. The cause of the vast majority of crashes, they say the fact is there’s no authoritative study by Nitsa or anyone else that supports the statement.

Urban myths are a poor source for safety claims, and that’s all that claim is. There’s no evidence that the errors automation potentially removes are any more frequent or consequential than the errors and faults that it introduces. Who knows what the future might hold, but the present is not particularly promising.

I guess Nvidia isn’t selling enough chips already, so they’re using this urban myth as justification for trying to sell more [00:28:00] good for them. Congratulations.

The Gaslight Nomination: Squirrels

Fred: But this certainly earns my Gaslight nomination this week.

Anthony: Good one. My Gaslight nomination is squirrels. That’s right. Squirrels on CBS news.

I’m gonna quote, when a driver and Shaler struggling to get his car to go this weekend, pop the hood. He found twigs, straw, leaves and walnuts. A squirrel had built a nest in there. Now look, our are squirrels our friends, do they wanna hang out with us or do they just want us to stop from driving? I don’t understand.

We don’t talk the same language. Squirrels, what’s going on? Are you gaslighting us? I don’t even know. Squirrels. Michael

Michael: Brown. Wow. That was pretty weak. I had to say. God dammit, man. You didn’t even mention the rats and the chipmunks and the other guys who build nest engine. Hey. Yeah. I only see squirrels.

We covered that way back early in the podcast career here. Oh, man. When we talked about the animals and the critters that like to chew on soy-based or other wiring in your [00:29:00] vehicle. Lazy. Come on man. You gotta do better.

Anthony: This is the wrong day of the week to record the show.

GM’s Ambitious AI Plans

Michael: All right, so mine is gonna lead into another article that we had on track for today, which is GM putting AI into its cars, making things, saying they’re going to move into level three into 2028.

And, the usual claims made by people who are trying to manufacture what they’re calling hands off, eyes off system, which we also call Brain Off Systems where there’s really no proven level of safety or any type of regulations in states or federally yet. They’re saying you can watch movies from your driver’s seats.

You can do all these other things that are to me, pie in the sky dreams, or as we might say here they’re more aspirational than realistic, but. That’s something the GM’s planning to do in the next three years, it appears. And they are [00:30:00] saying this, which is, where I wonder what their real motivation is.

CEO Mary Barra, who’s the, I think this May, the first time Mary’s gotten a gas life from me says, we’re taking a safety first approach. You’ll see us roll out much faster than what we did with Super Cruise. Which to me, that is a sentence that is completely contradictory. How do you take a safety first approach and then prioritize prior, prioritize rolling it out fast.

Particularly when, right now level, the only real level three systems operating America are, Mercedes-Benz that are operating, I think under 40 miles per hour on crowded interstates in Nevada and California. And that’s it. And GM is saying, our goal is to have this work in 50 states and in all weather conditions, three years to do that is, is, virtually impossible. I think I, I don’t think I’m going too far out on them saying that virtually impossible to do safely. I guess I should qualify. And for [00:31:00] that I’m giving GM and Mary the gaslight of the week for me.

Anthony: That’s a really good one. I like that.

‘Cause from that article in ours, Technica, they say they, this is going to an advanced machine learning to handle the driving duties in the controlled environment up to 80 miles per hour. Which I find fascinating ’cause they’re like, we can’t get a EB to work above five miles per hour or whatever.

Yeah. Ridiculous limit, but we can have the car drive fast.

Michael: And meanwhile, the most, you know what I would say is the most advanced autonom, fully autonomous vehicle in the market and Waymo’s aren’t traveling on interstates yet at those speeds. And, gm, which you know, is basing, I suppose some of this technology on what they went through with Kyle and Cruz is somehow bullish about their chances there.

I I don’t know. All this just seems like more, more blather from the auto industry around, advanced tech that, that, I think they’re trying to pull the wool over our eyes here and pretend they’re a [00:32:00] little further along. They are, we’ll see in three years if we’re still around.

Anthony: Okay. My team has done the quick scoring and Michael, you almost pulled ahead there with mentioning Kyle. ’cause any mention of Kyle almost brings you right to the top. But Fred, you win this week and it’s not No, thank you. A reason you suspect it’s because you said roughly, I’m gonna get, I don’t have the quote perfectly.

You said there is no roadmap. They have a set of words, which I found delightful. So for that, thank you. I

Fred: appreciate that. I’ve worked hard to get this honor and I’d like to thank my support staff and, all of the people who, who operate behind the scenes to make this happen. No. Which is basically you and Michael, give credit where due.

Anthony: Okay, great. Good.

Drowsy Driving Dangers

Anthony: Before we jump into the world of the ta, let’s do a little study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. They have an article about drowsy driving, and this is fascinating. I didn’t realize this. It’s a fun article. And the woman who wrote it confesses that, like when she was young [00:33:00] and driving, she almost, fell asleep and missed a curve and whatnot.

And which is a great way to start this article, but I’m gonna quote from the article here saying, studies cited by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health suggest that being awake for 17 hours is similar to a 0.05% blood alcohol concentration. Being awake for 24 hours is like a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1 above most states, legal limits of 0.08% compared with well-rested drivers.

Drowsy drivers react more slowly, are less vigilant, have reduced hand eye coordination, have bad hair, and are worse at remembering things that they’ve seen. I had no idea it’d be that much of a. They could do that kind of correlation between being drowsy and being drunk. ‘Cause I’m both right now,

Fred: it doesn’t speak very well for internships, for doctors.

Does it? Because they will keep them awake for what, 36 hours and then throw ’em into an emergency room when [00:34:00] somebody with a arterial bleeding pops in. Seems like a bad idea as well.

Anthony: Oh, look at this Fred Perkins on a roll today. I absolutely agree. So we should not allow Dr. Doctors to drive.

That’s my takeaway.

Fred: Or, doctors should show up drunk because they’ll start off with their final capabilities and then as the alcohol wears off, it’ll just be level. So there’ll be no degradation of performance throughout their duty cycle.

Anthony: There’ll be Benjamin Button this, they’ll be aging in reverse.

I love, oh my god. I was gonna have Michael be king, but I think Fred might be king.

Michael: That’s probably the good choice. There’s a few other things I saw. I think it worth noting recently Tesla, ultimately I think what’s going to really curb this drunk driving, distracted driving and a lot of the human problems that exist is driver monitoring systems.

That not just monitor the driver, but I can also monitor [00:35:00] the vehicle’s responses. So if a vehicle is leaving its lane, if a vehicle is displaying any types of behaviors that are characteristic of a drowsy or drunk or distracted driver, it, the vehicle can basically say, okay, driver, you are getting a timeout and you, you need to sleep, you need to sober up, you need to do whatever.

But you’re not driving me until something you know, you can show that you are in a better. Because, we know that enforcing that from a legal perspective is, you’re only, it’s a hit and miss proposition. You’re only going to catch, a few drunk drivers here and there. You, I don’t know how often it happens.

I’m sure it does, but, I don’t know how often officers are pulling drowsy drivers off the road. I imagine that’s fairly rare. When they’re not under the influence of something else. And, I think a lot of these drowsy crashes probably happen. I think like the author of the article, Rebecca Weist says I think it was in the morning, [00:36:00] it was, making the drive to school.

People who haven’t gotten enough sleep the night before are very subject to it. This isn’t just, late night or long haul drivers that are, that qualify for this problem. It’s people who haven’t gotten enough sleep before they get in their car in the morning, ultimately, I think that, that makes it difficult to enforce.

But I think that the technology is available and if not and developing to a point where we can stop drowsy driving or cars can stop drowsy driving. And that’s interesting also there, the other thing I would note from the article is that, Tesla and it’s continued.

Presenting consumers with a dual reality is saying that drivers who appear drowsy should turn on full self-driving, which, goes completely against their own instructions, which in their owners’ manual, which say drivers need to pay attention and be ready to take control at all times.

Full self-driving is absolutely not a solution for drowsy, drunken [00:37:00] drunk or other type of driving. It’s something that has to be monitored at all times or, you might end up worse off.

Fred: I’m gonna agree with you, Michael, but I won’t extend it a little bit just to say that cars are capable of warning other drivers if the driver of a certain vehicle is drowsy or not performing well.

So I think the world is really ready for cars that alert other motorists to the fact that the car is being driven irresponsibly or. Hazardously so that the other drivers have a chance to defend themselves. I, I have a friend whose two children were killed by a drunk driver who crossed a double line and ran into their car.

Through no fault of the two dead children, would they still be alive if the car had detected that it was crossing a double line and started flashing its lights or something to, let the other people know [00:38:00] that there was a danger ahead? I think so. There’s no guarantee that the other people would respond, but it, at least give people a chance when you’ve got laws in various states that allow people to shoot other people if they feel threatened.

Shouldn’t you also have a law that says if a car is engaged in hazardous performance. Passage is driving, or the driver appears to be outta control, that you warn the other people around them because of all that kinetic energy that’s in those cars. Remember a car, a typical vehicle, traveling 70 miles an hour, has the destructive energy of a hand grenade if you ignore, the burning fuel.

So there’s just a lot of energy and if the companies are capable of saying this particular car is outta control, this particular driver is ha drowsy, hazardous trunk, whatever it should damn well, let the world know [00:39:00] that there’s something going on here, and that people have the ability as well as the right to defend themselves against that hazardous behavior.

End of Grant.

Michael: Yeah, and, I’ll continue a rant which is that the type of technology that can prevent drowsy, drunken, distracted driving is, I would argue is much more ready for prime time and to be deployed than the kind of crap GMs promising in three years, in 2028, the level three operating at 80 miles per hour on interstate.

I think it’s pretty obvious that’s a much harder task than monitoring drivers to ensure that they’re, following traffic laws, paying attention. Not a threat to other road users. I can’t imagine how that could be more complex than designing a vehicle that’s going to take over the driving task for a level three vehicle.

And yet, manufacturers are so focused on shoveling all these convenience features and [00:40:00] AI and movies and everything into vehicles so that they can monetize it. But they’re far less concerned with getting the safety systems into vehicles, which, when you look back at, my Gaslight nominees, quote from this week really hits home the point, like they, they’re not safety focused. If these manufacturers were safety focused and not profit focused, we would already be seeing tech technology like this get into vehicles. We’d see better driver monitoring, we’d see better, alcohol detection, potentially.

And instead of pushing back against those types of systems at a federal level, which automakers are doing they would be incorporating into their systems to make our roads safer.

Anthony: I like it. I think every now and then the coffee cup icon on my dashboard comes up and says, Hey, need a rest? Yep. Why not?

I don’t know how the math behind that algorithm, but yeah. Make that external. Hey, I need coffee. Something, we can make it a little fun, right? No. All right.

Regulating Self-Driving Vehicles

Anthony: [00:41:00] Let’s jump into the tau. How’s that? Let’s do some tau time.

Fred: How time. Here we go. I’m working on, or we are working on a set of checklist items for regulators who are confronted with somebody, some entity who’s trying to get permission to use self-driving vehicles, computer driven vehicles in the states or cities within their boundaries.

We’re gonna post this on the website. We would love public comment on this. And even though it’s still in draft form, I think that where we’re headed is pretty clear. Let me read an introduction here. Stakeholders of extended automotive safety community are not experts in AV and other computer-driven vehicle safety.

This checklist is provided as a non-expert guide to interpreting critical applicable AV and other CDV safety criteria. [00:42:00] It is not a substitute for, but a supplement to a full safety evaluation. When a stakeholder has need of guidance beyond what might be available from the developer or CDV proponent, but does not have the time or money at hand for a full safety case analysis.

By answering these top level questions, the applicant will reveal to the stakeholder where yawning gaps exist in the safety information that reasonably supports initial or supplemental applications to operate computer driven vehicles in public. If time and resources allow additional resources identified in the end notes and other references will provide additional insights into CTV safety.

So this is coming from the observation that companies that want to operate their vehicles in public are inundating. Legislators and legislative aids, and [00:43:00] people responsible for regulating them with faulty information and no attempt to really give the people help with a comprehensive evaluation of the safety of these vehicles, right?

So we’ve seen over and over again, things like full page advertisements in New York Times saying computers are good, they never sleep, they’re never distracted. It is, they’re inherently safe, which is just nonsense. But where is the legislator going to find the other side of this argument in a form that’s achievable and digestible without having to become an expert themselves?

That is the gap that this document is trying to fill, trying to help people. Not to say that all of these things have to be done, but just to give the regulators awareness of where these gaps might exist. A couple examples. Okay, we talked about this a little bit last week. One question, has the applicant followed a generally accepted process [00:44:00] for validating performance and safety of the applicant’s CDD technology?

That’s something that you wanna know, right? Yes or no? Has they done that? The answer so far, by the way, for every single application we know about is no. It should be yes. Has the applicant. Another question. Has the applicant developed and validated compliance with a comprehensive safety case analysis for a subject CTV private institutional or for hiring offering?

Again, the answer so far for every single applicant is no. This includes Waymo, it includes gm, it includes Mercedes at every other offering. The answer is no. Should be yes. So has the applicant adequately documented the CDVs operational design domain? We don’t see that because one of the things that the applicant needs to do is show that [00:45:00] all the CDV operations are legal and that the applicant will respond to any emergency operational design domain restrictions that occur, for example, due to emergency operations, responding to fire events or, public safety events.

And many more won’t go into all of them. Now, we would like to invite you to view them on the website as soon as we get that up, that’ll be this week. And look at the rest and we’ll be going over more of these over the next few weeks to introduce some of them to people. And we’d love to get your responses.

Make sure that we have no gaps in this. But again, this is particularly oriented towards people who. Are in the world of regulating or trying to understand what these self-driving vehicles or computer-driven vehicles are all about and why they should be concerned [00:46:00] and are not satisfied with simply the self-serving information that’s available from the applicants themselves.

Thanks. That’s about it. Any questions from you guys that I can clarify?

Anthony: No. I I look forward to seeing this on the website once I figure out where to put it.

Fred: Alright, thank you. That’s it for today.

Anthony: Yeah, this will come out soon and you can go to auto safety.org. You can read about this thing and then you can also go and donate.

You can go Oh yeah. Or you can subscribe to this podcast because I know some of you listening and you don’t subscribe. You just chose up and you’re like, ah, I got it. But if you click that subscribe button I’ll have a weird southern twang in my voice all of a sudden. I don’t know why I said the subscribe button.

That was very strange.

Vehicle Recalls and Safety Concerns

Anthony: But let’s go into recall, shall we? Yeah. Alright. First up, the World Reigning Champion Ford Motor Company. One 1.4 million vehicles. That’s right. The 20 15 [00:47:00] 20 19 Ford Flex. 2018. 2019 Ford Taurus. 20 15 20 16 Ford Taurus. 2020 Ford Mustang Lincoln, MPKZ, blah. Ford Fiesta Explorers Escapes.

Oh my cus. Customers may experience a distorted, intermittent, and or persistent loss of the rear view camera image. This is the one you said you didn’t add last week. ’cause you didn’t wanna trigger me and you put it in this week. I

Michael: see how it is, but you deserved it. And, but, and this is another rear view camera recall.

I, I think there was something weird about this one that I noticed that was, they’ve divided up the population of vehicles. Some vehicles are getting the recall, some are just getting a service campaign. I’m always skeptical of manufacturers doing that because, technically there is how can there be a safety issue and one big.

Slice of vehicles. And then the same thing is happening in another slice of vehicles, maybe not quite as often, but it’s still [00:48:00] happening. How is one a safety problem? And the other one is addressable through a service campaign, which is not a recall, and that no owners may not be notified in the way they would be notified about a recall.

These things always concern me. If you have one of these vehicles or any Ford at this point, be sure to check to make sure that you, you can, or be sure to make a appointment with your dealer, whether you’re in this recall or not, to ensure that if you qualify for the service campaign and not the recall, that you can have the service campaign performed and you won’t run into this problem.

Anthony: The best part of this recall is the component description, the Miami Global rear view camera.

Michael: Love it. Also, I wanted to go back on Ford from last week. If you heard me talking about the the Mustang aftermarket parts. Yeah. The Mustang aftermarket parts. I completely botched my description there. I was seeing the L two and the L ones in the description of that [00:49:00] recall and associating that with SAE level two the automation levels.

It actually had nothing to do with that. It was, the, these, basically, there were, there’s a software system involved in those aftermarket parts that essentially disabled the L two, which is a level two, basically a check of how the engine’s operating and to prevent unintended acceleration that level two software system was not able was somehow disabled by the aftermarket.

Part and basically turned off what would be a redundant check on bad behavior by the car. So that’s my Mia culpa for that.

Anthony: Oh, we’re not starting a new section of the show called Mia Culpa, is it?

Michael: You started it out with my bad kinetic energy book today already. So that just me

Anthony: being obnoxious.

I’m sorry. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I’ve triggered you now. Okay. [00:50:00] Next up, Tesla. Speaking of being triggered the 63,619 vehicles, the 2024 to 2026 Tesla cyber truck, huh? Never heard of it. The Tesla detected that the vehicle controller software may have been inadvertently commanding the parking lamp photometric intensity to be greater than design specifications.

What is happening here?

Michael: Basically the. What they said there. The vehicle controller software is giving the parking lamp too much intensity, exceeds the maximum output that’s allowed by federal motor vehicle safety standard 1 0 8. So these vehicles are non-compliant. I believe this was rectified pretty quickly through an over the air update.

Yeah, that, that started on October 9th. So most of the vehicles should already have that. And beyond that, I think this is the ninth cyber truck recall. So they got a lot of, Hey, Michael, I

Fred: got [00:51:00] a, I got a question. Is there a federal motor vehicle safety standard for ugliness? Because I think that cyber tructure should be called for being awfully ugly.

Michael: No I guess you could argue that Europe has a standard like that since cyber trucks aren’t allowed there because of their shapes. That’s a roundabout way of calling them ugly, though. I don’t know that’s something that, there are a lot of ugly cars on the road.

I think we can all agree on that. I’ll withdraw my question. Starting with the gremlin that Anthony keeps in his garage and still drives around.

Anthony: Yeah. The cyber truck. The Ford of Tesla, come on. No. All right. Next. Recall Chrysler 291,664 vehicles, the 2018 to 2026 Ram Pro Master. That’s a 2018.

That’s a, huh? Pretty big one. Certain extremely demanding fleet. Diesel cycles can cost premature bearing wear, resulting in high current draw. [00:52:00] Combined with inadequate fuse protection on the 400 watt fan circuit, which may lead to a vehicle fire. What this the proma, I’m trying to think what a, is a ProMaster is a, is it This is a commercial.

It’s basically a,

Michael: it’s a commercial van, a cargo van for Got it. A little larger than the Nissan I think we talked about last week. They’re, the, a lot of fleets use these vehicles.

Anthony: Got it. So if you have this, you’ll get a notice soon.

Michael: Yeah. It looks like the notification date’s gonna be started yesterday.

It looks like the remedy is coming out between. Yesterday and

Anthony: Halloween. Ooh, spooky. Last recall, general Motors 22,914 vehicles. The 2026 Cadillac Optic 2025 Chevrolet Equinox ev the 2026 Chevrolet Equinox, EV 2025 Cadillac optic. And this issue is here, is affected tires can [00:53:00] experience partial or full tread detachment, which increases the risk of tra of crash.

This is, wait. Why is this not just a separate tire recall and is it these tires are only made for these vehicles.

Michael: Yeah they’re the OEM tire. So that, that when you have, similar to what occurred with Ford and Firestone, back in the day, if you have the OEM tire there, that’s the responsibility of the the car manufacturer.

Although you will see typically you’ll see coordinated recalls there between, in this case it’s General Motors and Continental because, the cars that come on your vehicle and OEM can vary from what, the cars that are being sold as replacement. Tires that are being sold as replacement tires on the open market.

Some manufacturers like to have tires that will give their new vehicle owners a better ride. But those tires may not be quite as durable or have different performance characteristics than what you would get off the [00:54:00] shelf at Firestone. So there’s some things that go on there. We receive complaints occasionally from folks who have, had a vehicle for 20 to 30,000 miles and their tires are wearing out very quickly and they’re also typically not gonna be covered under the original owner’s warranty.

And so people have problems when they tires wear out after two years and they go back to the deal and Peter says, we’re not covering this. They file a complaint with us. So it ha it seems to happen a good bit. And that’s how we are. We’re fairly certain that certain manufacturers will use different formulations in their tires that are on the vehicles when you buy them off the lot.

So that’s a concern. It looks like they’re going to inspect the tires and then figure out if they were made during this one period where there were some problems in the manufacturer. And that should, I think that owners are gonna be able to start getting that repair around the 1st of December.

Anthony: That’s crazy. I had no [00:55:00] idea that your car would come with tires that you couldn’t normally buy as a consumer. Weird. Something I’ve learned today. And with that’s our show. Thanks for listening. Go to auto safety.org. Click donate. And and we’ll be back next week. Oh, do we have a guest next week?

Next week we,

Michael: We have a guest and a special topic, so Phil Copeman is gonna join us and we’re gonna talk about unintended sudden acceleration. And in everything that has gone on in that area over the last 50, gosh, about 50 years, there have been a, there have been a lot of different investigations of sudden acceleration that have been carried out by Nitsa.

A lot of different reasons for that happening and a lot of really interesting, it’s a really interesting subject and one that we haven’t covered in much di depth at all on the podcast, despite the center being significantly involved in a lot of those past investigations. Should be interesting.

Anthony: Yeah, it’s always good. Then we’ll have the Philly fanatics, this fan club listening to us. [00:56:00] I got it. All right, bye. Alright,

Fred: Thank you and folks do check the website when you get the opportunity in a couple days and give us your feedback on this checklist that we’re putting together. Thanks.

Bye-bye. For more information, visit www.auto safety.org.