Auto Safety in an Unregulated World and Headlights Too Bright

[00:00:00] Introduction to the Podcast

[00:00:00] Anthony: You’re 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.

Good morning, listeners. Good morning world. Entering a world without any regulations whatsoever. I’m Anthony seminar. No seatbelts, airbags, gas mileage, tailpipe emissions, road lines, road dividers, stop signs, barriers. It’s Elon’s world now and hopefully we can live in it. Hopefully. Anyway let’s get into whatever this is.

[00:00:55] Hummer EV Review

[00:00:55] Anthony: Oh, I’m going to start off with this is light is our friend Jonathan Gitlin over at Ars Technica had [00:01:00] a review of the Hummer EV. Oh my God. You know what? We love the Hummer EV. It’s 9, 000 pounds of mommy issues. I think how we described it, but he has a good article on it. And my favorite part is his last two sentences.

And I’m going to quote directly. It says, but I think the biggest downside to driving the Hummer EV SUV or the looks I got from other people, the disapproving ones I could deal with. It was the thumbs up reactions that killed me inside each time.

[00:01:35] Michael: That kills me too. I’ve seen I’ve, I still haven’t seen, I don’t think I’ve seen an electric Hummer yet. I’ve seen Cybertrucks on a few occasions and they seem to generate responses from drivers all around them. But the Hummer EV was the original poster child for, One of our campaigns against these giant 9, 000 pound trucks that are coming and driving on our [00:02:00] roads.

So it’s got a special place in our hearts here, although we think they should be eliminated.

[00:02:06] Anthony: Yeah, it’s a fun little article. Check it out, because we have to move on with our lives.

[00:02:12] Fred: I’m, I think you should have put Another feature into his review, though, I’d like to see a tractor pull between this Hummer EV and a Cybertruck, if you’ve ever seen it, ever seen a tractor pull, they’re very dramatic, but they are, but

[00:02:27] Anthony: we know that the Cybertrucks back end will just tear off.

[00:02:31] Fred: That’s, that’s a feature, but it would be fun to see.

[00:02:34] Anthony: I agree. Hey, if you want to donate what would that be like? That’s a quarter million dollars. Give us a quarter million dollars. Then we can buy one of each of these and we’ll tractor pull them. And we’ll do it in a piggly wiggly parking lot.

Okay. So we need more than a quarter million dollars now because somebody’s paying our bail.

[00:02:52] Fred: Maybe they’d sponsor it. Oh

[00:02:56] Anthony: my word okay, let’s I’m going to jump on to [00:03:00] Zooks.

[00:03:01] Zoox Autonomous Vehicle Discussion

[00:03:01] Anthony: Yeah, I remember Zooks people. So this is interesting because Zooks is coming out with a their autonomous vehicle and they’re like, Hey, we don’t need steering wheels and brake pedals and accelerators because we’re going to we’re living in the future where there’s no regulations.

And they what they claim for today is that, hey, we’ve self certified. Most people that do this, they need an exemption from NHTSA. Hey, what’s the death watch on NHTSA? God, I’m sorry, I’ll try to be more positive. I’m trying here. From this article in The Verge, Zook contends that it won’t need exemptions because it self certifies that its vehicles meet current safety standards.

Minus the steering wheel and brake pedal and accelerator pedal. From the beginning, we’ve challenged ourselves to create a vehicle that would be compliant with federal motor vehicle safety standard requirements within the current regulatory structure. What? Wait, huh? How, like how? Okay. So I get the whole self certified nonsense thing, we’ve [00:04:00] discussed this, but these guys are like, Yeah!

We, I know this is in the regulations. We self certify, we don’t need it. Is that what they’re doing?

[00:04:09] Fred: There’s another quote in there that’s pretty revealing. It says, according to, Now we’ve spent an incredible amount of money and time and people complying with the FMVSS regulations as they are, Levinson said, and because there aren’t traditional manual controls in some cases that requires You know, interpreting them in a way that’s relevant to a robo taxi.

So what he’s saying here is that since there are no specific regulations concerning vehicles that don’t have steering wheels, we can just go ahead and ignore the rest of them. Because, it’s difficult. And we’ve thought about it and we’ve tried a lot, but heck, we’re just not going to do it. It’s an interesting approach to regulation.

Exchanging aspirations for actual requirements, but I guess we’ve seen a lot of that in this industry. Haven’t we?

[00:04:59] Michael: Yeah, [00:05:00] it’s a it’s this is an open question here. And this is had the petition. I see. I believe since earlier last year in 2020. three. And supes even wrote to Knitzen November 2022 saying, Look, we are planning to do this type of certification, even though we know that autonomous vehicles, certain parts of them cannot be certified because a lot of the federal motor vehicle safety standards assume the presence of a human driver.

It’s just As part of the standard, it is assumed that there’s going to be a driver in control of the vehicle in the driver’s seat. And so the standards are written with that reference inherent to all the standards. And so you can’t. Certify a vehicle to the federal motor vehicle safety standards.

If you are removing parts of the vehicle that are required. If the vehicle is going to pass certain certification tests and zoops is essentially their [00:06:00] argument is well, it’s Since we don’t have a driver and we don’t have to follow those references. Essentially we, I believe in one of their letters, they said, we’ve even redesigned a couple of the tests to accommodate vehicles that don’t have the.

The components that are required by the motor vehicle safety standards, which essentially means they’re creating their own test and passing their own test. But like I say, that says, had this in front of them now for a year and a half and haven’t made any determination on the matter, which is concerning and suggests.

It’s that, and especially with a new administration coming in that is probably not going to be holding Zooks’s or any other autonomous vehicle manufacturers feet to the fire. It’s problematic and it’s problematic that the federal motor vehicle safety standards, which are the gold standard of what’s expected out of companies when it comes to auto safety are going to be able to be [00:07:00] manipulated in this way.

[00:07:01] Anthony: So just to remind listeners, Zoox, cause most of us are not familiar with it. They created a car that looks like a, I don’t know, a smaller minivan. It’s a rectangle with tiny little tires that right now I think Zoox, it’s part of Amazon. They’re letting only Amazon employees use it. And it. It goes, what, 25 miles per hour or something like that?

Is that right? And it’s just in limited areas and Okay, so that’s Zoox. You’re not, you can’t, there’s no app. You can’t call it up unless maybe you’re an Amazon employee. But, so Zoox is, they’re doing their autonomous thing and now they’re getting into a cat fight with Tesla. And I don’t know. Maybe I don’t think it’s gonna work out too well for them now, but basically the head of Zoox is saying, yeah, Tesla’s full self-driving thing.

It’s not the right technology, it won’t work. We’ve said that we agree.

[00:07:54] Michael: Yeah, they’re basically saying what you’ve probably heard us say many times. He’s saying [00:08:00] that Tamela’s, Tesla’s camera based full self-driving doesn’t have the. Software necessary to keep people safe. And also touching on the fact that the systems can lull drivers into a false sense of complacency before the systems do the wrong thing and puts you in danger as a human.

But basically it’s the CTO and founder of Zoox came out and said, our perspective is you really do need significantly more hardware than Tesla is putting in their vehicles to build a robo taxi, that it’s not just as safe, but as. But as especially safer than a human. So Zoox is targeting a good thing, which is not just a software and hardware combination that equals, the rather bad stats we see on our roads, 1.

3 deaths for every a hundred million miles or so is the average driver benchmark. Zoox is at least. Targeting, something safer than a human, which is what we all want. And after that happened, Elon [00:09:00] came out and bad mouth Zoops saying that his company got bailed out by Amazon.

Elon’s been the recipient of at least one bailout that I’m aware of. It’s glass houses and all that, but he wasn’t building a glass

[00:09:13] Anthony: house.

[00:09:14] Michael: Yeah. In this in this fight, we’re firmly on Zoox’s side, even though we think their plans for the federal motor vehicle safety standards are their own version of corrupt.

[00:09:26] Anthony: Yeah. Elon saying, yeah, you’ve gotten bailed out by Amazon is hilarious considering all of his businesses are built on the U. S. taxpayer. Ah, you got bailed out by Jeff, I got bailed out by Uncle Sam repeatedly. But hey, that’s just a bunch of billionaires fighting each other, it doesn’t have anything to do with you or me, except when they put cars on the highway that are unsafe.

But hey, if you want to help make cars safer, donate to autosafety. org, wait, what? The Center for Auto Safety, donate to the Center for Auto Safety, you can go to autosafety. org and you can donate. And Fred’s laughing at me right now. That’s why we don’t have a video version of the show.

[00:09:59] Fred: I think some [00:10:00] of us were up late last night.

I’m guessing about that.

[00:10:02] Anthony: No I went to sleep early and woke up to panic.

Yeah,

[00:10:10] Michael: Given the last few elections, the staying up to watch hasn’t really been as productive as it was in the past, when you don’t really have an answer. But I guess this year was different. But I did not stay up late watching Returns. It’s, I didn’t expect to have an answer this soon, but here we are.

[00:10:26] Anthony: Alright, I’m gonna go a little off topic then. It’s still in our wheelhouse, but it’s not in our notes. The new administration moving in, and I’m not keeping this really political, They are very anti regulation, they think regulations are dumb and stupid and they want to get rid of a whole bunch of government agencies because they don’t understand what they do.

If I don’t understand it, let’s get rid of it. So I’m thinking, is NHTSA, does NHTSA have a chance of surviving in the future?

[00:10:53] Michael: That’s going, I think, going to survive as organization. We’ve seen a blueprint. We’ve seen the blueprint for what a [00:11:00] Trump administration does at NITSA eight years ago or so when that started.

And, um, essentially you’re going to see a NHTSA that is incredibly hesitant to do any type of rulemaking. We know that the Trump administration and Republicans in general are anti regulatory. NHTSA is a regulatory agency. They don’t want NHTSA rulemakings making it down the pipe.

So in the last Trump administration, I think we saw two. Final rules that rule regulations that actually reach the finish line and apply to the auto industry. They were very minor rules. While we’ve seen dozens of proposed and final rules presented by. The current administration. Yeah, there’s a huge concern on the rulemaking side.

That’s the thing that is most impacted by a change in administration over and that’s we also have concerns, since supposedly Elon Musk is going to be taking a role as the government efficiencies are [00:12:00] or whatever they’re calling it. We have serious concerns for a lot of things going over.

And it’s the investigations that are currently ongoing into Tesla is a significant concern of how fairly those are going to be carried out. Also the standing general order, which the current administration’s NHTSA put into place in, in 2021, I believe that collects data on all of the Partial automation and fully automated crashes.

That’s that was created by administrative fiat essentially. So it’s not a law, it’s not a regulation. And the next group coming in could eliminate that data collection, which has proven critical in getting recalls in, dozens of cases. So we’re concerned about that. Very concerned about that as a result of this election and beyond that, when you look at the composition of the Congress, the Senate is now Republican controlled and the house, I believe is still [00:13:00] somewhat in the mix.

And we’re not aware of any results there, but the chances for really bad consumer legislation, bad legislation for consumers regarding autonomous vehicles. There’s a really good chance that’s going to start pretty soon here. We’ve had a mix of control in the presidency and Congress for years now.

And so it’s been difficult for the AV companies and their lobbyists to advance this legislation. But if the house ends up going Republican, it’s. Probably going to be something we’re going to see in the very near future is a, an autonomous vehicle bill that, essentially paves the way for bad technology to be put on our roads without proper testing for safety before it’s released.

So we have a lot of concerns about safety, given the results we’ve seen the past 24 hours.

[00:13:54] Anthony: We’re all going to die. Yeah. Okay. Elon’s going to be the efficiency czar appointed [00:14:00] by off Broadway Mussolini.

[00:14:02] Tesla’s Summon Feature Issues

[00:14:02] Anthony: That’s sad because Tesla has this feature called summon or what is it? What are they called now? Real summon? Smart summon. Smart summon. And this is just a dumb demo feature they’ve sold to people.

And it allows you to remotely get your car delivered to you from a parking lot and whatnot, and it doesn’t really, it kinda works, maybe. One guy, he he’s hey, I got a really tight parking spot. I’m gonna park it there. It’s a spot where there’s houses on both sides, and you can’t get in there but he’s been using this feature to park his car there, and have his car come out, and his car comes out, so he can actually open the doors and get in it.

Tesla updated their software, and now this poor guy can’t get his car, cause the Tesla software is saying, Yeah, it’s not safe, dude, there’s buildings around us, we can’t move, we’re stuck here, what do you want from us?

[00:14:51] Michael: He’s essentially stuck in an alley. That’s narrow. He can’t open the car doors to get into his vehicle and move the vehicle manually.

And [00:15:00] he parked it there using the smart summon feature, which was updated. And I’m presuming here that the article is not clear and it’s unclear, but I’m presuming what happened with smart summon was they had, it was using two different systems to function. And it was using the. Tesla’s vision system, their much touted vision system, but also it was using sensors that were embedded in the vehicle that basic ultrasonic sensors that detect objects that are nearby.

A pair, it looks like in this guy’s case, he parked it. And when he parked it, it was using the software version with the ultrasonic sensors. Sensors. And then when he went back out to retrieve it, it was using the vision only system and now the Tesla vision only system can’t see its way out of a tight box.

And so his car is stuck there. Until he gets some help at, you know what, looking at the picture of it though, I think there’s a good case to be made that he could climb in a window of that vehicle.

[00:15:54] Anthony: Guy climbed in through the trunk and push the seats down. That’s how he managed to get into the car and get it out.

[00:16:00] And Yeah. He hasn’t been a contortionist for years, so he had to really limber up first.

[00:16:05] Michael: Yeah. I would call this an edge case problem that folks probably ever use. This isn’t something that, that most owners of this are going to have to worry about, but it does point out, a problem with using a vision system only for detecting obstacles around the vehicle.

[00:16:23] Anthony: Everything is perfect. You don’t understand. It’s the best ever. No, okay. Hey, how about some gaslighting? Do we have any gaslight subjects? Brad, I know you’ve got one. You always come prepared. You always do your homework. He’s sitting in the front of the classroom, his hand raised. Oh, big on me.

[00:16:40] Fred: No, please. I was in the back making the animal noises.

[00:16:43] Anthony: You’re that was just, you’re tall and you have digestion issues.

[00:16:46] Fred: That was me. Okay.

[00:16:47] Gaslighting and Misleading Reports

[00:16:47] Fred: I do have a gas light for this week. I, at least I think I do. So there was a, an article on about, E revs or extended range electric vehicles, [00:17:00] and I’m not sure if this was a gas light so much as a just a really lousy reporting job.

But anyway I’ll tell you what it’s about. They were talking about the let’s see, e revs might prove less emissions intensive than their cousins, because drivers cannot simply choose to skip charging and driving gasoline and known. I don’t know why not, because what this E Rev is all about is basically a plug in hybrid vehicle with a larger battery.

And they then use the internal combustion engine to produce a small amount of power to drive the car when it’s in normal operation. Now, the reason this works is because when you’re driving a car down the highway, you’re only using 20 or 30 horsepower. Unless you’re in one of the Hummer EVs, in which case you’re using, 50 or 60 horsepower.

But anyway, if you’ve got [00:18:00] that small amount of power Coming into the battery is electric power, then you’re basically just only using the battery, the large battery to go up and down uphills and to recover energy. So that’s, that’s the standard approach that cars, the big engines use. Now, they use a small amount to go down the road and then they use the rest of the.

Engine to accelerate and to go up and go up hills when you need extra power. So this reporter makes a lot of questionable statements here. And fake news. Maybe but a a couple of things. 1 is they assume that. Because there’s an electric power source, it’s going to be inherently more efficient than an internal combustion engine that produces the same amount of power.

That’s simply not true, because somehow you have to get electricity into the vehicle. Now, if you happen to live in an area with hydropower or [00:19:00] solar power that’s going into the utility stream, then when you charge your car, you are in fact saving some carbon. But if you’re in What almost all of us live in, which is a utility district where most of the power is produced by combustion, then really, it’s much harder to make the case that you’re saving the earth or reducing the overall carbon footprint by using an electric vehicle.

Because each stage in the chain, when you convert energy from one form to another, you do not have 100 percent efficiency and there are losses associated with it. But anyway, this reporter says that. That’s absolutely fine. The extender will increase the vehicle’s range for about 350 to 500 miles, and an EREV is more efficient than a gas powered vehicle because the gas is powering electric propulsion system, which wastes less energy than the gas engine.

Eh, [00:20:00] wrong. Because in this case The electric power is basically trying to replace a mechanical transmission. Mechanical transmissions are very efficient. Really, you’d have to make the statement that an electric motor is more efficient than a gear driven transmission, and that’s simply not true.

I’m giving them a Either a a Razzie award for making just bad reporting or promoting it through Gaslight Illumination. If this particular publication, which is called Wired, has some agenda that they’re trying to hide by putting out bad information.

[00:20:34] Anthony: You should have started off saying it was from Wired.

I could have taken a nap and ignored you.

[00:20:40] Fred: Didn’t you do that anyway, Anthony?

[00:20:43] Anthony: No, I paid attention. I was like, maybe he’s, maybe something good is Wired. Wired.

[00:20:47] Michael: I actually Wired, I don’t know what you’re Oh God.

[00:20:53] Anthony: Yeah, my Gaslight choice this week is Wired. Just, everything since 1996. [00:21:00] No, it’s the American public you’ve disappointed me.

You’re, this is just a prank, right? You the voting with this is just a prank, right? You’re gaslighting me? No. Okay. It’s Kathy Wood. Sorry. I

[00:21:10] Michael: can’t joke about it yet. Maybe any here. Yeah. I’m taking a week off from gaslighting. I feel gas lit.

[00:21:17] Anthony: Ah. Oh, so you have no, you have nothing to add to this, Michael.

[00:21:20] Michael: No.

[00:21:23] Anthony: Very firm no.

[00:21:24] Modern Headlight Controversy

[00:21:24] Anthony: Okay I’m gonna actually say it’s the modern headlight. That’s it. I’ve talked about this before on the show. What? Why? It’s not my gas light, but we’re gonna talk about this. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so look. Headlights, I’ve talked about this. I think drivers are out there trying to kill me.

They’re shooting their lights at me. I can’t see at night. They’re shooting their lights into the back of my car. The lights keep getting brighter. It’s awful. The kids are walking across my lawn. This is ridiculous. Okay. There’s an article we’re linking to from the Guardian and it’s talking about basically people saying, hey, [00:22:00] these new lights, these new LED lights are really bright and what have you.

Whereas AAA says, hey, we actually need more light on the road. And that that the issue is more of that. It’s many vehicles in the road have misaligned headlights over time. The regular wear and tear of driving can jostle headlights out of alignment, meaning the brightest part of the light ends up illuminating Anthony’s eyeballs.

And it’s not supposed to one NBC news report found that only 15 states require annual or biennial passenger vehicle inspections, and only 10 of those check headlight alignment. Michael, you have something you’d like to say.

[00:22:37] Michael: There’s a lot on this subject. I could probably have based a gas light on some of the commenters in this article, but, what AAA is saying is right.

We need more light on the roads. One of the, a lot of our traffic deaths and the majority of them occur at night and occur primarily due to poor visibility. Among other things, the usual suspects, drinking and speeding and all that. But [00:23:00] poor visibility plays a major role in that.

And there has been, a large number of people since I would say since L. A. D. Lights have become commonplace, but also since vehicles have grown in size and stature, we have headlights in our face a lot more because more likely than not, you’re going to have, if you’re driving a sedan, especially, you’re going to have a large truck behind you with headlights that are beaming directly into your rearview mirror, directly into your eyes.

That’s part of the issue. I there are groups that want to blame LEDs specifically for the issue. They make a lot of health and safety claims around LEDs that are unverified and get a lot of media attention somehow, despite their unverified claims. They claimed that there’s a safety issue, but to date I haven’t seen any evidence of crashes that have been caused by lights that are too bright while there are [00:24:00] thousands every year that are caused by not having enough light.

There, there’s an anti led movement of foot that is behind a lot of these stories. stories. And they should probably get my gas light of the week. But there’s some other things as well. This, we only have 15 states with state safety inspections as the article notes, and only 10 of those measure headlights.

And Lord knows how accurate their measurements are. We also have Millions of noncompliant lights being sold to Americans through eBay and Amazon and coming from China. And who knows, we know that these lights are not all they claim to be certified to federal motor vehicle safety standards.

They’re not. And we’ve heard from many people in the parts industry saying they’re. Testing these lights on their own and they’re not compliant with motor vehicle safety standards. And people are buying these at their local auto shop as well, installing them in properly. There are literally a dozen reasons why vehicles can.[00:25:00]

Glare you out of your seat at night. I, and I’ve certainly had that experience and I understand it. It can be a momentary distraction. It can be very annoying to have someone’s shining brights into your face. But like I say, we just haven’t seen the data that suggests that there is a real safety problem here.

That’s contributing to crashes. 1 thing we can all look forward to, I think, is the advent of Adaptive driving being technology in America that will allow for better control of where the light that’s being produced by our headlamps goes, it can be directed around corners. It can be directed in a way that would not obscure the vision of drivers of other vehicles.

That’s all possible in the future. This is probably a pits bad moment as Fred would say, but maybe I’m hoping that led lights and adaptive driving being technology can resolve a lot of this for people. It also wouldn’t help if we could drive smaller cars where headlights aren’t constantly [00:26:00] being aimed into our faces.

[00:26:02] Fred: There’s another factor here, which is that the optics are better for LEDs than they were for incandescent lights. If you remember the old days with incandescent lights, there’d be a fuzzy spot that is the high beam focus area or the low beam focus area. But now with LEDs, because they’re very, The light source is actually very small.

You can have very good optics on it. And you may have noticed that the led projection has a very hard edge to it. So yes, in my eyeball, in your eyeball sometimes it’s either really bright or really dark. Or not right at all. And so when you’ve tuned the optics so that the low beam top edge is parallel to the plane of the car, right?

So it’s just going straight ahead. Not up, which is what the high beams do. But if it’s just going straight ahead, as soon as the car goes over a bump or something, then that hard edge of the focus [00:27:00] area moves up into your line of vision.

[00:27:02] LED Lighting and Adaptive Lighting Challenges

[00:27:02] Fred: So that’s. That’s the consequence of the fact that you do have better optics associated with the LEDs.

That’s not going to go away with adaptive lighting, because the reason you can make the adaptive lighting work is because you’ve got this hard edge and you’ve got the optics associated with it. This is not something that’s going to go away. The, and there’s, and the other factor is of course, that the front ends of a lot of Pickup trucks and SUVs now are just getting higher and higher.

So as you get close to the back of your car, even though they have the high beams on what is straight ahead to the driver of that vehicle is in your rear view mirror because you’re driving a smaller vehicle. So those are all factors.

[00:27:49] Anthony: It’s because I’m in a tiny car that I have to be subject to these big bad LED bullies.

Yep, shame on you. Damn it.

[00:27:57] Light Sensitivity and Safety Trade-offs

[00:27:57] Anthony: Okay, because I was told [00:28:00] I may

[00:28:00] Michael: not be sensitive enough to people who have light sensitivity issues. I don’t, so this isn’t something I experienced a lot but it seems like there, in the article for sure there are people who are much more susceptible to problems there.

So perhaps, I’m being a little too harsh on them, but I see the life saved by good lighting as, It’s outweighing some of the light sensitivity problems as a whole. It’s so it’s one of those safety tradeoffs that is made every day in the industry and that really have to be made to reduce the number of crashes we see on the road.

[00:28:37] Debunking LED Myths and Light Frequency Issues

[00:28:37] Anthony: Part of the article, and I think this is my issue that I have with it, I don’t care what the technology is behind it, except that I was told by RFK Jr. that LEDs, they’ll remove, they’ll put vaccines inside your body, and he told him that by a tapeworm in his brain. Anyway.

[00:28:52] Michael: Your new FDA. Let’s all wave

[00:28:54] Anthony: our head to the new homeopathic FDA.

[00:28:58] Fred: Oh man, it’s gonna be [00:29:00] bad. .

[00:29:02] Anthony: Let’s remove fluoride from the water. Anyway. But part of the article they talked about, and I think this is the issue I have, it’s talking about that incandescent halogen bulbs. They’re. Halogen were the predecessors to LEDs after incandescence. They admitted a light that has a light orange or red hue, which is gentler on the eye, whereas LEDs tend to admit a harsh white light.

And I think that’s the problem I have with it, is the frequency of the light and the bouncing in my face when I’m in a small car. Fred, maybe this is a technical question for you, I don’t know if you can answer it, but if you say it with enough confidence, I’ll believe you. Can’t we tune an LED to change the temperature of the light coming out of it?

[00:29:41] Fred: Sure, but that’s not going to solve your problem. This is a problem of intensity, not of color.

[00:29:47] Anthony: No, I think the temperature. I think definitely. It’s, you tune it down, you add a little more yellow into it. A nice cerulean blue, a happy little tree.

[00:29:57] Fred: Okay, recreational drugs can [00:30:00] do that for you. So try that out sometime.

Don’t try. I don’t think I don’t think that’s the problem. The problem is just the fundamental optics associated with it. And, the fact is that when you’re in front of a car, and that car behind you goes over a speed bump, even though. It has a slow beams on you’re going to get zapped by that light color may make it a little better.

But, you’d have to go to red to really not impact your night vision and nobody’s going to put a red light on it. And I’m here to tell you, because I’ve tried it that if you look at an intense red light, that is bright enough to let you actually walk around or navigate. You’re gonna get a pretty Good Eyes app.

[00:30:46] Anthony: Oh, hey listeners, if you think Fred’s right, donate a hundred dollars if you think Anthony’s right, donate $101. If you think Michael’s right, donate $102 and then we’ll figure out who’s right. That’s right. Donate [00:31:00] a hundred dollars if you think Fred’s right. $101 If you think Anthony’s right, and $102. If you think Michael’s right,

[00:31:06] Michael: you guys.

I’m voting for Anthony. I’m voting for Anthony just because he slipped in a Bob Ross reference.

[00:31:12] Anthony: Hey, there we go. And speaking of Bob Ross, Fred, can you enlighten us with your Tau this week? You’ve

[00:31:19] Fred: now

[00:31:20] Anthony: entered Bob Ross,

[00:31:21] Fred: Fred,

[00:31:21] Anthony: Bob, the Bob, he’s the PBS painter guy.

[00:31:25] Fred: I don’t know anything about that, but okay.

[00:31:29] Understanding Extended Range Electric Vehicles (E-REVs)

[00:31:29] Fred: So I’ve been asked to make people understand E REVs this week. So E REV is a extended range electric vehicle. Fundamentally, it’s a marketing term that’s being associated with. plug in hybrid cars that have a larger battery than the plug in hybrid cars you can buy today. This is started in China and it is responding to the fact that people don’t like the idea That they can be stranded in the middle of [00:32:00] nowhere when their battery goes dead.

This innovation, such as it is, puts an internal combustion engine in the train. It recharges your battery and takes over, essentially, for the power requirements when you’re going down the road at normal speeds. Now, horsepower pickup truck it’s good for you. But almost all the time when you’re driving a pickup truck, you’re hauling around 470 horsepower’s worth of junk and using 30 horsepower to drive down the highway.

Yeah, there are circumstances when you’re going to use more, but that’s the basic idea behind this. So what the E Rev does is they replace that 20 draw. That normally has to go through keeping your car moving with an internal combustion engine. It just reduces the duty cycle on the battery. [00:33:00] And because it reduces the duty cycle on the battery, of course, you get a more extended range.

Now, this means that your vehicle will run out of fuel in 500 miles rather than 350 miles. And if that’s good enough for you, then that’s good. There are a couple of design options. So 1 is that the rev can have enough power. The internal combustion engine can have enough power to recharge your battery, which is what with the plug in hybrid.

Or that it does not, which would mean that it’s extending the range of the vehicle, but you’re still dependent on plugging the car in from time to time. So we don’t know which is going to win with that. My guess is that people liking the independence from the recharging capability will probably go with a slightly larger engine so you can recharge the battery on the fly, similar to the way a plug in hybrid works [00:34:00] now.

But we’ll just have to see what that happens. Anyway. That’s the term extended range, electronic or electric vehicle. It’s a plug in hybrid with a bigger battery and it. Is available now, apparently, or soon will be through Volkswagen subsidiary scout, which could have been my gaslight illumination. I guess they’ve appropriated the, or they bought the name scout.

And they’re promoting it as an all American solution to the. Electric SUV problem. When in fact it’s a German company that is doing that, so maybe there’ll be a future Gaslight. Who knows? Anyway, that’s the E Rare story. Any questions about that?

[00:34:45] Anthony: So it sounds like it is just marketing nonsense.

[00:34:49] Fred: It is marketing nonsense to the extent that marketing is nonsense, but.

[00:34:53] Michael: It’s distinct. So it’s distinct from hybrid vehicles in that the gas power portion [00:35:00] of it is not contributing to the movement of the wheels, just to the charging of the battery. Is that right?

[00:35:05] Fred: That’s what some people would assert, but hybrid vehicle only means that you’ve got both the gas power and electric power that are associated with the mode of charging.

With driving the car forward, the light hybrids we’ve talked about from time to time. They provide electric power, but it goes through the engine and transmission to drive the wheels. But there are other hybrid vehicles. That are strictly electric drive, but they also have an internal combustion engine.

So the distinction that part of the motive power goes directly from the engine to the drive wheels through mechanical transmissions. Versus electric power going to the drive wheels is something people might promote, but that’s not a unique aspect of the hybrid vehicle or the extended range electric vehicle.

[00:35:56] Michael: That’s interesting. It makes me wonder if this is a marketing. Just a [00:36:00] marketing scam or also something that might allow these vehicles to qualify for, tax credits that a hybrid might not be able to as well.

[00:36:08] Fred: That that latter consideration, I don’t know, but the marketing aspect of this is pretty clear to me.

Now, it doesn’t mean it’s, it doesn’t mean necessarily it’s a bad idea. It probably is because of waste of resources, but. It may help people sell some more cars. It’s the new undercoating. Yeah, but if you believe, if you’re one of the people who believes that an electric propulsion system is inherently much more valuable and sanctified than an internal combustion engine then this would be clearly good for you.

But I think people have to recognize that a 9, 000 pound Hummer electric vehicle is not inherently more efficient than a 50 horsepower moped or 5 horsepower moped. This is there are scaling effects associated with these electric vehicles. [00:37:00] And the fact is that you’ve somehow got to come up with the electricity to stuff into the battery in the 1st place.

If you’re burning coal to do that. You really have only marginal benefits associated with a carbon footprint from the electric vehicle.

[00:37:17] Anthony: I don’t think you’re going to like the next four years, Fred, with that attitude.

[00:37:21] Fred: Okay.

[00:37:21] Anthony: Yeah.

[00:37:21] Fred: It’s going to be fun.

[00:37:23] Anthony: Okay.

[00:37:24] Fuel Filler Location Debate

[00:37:24] Anthony: So let’s get into a serious conversation here.

Okay. Look enough of this, which side of the car should your fuel. Filling hole beyond. Your fuel door hole being on. There’s an article in Jalopnik where apparently people with way too much time on their hands argue about this stuff. And it’s saying, ah, should it be on the driver’s side? Should it be on passenger’s side?

Now the article is interesting. It starts off and says, the right answer is the middle of the car, but apparently that’s illegal. I remember as a kid, it was awesome. Like you’d lower the license plate and you’d get the gas thing in there. And I think like a Chevy Caprice, maybe, I [00:38:00] don’t know what it was.

Chevy something.

[00:38:02] Michael: I don’t know. There were a lot of cars that used to have that.

[00:38:05] Anthony: Why don’t they do that? I love that.

[00:38:07] Michael: I was actually, I was struggling to find a site to where it’s actually, ban to have a fuel filler in the center rear of the vehicle. I don’t think there is such a law or regulation, but what I do think is that, NHTSA increased.

FMDSS 301 is NITS’s fuel safety regulation. It covers, fuel tanks and fuel fillers and lines, and they increase the speeds in which that test was conducted and in the 90s, I believe, and again, in the 2000s. And the rear, they increased the rear crash test on that. I think it’s virtually impossible or really difficult to pass muster on the certification test if you have a rear fuel filler location.

So I think that’s the reason for that. But, the [00:39:00] article it’s It’s interesting when you’re talking about, safety considerations on the left side of the car or the right side of the car. On the, if you’re putting a fuel filler door on the right side of the car, then, the guy in the YouTube video that accompanied the article, very over caffeinated young man who was debating all sides of this topic, suggest that there is a safety reason for that.

If you run out of gas on the highway. When you’re refilling your tank with your portable gas can, then you don’t have to stand on the road side of the highway to refill it. Now, again, I’ll bring the word edge case up. That’s a rare scenario. People don’t run out of gas all that often, but it does happen.

And when it does, you probably want them to be safe. On the left side of the vehicle. I think the real argument there is for convenience. There wasn’t really any safety reason that I could come up with to put a fuel filler on the left side, other than the fact that you don’t have to walk around your car to fill your gas tank.

And I think America, as [00:40:00] it turned out, it looked like we’re a country with about 65 percent of our cars having a left side fuel filler and 35 percent on the right. My Volkswagen has it on the right. How about you?

[00:40:11] Anthony: Mine’s on port. It’s on the left side. Fred. I’m starboard. You’re still really in a Subaru.

I figured all the Japanese, maybe they all kept it left.

[00:40:20] Fred: I think it’s, I don’t know, it’s Starbreeze.

[00:40:22] Anthony: Huh. Fred doesn’t even know. Fred doesn’t know. Oh, I do. I’ve fueled up my car many times. Have you? Don’t you have your butler fuel it for you? Let me try that again. My butler won’t,

[00:40:34] Fred: just won’t do that.

[00:40:37] Anthony: Oh, that’s

[00:40:37] Fred: too bad.

[00:40:38] Anthony: They have no organic

[00:40:39] Fred: chemicals laws in this contract.

[00:40:42] Vehicle Recalls and Safety Features

[00:40:42] Anthony: Let’s jump into recalls. And I’m guessing in a year we’ll never do recalls again. Because You’re

Very negative. I’m sorry. I’m being I know I apologize

[00:40:56] Michael: Recalls are going to continue to happen. Maybe not at the rate they should, [00:41:00] but

[00:41:00] Anthony: they’ll never include Tesla again.

Anyway, I’ll start off with Nissan 4036 vehicles. This is the 2023 to 2024 Nissan Z. Some components names and the components names. I’ll just help you out here. Harden corner, send. Around the front bumper issue, a Nissan tech identified an incorrect diagnostic trouble code on the right hand pedestrian collision detection centers of the front bumper harness were disconnected.

[00:41:31] Fred: Okay, so I want to talk about this. This is actually a good feature. The pop up pedestrian safety hood releases the hinge at the back of the hood and causes it to move away from the engine components. It turns it into essentially a relatively soft springboard. When you hit a pedestrian, the electronic sensor causes The hinge to relax in the back and pushes the hood up so that when the pedestrian [00:42:00] falls over the hood, they don’t hit the hard components in the engine.

So it’s, and so that, reduces thoracic and and cervical and head injuries. So the recall is important, but this is actually a good feature and good for Nissan for putting it to their vehicles.

[00:42:18] Michael: Yeah, this is required in Europe, but not America, or these types of pedestrian protection measures and hoods.

And quite frankly, Nissan didn’t have to perform this recall. It’s not violating a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, and It’s not an unreasonable risk to safety in the sense that, most cars out there don’t have this technology in America. So like Fred said, good on Nissan for getting this fixed and making their cars safer for pedestrians via recall.

[00:42:47] Anthony: Hey, good job, Nissan. Next up, Chrysler, 33, 777 vehicles, the 2025 Ram 1500 pickup truck. They’re violating a oh my god, [00:43:00] FMVSS 57. 126, blah, blah, blah. The escape system, the ESC, what? What?

[00:43:07] Michael: That’s the Electronic Stability Control System, so there’s a fault in the system, and that’s bad. Yes, the electronic stability control is required.

And the. The recall is about an encoder ring something I’m not real familiar with. I’m familiar with decoder rings that used

[00:43:24] Fred: to contain

[00:43:24] Michael: cereal boxes. Sorry, so

[00:43:26] Fred: Let me jump in here. Okay. There we

[00:43:27] Michael: go.

[00:43:28] Fred: In order for the electronic stability control to work, or actually for the The braking system to work properly, the anti lock braking system to work properly.

You have to know what the speed of the individual tires on the vehicle is. So what this sensor does is it sends an electronic signal to the vehicle controller that lets the controller know exactly what the rotational speed of the individual tires is. Now what the electronic stability control [00:44:00] does is it looks at all the tires When your car’s in a critical configuration, or it’s going to flip over, or it’s going to swerve or whatever, and it individually controls.

The braking on each of the tires bring your car back into a stable, safe configuration. Okay, so this is a critical component that allows the vehicle controller to know what the speed of each individual tire is. Okay, so that’s where this comes from. And so when I say encoder, what it does is basically it encodes the rotational speed of each individual tire.

Okay. Or you can change the visual wheel so that the stability controller can work. Very neat.

[00:44:47] Anthony: Okay. If you were a customer of one of these vehicles, Chrysler will fix it for you. And they’ll reimburse you for any issues you have with it according to this because they have a history of reimbursing their customers who’ve already paid [00:45:00] for the cost of repairing this problem.

So get that one done.

[00:45:04] Michael: Yeah. That should be out around the middle of December is when owners will start to know about that. But be aware that in the meantime, your electronic stability control system may not work as expected. So stay stable.

[00:45:18] Anthony: Stay stable. Up next General Motors, 107 vehicles that is very specific.

The 2020 to 2022 Chevrolet Bolt EV which people seem to really like. Service records were determined to determine vehicles that may not have successfully completed installation of the advanced diagnostic software as related to another recall. Wait, so these cars got recalled, and then some of them, I guess they just unplugged it before the update was completed?

[00:45:44] Michael: Yeah, it looks like they figured out that some of the vehicles that, this was a recall. I think this was the fire recall for the bolts where owners waited quite some time for a fix. And then it looks like about a little over 100 of the owners that waited all that time for a fix didn’t actually [00:46:00] get the fix.

It’s, it looks like I don’t think there was an incident that causes that someone’s vehicle caught on fire, but it looks like they, they noticed it. And found all these vehicles through service records. So that’s good news. And owners who are having this issue, the 107 of you out there who got a bad software update on that initial recall should hear from them in a little over a month.

[00:46:24] Anthony: All right. I will say

[00:46:27] Michael: In the meantime, I would say, I think there was a park outside associated with that recall. So you should continue to park your vehicle outside until you get this recall fixed for the owners affected here.

[00:46:38] Electronic Stability Control: A Lifesaving Innovation

[00:46:38] Fred: Hey, I want to go back to electronic civility control for just one second.

You’re living in the past. This is a wonderful innovation by the industry. These things are great. So let me give you a couple examples. I was on the Beltway in Washington driving, minding my own business when traffic was backed up to get out to I 66 when they had a left exit. And, it [00:47:00] always backed up for miles.

So I was going along it at highway speed. All of a sudden, one gentleman, who was queued up to get onto I 66 decided he’d rather do something else. And so about 10 feet in front of me, all of a sudden he, pulled into the traffic lane right ahead of me. I was driving an Isuzu Trooper at the time.

So I cranked over the wheel, the car started to flip. It didn’t flip, but it started to roll over. So I was glad to get it under control. I may have offered a famous salute to the driver, but I’m not sure. Then I bought a Subaru. And I was driving back from Annapolis to Washington at highway speed. All of a sudden, a big lump of metal fell off a tow truck that was ahead of me.

And so I once again had to crank the wheel over to get out of the way of that object. And it was just stunning because the car was stable, the ESC kicked in, [00:48:00] I steered away from this large object, whatever the hell it was, and went on my merry way. So this is a wonderful system. Thank you to industry for developing this.

This is the kind of electronic innovation. That we would like to see more of and, we’d like to see people stop concentrating on automatic vehicles and putting more and more of this really excellent life saving technology into vehicles that are currently being offered to the public. And that’s where it

[00:48:34] Anthony: electronic stability control is not a required feature.

It is now. Okay, good. That’s what I thought. Okay.

[00:48:40] Final Recalls and Closing Remarks

[00:48:40] Anthony: Moving on Mazda to 80, 915 vehicles. The 2024 Mazda CX 90, the 2025 CX 70. This is old. Can I say this as part of the the backup camera thing, multiple messages. Yeah. Yeah. Go for it.

[00:48:57] Michael: Yeah, the 360 view monitor is affected by this [00:49:00] one.

So it affects the backup cameras function as well as numerous other things, including anything on your instrument cluster seat belt, warnings, defroster, engine, warning, light, high voltage, battery, cooling system, all sorts of things. So this electrical issue is big.

[00:49:18] Anthony: Come get that fixed. Last recall, Ford 6, 212 vehicles.

Wait a second, Ford I understand being in the recall roundup, but only 6, 000 vehicles? Come on, they’re always like 600, 000 vehicles. So this is the 2024 Ford Mustang, the gas version, and it has a problem with its instrument panel cluster may not illuminate at startup or during a drive cycle, it’s exactly as a drive cycle.

So basically I guess their screen just stays black and you’re like, I’m going. I’m going fast, slow brakes on, I don’t know. What is it? What is a drive cycle? Does that mean just [00:50:00] you’re driving the car?

[00:50:01] Fred: Yeah. That’s just, you start, you go somewhere and then you stop. That’s the drive cycle. Oh, that’s not that exciting.

[00:50:09] Michael: Yeah. It’s exciting. If you don’t have an instrument panel, though. And in a good way. So that’s something, it’s just a yet another software issue in vehicles. What they’re going to do here is basically update your instrument panel cluster software. And owners should be hearing about this one starting next week.

So get ready to take your car in for that software update. If you own a 2024 Mustang.

[00:50:35] Anthony: Oh, that’s exciting. And with that listeners. Have you gone to autosafety. org and clicked on the donate button? Come on, do it. We need your help more than ever. Thanks for listening. Tell all your friends. Until next time.

Bye bye. All right. Bye bye. Thank

[00:50:50] Michael: you. Thanks everybody.

[00:50:53] Fred: For more information, visit www. autosafety. org.