Fatalities down, Elon lies and blind spots are a big problem

Introduction to the Center for Auto Safety Podcast

Anthony: You are listening to their automobile 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 everybody. Welcome to your favorite visual podcast. Nah, I’m just kidding. We, it’s audio only ’cause apparently we all have just discovered we’re not that good Looking here. Something is a very strange conversation behind the scenes.

Good News on Traffic Fatalities

Anthony: Anyway, let’s start off with some good news from our friends. Nitsa, I’m gonna quote from an article they have on their site.

Nitsa projects, that traffic fatalities declined about 6.3% in the first quarter with 8,055 lives lost. This is the 12th consecutive, quarterly decline in fatalities, and the [00:01:00] estimated quarterly fatality rate is the lowest in six years. Now, I don’t know if this is accurate, but that 6.3% decline is also almost in line with how many less cars Tesla has sold.

Michael: Eh, come on. Nah, I don’t know. That’s definitely not the reason. Okay. But we’ll see.

Anthony: But this is a good news, right?

Michael: Yeah, it’s great news. It’s the lowest rate of fatality rate we’ve seen since 2019. I, I guess one could infer that we’ve gotten past the spike we saw in the pandemic.

Anthony: Yeah.

Impact of COVID-19 on Driving Behavior

Anthony: ’cause from our, another article we have here from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety they’re talking about poor mental health police cuts fueled pandemic spike and impaired driving deaths. So we’ve talked about it numerous times in the show, how during COVID, you guys remember that it was so long ago.

But people started driving like lunatics. And from this article in 2019, prior to the onset of [00:02:00] COVID, 19, 28% of passenger vehicle drivers killed in crashes, had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 or more. The legal limit in most states in 2020 as the effects of the pandemic set in that proportion greased to 30% and remained elevated through 2022.

So we’re out of COVID. Now, people are just like, eh, I got COVID. And everyone’s eh, take some flu medication, have a nice day. And during the pandemic we’re like, it got COVID gonna die. Let’s get drunk and drive. Is that. Is that? No,

Michael: I don’t know. No, that’s probably oversimplification, maybe a lot of people, I think.

Virtually everyone across the political scale agrees that America needs to invest more in our mental health treatment. And that’s something we didn’t have in place, obviously, when COVID occurred. And the result was that I think around, 60% of adults in the United States said, yeah, I’m drinking more.

I am, stuck in my house with my [00:03:00] wife and kids all day, and I need to drink more. Or I don’t have to go to work every day. I’ve got more time to drink. Or I’m depressed because I’m lonely, because I really enjoy being at work. And we’ve gone remote. And, there could be a, dozens of reasons for why people drank more.

But the downside of that was more people were driving after drinking. And at the same time we’d seen a decrease in policing. We’d seen, a loss of police. I think it was something like around, an average loss of five full-time law enforcement officers per a hundred thousand residents nationwide between 2018 and 22.

So you had less enforcement out there, which is, something.

The Role of Law Enforcement in Road Safety

Michael: Nitsa had points to in their statement when they give yet another nod to their attempts to bolster a stronger relationship with law enforcement. NITSA, I think we discussed this a few weeks back and may have been my Gaslight of the week, one week when, nitsa came out with a report and [00:04:00] leaned heavily into law enforcement as a way to prevent deaths on the road, which I don’t disagree at all. That enforcement can lead to a lower death rate, and you’re going to get more drunks and impaired drivers off the road and many other things, can happen with increased informance on the road, less speeders, less reckless driving and that sort of thing.

But at the same time, I always want to point out that NHTSA’s job is to be, to enhance the American police state or enforcement. It’s, they also have a responsibility, which is.

Vehicle Safety and NHTSA’s Responsibilities

Michael: I would argue their main responsibility to ensure that vehicles are safe. And that’s something that, they were failing on in the years leading up to the pandemic.

And, we still have issues with the way they’ve proceeded and are continuing to proceed in the areas of rulemaking that we think are ripe. But that the agency simply hasn’t moved on. But, this is something, I, this report from the Insurance Institute is, [00:05:00] really confirmation or scientific confirmation of something we already knew.

And that nit ad pointed out many times that, impaired driving. It was a major cause of the spike in fatalities during the pandemic. And then going back to NSA’s announcement of the first quarter this year, which is a great news and everything, I noticed in there, I don’t know if this really qualifies the gaslight of the week, but I noticed in there, final paragraph. They say the fatality rate for the first quarter decreased to 1.05 fatalities per a hundred million vehicle miles traveled down from the rate of 1.13 from the same time in 2024. This is the lowest quarterly fatality rate since the first quarter of 2019. All that’s fine, but didn’t they say vehicle miles traveled in the quarter, remained mostly flat at 4.3 billion miles, or about a 0.6% increase.

That’s, that 4.3 billion mile figure is miles away from accurate. So I don’t know if it casts doubt on NI’s math here. I hope not. I [00:06:00] hope they didn’t make a mistake in their calculations, but 4.3 billion miles is probably low by an order of about 762 billion miles or so. We travel 3.2 trillion miles in America every year, and if you do the math and you reverse the 1.05 fatalities per a hundred, me being a hundred million vehicle miles traveled using the 8,055 fatalities from the quarter, I think you’ll find that, that it was around seven, we would need around 765 billion miles travel to get that number.

So just pointing that out in case nits, I’d like to correct its statement.

Fred: Holy mo. Michael, you’ve gone off the reservation. You’re all numbers now. Yeah, I’ve been taking the amazing transformation.

Michael: At 4.3 billion miles just was a big big flashing red sign to me. That’s completely, that couldn’t be correct unless Americans almost completely stopped driving.

Even if you just [00:07:00] had semi trucks on the road, we’d probably go above that figure.

Fred: Yeah. But we, we should also point out that even though this is good news, it’s not great news because the slaughter at the rate that was evident in 2019 continues and we’re still talking about deaths of thousands of people every month.

There’s a lot of work left to do here. It’s not time for a big celebration, but yeah, a glimmer of hope in these statistics. I’m, am I the Debbie Downer here? Or do we all share that? No

Anthony: you’re right. I think it’s great that we’re getting back to the pre pandemic.

Fatality rate, but the pre pandemic fed fatality rate wasn’t great. But I think that’s what you’re saying. So listeners gotta still keep your seatbelt on. Don’t drive drunk, don’t take Benadryl and drive. I just read today that apparently the Europeans have listed Benadryl as a do not drive while taking this drug thing and the US do as well.

That,

Michael: Should you drive using [00:08:00] a drug that a lot of people use to keep their kids quiet on airplanes and asleep? Probably not. Wait, that’s a thing, but. But Benadryl has a lot of other uses, and I don’t, I’m maybe, I’m, maybe I’m just odd and my brain chemistry is off. I think most people that know me would attest to that.

But it’s Benadryl has a lot of other uses, like preventing people from going into anaphylactic shock after a bee sting or some other type of allergic reaction. And, I would be scared of a world in which, the cops pull you over and if you come up positive for Benadryl, you’re going to jail.

That’s. I, I don’t know what that would, that, what that would do to people who rely on Benadryl for allergic responses. But I don’t know. Who knows? Michael’s

Anthony: very much on the prob Benadryl driving lobby. I see how it is being bought by big Benadryl.

Michael: Benadryl is a very useful drug in preventing human deaths.

I think if you remove Benadryl from the world, we would see a lot of problems that we’re

Anthony: not suggesting that just don’t take it and then drive the car. Yeah. Have your child drive the car for you anyway. Totally different stuff. So we’re [00:09:00] talking about crashes and fatalities decreasing.

Driver Blind Spots and Vehicle Design

Anthony: But here’s an article from Fast Company titled Driver Blind Spots are Getting Bigger, lame New Car Design.

I’m gonna quote from the article, the study looked at six different models of top selling cars sold in the US, including the Honda CR-V, the Chevy Suburban, and the Toyota Camry, and compared blind zones in different versions of these cars released between 1997 and 2023. Using a camera based visual measurement tool, the researchers found that the Ford Blind zones in every one of the six cars got bigger in newer models.

The worst performing models, the CRV and the Suburban had Ford visibility reductions by up to 58%. Oh my God. Further down the organization also found that the organization being IIHS found that vehicles with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45% more likely to cause pedestrian fatalities, road deaths that have increased nearly 40% since 2000.

So this covers a lot of things we’ve talked [00:10:00] about with the vehicles being higher up and the forward over problems where you’re hitting people ’cause you can’t see what’s in front of you. Blind spot issues, like when I was taking my kid out, teaching him driving, I had to teach him to set up the mirrors properly.

I got outta the car, stood in what I knew was the blind spot, but if he had adjust the side view mirrors, he could see me. I was like, adjust the mirrors till you see me and try to. Eliminate, reduce the blind spot. There’s no way to fully eliminate it unless I was gonna take a reciprocating saw and set off the roof and make the car convertible.

But I chose not to do that. There

Fred: actually, there is a way to eliminate the blind spot, which is to move your damn head around. You can, you if you stop at a stop sign and you look twice both ways, alternating your head position and you move it around, you can see, in fact the full scope of the world around you.

So there it, there’s no way of eliminating the blind spots from a static design, but [00:11:00] you as a sentient human being can go ahead and move your head around so that you’re gonna actually see what’s in front of your vehicle before you move the vehicle.

Anthony: I think in some of these newer vehicles, like the A pillar, that’s for those playing the home game.

That is that you are sitting in your driver’s seat and you look out over the windshield and you have your passenger window to your left, and that big pillar in between that connects those two, that’s the A pillar that seems to have gotten bigger in some cases or reduced it. So now you’re, you gotta stretch before you get in the car.

So you can move your head so far to see one

Fred: reason, remember one reason it’s gotten bigger is because they now contain airbags and curtain airbags, so it’s there are a lot of variables at

Anthony: play here. Does the, A pillar contain an airbag? I know

Michael: the B

Anthony: pillars

Michael: do. It can, but to the end, the A pillar can, I think, but that also, it’s, there’s also a roof crush standard that went into effect during this period as well that might impact [00:12:00] that pillar size.

It could be a lot of different things that impact pillar size. One of the, there are a couple interesting things about this announcement. The first is Volpi which is a Nitsa research center. Did this study finding that in these, they took six vehicles. They took a Ford F1 53, mid-size SUVs and a couple of sedans.

And across the board found that visibility was reduced, from, I think it was the seventies until 1997. Sorry, 1997 until 2023. Where the years they looked at visibility was reduced across the board and somewhat significantly, as much as 58% in some models. And when they’re studying that visibility, they’re looking at.

A 10 meter radius around the vehicle. And then that’s how the base they use to model, use the models to decide where, where, what visibility has been lost. But I, something that we missed, we didn’t talk about, I think in April, IHS put out a study where they [00:13:00] had they’ve developed a measurement technique, and I know the folks at Volpe have been working on how to measure visibility for quite some time now.

And IHS developed a measurement technique where they have a camera that, and if you look at the IHS press release on this study, you’ll see a kind of a good visual representation of it. They’ll show a vehicle, basically moving down the road and the blind spots for it are highlighted on an illustration.

And you can see as the vehicle moves, how the blind spots change. And for each vehicle, that’s an incredibly useful. Thing to have. Volpi took that and used that. It’s a camera based system of some sort Volpi took that, popped it into these six vehicles. And apparently now they’re, they’re planning to do the entire range of vehicles hundreds of vehicles to determine, just how bad is this visibility problem.

Pedestrian and Vulnerable Road User Safety

Michael: And all that just leads me to say, last year we supported a bill put forth by representative Mary Gay [00:14:00] Scanlon in the house called the Pedestrian Protection Act. That would have mandated that nitsa, do you know, a rulemaking here to increase, ultimately increase visibility in vehicles because we’ve seen so many, pedestrian and vulnerable road user crashes in the past few years. It, that’s, we had the pandemic that we just spoke of, but there’s also a pedestrian and vulnerable road user pandemic that’s going on and doesn’t show any signs of declining. As more and more bike bicyclists and pedestrians and scooter riders and other folks are killed and, a significant portion of those folks die or injured because of low visibility in these giant cars we’re making.

And also, as the study shows, the visibility, it’s not just the big giant heavy trucks that are part of the problem here with visibility. It’s also your average sedan or mid-size SUV that’s a problem. So visibility is something that, that we think [00:15:00] needs to be increased period in vehicles across the board.

And I think this research bears that out.

Fred: Yeah. You brought up a great point, Michael, which is that 100%. Of vulnerable road user deaths are caused by inadequate separation between vehicles and the vulnerable road users. We saw, I saw in Germany when I was there a couple weeks ago, they use barriers.

They use various means, visual means, and physical means to separate the people who are likely to get killed from the machines that are likely to kill them. Yep. There are systemic problems in American roadway design that could be solved over time by simply acknowledging that vulnerable road users exist and they have a right to use the roadway.

The same as any other party.

Anthony: Fred, when you say these barriers, are they kinda like a [00:16:00] wall?

Fred: In many cases they were, so the Germans built a wall to separate

Anthony: people. More like a, I just more like a curb. Okay. So it wasn’t like a full wall that the Germans built to, to separate people.

Fred: They have a history. I’m reaching for a bad God. Sorry. I was put, I was, they not all

Anthony: working,

Fred: but

Michael: I didn’t go to Berlin, so who knows, dedicated bike lanes are I important, but they’re even more important if you can get them separated from the traffic lane. I think they’re going to be, ultimately, they’re a lot safer.

We’ve seen more and more bike lanes in America, probably not enough over the past decade or more, but we don’t, I don’t see a lot of them that are actually protected from vehicular traffic. That’s something I think that the infrastructure needs to catch up on. It’s also something that is not being funded well at all by the current federal government.

Fred: This is also an AV issue. Don’t forget, because they’re being operated in city streets with no physical barrier or no logical [00:17:00] barrier or no visible barrier between them and the pedestrians in the streets, which is just madness, but. That’s an aside. No, that’s back to the flow.

Anthony: Not a total aside, because in this article, the way it ends, the GM basically saying blind spots have increased, but we have things like blind spot detection and automatic emergency braking.

GM’s so cute. We have pedestrian warning things. That’s funny. That’s

Michael: funny that there’s my gaslight right there. Yeah, that

Anthony: Come on. That’s what I’m doing. You, Nope,

Michael: too bad.

Anthony: That’s blind spot

Michael: detection detects cars on each side of you, typically not pedestrians. And automatic emergency braking isn’t required at this point to detect bicyclists or motorcyclists even.

And, GM is part of the coalition that’s trying to get the automatic emergency braking rule rescinded. So what the hell are they even talking about?

Anthony: Oh, okay. That’s your gaslight. That’s pretty good. You stole it right from me. But that’s fine. I got a better one. But what I [00:18:00] like about this is they’re saying, Hey, technology will solve these problems.

Whereas, what’s my favorite recall that we have pretty much every week review camera fails. Yeah. And so these systems, they’re using cameras and sensors that I don’t think we’ve seen any blind spot detection things fail yet and be recalled yet, but, give it time. So anyway, that’s my that’s Michael’s guess.

Fred, what’s your gaslight, because I know you’re stealing from my favorite as well, but that’s okay. I’m not worried. Oh, no,

Fred: I’ve never, no, I never do that. Anything because it cruises is cruise is gone, so I can’t really do that.

Gaslight of the Week: Aurora and Waymo

Fred: So my Gaslight this week comes from LinkedIn, which for those who don’t use it, is a social networking site that’s business purposes for the most part. And there was a host there by, and forgive me if I get the organization wrong, Nat Busey, who is Aurora’s chief safety officer,

Anthony: quoted from that Aurora, the self-driving trucking [00:19:00] company.

Fred: Yeah.

Anthony: Self-driving. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, I think. But as you see, the sun. And Matt used Na used to be high up in the nitsa research division before he went through the revolving door.

Fred: Went to the dark side. Okay. So quoting from that article that Aurora, we take a transparent and thorough approach to safety, including adoption of innovative safety tools like safety case frameworks and safety management systems goes on to say that they should leverage safety expertise found in the automated vehicle Safety Consortium, best practices, and other voluntary industry standards.

Publish by groups such as SAE, ISO I Triple S, close quote. So unfortunately, none of these industry standards are actually standards. They’re actually qualitative essays and suggestions, a nod and a wink about what you might do if you want to, but you don’t have to do it. And the reference [00:20:00] to ul, which he includes is clearly gratuitous because they’ve not hired an independent team to perform a, an audit.

And if you just pick and choose the parts that you like from UL 4,600, you are completely denying the purpose of it, which is to do a comprehensive analysis of your safety case as evidence of aurora’s transparency and thorough approach to safety in the post. Mr. Busey then goes on to reference figure by Waymo, a completely different company.

That particular paper has itself been a past gaslight nominee because it basically tries to justify something that can’t be justified. But how does this contribute to transparency at Aurora? Does transparency mean you look right through Aurora to what Waymo’s doing? This is a really curious post, but moving on, if Aurora is transparent and thorough and should have no problem referencing their [00:21:00] own work, sharing with the public their entire safety case framework, key safety indicator metrics, showing steady progress over time, safety metrics, targets presumably met before deployment and their safety case review process, focusing on competence and independence.

Haven’t seen any of that. Or claiming transparency by referencing a different development team’s problematic justification for alluding actual safety design. Which, by the way, is just the opposite of transparency. While referencing a thinly disguised PR release for safety claims, rather than referencing an actual safety design and making species claims about conforming to safety standards that don’t actually exist, I give my first joint Gaslight nomination to both Aurora and Waymo.

No one could generate this much cash light alone.

Anthony: That’s pretty good. Guys, I’m

Fred: gonna be a winner this week, Anthony.

Anthony: I don’t, you guys are honestly neck and neck. Michael gets bonus points for literally [00:22:00] stealing it out of my mouth while I’m doing it.

Fred: Oh, he does not. He does those negative points.

He does, but

Anthony: You’ve got the Waymo in there, which is a classic. But I’m gonna tell you guys, I didn’t let you know ahead of time, but I changed the rules this week on Gaslight. See, mine is not a gaslight. Mine is a mood lighting. That’s right.

HSBC’s Take on Robo Taxis

Anthony: I’m doing a positive one to our friends at HSBC.

Sure. They’re a bank that was once involved with helping drug cartels, launder money. But they came out with a report. They

Michael: allegedly,

Anthony: no, they were caught. I think they were caught. They were caught. Yeah. I think they were. Yeah, they were. Allegedly, I don’t know, just in case I’m wrong, but I’ve been, they’ve been listening to me.

There are analysts have been hearing me say, Hey, the math doesn’t work on robo taxis. There’s no there, there’s no business case there. It doesn’t work. And I broke down numerous times in the show, the back of the envelope math saying this will never happen. And these guys sat down and did real math.

And I’m gonna quote from it saying this report from Business Insider in a Monday note, [00:23:00] HSBC analysts suggested the idea that Robotaxis would be more profitable than their human driven counterparts was based on a misconception. That’s a nice way to say it. It’s based on bullshit. Although robo taxi operators do not have to worry about the cost of paying a driver’s wage, aren’t Uber drivers like a independent contractor?

They said that the driverless taxis face a slew of overlooked extra costs that would likely cut into profits according to HSBC’s analysts. Those include parking, charging and cleaning fees, as well as teams of remote operators to intervene when things go wrong. When we factor in these costs, we believe robo taxis won’t be break even on a cash flow basis until seven to eight years after launch.

The analyst wrote adding that the projections for Robax revenues vary from the ambitious to the unrealistic. I think seven to eight years after launch is highly speculative and super optimistic because again alphabet is not being totally clear on how much money they’ve set on fire with Waymo, but it’s well over $10 billion [00:24:00]

Michael: and they’re well over, past seven to eight years.

Anthony: Exactly. And, GM crews we know set like at least five, $6 billion. On fire during this it was 10 billion for GM cruise? Yeah. Okay. So GF GM Cruise did $10 billion. Waymo did much more than that because their pockets are deeper and they actually came up with something better. So I I give my mood light to HSBC analysts, but at the same time I’m gonna gaslight them ’cause they’re seven, eight years things is, that’s just somebody in their investment banking department being like, we can’t tell them the truth that this is all bs.

So it’s a mood like Gaslight, I win.

Fred: You do not, you don’t even come close. You can. I will.

Michael: I will mute you. You are

Fred: not you. You know

Michael: how do the field, I like this Fred. How did Anthony become judge and Jerry?

Anthony: Look, you guys, you let me, this is how revolutions start.

Yeah. So this is a, I wish we could link to this article, but unfortunately we can’t. It looks like,

Michael: yeah, I couldn’t find [00:25:00] the HSBC actual report either. I assume that’s something that you have to pay a lot of money to receive in your inbox, but I would’ve been interested to see what else that was in there.

Yeah. Since they were one of the few analysts that’s willing to tell the truth about all the things that are coming outta the mouths of autonomous vehicle companies.

Fred: Yeah. It’s, Hey, you don’t want to get in the way of a gold rush when

Anthony: you’re a promoter, right? That’s true Artificial intelligence. It’s gonna take over the world.

So are my pet rocks. Indeed. I love pet rocks.

Fred: Hey, did you see the MIT report that says that actually proves based on the report that reliance on ai also permanent loss of cognitive ability, particularly chat GPT. Very interesting article. That is awesome. I would tend

Michael: to agree having interacted with some folks who over rely on chat GPT.

Anthony: That is amazing. Hey we know listeners that you’re not relying on chat GPT because you know what chat GPT can’t do for you can’t go to auto save you.org [00:26:00] and click on donate. Maybe it can everyone. I don’t use this shit. But yeah, but you can go there and click on donate and we’ll keep doing this.

So thanks. So related to this, let’s jump back over to MSN or Reuters, talking about now, this is a surprise to me.

NHTSA’s Active Oversight on Self-Driving Cars

Anthony: This is an article titled US Auto Safety Nominee Calls for Active Oversight of Self-Driving Cars. My head is exploding on this. I don’t get it. I’m so confused. Jonathan Morrison, the Chief Counsel of nitsa will testify to the US Senate that autonomous vehicles offer potential benefits but also unique risks.

Quoting Nitsa cannot sit back and wait for problems to arise with such developing technologies, but must demonstrate strong leadership. That’s what Morrison said in his written testimony that I guess is later today or tomorrow?

Michael: Today. Today. It’s actually should be starting any second. Yeah. So

Anthony: that’s,

Michael: By the time everyone hears this podcast, it will have been yesterday.

Anthony: So I’m shocked that he came out there and said, Hey, [00:27:00] I get the impression from this, that he’s maybe we should put some limits on autonomous vehicles. Maybe we shouldn’t put the cart before the horse. Is that, am I reading that correctly, Michael? Or is this just fluff?

Michael: It’s hard to know from the little snippet we got from the Reuters article.

Actually, his testimony has come out while we were talking here. And there’s, a lot of people point towards, Morrison was. Kind of the signatory on this letter that went out to Tesla saying, the way you are compiling and describing the safety of your vehicles is incorrect and wrong.

And that was Nitsa was completely correct in that instance. Tesla has been fudging its data, as long as they’ve existed as a company. There, there’s also a push that I don’t think you can, in his testimony he says, NITSA can’t sit back and wait for problems to arise with developing technology.

Technologies must develop strong leadership. And for ad this [00:28:00] means deep and sustained engagement with industries, state and local governments and technical safety experts. It also means creating a safety framework consisting of guidance and, yes, regulation. Ding ding. See that’s the word we want to hear.

Because as Fred discussed earlier, guidance is unhelpful. Manufacturers can ignore it at and Fred may discuss this again later in the podcast but that’s something, creating actual regulations that force. Good behavior and circumstances where we know bad behavior is likely to take place is critical.

If you’ve looked at the history of the auto industry and know anything about it, you know that there are times when industry actors get, get their, get. The stars in their eyes are more likely the dollar signs in their eyes and make decisions that negatively impact consumers while positively impacting corporations.

And that’s ultimately where the federal government needs to step in and [00:29:00] ensure consumer safety, even if it costs manufacturers a little bit. And that’s what we’re hoping, I. I don’t foresee a lot of problems in this nomination. I think he’ll probably be confirmed as the nits administrator.

We are, we, it’s hard for, we, of course we would love someone walking in the door who is gonna be very strong on regulations, very strong on enforcement and, put the manufacturer’s feet to the fire. That’s probably not gonna happen with a Trump nominee to a safety agency.

At least the safety agency still exists in the form it did before he took, unlike the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is being dismantled as quickly as the administration could do it. This is obviously isn’t a perfect nominee or someone who we would support by any means, but it’s not the end of the world.

And there’s also the question here of, there’s this ongoing Trump and Musk feud and how much of this talk is tough talk directed towards Tesla as they deploy robo [00:30:00] Taxii and how much that little tiff that’s been ongoing at the top between Elon and DJT is causing this.

We’ll I, the proof will be in the pudding and what Morrison does once he’s in the position of administrator, which I expect he will be confirmed, but that. We will wait to see. ’cause when he was chief counsel that said it was the worst period of re regulation and rulemaking in the agency’s history.

So he’s got a lot to prove if that statement saying that he’s willing to regulate is going to be born out in, in, in reality.

Anthony: So this is a glass half full of arsenic scenario. All right. So you said the word, so we’re gonna have to talk about it.

Elon Musk and Tesla’s Regulatory Claims

Anthony: You said Tesla didn’t want to do it, I apologize.

We pretty much have to do it all the time. ’cause this is a show about auto safety. Elmo, Elon he’s, he lies just constantly. Okay. He’s just full of shit. Yeah,

Michael: You can’t spell felon without [00:31:00] Elon.

Anthony: He’s Hey, we have these robax he released out in Austin. And so somebody on the Twitter is like, when are you gonna do this in the Bay Area?

And Elon’s response was waiting on regulatory approvals, but probably in a month or two. And how do I know this is a lie? Because he hasn’t filed for paperwork in California to release autonomous vehicles or any sort of roboto taxii service. They haven’t applied yet for any permits at all. Hey, those in the Bay Area, read a little easier.

Michael: Hey look, another story proving Elon’s full of shit.

Anthony: Yeah. Next. Alright, then we’re gonna go on to we’ll just go lighthearted. The man is a child. He is a child. A child. A child. So we’ve talked in this in the past about operating design domain, and this is the area where cars are geofenced so that they’re, the autonomous vehicles can’t get outta that.

Geofencing and Tesla’s Operating Design Domain

Anthony: So like for example, in San Francisco, the Waymo’s or geofence where they couldn’t get on the [00:32:00] freeway or we talk about super cruise and blue crews where they’re geofenced to only go on pre mapped highways. The mind of a 12-year-old who’s running Tesla, he, his operating design domain he drew to look like male genitalia.

That’s right. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the world’s wealthiest man as the sense of humor of a 12-year-old boy that’s been hit on the head and eats lead

Michael: pages. Yeah. I’ve got a different take on that. If you look at a map of Austin, the kind of the, I guess the power corridor or the shape of the city

Anthony: that’s not making it better, man, the power corridor, it’s relatively phallic, right?

And so if

Michael: you’re drawing up an operating design domain that encapsulates kind of the bus areas of Austin, you, you’re probably going to wind up in that area. I think he saw that and posted it because he had the sense of humor of a 12-year-old. I don’t know that the operating design domain was specifically crafted to, to look like a cocking balls

Anthony: Four 20 [00:33:00] man.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. All right. But it’s hopefully that’s the last time we have to talk about those shapes on this podcast. Yes.

Tesla Autopilot Crash Trial Overview

Anthony: And then moving on to a more serious Tesla story, this from Bloomberg titled Tesla Goes to Trial Over Fail Autopilot Crash in Florida. So a quoting from this article Tesla has bend its defense on driver error.

The driver of the Tesla s had engaged in the driver assistance system, but had dropped his mobile phone and wasn’t watching the road while reaching for the device on the floorboard. That’s when the car went through a T intersection in Key Largo and off the PA striking a parked Chevrolet Tahoe whose two occupants were standing outside the vehicle.

So this happened in 2019, and let’s just, yeah, let’s rewind people.

Michael: We, we reviewed a Washington Post article, I think from last year, maybe two years ago, that had a video of the crash was captured on. Obviously on the Tesla’s video and recorder and, basically it was nighttime. The [00:34:00] vehicle was headed towards a T intersection that was very well marked.

There was a stop sign. There was a, there was a flashing light above it. There were a number of signs at the end of the road indicating that, the road didn’t continue any further. There was a vehicle parked with the victims in it or outside of it? Outside. I’m not exactly sure. Apparently star gazing at the intersection and the Tesla went while it was, the Tesla went straight through and killed one of the individuals and injured the other.

So these are.

Tesla’s Autopilot System Under Scrutiny

Michael: It, this case has a lot of elements of things that we wonder about with Tesla vehicles. There’s, its inability to recognize flashing lights as we saw in the investigation. Nisa open, but never really resolve that issue in it’s, at nighttime using cameras, which we know are going to struggle in low light conditions.

So it, it’s got those features, but there’s some, there’s some factors in this case that are, that complicate what the jury’s gonna have to consider. Ultimately [00:35:00] the jury’s gotta decide here whether it was the vehicle systems that were the primary contributor to the crash or the human actions.

And we have a driver here who. What’s driving on a rural road turned on autopilot. Autopilot is supposedly supposed to turn off or become some semi disabled. If you go over 45 miles an hour on a rural road. Apparently the driver had accelerated. I think these facts may be in dispute. I’m not sure.

The driver, it accelerates to around 60 miles per hour around the time of the crash. So there’s a question as to whether autopilot was fully engaged at the time of the crash, and also the driver was searching around on the Florida’s vehicle for a dropped cell phone while pressing the accelerator. So it’s not a, it’s not, what I would say would be, a perfect case if you believe that Tesla’s autopilot system is the number one cause in these crashes.

But it’s certainly. There are questions that need to be asked here why, if autopilot was engaged, why didn’t it sense the [00:36:00] stop sign, the flashing lights, all these big no-nos right in front of the vehicle and stop the vehicle in time to avoid the crash, or at least to decrease the amount of damage done that could have saved a life or prevented injuries.

So it’s going to be a very interesting trial. I believe they, they have just picked the jury and are starting this case this week. So we’ll have more information on it over the coming weeks as long as Tesla doesn’t settle.

Anthony: Yeah. I just wanna remind viewers, this was, this crash happened in 2019.

It’s 2025 currently. Yeah. So you gotta rewind. This is pre pandemic 2019. This is Elon Musk on 60 minutes being the car drives itself. Yeah, these cars drive themselves. He’s completely repeating this all the time. Tesla has posted a doctored video on their site showing the car driving around by itself.

No human intervention, parking itself. All of that has come out, was all faked, didn’t happen. So I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable for the average consumer to think the car drives itself. [00:37:00] It was not full self-driving supervised, which Nitsa forced on Tesla recently. It was Elon saying everything’s great.

It was him appearing as Iron Man’s friend in movies. It was, everyone thought this man must be amazing and genius. And then just fast forward a few years and he is doing a Nazi salute. Related to that, I’m gonna ask Fred to unmute himself.

Fred: Michael isn’t this an important case simply because the discovery files will be available to the public for the first time?

Michael: I don’t know that’s going the discovery, probably a lot of that will probably be under seal. But. The public parts of the trial will, I think this will be. This will be one of the first trials that really digs in deep on Tesla’s autopilot operations and how they contribute to the human the automation, complacency, and the things that [00:38:00] happen to the human who’s relying on the Tesla system.

And it’s also, I think one of the most interesting things for and one of the things that we’re really worried about in this situation, Tesla’s made a history of blaming the human. Every time someone crashes an autopilot or full self driving, Tesla’s gonna say we warned them that they had to responsibly look at the road the whole time.

We pop that up. But at the same time, we all know Tesla’s putting out conflicting messages on Twitter and Elon pretending that the vehicles drive themselves for years and all that sort of stuff. So getting that information in front of a jury. And seeing how the jury responds and is really the meat of this trial.

It’s a man versus machine trial to see who is, who really deserves the blame for these kind of crashes. And this is a difficult case. Like there, there’s certainly problems on both the side of Tesla and the side of the driver who was, clearly doing some things that are not safe if you’re responsible for monitoring [00:39:00] a vehicle’s performance.

So it’s going to be interesting to see how it turns out.

Anthony: And let’s go from this.

Safety Standards in the AV Industry

Anthony: I think this is a good transition into the tower a Fred. Oh, thank you. ’cause it’s safety requirements versus industry standards.

Fred: Yeah. So we talk about this a lot, but I just wanted to elaborate on it a little bit.

The industry talks about their conformers to existing safety standards as. Perfectly fine. And then they put these things on the road. So what does that really mean in terms that are hopefully are more easily understood? As an example, Anthony, have you ever seen a speed limit sign that says something like school zone, safe speed, 15 miles per hour?

Yes. Okay. Not much ambiguity there. That’s if that were written into a standard, a safety standard, that would be called a normative requirement that just says, look, you can’t go [00:40:00] over 15 miles per hour in this situation. So that’s a normative requirement and it, it says this is what safe means.

So industry avoids those like the plague in all of these standards that they’re referencing as. Safety standards. I’m gonna give you a counter example. The requirement that a commercial airline be evacuated in 90 seconds for certification, even in the event of electric or hydraulic system failure is a normative requirement.

Pretty cut and dry. Useful for aircraft design engineers, what to do with it. It’s probably useful for automotive design as well, by the way. Tesla would fail that test, but in the AV world, none of the industry safety standards, which are actually typically reports and best practices, contain any normative [00:41:00] requirements.

Repeat no normative requirements in any of those standards. Just suggestions and allusions, nods and winks. This is because the working groups that developed these documents are staffed almost completely by engineers for AV companies. They don’t want to be held to objective normative safety standards.

So when someone suggests the conformance to AV industry safety standards, we’ll provide acceptable safety. Actually, they’re just wrong. Whether or not intentionally, for example, the AV industry’s relying on an engineering definition of safety, which is stated in IO 2 6 2 6 2 as absence of unreasonable risk.

This is actually a legal term that might be useful in a courtroom, but it has very little applicability in engineering. How would you put a number on this? What is an engineer supposed to do with this information? But going back to that school zone, if you [00:42:00] follow the AV industry example the speed limit sign would say school zone speed, limited to absence of unreasonable risk.

Anthony: Does this make any sense? Probably not. No. It feels like it was written by a shady lawyer.

Fred: Yeah. Or a shady engineer I don’t wanna say shady, perhaps benighted, but anyway, but that’s the 80 way of dealing with safety to just pretend that you don’t need to have hard limits on that. Now for our listeners, the Center for Owner Safety is advocated for specific affirmative standards in these statements, in these standards.

Safety is the response that an engaged, competent human driver would have in the same circumstances. It was shouted down and usually in a vote of about 20 to one. But but you were that one,

Anthony: weren’t you?

Fred: I was [00:43:00] that one, yeah. So what would an objective normative safety standard be? For example.

All safety critical AV logic associated with vulnerable road user interactions shall be dual fault. Tolerant, meaning if one thing fails, the other will, save the life of the pedestrian. There’s a reasonable standard every car, every AV on the road should conform to that, but none do. I think that’s a reasonable expectation for these inherently dangerous industrial machines when operating in the vicinity of fragile humans.

Current industry standards as referenced by our friended Aurora, avoid the use of shallow statements like the plague. They simply don’t wanna be required to do any particular thing to design safety into the vehicles, and that’s the difference between [00:44:00] effective safety design and whatever is going on in the AV industry.

Faith-based engineering, avoiding the use of shall statements and instead relying on the mythical powers of AI will not get them to an acceptably safe design. So be very skeptical when a developer credits and industry standard as an actionable safety implementation approach, no one can conform to objective safety criteria that don’t exist, can’t happen.

So incidentally, we at the Center of Auto Safety are grateful for our, your health, our listeners’ health, and we do what we can to be the loyal opposition advocating for safety above all as a counter to the industry dominated membership of standards development working groups. And to be clear, I have not been invited to the Christmas parties of any of the other members of these working groups.

Thank you.

Anthony: That’s what this really comes down to is you’re just lonely over the holidays. Is that what it is? [00:45:00]

Fred: Lonely. Oh, so lonely. Why did you open that? I’m sorry. I didn’t

Anthony: mean to do that. So I wanna dig into this a little bit more. So these are engineers that, right now they follow a bunch of standards.

So you’re building an electric vehicle or anything. The electrical components, for example, they’ll say, Hey, I can only accept this voltage. That’s a standard. ‘Cause if I put more voltage into it, things will explode or go bad or fail. And so they’ve got, so they’ve got brake systems. They know, hey, this is how much force we can put on it for it to be effective, right?

Yes, sir. They’ve got constant velocity joints and they’ve got things that have stress limits. They’ve got, yeah. And their

Michael: standards for everything. Overdose is everything.

Anthony: Every ev, every part of the vehicle has standards onto it. Has

Fred: objective standards, objective. Normative standards. Yes, a hundred

Anthony: percent.

And so they put all this together to ideally create a safe vehicle, but then they wanna skip off on the safety part at [00:46:00] the end for the humans,

Fred: I think my message came across,

Anthony: yes. Okay. Because the individual pieces, like for example the amount of voltage going to the battery, that is, you can look at that as a safety feature, right?

There’s too much in there. It explodes. But when the vehicle’s actually in motion, nah, let’s not talk about safety.

Fred: Alright. Let’s not talk about the interaction between this five son vehicle and a hundred pound 12-year-old.

Anthony: Yeah. I, the cognitive dissonance that must be going off in these engineers’ heads is mind blowing to me.

Fred: Well, a lot of engineering is about cognitive dissonance. Actually, when I was working on missile defense, we never talked about. We never talk about the actual impact of a nuclear device on a city. ’cause that’s too big. So you’d talk about the physics package and the missile, right? Collateral damage.

We didn’t even get to collateral damage ’cause we were looking at shooting [00:47:00] down the missile. But you wouldn’t say, for example, that there’s a nuclear warhead in there. You say there’s a physics package that you are trying to disable. So a lot of that goes on. And sometimes it’s really useful by the way.

But in the case of safety of avs it’s not, it’s just very dangerous. And it’s a way of promoting the vehicles without actually doing the hard work of implement, of developing and implementing a safety design.

Anthony: Huh. And why doesn’t the public trust these things? Who knows? Government. Get your hands off My Medicare.

Fred: Oh they’ve driven a hundred million miles. What could be wrong? Oh my God.

Anthony: Yeah. It was a hundred. What could possibly go wrong? 132 million miles. We will not provide a source for this number. There you go. Wow. That’s a, that was a good one. That was a I enjoyed that quite a bit. I’m gonna say,

Fred: oh, thank you.

Anthony: But get back

Fred: to [00:48:00] work

Anthony: here. Yeah. You’ve won this week’s to a hundred percent. All right, let’s jump into an update on one.

Female Crash Test Dummies and Safety

Anthony: We’ve talked about this in the past. Female crash test Dummies from an article, I’m gonna quote women make up more than half of us drivers, but are 73% more likely to suffer a serious injury in a crash than men.

According to nitsa, there are, they are 17% more likely to be killed. Data shows, and we’ve talked about this, whereas the standard crash test dummy doesn’t fit any of the three of our. Physiques. And it’s a five, ten, a hundred and seventy five pound male. Is that right? 175 pound, something like that?

I think so, yeah. And senators, a couple senators got together and they’re like, Hey let’s change this so we can actually test crash tests for women and people who don’t fit this five, ten, a hundred seventy five pound male. I think it’s a good thing.

Michael: Yeah, there’s, you know who really loves the [00:49:00] spill is Humanetics, right?

Because they’ll be making the dummies that, are gonna have to be modeled on all sorts of different body types. The more potty types, the better for them. The Insurance Institute weighed in on this and said, maybe that’s not the way to go. Maybe we should be looking at simulation modeling type.

Things as a far less expensive and probably just effect just as effective solution. I can’t pretend that I know enough about the entire area to come down on one or the other. I, all I know is that there are a lot of different body types out there, child body types, female body types, even male body types that are different than the normal one that aren’t being properly protected in crashes because they’re not being tested for in the development of these cars.

So anything that makes this situation better is probably a good thing. And whether that’s more dummies or more modeling I’m probably gonna be for it.

Fred: I wanna point out this most [00:50:00] drivers are women. For using men as the standard for the crash, their dummies is odd.

Yeah, number one. But number two. No simulation should be trusted unless it’s grounded in experimental data. Every simulation is doomed to succeed because the engineers keep working on it until it gives you the results that you want. But unless it’s been grounded in experimental data it’s really questionable whether or not you should do it.

And I could give you some scary examples from finding element analysis, but Yeah. But I won’t, time is short.

Anthony: Thank you. I’d also like to point out, but that, this is odd, but I, IHS on all other job applications say that you must be five, ten, a hundred seventy five pounds. Could be that, I don’t know.

All right.

Ford’s Record-Breaking Recalls

Anthony: Let’s do some recalls before we get into recalls. This is my Jim Farley section of the show. Hey Jim. How you doing? Listening to the show. How is things in Dearborn? Oh, that’s good. Little hot. [00:51:00] Yeah, a little hot here too. Anyway, Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford. Is always invited on this show.

And this is an article from The Wall Street Journal. Ford Breaks annual record for safety recalls within first six months of the year. That’s right. Ford Motor has recorded more safety recalls in the first six months of 2025 than any car company ever has in an entire calendar year. Through the end of June, Ford issued 88 safety recalls.

According to federal data, the next closest manufacturer this year at 21 is Recreational vehicle Company, forest River, which has been plagued by manufacturing errors since 2020. Ford has either reported the first or second meek most recalls in the industry. Does this mean that they’re producing unsafe vehicles, or does this mean that they’re more proactive than their competitors?

Michael: I think what this particular year’s numbers mean is that Nitsa and Ford entered a consent agreement in November of last year. [00:52:00] That around, I think around 35 of the recalls that Ford has put out this year are actually redos. They’re recalls where the remedy didn’t really correct the problem.

And so they’re essentially under order by Nitsa to correct those recalls. So that certainly inflates their numbers. But even without those 35 recalls, they’re leading the pack by a long way. And that’s partly because under the consent order that they entered with Nitsa, they are. Having to upgrade a lot of their data systems, their communication systems, their, low voltage electronics design and evaluation systems.

There’s a lot of things that Ford is required to do. Because essentially what happens when Nitsa does a considerable like that or consent agreement is they say, oh, we’re fining Ford $165 million. $65 million goes is paid immediately, but, 45 of that million is going to improve Ford’s internal [00:53:00] systems to make sure that they’re able to conduct better recalls.

And then if Ford does everything right, they get that last $55 million back. So Ford is, the, it, it’s incentivized to do a better job on recalls so that it can not just get $55 million back, which, is a lot of money to us, but not that much to Ford. And I think that’s, in this case it’s a good story in some ways.

It shows that nitsa enforcement and when nitsa really, cracks down on a manufacturer’s recall processes, we can see great results and, everybody’s gonna benefit here. Ultimately, Ford’s customers certainly are because they’re gonna be having their vehicles actually fixed, whether, rather than getting recall remedies that continue to lead them in danger or at risk, and.

Hopefully this will make Ford’s processes better in the future so that they’re not leading the recall sweepstakes every year.

Anthony: Wait. So Ford Nitsa finds Ford $165 million and [00:54:00] now the average person, you think Ford’s gotta write a check for $165 million, but you’re telling me no, they only have to write a no, a check for a part of it and you’ll see

Michael: that.

Yeah, that in almost all of the nitsa consent agreements. Essentially they come to a decision on what the total fine will be for the manufacturer. But then they say you’re gonna pay this much now, but if you put these things into place and you can use some of this fine money to do that.

Right? 40, 55 million, I think it was maybe 45, to put these systems in place to make your recalls better then and, and you show us they’re gonna have an independent monitor that. Ford has to employ to evaluate all this, to make sure that Ford’s, dotting its i’s and crossing its T’s and then a few years down the road, NSA will come back and say, okay, we’re satisfied.

You did better. We’re gonna waive that last 55 million, or whatever it is. So that’s something NSA has done for years now. I think they, they’ve been doing that since, maybe even since Toyota. I know they did some of that with the Tata stuff. They definitely did it [00:55:00] with Hyundai on, on, on their fi vehicle fires.

So it’s it’s like instead of just, charging the company a bunch of money and not being guaranteed any results. They’re dangling a carrot along, trying to incentivize the company to do a better job in the future. So while I would love to see manufacturers having, to empty out their couch cushions to pay for a fine when they’ve, done things that threaten consumer safety, on the other hand, I want them to get better.

And this is a great way of incentivizing it. So I can’t totally go against what Nitsa does in situations like that.

Anthony: So if Ford gets this $55 million back or whatever it is can they donate that to the Center for Auto Safety? They

Michael: could. They absolutely could.

Anthony: I didn’t think we would accept money directly from Ford.

Michael: We wouldn’t, but they could try. But listen, at least they could at least let Jim join us on the podcast.

Anthony: There you go. But listeners, we’ll accept your donations. Auto safety.org. Click on donate. And now

Fred: let’s, Hey Anthony, I’m not sure how close you’re to the end, but I wanted to give Phil Koopman a [00:56:00] shout out.

Because he just published a very interesting article in Substack, and if you wanna look him up, K-O-O-P-M-A-N is his last name, where he talks about a layered approach to assuring AV safety and operations. I, worth the reading, and I’m glad Phil put it out there, but it’s innovative and useful, so thank you, Phil.

Anthony: Okay, and we’ll put a link to that. But now let’s can, let’s go into recalls again. Ford, holy shit. Ford’s the first one. Come on. 850,318 vehicles. The 2021 to 2023 Ford F 55, 50 sd. The F four 50 sd, the three 50, the two 50. The Lincoln Navigator, Lincoln Aviator, a whole bunch. I’m not, I’m done reading this.

I’m, this is too annoying. The effective vehicle may lose fuel pressure and flow from the fuel delivery module to the failure of the low pressure fuel pump. [00:57:00] So this is a fuel pump issue here?

Michael: Yep. Okay. And essentially, you’re losing fuel to your engine and you will stall leaving you on the side of the road.

I, I, the thing to point out here is that they haven’t developed a remedy yet. So customers are, drive carefully for the next few months until Ford has this remedy available can actually fix your vehicle.

Anthony: All right. Up next we have Jaguar 20,999 vehicles, the 2021 to 2025 Land Rover, range Rover, Evo Q.

Michael: I think it’s a evoke. Evoke,

Anthony: oh God. The spelling of these things. Yeah. This is a weird one. ’cause this is the the airbag may be torn when it’s deployed due to improper folding during manufacturing. And it’s fascinating. I’ve watched a video, I can’t, I’ll if I can find it, where the folding that they do on airbags, it’s like super advanced origami.

It’s absolutely, it’s

Michael: incredibly important. Amazing. In fact, probably 20 [00:58:00] years ago there was an investigation somehow we got involved in a foyer request and ended up suing nisr for more information, which is something we do from time to time to get information. Then we, I don’t know how to, I think we ultimately did not get the information we wanted in that case, but Nissan did end up doing a recall, and it was because the airbags were folded in such a way that when they deployed.

The airbag was deploying in in, with a quarter. It was folded in a way that a quarter of the airbag would thrust itself into the passenger before the airbag fully inflated, and people were being blinded and getting other facial injuries simply because of the way the airbag was folded, which has a lot to do with the way it deploys in early deployment.

You don’t want the airbag hitting the passenger. You want the airbag hitting the passenger when it’s fully deployed and ready to absorb all the energy. And in this case it’s even diff more, it’s a [00:59:00] different problem. It looks like the airbag is folding away that allows it to be torn. So it’s a double-headed scenario.

You can either. The airbag could be torn and it won’t properly inflate and you won’t be protected in the crash. And also because of the tear in the airbag, the gases that are used to inflate the airbag can be released and cause burn injuries the passenger. So it’s a pretty scary recall.

Anthony: Yeah.

And as we learned on, I think episode one way back when that Mr. Perkins pointed out they can use anything as a propellant in your airbag, right? Is that still a thing?

Michael: Yeah. They can even use cans of that gross cheese.

Anthony: Oh, we’ve talked about that. We want cheese in there. Alright.

Polestar Rear View Camera Issues

Anthony: That’s the end of recalls, but we have one investigation I’ll talk about this week because it’s my favorite subject.

This is from Polestar. And the problem description is the rear view camera display may have visualization issues during a backing event. Blah. Come on guys. We look forward to this. Recall. Yeah.

Michael: This is a recall [01:00:00] query. So NSA’s like looking at a polestar because the recalls are bad. And what happened is, Polestar, it’s, there’ve been a lot of incidents reported to nsa.

There’s only, it’s only a population of 27, 20 8,000 vehicles. And so they recalled them in June of last year and put out a safety fix. It looked like a software fix, right? So a cheap fix. As soon as they put that out and started repairing vehicles, people continued to complain. It didn’t fix anything.

And so then Polestar said, oh, okay. In April of this year, just a couple of months ago, Polestar said, okay, we didn’t, we screwed that up. We’re gonna put out an additional software update to fix this problem. But then as soon as that update went out, NITSA continued to receive complaints for consumers who weren’t having rear view cameras operable.

So at this point Polestar, and it looks like they met earlier this month, the [01:01:00] Office of Defects investigation at Nitsa, Polestar and Polestar said, yeah, our recall remedy the second time didn’t work either. So NSA’s opening this investigation to figure out what exactly is going on here. And I’m wondering, given that software updates are not working, if there’s not a physical or design or engineering issue that’s going on here that software can’t really touch, and that might be a little more expensive for Polestar to do, we will see.

Anthony: Alright.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Anthony: And that’s our show. Fred, do you have any last words? I’m thinking of two specifically.

Fred: Goodbye.

Anthony: Ah, the little answer I was looking for was Piggly Wiggly.

Fred: Really work out. Damn it.

Anthony: Alright, till next time. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye. Thanks everybody.

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