Kissing Tesla’s Butt and the end of the EPA

Introduction and Banter

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

Hey, listeners, we’re on a roll this morning. We are firing. We’re, we’ve got some really great, smart banter going, which means this episode might be a dud.

Michael: Yeah we just missed it all.

Fred: We went off too early, but, so let’s bring it back. We need to have some merch for sale because we’re now a successful podcast, right?

Yes. So I am suggesting that we start a line of Center for Auto Safety sleepwear made out of recycled tires and spare parts from Ford Pinto. That have been decommissioned as part of the [00:01:00] influence of this show on automotive safety. What do you guys think?

Anthony: How old do you think this show is that we played a part in getting the Ford Pinto off the road?

Fred: We’ve been around for a while. I think we’re up to over 150 episodes now, aren’t we?

Anthony: We are. Hey listeners, if you’ve been with us since day one, we’ll see you at Thanksgiving. But this is the start of season four of this show. It said it couldn’t be done.

Fred: Talking about listener loyalty. My sister, the number one fan said that Michael rightfully won the Gaslight of the Week award last week.

And I, it was a wonderful thing, I suppose for you, Michael, but it doesn’t

speak well for family loyalty, does it? Oh, it speaks well for the US Mail means

Michael: she got my check

Fred: and she didn’t share it with me. Another

Anthony: slam against family loyalty. Oh no. Hey, listeners.

Environmental Regulations and Auto Industry

Anthony: Today is July 30th, also known as the day that the [00:02:00] EEPA decided HA.

Environment. Environment. Yeah. The head of the EPAA weasley little man named Lee Den is basically saying, Hey, I bet we can get rid of environmental regulations. What does this mean? Fraud safety? And people who use the road and people who breathe means we’re not gonna have regulations around the pollution that comes out of your tailpipe, but Ford vaguely pushed back from an article in the Wall Street.

Yeah. Washington Post Ford said in a statement that had appreciated President Donald Trump’s orange skin and Selden’s work to address the imbalance between current emissions standards and customer choice like breathing. Added that the government should establish a new standard. America needs a single stable standard to foster business planning.

Uhhuh the standard should align with science and customer choice. Again, the right to breathe, reduce carbon emissions by getting more stringent over time and grow a menu. American manufacturing. So boards basically saying, Hey, we’ve been doing for the last, I [00:03:00] don’t know, since the mid seventies when Nixon started the EPA Nixon.

Yeah. When good old tricky Dicky started the EPA. Let’s let’s keep with that program. ’cause we’ve built our business around that model for the, since the mid seventies.

Michael: Yeah. And let’s not lose sight of why that. Primary reason for why that came about in the first place was the lead leaded gasoline that GM invented, right?

And was polluting the air everywhere. And, even in the development of leaded gasoline, there were a lot of people being killed in, in factories. They knew it was a carcinogen, they knew it was a bad thing, and yet put it in the gasoline for, the majority of cars in America.

This all somewhat started as a, an outgrowth of auto industry overreach.

Fred: The Ethel Corporation down in Richmond, Virginia, was the source for a lot of the tetraethyl lead that was added to the cars to increase octane. And they’re standing by with a manganese based compound that would [00:04:00] do essentially the same thing.

So rather than lead poisoning they’d prefer to have manganese poisoning. So hopefully this administration is a sopa. I ignited that they push that forward, but. Standing by for a press release from Richmond on the benefits of manganese in the air.

Michael: Yeah. And the Clean Air Act goes well beyond cars, right?

And even in cars, there are other issues like electric vehicles rely on power that, it may be sustainably sourced. It’s probably not. It’s probably coming from gas or coal-fired power plants, which the Clean Air Act regulates and prevents those plants from emitting bad things into the atmosphere.

Whether it’s gas or electric, there’s, there’s, there are only downsides here in terms of pollution and emissions.

Anthony: This episode brought to you by n neurotoxicity, you might not be dead yet, but one day you will be speaking of somebody who might be having lead poisoning, Congressman Vince Fong.

Autonomous Vehicle Legislation

Anthony: Congressman [00:05:00] Vince Fong, he introduced landmark legislation to streamline AV trucking and strengthen national supply chain. Now, that’s a headline that makes me know this guy didn’t read the bill, and if he did, he doesn’t understand it. This was written by some PR flax for the AV industry. This specifically this bill will establish a federal framework over state laws requiring human drivers requiring in commercial vehicles with level four, level five.

A DDS update. Federal definitions to include a DS equipped vehicles align a DS levels with Society of Automotive Engineers international standards that authorizes the interstate testing and operation of fully AAU automated trucks without human or remote drivers on board. Now, first of all, a DS, isn’t it a DAS strike?

No. A DAS is different.

Michael: Different. So A DAS is basically the level two stuff that’s. Operating on a lot of vehicles. A DS stands for automated driving system, which is one of the terms that’s [00:06:00] used for autonomous vehicles.

Anthony: Okay. And then Fred, question to you. Are you a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers?

Are you a member of S-A-E-I-I

Fred: am Guilty?

Anthony: No. No. Which one is it? ’cause didn’t s sa didn’t they just change their name to just SAE?

Fred: No, it’s been SA International for a while now. It’s no longer Society for Automotive Engineers. That’s what I mean. Okay. Yeah. I’d also point out that when the Congressman refers to our conformance with standards, there are no standards.

Even the one he cites, J 30 16 is a report and reported best practice, but it’s specifically not a standard. This law, as written basically says there are no standards.

Michael: Yeah, it, it really does. And one of the main things going on in this bill is aligning the federal definition of automated vehicles with the SAEs version, [00:07:00] which, as we have pointed out on numerous occasions, creates a lot of problems including a level two loophole that allows vehicles to pretend to be something they’re not a La Tesla.

It’s a bad bill and it’s not just bad because of that, it’s bad because it does the same thing that most industry supported autonomous vehicle bills do. It says, oh, we’ve got this huge problem, the patchwork of laws and all these states. We need Congress to eliminate those in, in, in exchange for federal law laws and regulations that give us, one base system to operate under.

But what they try to do it, the way they try to do it is to have the federal law kick in once, they want a framework that basically preempts state laws now, and then we wait and we wait for 10 years, 15 years, 20, 30 years. How long is it going to take to actually have a federal regulatory framework around autonomous vehicles?

We don’t know. And so in that time [00:08:00] period, the industry is in complete control. States can’t tell them what to do, and there’s no federal law telling them what to do. It’s a huge problem. It’s a problem of putting the cart before the horse that virtually every autonomous vehicle bill we’ve seen over the last decade has had.

And, there’s never going to be an autonomous vehicle bill that, that safety organizations can even come close to supporting if it results in that kind of regulatory, black hole. Essentially there’s going to be a period of time in, in these types of bills where there’s no federal law.

States can’t do anything. Cities can’t do anything, and autonomous vehicle manufacturers have their way and do whatever they want. So that’s a huge problem with this bill. The SAE issue is a problem they. There’s some weird language in the bills introduced. There’s one part that says the secretary may not issue a regulation that unduly burdens motor carriers operating a DS equipped vehicles or [00:09:00] discriminates against an a DS equipped vehicle relative to other commercial vehicles.

So here we go. We’ve got congressmen trying to pass anti-discrimination measures that would favor a DS vehicles very odd provision. There are obviously things that are going to have to be different for a DS and commercial and regular commercial vehicles. And virtually every time the Secretary of Transportation would even try to pass a regulation that impacts a DS, equip commercial vehicles and not regular ones, the industry’s gonna come in and say, oh, that’s unduly burdensome, and point to this provision and try to get it thrown out.

So this bill has, that’s one of many problems with this bill. There’s also some issues with, because. The federal law requires, a, a warning triangle that is set outside of the truck if there’s a crash or the breakdown to warrant oncoming cars. They’re trying to wipe out that requirement with this legislation in exchange for allowing people to use a flashing cab mounting [00:10:00] beacon that hasn’t even really been studied or vetted for safety, or to show that it can actually help drivers avoid a commercial vehicle that’s stalled on the side of the road.

It’s not a very well thought out bill. It continues along the same path of a lot that we’ve seen before that have been really problematic.

Fred: Yeah. But Michael,

what about freedom? Shouldn’t the truck manufacturers be free to do whatever they want? I

Michael: won’t jump into my rant, it seems like everything that, that might make money someday in America is viewed as good these days.

Yeah. And part of our freedoms and I, I think we could clearly see examples of the opposite, even where some of our social media and other things are headed that are unregulated in many ways. A lot of the tech industry that’s gone unregulated, we’ve seen a lot of negative impacts in America from that.

I don’t think that can be denied. It’s become entrenched in our politics and in a lot of other areas where we might. They’ve set some safeguards at one point instead of allowing for all this freedom, and it’s not even, okay, I’ll stop there. [00:11:00]

Anthony: Wow, you’re going on full Fred Perkins mode there.

That was pretty

Michael: good. Yeah, I will stop right there. But that’s a huge problem is this, anything that makes money is great and shouldn’t be regulated. Is you, I hear this over and over for virtually everything. The industry, the auto industry, is that what we’re focused on?

I’m sure this happens in every other industry, but there’s just seems to be this acceptance because something might drive the economy that it’s automatically a good thing. And that’s something I think we’re seeing here. There’s not a lot of proof that AV trucking is safe. We just saw a couple months ago where Aurora had to put safety drivers back in its trucks because the manufacturer of the trucks was scared for liability reasons.

When you see that kind of thing, it makes you wonder why the congressmen are so intent on removing any type of oversight of that industry.

Anthony: Are you familiar

Fred: with lobbying? For our listeners who don’t follow this quite as closely as we do, the Aurora Free Range [00:12:00] Trucking experiment lasted exactly two weeks from the time they first put a driverless truck on the road until the manufacturer of that truck demanded that they put a driver, a human driver back in place.

Not very promising.

Michael: This legislation, specifically says states that, an autonom, an a DS equipped commercial vehicle does not have to have either a safety driver or a remote driver. So they’re basically saying, we don’t need a human backup in any way, shape, or form to call something an A-D-A-D-S, which at this point in the development of these vehicles, I think is a.

Incredibly bad step.

Fred: Another detail on this bill that’s missing is a provision for safety inspection of the vehicles. So there is no, these are big vehicles barreling down the highway at pretty, pretty high speed. Currently. State police can [00:13:00] stop any vehicle, any commercial vehicle and do a spot check to make sure that its safety equipment is up and operating.

The tires are good drivers log is up to date. And, all those kind of basic things that assure as much as it can be the safety of the operating of operat of this big heavy vehicle. But there’s no provision in here for to do that. There’s no design provision that says there’s visibility into the safety parameters of the truck.

For police to monitor the safety there, there’s is basically no way in the world or the state police to even stop the vehicles. To do a check or to find out what the safety information is. It’s pertinent for this vehicle. This is a disaster in the making.

Anthony: Is there any update on the Aurora situation where they’re like, no, you’re putting a human back inside the car?

Is that human still inside the cab? I think the human’s still there. I’m assume they’re,

Michael: yeah, I think, was it Packer or was it was [00:14:00] heavy truck manufacturer that they were engaged with that I think primarily for liability reasons, said Uhuh. Yeah, we can’t have, we can’t have this and

Fred: they put somebody back.

But Aurora touts its transparency if there’s safety design. So I’m sure that any day now we’ll be. Getting an update.

Anthony: Hey, if they’re touting it, it must be good. My other question related to this is ’cause I did a long drive the last couple days, and there’s stop, there’s signs for way station’s, open trucks that weigh more than two and a half tons.

I’m like, every car on the road has to get weighed. Do autonomous robot trucks or do they know how to navigate these way stations?

Fred: Good question. I don’t have the answer.

Anthony: Don’t you need a person there to isn’t, it’s not just you drive up on a scale and be like, bye, aren’t they? Isn’t there more of an interaction?

That’s just one of,

Michael: one of many kind of issues there. These autonomous trucks have been, promoted when their makers are being careful promoted as a way to, to, drive goods [00:15:00] down the interstate towards, like hubs where then a local delivery driver would pick it up and take them into the cities.

Under this bill you’re exempting cities and states from being able to do anything or control anything around that. Technically the drivers, cities couldn’t say, Hey, no autonomous heavy trucks in our cities. And that poses a huge problem when there’s no evidence right now that these vehicles could operate safely in American cities.

And yet we’ve got Congress trying to pass legislation that preempts cities and states for even touching their operations. So this is it’s very troubling from that perspective. The

Anthony: Deep State has infiltrated the city’s folks. They’re coming for you.

Ford’s Quality Issues

Anthony: Speaking of nonsense, Ford the Detroit Free Press has a good article that is unfortunately pay walled titled Ford has spent 18 months trying to fix quality problems that costing the company billions.

Part of their way to do this is they’re infantilizing their workforce by having large [00:16:00] displays in their buildings that have a green, smiley face saying We’re doing good or red, frowny facing uhoh. Something’s not working. If I work there, I’d be I’d be like, why don’t I, why can’t I get a job? Gm? No, seriously Ford, as we’ve talked about, they eh that’s the quality of Ford lately.

But Ford is saying, Hey, we’re making changes to its quality process, including my favorite one is more rigorous procedures around new vehicle launches. What the hell does that mean?

Michael: There’s a lot in this article. It’s a, it’s quite a long article on that, the ob we talked last week, I believe maybe the week before, about Ford’s way out in front of every other manufacturer this year in terms of recalls.

And a lot of that has to do with the fact that Nitsa clamped down them in November of last year. The massive fine. And Ford is having to, jump through a lot of hoops, redo a lot of recalls. I think in the article says 33, I think we’re higher than that now, or what they’re [00:17:00] calling rere recalls where it’s a recall from the last few years that didn’t work.

They’re going back and redoing it. Ford is at least from the article, Bryce Curry, who is apparently. The guy who is now in charge of Ford Quality there, it basically admits that, this is Ford’s low point and that he’s there to make things better. And the way he’s doing it is probably the most interesting part of the article to me.

He’s going to Japan, he’s going to Toyota, and he’s looking at their processes. You know the word sensei? Sensei? How do you pronounce that? Anthony? I know you are Karate kid. Nah, sensei comes up and they were really looking at the way the Japanese do auto manufacture. They should have done that

Anthony: 1990.

Michael: They probably should have, but now they really seem to be embracing it. They’re talking about pokey, yo, you know what that means? It means a mistake proofing device, essentially preventing errors by making sure they [00:18:00] can’t happen. So there’s a lot of discussion of that. I, it’s.

It’s a lot of positive talk. It looks like Ford is really trying to do something good here. I hope to God that, that they do well and get better cars out on the road because, I’m tired of talking about Ford recalls, but, wow. Other than that it’s, it’s a process and it’s a, every car is a tough thing to get out on the road without defects.

I don’t know, Ford seems to have been doing a really poor job in the 20 teens and the early 2020s of getting their arms around this and, hopefully this will help them do that.

Anthony: Yeah. I’m not sure, Michael, because they said in here that, to disagree with you, the article says the changes, their safety changes are self-motivated.

They’re doing this, but it also says they’re doing this under a consent order. Yeah, it’s,

Michael: that’s,

Anthony: but that’s their self-motivation is a court said you gotta do this, but I can’t believe that this is actually Ford’s low [00:19:00] point. Ford, the Edsel, come on.

Michael: That’s Ford Firestone.

That was a tough period for them. They did favor the pin. I don’t believe that. They didn’t have to take a bailout when GM and Chrysler did. I don’t believe they opted

Anthony: not to. I appreciated that as a taxpayer. Yeah.

Michael: But, they’ve had some low points, in terms of safety.

This has absolutely got to be there. I, there’s so many vehicles affected here. They’re losing billions of dollars due to these problems. It’s. And the recalls are, it’s an outrageous number now. I think they’re up over 90 for the year, and the closest manufactured to them probably is around 20.

So they’re out, out outpacing the industry, I think they’re responsible for around maybe even more than a fifth of all recalls that have been issued this year.

Anthony: Yeah. A friend I was just visiting with had, it’s a 2022 Ford F-150 and he keeps ringing it back into the dealer because the edutainment display system’s, like morning, everything’s failed.

And so of course I go to autos safety.org and look up a recall, [00:20:00] but there’s not a specific rate crawl on this. And I’m like, come on, it’s the backup camera. But board so far has not been gone. That’s a good guess. That is an excellent guest and I learned that by gonna auto safety.org and clicking on that red donate button you can too.

Hey, let’s go to our ’cause it’s sweltering today in the United States, spread as it’s sweltering by you as well.

Fred: We’re in the Swer. Yes, sir. Bob. Okay.

Bike Lanes and Urban Traffic

Anthony: Where it’s less sweltering is our neighbors to the north, soon to be the 51st State Canada, the New York Times has an article titled Drivers Versus Cyclists A Battle for the Streets in Canada’s largest city.

And so what happens is Toronto put in really protected bike lanes. It looks like in New York City. They’re just like, there’s just some paint on the street, and I guess under the law that’s protected. Canada looks like they put in some physical barriers here and traffic is really bad in Canada and they’re like, this is bad.

You, the bike lanes, the bikes are so big, they’re taking up so much of our [00:21:00] streets. Hey, I gotta get to the leaf skating and I gotta walk. Hey. Yeah. But my takeaway from this article is quoting many compute commuters also argue that driving into Toronto from the suburbs is often faster than using public transportation with experts saying that the city lacks enough rapid transit to meet its needs.

The provincial government has been criticized for long delays to transit projects. So what I’m trying to get at is once we annex Canada, it’ll be no different than any other US city.

Michael: If you look at Toronto’s, subway map, I mean it, for a city of that size, it appears relatively sparse.

It’s, we’re, I’m in the DC area generally and the metro system there. While it can be great for folks who live in proximity to US Station, it’s a little lacking for people who live further outta the city and it just doesn’t hit certain spots. And it seems like Toronto’s is similar.

I think DC just came in at number one in the worst traffic in America on the, on, on this [00:22:00] year’s report from consumer affairs.com. So they’re not doing well. Partially because of the lack of opportunities there. And I think Toronto is in the same bucket here. They just, they, they don’t have a lot of good ways to get into downtown Toronto other than by car.

And because of that, they’re experiencing tons of traffic. They don’t have congestion pricing yet, Anthony.

Anthony: They should, I think they’d be great at it. Continuing with dangerous bikes and strange things. New York City place. I’ve been to a, the, so Michael sent this article titled Six Nane Arguments.

Mayor Adams is using to defend ripping up the Bedford Avenue bike lane. And he said, I need this to be translated from New York to English. Yeah. And so what happens is Bedford Avenue is this strip in hipster Williamsburg, and it’s just a straight road with a bunch of shops normally on it. It’s a commuter street.

It’s had a bike lane there for a while and there’s a lot of hipsters there riding [00:23:00] their bikes and non hipsters riding their bikes. And what the argument essentially, I’ll break it down for you, of why they wanna rip out these bike lanes is because in that area of Williamsburg, there’s a large religious cult, doomsday cult that all votes in a block.

And so the, every politician in New York City, they listen to this doomsday cult called the Hasidics. And they’re like, okay, you guys want this out? We’ll rip this out. You can look into this. It is a doomsday cult. And they’ve been calling for the end times for a long time. It’s hilarious.

Michael: So this is just a political play.

This is

Anthony: politics. Plain and simple. ’cause the argument is like our private school buses for the acidic community where we don’t teach things like English or math. Or girls it doesn’t know where to stop. And if we have to stop in a bike lane, don’t give us a ticket. And so the Mayor’s office is let’s get rid of bike lanes, doomsday Cult.

It might not be a popular take or a more common one, but it is the truth. And [00:24:00] that’s my opinion. Now, back to the Center for Auto Safety.

Michael: Yeah, that’s obscene that they’re even considering that, politics is politics. We see, all sorts of crazy things happen, don’t we?

Yep.

Michael: But like Toronto here, they’re trying to rip up bike lanes and they’re experiencing some significant outcry. Was it the Toronto article? Maybe it was this New York article where they interviewed the head of a local bike safety group who was in the hospital after being hit by a car.

Anthony: That was the Toronto one.

Yeah. Yeah. In this article, I have a good quote though. Though the Department of Transportation noted that overall injuries among cyclists and pedestrians were down 47% in the portion of Bedford Avenue following the 2024 redesign. Not all collisions were reported to the police. That’s part of their argument.

But hey, look, all injuries went down this massive amount, but hey, probably not all of them were talked about. So it’s probably a spike. We gotta get rid of this stuff,

Fred: do whatever it’s called, doesn’t say I like the part of that report that said we [00:25:00] really can’t enforce the law in New York, so we’re gonna give up.

Anthony: I like that one as well. ’cause, why enforce the law?

Fred: It’s inconvenient. It requires policemen in courts and stuff like that. I’ve visited New York sporadically and I have noted that people tend to violate the bike lanes pretty regularly.

Anthony: I saw this is, it might be true because I remember a couple years ago, there’s kids in my neighborhood and they’re on dirt bikes riding through the street, riding in the wrong lanes, going up on sidewalks and whatnot.

There’s a cop car coming by in the SVV and my wife’s aren’t you guys gonna stop these kids? And the response was why? They would just drive away. I was like, wow. Why? Why would I do my job, man? That’s ridiculous. Anyway, New York City, it’s safe. It actually is. Let’s jump onto another cultist Tesla.

Tesla’s Robo Taxi Plans

Anthony: That’s right. So the Elon has been claiming for a while that San Francisco’s [00:26:00] next for our Robo Taxii. We’ve expanded our area in Austin and now in Austin. He won’t say how much he’s expanded it or what it is, and it’s a pretty tight little operating design domain for that. And in San Francisco Michael, will these be like Waymo Cruise type robo taxis that Tesla’s deploying.

Michael: I don’t think, I don’t think they’re deploying anything like Waymo or Cruise Robo taxis. They’re, first of all, they don’t have the permits to operate a autonomous vehicle in San Francisco at the moment. They’re gonna have to have a driver in the driver’s seat. So basically what you’re paying for here is not a robo taxi ride, it’s just like an Uber.

‘Cause you’re going to have a driver in the driver’s seat using. Presumably full self-driving to take you and the driver’s gonna be monitoring it, an intercede if necessary. But it’s clearly nothing like what Waymo’s already doing out there. And I’m a little [00:27:00] surprised they’re going to San Francisco since, Waymo owns the roads there and is actually doing autonomous driving without a, a remote operator that can take over any time.

I think Waymo’s remote operators only take over to guide the vehicle after it’s stuck. They don’t have people behind monitors with steering wheels ready to take over when the camera system fails like Tesla does. So it, it’s, I don’t know I don’t believe, it’s hard to believe 90% of the stuff coming out of Tesla these days after all the highs they’ve pulled.

So yeah, I guess they’re going to. San Francisco, but they’re basically operating a glorified Uber service.

Anthony: Yeah. Quoting from the article, sorry. The permit allows Tesla to provide ride sharing services with a safety driver behind the wheel of vehicles using its driver assistance systems. A lawyer for the car maker told California DMV, so basically they got a permit to operate a taxi.

They’re like, isn’t he cool? Yeah.

Fred: [00:28:00] So he, Phil Cooperman forecast this a couple of months ago when he was on the show. Basically, the strategy for Tesla is no doubt that they’ll put these vehicles on the road saying they’re just level two, so don’t bother us. We have a safety driver. Then they’ll accumulate X number of miles, then they’ll go back to the regulators and say look we’ve accumulated X miles.

We haven’t killed anybody yet, so give us a permit to just let us go full. Full autonomous. We’re not like these other companies that are trying. To convince you that their technology is great before they’ve tried it out. We, Tesla are so forthright that we’re trying out the technology with these safety drivers and we’ve now gone far enough so we can assert with high confidence that we’re perfectly safe and ready to go and we’re just gonna jump over to full autonomy using this same software.

Anthony: High [00:29:00] confidence.

Fred: I think that’s so I think that’s where they’re headed. And six months from now, we’ll see statements coming outta Tesla saying that we’ve proven our safety. It’s time to go, time to get the regulators out of the way and let us improve efficiency and economy and save the world and yada, yada, all of the things that, Tesla believes that they can do.

Anthony: I disagree, Fred. And I think in six months time, Tesla will be saying we’ve never been a car company. We’ve always been a rocket ship company, ai, robot throwing company. I don’t know what you’re talking about. These cars don’t exist.

Fred: Oh, that, that may well be, we’ll see.

Anthony: Yeah. And that’s gets me to my Gaslight of the week.

’cause it’s Tesla adjacent.

Sandy Monroe and Tesla’s PR Machine

Anthony: That’s right. There’s a man named Sandy Monroe and he runs a consulting firm called Monroe Associates. And at one point they might have been doing great engineering work and whatnot, but now, as I, I can tell for the last [00:30:00] 3, 4, 5 years, they’re essentially just a PR firm for Tesla and Elon Musk.

That’s everything they do is just, everything Elon does is amazing. As what I’m trying to say is Sandy Monroe is done some deep colonoscopy work for Elon. He’s really, he’s gotta brush his teeth again.

Tesla Robo Taxi Test in Austin

Anthony: So they have this video where a couple of their employees, this guy Paul Turnball takes a Tesla Robo Taxi in Austin and basically says it’s great.

And their first left turn in this video it does it wrong. It can’t get into the left, correct, left turn lanes. The safety driver is immediately oh no, this car is stuck in the intersection. And you hear this in the video, can you navigate us outta this intersection please? No one in the car can ’cause yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

So in the backseat, these past news, they ask questions like, how often do you have to intervene? They ask the safety driver, safety person sitting in the passenger seat, and his response is, [00:31:00] yeah, I’m not comfortable talking about work. Good for him. He wants to keep his job.

Critique of Tesla’s FSD and AV Systems

Anthony: This Paul Turnball guy, he is a, he’s a, as clearly his retirement is totally tied up with Tesla stock as well.

He’s really glossing over everything. He’s we’ve had one incident that was unusual. Ha. How would, how would you know that this is unusual versus the usual behavior of these things? He continues, I’ve not experienced it. This is a quote from, I’ve not experienced it, but I’ve heard that the Waymo has trouble with construction.

Like now you’re just like a teenager making shit up. What are you doing?

Yeah.

Anthony: Most of this driving is happening under 35 miles per hour. Actually, they never went above 35 miles per hour. More like it was close to roughly 20 miles per hour. Very short streets. Not a lot of. Difficult things happening. And so the guy, the Paul Turnball continues to say human Uber drivers, they use FSD to keep stress on the job down so you don’t have to drive every second.[00:32:00]

Wait a second, he, this is, yeah. Once you have, these eight ass systems and whatnot, you don’t have to drive every second. You can just disconnect from reality. Man. No. You’re a company that’s supposed to be doing safety engineering right off the bat, you’re like, fuck it. And lastly, he gets into this Paul turn ball.

He says this is the reason we need avs. He said, my dad is in his mid 90 nineties avs are great for him. I’m like, how? Like, how is it? And he continues to go on. If you’re in your mid nineties, you’re like, he wants to go out and drive whenever he can. No. And basically he says, when it comes to Uber, they just don’t trust the driver.

So your dad’s old and racist. I get it. So I have a thousand issues with this on so many levels. Again, if you’re in your mid nineties, you, you may or may not have some sort of mobility issues. You probably need a driver in the car to help you in and out. You’ve got packages. I want a person there. I don’t wanna be like shit, I’m at my destination.

Can you open the door? But that’s just me. That’s [00:33:00] my gaslight of the week. That’s not bad.

Fred: Shall go to mine. It’s not bad. All right, topic. I question whether that’s more bullshit or gaslight,

Anthony: the amount of they do to this saying how amazing it is and honestly like Tesla in a tiny, tightly mapped area of Austin, like they should have the entire city mapped down perfectly and they still can’t fucking drive.

Come on.

Fred: That’s a good point. Since Gaslight’s become competitive, gotta make sure that we.

Gaslight Award: AV Testing in China vs. US

Fred: I got the rules down here, so I’m going, I’m gonna go with a gaslight that’s associated with a test of automatic driving systems that was done in China. And this has, it was very interesting because they actually took 36 different self-driving model cars, put ’em on the road to see what they could do.

They had standardized maneuvers, they had fake pigs on the road. They had cars [00:34:00] that were obscured at some point. And, they saw how the vehicles did and some did pretty well and some did worse. There were a lot of fake pigs that were killed. There were a lot of mock-up cars that were crashed into.

But the point of this is that in America, land of the free and home of the brave, what we hear from. The companies that who are producing these automatic driving systems are that there’s no way they should be regulated, and there’s no way they should be included in anything like ncap, because that would stifle innovation.

There are no qualified technicians outside of the AV companies who can do this, but parenthetically, if the AD as and AV systems are safe, so why do we need to have specially trained people to test them? But I digress. They’re asserting that the miles they’ve driven prove that they’re safe. [00:35:00] The US relies on self-certification, so there’s no justification for testing the vehicles to see if they’re relatively safe.

Industry standards are sufficient. They’re saying even though no standards actually exist, and also the sky is cloudy. So what’s interesting about that is that all this rationale for why they don’t want to participate in any tests yet, they’re perfectly happy to go to China. The companies involved are who were doing business in the US who were there are Mercedes, Tesla, Volkswagen, Toyota, Honda, all of whom are doing business in the US And they’re all happy to participate in these standardized tests in China, which they plan to do every year to show comparisons between these automatic driving systems produced by these various people.

So my Gaslight award goes to all of these manufacturers, bw, [00:36:00] Mercedes, Toyota, Honda or saying that they don’t need to and actually should not do any kind of comparative testing in the United States while they’re happily participating in these standardized tests in China. Proving that standardized tests can be established for them and that they are useful to establish absolute safety, whether or not they ran into a fake pig, for example, and the relative safety how did they do compared to their competitors in the market.

So there you go. It’s a broad brush gaslight, but all I’m giving that nomination to all of the people in the AV industry who are not making America’s roads safer and who do not want to provide any data that would allow us to compare which work better than any others.

Anthony: So what you’re trying to tell me is that [00:37:00] if a market’s large enough that these manufacturers will do whatever the regulators want them to do,

Fred: so it seems Yes.

Oh.

Anthony: A shame in the US is such a tiny part of the world economy onto Michael

Michael: Brooks.

Congressman Fong and Federal Regulations

Michael: That sounds like something, Congressman Fong would say, I’m dipping back into the truck autonomy thing. Fong is wrong. So let’s see. Ooh. Europe, and he’s what he says Europe and China are rapidly integrating autonomous trucks into the, their supply chains.

I don’t know that I’d buy that, but that’s what they want us to believe. America is asleep at the wheel hamstrung by a confusing patchwork of state regulations that threaten public safety. The state regulations threaten public safety. You may wanna look at a different press office writer here for that innovation and economic growth.

By establishing a federal framework for autonomous trucks and empowering the Department of [00:38:00] Transportation to set practical regulations, we can safely scale this emerging technology nationwide. When in fact, what the bill he has proposed does it, it eliminates the state regs, which are the only thing currently protecting Americans from bad autonomy.

There’s the state regulations certainly aren’t threatening public safety. I don’t know where in the hell they came up with that. And as I discussed earlier the federal framework that they’re trying to stand up isn’t going to be here for a while. It’s not going to come next year. It’s not gonna come in five years.

It may not come in 20 because, Mr. Fong, the president from your party, has just cut the agencies in charge of making those regulations by up to 25%. So I don’t see, safety is thrown in as an afterthought into this, there, this is all about scaling, all about supply chain efficiency, all about domestic commerce, all about making sure that America’s [00:39:00] unbeatable in the global marketplace.

The only real way to get there is to get strong federal regulations around AV safety on the books. Now there goes your patchwork for whatever that’s worth. If you believe there’s an actual patchwork of state regulations holding them back, I don’t there’s, this is just clearly. Can Congressman Fung setting up a straw man argument that somehow the states and are in the way of the autonomous vehicle industry.

What they ultimately just want is no regulations that apply to them for the next 10 years so they can scale at will. And, ultimately the only thing in that scenario that’s going to be helping people who are injured or killed by these vehicles I is the trial lawyer bar. It the legal and the liability threat to these companies is the only thing that has helped prevent, Waymo, even Tesla, from going a [00:40:00] lot further in their plans than they have gone already.

It has nothing to do with the state regs, the patchwork of state regulations. What they’re ultimately looking for is a way to preempt state laws preempts. Even state laws that apply to litigation and in other areas of product liability and have, basically a free for all where they can do whatever they want and try to compete with Europe and China, who by the way, are both setting strong national and federal requirements at a rate the United States isn’t keeping up with.

Maybe we should be looking at keeping up with Europe and China in the area of setting regulations rather than watching Nitsa sit on its heels while the autonomous vehicle industry claims that they’re being victimized by state regulations. So again, Fong is wrong and that’s the Gaslight of the week for me.

Anthony: That’s really good. This is a tough one. Michael, you got the pithy Fong is wrong. But I’m going strictly based off of passion. [00:41:00] And this week, I was the most passionate. Michael was second Fred. Like it was good information, but I don’t feel a lot of fire in the belly there. There was not, oh man, A lot of, there was, you need to rage more.

Fred: This is so unfair. You’re prejudice against, you’re clearly prejudiced against all people. People.

Anthony: Look on my screen, you’re not that big. So it’s not that you can

Fred: adjust that,

Anthony: But Fred, for you and you alone will go into the Tao of you.

Fred: Alright? Alright. That’s some kind of compensation.

Signal theory or electronic signals and capture and antennas and things like that. Basically you’ve got an inverse relationship between the bandwidth. You need to detect the signal and the frequency of the signal. That’s why in the old days when you saw a radar antenna at the airport for example, it was really big.

And the reason for that is they were using relatively low [00:42:00] frequency to detect the airplanes. Now they have radars in cars, and they’re really little because they’re using very high frequency to detect the presence of other cars. Millimeter wave radars, for example, are really small. They’re built into the detectors that you walk through and your way to the airplane at, the terminal.

Transparency and Safety in AVs

Fred: So what does this mean for avs? Basically avs are trying to convince the world and have so far convinced the world that deaths per unit mile driven is a reasonable way to characterize the safety of the avs. It’s not for this very same reason, because the deaths that occur and the injuries that occur.

Relatively low frequency. There are many vehicles that will never, happily, that will never kill anybody, right? And there are many that will never injure anybody. But that doesn’t mean that any, [00:43:00] that the industry is safe or that the public is safe because you have large numbers of cars that are out there addressing to people.

So the individual experience of any vehicle doesn’t really tell you much about how that vehicle is doing. With regard to safety, if you are only perimeter, is something that happens very infrequently and may not happen at all. For example, one way you could characterize conventional cars is the number of mountain passes above 14,000 feet.

They are likely to go through in their entire lifetime. That would tell you something about the cars, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. I’ve been ranting about this for a while, and I just wanted to support the rant by saying that what we need to do, and for the companies that are trying to establish their transparency in the safety arena, is they need to establish some criteria that occur day to [00:44:00] day that can be used to indicate the safety of these vehicles.

In other words, very high frequency, so that we can get our mental bandwidth to wrap around the actual information. So what kind of parameters would that be that are, show a lot more resolution than deaths per a hundred million miles? You could have things like the actual trajectory of the car as it goes through a curve versus the plane trajectory of the car.

In other words, how far does the actual motion of the car deviate? From the planned motion of the car. And that’s something every car could measure every day, could measure it automatically, because you’ve got the GPS on the one hand that tells you what the actual location is. And then you’ve got the planned trajectory.

On the other hand, that’s a computer driven trajectory, right? So you can look at the distance between those. You could also look at, [00:45:00] for example, how far away you are from the cars around you. You’ve got a projection in the vehicle, in the computer that says, I’m gonna stop X feet away from this car and never come closer than Y inches Do any of the moving vehicles around me?

You’ve got sensors that can detect that. So how well does your car conform to the design standards that you built into the car? This is the kind of information that we need to get from these vehicles. Because it tells you on a day-to-day basis how well they are conforming to the safety design requirements that you built into the car.

Some of these other parameters could be built into the computers itself. For example, you’ve got a certain amount of ram random access memory available in the computer, and you need this in order to do quick calculations of, whether or not there’s a human being in front of you or whether or not there’s a child [00:46:00] riding by the side of the road that you have to avoid.

But the computer has requirements to have a certain amount of memory available. So the question that should be asked is, how close are we coming to the margins for the memory that’s in the computer that enables the safety calculations versus the actual amount of memory that’s in the computer. Okay.

This is a standard way of measuring the performance. Of computers in real time applications like controlling a vehicle. We’re not seeing any of this. Okay? All, all we’re seeing is the industry pushing us to look at a single parameter. Have I killed anybody today? Versus all this other information that would let us know objectively how well they’re conforming to their design standards.

And by the way, what are those design standards? And who approved the idea that you have to stop three inches away from a vehicle? Why [00:47:00] is that a good number or six inches, or whatever the number is that, that you’ve picked. So we need this kind of transparency in order to do a safety evaluation of these avs before they get on the road and after they’re on the road to find out how well they’re conforming to the performance that was promised before the regulators approved.

The use of these vehicles on the highways. So this is a little complicated, but the idea is we need to have a better set of parameters than death per a hundred million miles in order to really understand what the safety is available from and actually being delivered by these self-driving vehicles.

So does that make sense to you guys, or is that too much inside baseball?

Anthony: It’s deep, but I get it. So my question is, you, let’s take Uber as an example. They have a ton of sensors on their cars. They’re probably collecting all this [00:48:00] data, and they’re a company that has two CEOs, so you know, they’ve got two people to oversee this ’cause that’s a well run company.

But do you think that they’re collecting this data and not looking at it, collecting this data, looking at it, analyzing it, and being like, we’re transparent? We’re not gonna tell people about what we found.

Fred: We I’ve got some comments about that transparency later on. Or maybe I can, you can do it right now.

Later.

Anthony: There’s, there is no later on, there’s just now there’s no later on. Okay.

Fred: So Waymo is talking about transparency, of course. And this week they talked about

Anthony: Waymo. That’s why I meant with the co CEO, sorry, not Uber. I didn’t mean to disparage Uber. It’s Waymo that says two CEOs. That’s a poorly well run company when you need two people to do the same job.

Fred: Yeah, that’s right. That really makes decision making streamlined, doesn’t it? Oh, it’s beautiful. So if you go to their website, you’ll find one page that says, Waymo Safety Impact. And then in the Waymo safety [00:49:00] Impact. Sorry,

Anthony: sorry for that. That is a bad choice of words. Horrible choice of words for safety around a vehicle company.

Safety impact. And it’s a little bit

Fred: ironic, isn’t it? Do it again. So then they say the trust and safety of the communities where we operate is paramount to us. That’s why we’re voluntarily sharing our safety data. This data hub compares the Waymo driver’s excuse me the Waymo driver’s risk rider only crash rates to human crash benchmarks for surface streets and leverages best practices.

Remember, there are no standards, so this is a true statement. It leverages best practices and safety impact analysis, and builds upon dozens of Waymo’s safety publications. So in other words, there are no standards. So we’re doing what the hell we want, providing an unprecedented level of transparency within the autonomous driving industry.

So inquiring minds contrast these statements with the redactions of every [00:50:00] single comment way MO provided in response to the nitsa ODI request for safety data. I don’t think that’s really got a lot to do with transparency. So to be transparent with us, Waymo, give us something we can use. Give us the data that you’re recording every day.

Let us know how your vehicles are performing compared to the standards that you built into the design and the design requirements, and then show us that it makes sense. Please, we’d like to support your operations. You haven’t killed anybody yet. We’d like that to be the case forever, and we’d like to see your rationale for that and help you stay safe.

Thank you. That’s it.

Anthony: I figured out why they have co-CEOs. ’cause in ca they’re hedging their bets in case the law’s I improve in this country. And when it comes time for someone to go to jail, they’ll be like, you’re it. And they choose straws of who’s gonna jail. Maybe

Fred: I, [00:51:00]

Anthony: one of the Oh

Michael: my God.

Yeah. CA CCE going the CEO going to jail. Ha. That’s the best joke on the podcast.

Anthony: Okay, before we get into recalls somewhat related to this is from WSB TV to Atlanta. The article is titled Different Rules for Humans and Robots. The Atlantic Police Department says Court system cannot process citations for Waymo.

And we’ve been listening to Anthony all these years. Who gets the ticket? This is basically saying, Hey, if you’re an autonomous vehicle, you can do whatever the hell you want. ’cause there’s not a human driver to get a ticket Quoting from the article. The standard reads in part, this is the Atlanta Police Standard operating procedure.

The court system is currently unable to process traffic citations for AVS with no human operator. If the vehicle violates a traffic law where a citation would be warranted, the officer must write a report providing the details surrounding the incident and the law that was violated. Cops are really well known for a, Hey I’ll write a report without a person there.

Yeah, [00:52:00] let me do this. That’s I, I.

Michael: So this is tough to get around. I guess state law is a problem here. There’s just everything is connected to a person. But, I wonder how they do this. Like for instance, if they’re giving a parking ticket to these aren’t parking tickets, these are operating tickets.

But if you’re giving a ticket to a corporate actor a corporate truck, a, that type of thing, are there really no ways to cite Waymo for. Traffic citations? Is there really not a way, or is this just a problem because the police can’t figure it out? The court can’t process it?

I don’t know. It seems like, obviously our legal system is way, be way behind technology and is catching up, but this seems like a pretty simple fix, right? Yeah. If there’s an autonomous vehicle that’s violating traffic law, you cite the company and not the human. How hard is that?

Anthony: So that’s what New York [00:53:00] City does.

’cause when the woman I live with gets a speed ticket through an automated camera, it sends to me as the listed owner of the vehicle. But I wasn’t even in the car. So it’s, yeah, the owner

Michael: it doesn’t seem very difficult. It seems like they’ve just thrown their hands up and decided not to push back on, on violations.

But for all we know, they’re Waymo hasn’t had that many traffic violations. We’ll see.

Fred: It could be the, they use the same camera company that they use at the Coldplay concert, and they just detect love and, that’s why you got the ticket instead of your wife.

Anthony: That, that, that could be it.

Recalls and Safety Defects

Anthony: Let’s jump to recalls. Chrysler 121,398 vehicles, the 2023 to 2024 Jeep Grand Cherokee. L The same thing without the L when measured, the top of the head restraint located in the outboard designated seat, something with a head restraint. It’s, there’s too many numbers involved. My brain gets [00:54:00] sleepy.

Their head restraint is designed wrong.

Michael: Yeah, basically there’s gotta be some type of there has to be a way for the head restraint to lock in an upright position so that if it isn’t a crash, it can’t move around and not protect the occupant. And this is not only, a safety defect from that perspective, I think it also violates federal motor vehicle safety standard 2 0 2, which applies to the head restraints.

And essentially the head restraint. Can come forward or it can, it, people underestimate just how important head restraints are. In fact, there are a lot of active head restraints that are built into vehicles now because traditional head restraints really aren’t protective enough of the spinal and head area and crashes and active head restraints can do a lot more to prevent injury in those areas.

In this case, you might as well not have a head restraint at all and Chrysler is gonna it’s Jeep Who, who these are jeeps that this is [00:55:00] happening to are gonna have to do a fix. It looks like they’re going to replace the head restraint for these vehicles and owners.

Although this recall’s coming out now, owners aren’t gonna hear about it until September 5th, so it’s not clear when you’ll be able to get this recall performed. Hopefully sometime in early September if they have the new part ready. Because it appears this applies to a lot of grand Cherokees and they may have to redesign their headrest in order to provide a recall part.

Anthony: Alright, moving on. Next up, Hyundai 4,754 vehicles, the 2023 to 2025, Genesis G 90 and the Genesis GB 60. Upon vehicle startup, the instrument panel cluster may be temporarily blank doodle erroneous software logic uhoh. So they didn’t do some testing, is my guess. [00:56:00] And it’s not quite the rear view camera, but it is the infotainment.

Michael: You’re starting your vehicle and you’re, you’re about to back up. I wonder if it affects it.

Anthony: No, it didn’t say anything like that. Don’t even try to force it. It didn’t say

Michael: anything like that, so I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna do that. But, it certainly could impact it but essentially you’re, they’re gonna be in violation of F-M-D-S-S 1 0 1 here because, you’re turning on your car and a lot of things like your speedometer and other systems that show up on your dashboard aren’t going to be showing up.

So it looks like it looks like they figured this out in April, 2025 and upgraded. But it’s hard to tell from the way they’ve typed out this chronology. At any rate, the the owner should be hearing about this one in mid-September. And they’ll be getting a software to Logic update. I don’t know if some of these are the fancy Hyundai vehicles, right?

These are the genesis. So they may, I don’t know if they have over the air updates yet. I don’t know, [00:57:00] but it looks like it’s going to be a software update.

Anthony: All right, moving on. Winnebago 2,119 vehicles Winnebago a rare entrant. The 2025 to 2026 Winnebago Revel Sport, the 20 24, 20 25 Winnebago Beta 2024 to 2026 Winnebago View.

Then there’s a bunch of others, and I’m not gonna keep listing them off ’cause we can be here forever. No, ooh. On certain Winnebago vehicles, there may be improper wiring, routing under the driver or passenger seat, which can result in damage to wires related to the airbag. Oh. The wiring for their airbag goes under their seat, I guess underneath the floorboards,

Michael: like this is just a, there’s a lot of lack of oversight over modifications done to these chassis that are bought by companies and then modified with a giant house on top of them, essentially is how Winnebago doesn’t make the RVs are built.

Anthony: Winnebago doesn’t make the chassis itself, you don’t think? No. So they’re buying it from, they usually

Michael: buy those. Yeah. And [00:58:00] so they’re they don’t have. They don’t have to pass a lot of federal motor vehicle safety standards because those have essentially already been passed by the original chassis manufacturer.

And in this case, it’s just a bonehead design where if you’re adjusting one of your front seats, it’s going to hit the cable that controls whether or not your airbag deploys which should be a cable that’s very well protected and is clearly not in this situation. And it looks like they’ve known about this problem since June of last year.

They issued an internal campaign and then earlier last month, they just said, oh wait, we found out that, production failed to follow the campaign rework instruction. They issued an internal campaign and apparently no one paid attention to it and they kept producing defective vehicles.

So not a good look for Winnebago. It looks like they’re gonna be taking your Winnebago and putting correct wire routing. A better way of [00:59:00] routing. The wires will be provided than through a seat that can move. They’re not gonna take my

Anthony: winnebagos from my cold big hands. And yeah,

Michael: that’s gonna be out to the owners in late September, so be on the lookout for that.

Anthony: Do you think Winnebago, they’ll start putting green smiley faces in red frowny faces in their offices show? No. Okay. Last recall. Fred, guess who the last recall’s from. Take a Wild Guess. Wild guess I’m going with Mirror. What? No, it’s Ford. Oh, it’s 23,111 vehicles. 20. I think I’m listening

Fred: to our president too much.

I’m not making any sense anymore.

Anthony: That’s 2025 Lincoln Aviator let’s see. Ooh. During a global close operation activated using the key fob or the Lincoln Way mobile application, the side rear power operated windows may not automatically reverse when encountering an object while [01:00:00] closing after an exerting an upward force.

Oh. The windows this is the choking hazard stop thing, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Michael: This is the F-M-D-S-S one 18, which was put into play in the early two thousands, potentially protect children who were being and some pets who were being killed or injured by power windows rolling up on their necks or other parts of their bodies.

It was. The regulation that NSA put into effect allowed for an automatic reverse to be used as part of these systems. And in this case, it’s a little, in modern vehicles, this problem becomes a little scarier, right? If you look at the description of the defect here, they talk about the Lincoln Way mobile application, which has a global close operation, which means you could functionally be, anywhere in America, right?

And hit the global close and your vehicle windows are gonna roll up and your doors are gonna lock, supposedly while you’re not even there to monitor if [01:01:00] there’s, a person inside the vehicle. So that’s troublesome in itself. So if you have that system, you definitely need windows that automatically reverse if they encounter an object while closing.

Anthony: That’s the perfect way to commit a murder.

Michael: Would be, I wasn’t even

Anthony: there. I wasn’t even there.

Michael: It’s a terrible it’s an awful thing when it happens just because it’s just, the stories from parents and other folks who were involved in those incidents when they occurred were just awful.

So it’s even more troubling when you see the ability to remotely roll up windows coming into play when there’s presumably no one there to see what’s going on. But this is gonna be fixed, I think with a software update and it’s on the driver and passenger door software modules and owners should be able to get that fixed sometime in late September.

Conclusion and Call to Action

Anthony: Alright, and with that, Jim Farley, please come on the show anytime you want. We’d love to talk about why we can remotely roll up our windows while sitting in Belize and our cars in [01:02:00] Nebraska. And with that, thanks listeners, I go to auto safety.org. Click on donate. Give five star ratings to this. Tell all your friends, families, neighbors, dogs, whoever.

Until next time.

Hi. How about Hi everybody. For more information, visit www.auto safety.org.