NHTSA, Jeff Bezos and Redundancy… again.

Introduction to the Podcast

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 everybody.

The Badger Licking Anecdote

Anthony: Welcome to the only podcast that will tell you yes, you can lick a badger twice. What?

Fred: Whoa.

Anthony: Yeah, I know. You think it’s

Fred: weird. I think maybe need a little background on that.

Anthony: Yeah. I know you guys familiar with this this is it. It’s vaguely. Are you sure it’s not a

Michael: toad? No. No.

Anthony: Apparently Google’s AI and AI runs everything now.

It would it’s hallucinating answers to made up things so you can put in some made up idiom. Why can’t you let, you can never lick a badger twice. And we will explain what all of that means. And this is the [00:01:00] technology that’s driving our cars in the future.

Michael: Badgers are pretty feisty. I don’t think I’d wanna lick one once.

Anthony: You can’t drive in myself driving vehicle.

Fred: I don’t think there’s any evidence of cars licking badgers in the first place. May be on the scope of this discussion, but, all I’m willing to dive in.

Anthony: Look, I tried something. I jumped out there. I it got listeners attention. I might have caused a car crash as somebody’s listening to this driving down the road.

What? But let’s let’s go right into Nitza. Okay? I wanna start a little light before going into the world of Nitza.

NHTSA’s New Framework and Regulations

Anthony: And the the Mr. Sean Duffy. He’s released a new framework and quoting from their press release, I guess the new framework will law unleash American ingenuity ’cause it’s been bound in a cage, maintains key safety standards and prevent a harmful patchwork of state laws and regulations.

So that’s as far as I got before my head had cognitive dissonance issues. And I realized this is just nonsense. So that’s where I turned to. Michael Brooks. Michael [00:02:00] Brooks.

Tesla’s Reporting and Safety Concerns

Anthony: So Nitsa is changing their standing general order saying that, Hey, avs gotta report accidents unless you’re Tesla.

Michael: They are, they’re modifying the standing general order, which, it’s.

I think a lot of us are glad to see that they’re only modifying it and not totally eliminating the standing general order because they’re going, level two technology is, just reaching a lot of America’s cars and it’s in its infancy. So having a good crash reporting on incidents related to level two problems is really important.

So that we can, NSA can continue to do enforcement and recall operations to make sure that bad technologies doesn’t stay on the road. Although, it could be argued that the way they’ve approached Tesla doesn’t suggest that they could do any of that. The, what they did essentially, a, a quick look at what they did with the standing general order is they basically reduced the circumstances under which crashes have to be reported.

The new version is [00:03:00] still going to capture. Fatality incidents, injury incidents where an airbags were deployed. But it looks like it’s going to exclude a lot of incidents where there was no fatality or injury where, there, there essentially fender vendor type incidents or low speed incidents that don’t result in injury or significant property damage.

Which ultimately is gonna, look, most manufacturers are reporting very few of these incidents. A handful for most manufacturers, maybe a dozen. I think Honda reported a hundred and some odd incidents. So they’re leading everyone except Tesla, which is reported over 2000 incidents.

And many of which are fatal crashes. I think there are 40 or so fatalities that have been reported by Tesla understanding general order. And what the, the agency is gonna continue to receive reports from the most significant or most damaging crashes, but they’re going to lose [00:04:00] the opportunity to look at, all of those other incidents that didn’t rise to the level of a crash, but might, could have helped them in their investigations or in their research into the problems.

Because, not every time an A DAS fell fails, is it going to lead to a crash? It’s one of the reasons why, states like California are following, not just when they’re looking at autonomous vehicle safety. They’re not just looking at the fatal crashes. They’re looking at things like disengagements.

Basically how many times are these things screwing up? Which we talked about in the past, I believe on the podcast with Missy Cummings a few months back. So I. It’s a good news, bad news situation for the standing general order. The standing General order remains. That’s good news.

Bad news is it’s not going to be capturing all the information that it did before. There’s probably some other smaller issues in the new standing general order that more interest are our listeners too much, so we won’t bother with those. But in addition to the standing general order modification, they [00:05:00] also, nits also issued a letter basically saying, they’re claiming this is gonna unleash American productivity and autonomous vehicles and all that.

Exemptions for Autonomous Vehicles

Michael: But essentially what they’re doing is for the last four years or so, I think, maybe since 2016, the last eight to 90 years, they’ve allowed foreign manufacturers to petition the agency for exemptions under. A, an exemption provision an exemption regulation that allows foreign manufacturers to say, Hey, we wanna bring this automated driving system into the United States and use it on pub and test it on public roads.

Can we have your permission? They’ve done this hundreds of times, I think it’s 340 different a DS equipped vehicles that they’ve done that way. And the problem they’re suggesting there is that’s allowing foreign manufacturers to exempt their automated vehicles or automated vehicle systems through that program.

But domestic [00:06:00] manufacturers don’t have access to that provision. And we’ve seen General Motors and also Google Waymo applied for exemptions through the typical NITSA process, and that’s seems to be a process that requires a lot more submissions, which are important to ensure safety require a lot more work by the agency and.

For whatever reason, they take a long time. Nitsa can’t seem to exempt these companies in time for them to get their operations going. And so there aren’t many petitions filed by the domestic A DS manufacturers, Waymo is operating, using vehicles that already meet federal motor vehicle safety standards rather than building a, a purpose built autonomous vehicle because they can’t, it because the exemption process is hard for them to get through because Nitsa is basically standing in the way.

That’s the red tape. That, that’s the only federal red tape that exists to stand in the way of [00:07:00] testing autonomous vehicles. So basically they’re turning to. Another provision, which is a statute 49 USC 31 14 A, which basically says,

Anthony: oh, it’s so close, almost

Michael: matter. The secretary can say, if for research purposes, for demonstrations, for like race cars, there’s a provision that allows the secretary to exempt certain vehicles.

And they’re going to start, they haven’t issued the framework yet. They’re going to announce the notice soon and we’ll get a little more insight into what this looks like. But they’re gonna start accepting applications under that provision from the domestic autonomous vehicle manufacturers and processing them accordingly to basically level the playing field.

We. I’m, and I’ll talk, probably talk more about this a little later in the podcast. But it’s problematic for a number of reasons. The current nitsa exemptions from Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards require showing that the vehicle is as safe or safer [00:08:00] than the vehicles that meet the Federal Motor Vehicle safety standards.

The provision they’re relying on here has no such requirement. In fact, it has very few requirements at all. It’s basically like you apply to the secretary and the secretary makes the determination and there’s not really any standards there to ensure that gonna be considered. So that’s a concern of ours.

We’re interested to see how that plays out. When Nitsa announces this, are they going to announce, that manufacturers do need to make certain safety showings? What’s gonna happen there? Stay tuned and we’ll let you know as soon as we do.

NHTSA’s Role and History

Fred: Michael for the hundreds or perhaps thousands according to Anthony of new listeners we get each week.

Who is Nitsa and why should we

Michael: care? Nitsa is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They were established in the late sixties. They, I think they had a different name back there, something like the National safety Bureau, something like that. But they became nitsa, I believe, in the early seventies.

[00:09:00] So they are in charge of really two to three major things. First and it would be creating a federal motor vehicle safety standards that essentially create a minimum floor for safety, around things like your brakes, your tires basically any part of your car that could impact safety, almost any, there’s a standard that exists that tells manufacturers what they need to do. And then when a manufacturer goes to sell a car, they have to basically say, Hey, we met all of these standards. If they didn’t, they can get in trouble. That doesn’t happen a whole lot, but Nitsa stays on top of that process and does the research and the rulemaking required to keep federal motor vehicle safety standards updated and in place.

Also importantly, NHTSA’s in charge of doing safety investigations and recalls in their enforcement division, which. We talk about ad nauseum on the podcast. You’ll hear the recall roundup at the end. And [00:10:00] essentially beyond that, they also provide a lot of funding to state programs to ensure that states have the ability, whether it’s through law enforcement or infrastructure on many other ways to make their streets and their and their highways safer.

So Nitsa has a long history of. You can look at some of the stuff they’ve released in January regarding the impact of federal motor vehicle safety standards and just how many lives have been saved since the agency came into existence. And they’re the agency that essentially is behind getting seat belts into your cars.

And even beyond that, in giving money to states to promote seatbelt use and also getting airbags into your car along with a lot of other things that make you safer in your vehicle, like electronic stability control. And now they’re going to, and analog and analog braking Also, now they’re gonna be heavily involved in automatic emergency braking standards and how, [00:11:00] impactful those are remains to be seen.

And other things as we move forward into this era of autonomy. NS is going to be the cop on the beat when automated vehicles go bad. So they’re incredibly important.

Fred: That’s great. So just again, for my reference, how many motor vehicle standards do they have in place now that relate to the unique hazards associated with self-driving vehicles?

None. And that’s good

Anthony: for us, Fred, because for our Fred and our AV company, we don’t want standards.

Fred: Yeah. Who needs it? We’re really smart.

Anthony: Yeah. So Michael related to this, ’cause you said in this changes to the standing general order that now you just get the secretary to give you an exemption and you don’t need to there’s no talk of safety.

So for Fred and mine are self-driving Robo Taxii company. So we’re not using steering wheels, we don’t have any pedals and whatnot because expense we don’t even wanna put in a big red button to [00:12:00] stop the car in an emergency for people. ’cause again, that’s an expense. Since there’s no mention of safety in this standard.

What do we do? Do we put a fruit basket to the secretary? Like how do you, what’s the process for getting approved?

Michael: It is. That’s what we’re waiting to see. We’re waiting to see, exactly what the process involves. I’m you have to think that there’s going to be some required safety showing.

There, there are people at Nitsa who will be evaluating this beyond, it’s not just going to be, a, a totally political decision made by the Secretary of Transportation. There’s going to be things exchanged, I’m sure a lot of paper exchanged between manufacturers and Nitsa and the DOT to make sure that these vehicles are safe.

I can’t imagine that you’re going to be able to get away with putting a fruit basket in the vehicle instead of a red button. But we put in macadamia

Anthony: nuts,

Michael: At this point we just don’t know. This standard has never been used. This way this regulate, it’s a statute, actually, [00:13:00] it’s never been used in this way.

So we’re not exactly sure what it entails or what the process is going to be,

Fred: but California is putting some standards in place for licensing that seem, at least on the surface to be very reasonable. What is the history of regulations flowing from California to Washington versus from Washington to California?

Michael: There’s a big history of California kind of being out front. In fact, if you look at the way that emissions and fuel economy are regulated, California law comes up a lot because California does some things in those areas that the federal government doesn’t. And there’s a conflict in the law sometimes between federal and state law around that.

But when it comes to things like licensing, that’s an area where I. The states have traditionally exercised total authority over, you, you get your driver’s license from your state, not from the federal government. And so that’s an area that, that has a lot of it, it really becomes complex when you’re talking [00:14:00] about automated vehicles because in an autonomous vehicle, NITSA has traditionally regulated, things like the design of vehicles or are, and the construction of vehicles, how the vehicles perform are the domain of nitsa regulation.

They don’t get into, whether a driver’s good enough to drive the vehicle. But in an autonomous vehicle, you’ve got that, you’ve got the, you’ve got that driver. Inside of the vehicle as part of that design, construction and performance. A lot of the red tape that the government talks that manufacturers talk about, we hear all the time this phrase, there’s a patchwork of state regulations that are preventing auto manufacturers from being able to deploy autonomy into states.

That’s true. There’s a patch worker of state regulations because states create very different laws depending on how each state wants to manage its own roads and highways. And some states really want autonomous vehicle companies to come into their state because they see it as a source of economic prosperity.[00:15:00]

Others, that have experienced things like they experienced in San Francisco a couple of years back and continuing through the day even we continue to see problems coming out. They have a kind of a different view and they want to maintain some power. In the equation to, to say, Hey, your car is not doing well on our streets.

You’re blocking ambulances and fire trucks. You’re almost hitting pedestrians. We don’t want you here. The industry doesn’t want states to have that authority. They want the federal government to come out and issue autonomous vehicle regulations and preempt states from having really any say in how their operations are run.

So when you hear patch worker, federal regulations, what you should be thinking, it’s not that there’s somehow. It’s, all these competing state laws that are hurting the a DS industry and that they need to be freed from that. You should be thinking about, don’t states have a right to determine which drivers are on their roads.

Yes, they do. And they have for many years. And [00:16:00] that’s one of the inherent complications here, is that manufacturers of autonomy really want to preempt state law with federal regulation so that they can deploy these vehicles at will and not have to deal with states.

Anthony: Okay. I think Fred, I think we, I think since we’re not gonna have any pets and whatnot, I don’t even have windows in our car ’cause we don’t need them.

And that’s just glass costs money. I think we go for the fruit basket that contains macadamia nuts. I think we can afford it now, and we do that.

Fred: I like Kiwis. You’re

Anthony: not the audience, you’re not the look, you’re not the re we’ve been through this. This is why we’re never gonna get off the ground.

Okay. Yeah, I’m

Michael: gonna, I’m not investing in your company.

Anthony: No, please. Oh, come on. Your t-shirt. Come on. Look.

Jeff Bezos and Slate Auto

Anthony: Anyway, speaking of a another nut, Jeff Bezos. Yep. So Jeff Bezos, he’s one of these billionaire guys who’s Hey, I’ve got all this money. I don’t have any friends. Let’s try human growth hormone.

Nope, that didn’t work. Let’s I got a [00:17:00] phallic rocket. Maybe people will like me then. I don’t know. So now he’s going a different route and he’s a rumor. Has it, I don’t know if it’s confirmed, but this little AV electric, no, it’s not an av, an electric truck for around 20 grand called Slate Auto.

And it’s a neat idea where I have a bunch of questions around safety. But it’s a, yeah, it’s a pickup truck that is just in one configuration, but you as a consumer say, Hey, it’s a flat pickup truck, but I’ll add on a module that now makes it an SUV or now makes it, I don’t know a rocket ship or I can put my gym weight in there, bro.

So whether we have a link to the article in ours, Technica they go through it. But so Michael, on this thing it’s if it actually sells for less than 30 K. ’cause I don’t know if you notice billionaires, they talk about their electric trucks and their pricing is wildly inaccurate.

Yeah. Can you, so this thing will be crash tested in its default configuration, but then apparently [00:18:00] I can buy an add-on that now changes the flatbed to SUV seating. Like how does I. That’s nothing

Michael: new, right? Toyota Forerunners have been doing that forever. In fact, I’ve spent most of high school riding around the backseat of one of those.

But wait. It’s, this is a cool idea. Look, they’re saying we’re gonna, they’re including the cost of the federal, the ev credit in that price, right? They think it’s gonna be, mid 20 thousands, high 20 thousands. I don’t know if they’re gonna be able to make that or not, but they’re saying that they’re gonna try to get the price, starting price under $20,000 with your federal clean vehicle tax credit.

I, there it’s a. It’s a really basic vehicle. I kinda like this idea because, you hear me all the time pitching about a number of things. One of them is really heavy EV pickup trucks, right? And one of them is, this isn’t, this is an EV that serves u utility purposes. I can throw 30 bags of mulch in the back of it.

I can turn it into a five seat SUV if I wanna [00:19:00] take my family somewhere, I can drive it into work everywhere. And it’s small enough and light enough to where it’s actually, producing some good benefits for the climate. And it, it has windows that roll up using the crank, right?

I know. Manually controlled Windows mind. It doesn’t have a lot of the electric mess and junk. It doesn’t have screens, it doesn’t have, a lot of the things that, screens cause distraction and some other problems. And we’ve seen, I. Lord knows how many recalls related to screens. Obviously I think it’s gonna have to have a screen to meet the F-M-D-S-S one 11, the rear view camera thing, right?

You have to have a screen to display that image on. So it’s gonna have to have a screen. But I don’t know. I like this idea. If I don’t know that you’re going to have, all the guys driving 7,000 pound pickups right now are not gonna go out and buy this. I think this is more geared towards the Honda Ridge line type market, the suburban [00:20:00] dad who doesn’t want to drive a massive pickup market instead of the, the, macho guy who needs a giant truck to look big.

But it’s interesting, it’s the, this is the kind of pickup truck we need to take over the pickup truck market. Whether that will happen or not is in highly in question.

Anthony: So do we know if this is a

Michael: real thing or not? It has been put on a stage and introduced as Slate Auto and Okay.

They’ve unveiled their first ev it’s called the Slate Truck.

Anthony: Okay. I gotta go back to my original question around, so you buy this truck and you can convert it to an SUV and you saying Toyota four Runner does that

Michael: Yeah. I mean there used to be Toyota for runners back in the day.

You could pull out the back seat, take off the top, and you had functionally a pickup. Oh,

Anthony: but this is different though ’cause this is a flatbed that you’re then converting, like it’s adding stuff to it. That’s what I’m wondering from a safety perspective. ’cause if Joe Blow’s doing that, that just seems,

Michael: look,

Anthony: I dunno, it’s,

Michael: look, cars have been made with removable seats [00:21:00] for quite some time now.

Lots of minivans. Other things. I had a Honda Odyssey years ago. You have to make sure that when you’re putting the seats back in, that you’re getting them secured properly. That’s really important because if your seat’s not attached to the car, then you’re in a whole world of trouble in a crash.

So I would recommend that people, you get someone who’s knowledgeable and who knows what they’re doing to do that. It’s something that’s been around for quite some time and it can certainly be executed safely. So I don’t really see that as a problem here, really. I think the biggest problem here is building this vehicle at that price seems incredibly difficult.

But, if we had $20,000 electric pickups like this available, I think that’s great. In this current market, there’s nothing like it.

Anthony: Okay. I

Michael: think of

Fred: it as the model team meets the Jetsons. You’ve got all of the technology that’s available, but. What the joke was about model T was you can get it in any color you want as long as it’s [00:22:00] black.

Yeah, you’ve got a, you’ve got a basic frame and it probably will be listed on Amazon with a list of options, including hats and sweaters that are, have appropriate logos on ’em. So we don’t know exactly what’s gonna be in it, but it is really interesting technical and marketing idea.

Anthony: Alright. The I think an also interesting technical and marketing idea is to go to auto safety.org and click on donate that.

Fred: I can’t wait to see these slates in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. That’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Anthony: So we were talking these, this car and it doesn’t have power windows, which I think the last time I was in a car that had a crank was maybe the early nineties.

I don’t know. I don’t know. We

Fred: just saw a pickup truck with a crank in it and the white house lawn.

Anthony: Wow. Played. Oh, thank you, Mr. Perkins. Two points to you checking the scoreboard. It’s just Fred. No, let’s be serious now.

Safety Concerns with Electric Systems in Cars

Anthony: The [00:23:00] star.com. This is a Toronto newspaper talking about the dangers of everything being electrified inside your car.

And we’ve talked about this with the problems with what’s that guy Tesla where their their door handles and everything are all electric. And so when you’re in a crash and you don’t have any power, your door handles don’t work. But you as a savvy Tesla shopper, clearly read the manual and know that, oh, you have to bend down, remove a speaker, grill, reach in there, pull an orange cord, and hope that disengages the electronic systems and opens the door.

So I’m gonna quote from this article here. Vehicles with these systems do have redundant emergency mechanical interior releases, but as they’re not always obvious Tesla, and they’re not used in normal circumstances, occupants may not be aware of them, that can be fatal. And we’ve talked about this a hundred times.

I think we came up with the solution for these systems hold twice and engage in mechanical release.

Michael: Yeah that’s it. This article goes [00:24:00] into a number of different situations where the introduction of either electrical or computer systems into vehicles has created a safety issue versus making things safer.

I think a simple way to look at this is the introduction of power windows, when we had the crank to crank windows up, we didn’t see people getting caught in windows. We didn’t see children being strangled by power windows rolling up on their necks. We didn’t see pets getting killed in the same way.

As soon as power windows came out, we started seeing a few of these incidents every year where children were killed or injured when windows were rolled up and who, and kids could stand on a armrest, for instance, or put their knee in a armrest with their head out the window and the window rolls up onto their necks.

We, we would see that frequently and it was a terrible thing. And we petitioned, it’s a, on a number of occasions before finally some provisions were included in federal standards to prevent the [00:25:00] type of rocker switches that you might remember power windows having where the switch was just it’s hard to describe like a, like a flattened light switch, but.

It allowed. Now we have these power windows switches that you have to pull up on to make the windows go up so that someone standing, a child standing or a child messing around with it wouldn’t. Necessarily allowed them to become trapped inadvertently in the window. When you introduce new features to vehicles, there are safety concerns that can arise depending on the, how well those features were designed and how much consideration the designers put into all the potential things that can happen in a vehicle with humans.

And so this article is pointing that out in reference to the electrical retracting door handles, which we’ve talked about a lot. How hard it is to escape Tesla when you’re not totally familiar with the owner’s manual. But there are a lot of examples of this.

And, I think another good example is, the unintended safety problems that occur when you introduce technology. We’ve seen phantom [00:26:00] braking occur because of automatic emergency braking. If that’s not reigned in it, it could really prevent automatic emergency braking from becoming the success that it should be.

So there, there are a lot of, I think that the over the overarching thrust of this article is we need to be careful when we’re introducing features into vehicles that we don’t have a lot of experience with.

Anthony: So with power windows, when that came out, now there’s systems in place. If it feels pressure, it backs off How long before power windows when they’re released.

And then they realized, oh, I don’t want to kill my kids. Let’s put in this little safety thing. It

Michael: was forever. It was, I wanna say they were probably introduced in the fifties or sixties. We petitioned Nisa to put a standard in that required, first of all the rocker the type of switch used was important because kids standing or playing around the armrest, you had kids rolling.

Is up on the neck of their, brothers, a sibling, someone else in the car with them themselves. The and the rocker switch was just bad, really bad [00:27:00] about that happening. These weren’t, this wasn’t an epidemic across America. There were, a few incidents, maybe in the teens every year in a in a really bad year.

But it’s something that was such an easy fix that, that finally, I think it was in the two thousands after this happening for 40 years or so, and I think on our third petition to Nitsa to try to fix the problem where they did that. And I think that they did not do everything we wanted there.

We wanted all vehicles to have the auto reverse. I had a 2000 and I think 2003 Volkswagen Jetta at the time. And it had auto reverse on it, but it was made in Europe, right? None of the American cars were required to have that. And so that they ended up not mandating the auto reverse part, but they did say, if you, that if you had auto reverse, you’d get credited for it somehow in the regulation.

So it is taken into account, but not as forcefully as we would’ve liked to have [00:28:00] seen. But that’s a problem that, that since that rocker switch and the new standard came into place that we haven’t heard a lot about. Hopefully that’s because these instances have, stopped happening in the newer model vehicles.

Anthony: Oh, my word. I didn’t realize it was that, that long. I figured. Yeah.

Michael: It takes when there’s a, when there’s a problem that occurs. Somewhat infrequently, even if it’s, killing children as it was in this case, when you to get a federal rule passed around it, you still have to show a, the show you have to make.

The government does a cost benefit analysis essentially, and looks at the cost of making this change and putting the regulation into place and weigh that against all the incidents and the deaths and injuries that happened. We also see this problem in the area of seat belts on school buses. We have, right?

So few. Incidents of children dying on school buses each year because the school buses are, very large and fairly protective of their occupants. [00:29:00] And we, I might have discussed this a couple weeks ago, we talked about transit system safety and the buses and how safe they are. But when you do the cost benefit analysis, there are so few crash deaths and injuries involved that it, the cost to put in seat belts on, every school bus in America outweighs that.

And you get, you even, it’s crazy. That’s a crazy one because you get school districts coming to Nitsa and saying, we can’t afford to put seat belts on school buses to protect the kids we’re supposed to be protecting. So it’s a very odd situation, but it shows you ha you have to have a, you have to be able to show a fairly substantial amount of harm.

Ongoing in order to essentially allow a federal regulation to make it through the cost benefit analysis and become an a rule.

Anthony: Thank God Doge will fix all of that for us.

Gaslight of the Week: Tesla and NHTSA

Anthony: Oh, speaking of Gaslights, let’s do that. I’m gonna kick off with arc. That’s right. [00:30:00] Kathy Wood Ark. They I get their newsletter.

It makes me weep for humanity.

Michael: They still wants to buy Tesla.

Anthony: Oh yeah. The headline is Tesla’s on track for its robot Taxii launch in June, and their quoting is basically they just cut and paste a Tesla press release with no understanding of history and all the other lies coming out of Tesla.

What’s the saying For those who don’t know History, I. Kathy Woods an idiot. I think that’s how the phrase goes. I

Michael: think, yeah, I don’t under, I don’t understand how, I don’t understand why anyone listens to these people.

Anthony: I don’t understand either. But yep. I’m sticking with my classics this week. It was Ark Automotive for me, or not arc, arc Investment, whatever it is, whatever nonsense pump and dump scheme it is.

This is just a, this is my personal opinion now, the opinion of the Center for Photo Safety. Look at that bold disclaimer. Michael, what do you

Michael: got? Mine. I’m going back to something we just talked about that I said I probably talk about [00:31:00] later because I knew it was coming in the Gaslight. It is part of NHTSA’s relying on this new, it’s not a new statute, it’s the secretary’s ability to exempt a vehicle.

If you look at that statute, there’s a problem. And this, I’m gonna use this as my Gaslight of the week, the statute that they’re using for exemption purposes. Only contemplates the exemption of a single vehicle or piece of equipment. I’m gonna test you to see if y’all agree with this.

So here’s what here’s how it reads. It says, the Secretary of Transportation may exempt a motor vehicle or item of motor vehicle equipment from Section 31 12 a of this title. That’s the section that requires you to meet motor vehicle safety standards. On terms the secretary decides are necessary for research, investigation, demonstrations, training, competitive racing events, show or display.

When [00:32:00] do you think that could be used to exempt an entire fleet of autonomous vehicles when it says, a motor vehicle or item of motor vehicle equipment? I, legally, the plain reading of the statute suggests to me that they. They can’t use that. And yet they’re apparently basing their entire new framework to release automated vehicles onto the roads around this statute, which I, for whatever reason I can’t wrap my head around how they think this statute allows them to do what they’re going to do with it.

Anthony: I’ve got it. But Fred, what do you think?

Fred: I think re regardless regarding that, we have a Supreme Court that allows interpretation of only one of the clauses in the Second Amendment as the law of the land. So apparently full sentences no longer have to be read as, a coherent plot in order to determine what people do.

I don’t know, there’s a precedent for stupidity and ignorance as [00:33:00] part of the federal law, so

Anthony: that’s pretty good. My, my take on it is you said a. Part of a vehicle. And so this or item, yeah, item. The item in this case would be the computer brain.

Michael: Yeah, but is it one computer brain?

It’s the

Anthony: collective computer brain. ’cause they’re all the same thing, man. We’re all like, connected in the universe. Oh the it’s neural network, man. Yeah. It’s you can’t lick a badger twice. Everybody knows

Fred: this. And zombies eat computer brain. Whoa. That’s a, so we need to research. I don’t

Anthony: podcast.

I birkins. Deep questions. I gotta run into

Fred: my gaslight here.

Volkswagen and Uber’s Autonomous Vehicle Partnership

Fred: So I’ve got a new contender this week oh. Ference with Volkswagen and Uber. So they’ve announced a long-term strategic relationship to deploy autonomous ID buzz vehicles on the Uber platform. They go [00:34:00] on to talk about how wonderful it’s going to be.

Legal Consequences of Autonomous Vehicles

Fred: But the reason I think this is a great Gaslight nominee is that they never talk about the legal consequences or liability consequences of this. Now, we know from a court action in New Jersey that Uber will vigorously defend itself against any claims of damages associated with accidents or collisions with their cars by virtue of people’s prior Uber Eats behavior

Anthony: and,

Fred: Yeah. So what this what this announcement does not talk about is how its users can become liable for damages or its users can be prosecuted for a negligent operation or whatever those right words are. But it doesn’t talk at all about the legal consequences that can have devastating effects on people who’ve likely.

Turn over the credit card and go for a ride. This is a problem that is also being ignored [00:35:00] by Waymo and the other people licensed to do operations, commercial operations in California. But I think that Volkswagen and Uber know about this, and the failure to warn people that they’re gonna be, they’re gonna be hung by their french fries is something that really ought to be required in this.

So here’s my Gaslight nomination this week.

Anthony: That’s a good one. I like that because Volkswagen and Ford had a AV company partnership. They shut down a couple years ago ’cause they did the math and realized, oh these taxi systems, it is not gonna work. But now they’re like Uber’s the newest sucker.

They’ll go for it. Yeah it’s fascinating. I thought Volkswagen had totally left this game because math.

Fred: So who wins? Anthony, you keep giving yourself the winning vote for

Anthony: No, you’ve won sometimes, but I

Fred: think that’s completely unfair and biased.

Anthony: This is the way the world works.

It’s well, that’s true. Win based off of reverse height order. Yeah. Anthony’s the

Michael: decider.

Anthony: Yeah, I am the [00:36:00] decider. Exactly. I’m gonna, I’m gonna give it to Michael this week. I’m sorry. Ah, dam it. Fred. Fred, you’re close. You did step out. You brought somebody new into it, which was, which is good.

It was bold. I appreciate that. But yeah, Michael’s gonna win ’cause he got very specific with 30 11, 12 or something.

Fred: Wife can be so unfair.

Anthony: It can be indeed. But you know what I like the sound of your voice, Mr. Perkins.

Redundancy vs. Complementarity in AV Sensors

Anthony: So let’s talk about redundancy. Whoa. Wait, did we already talk about redundancy?

Let’s talk about redundancy again last week. Yeah. Again, yes, the doubt threat.

Fred: Thoughtful listener commented that. Use of different sensors on a vehicle does not constitute redundancy. And people who are promoting avs have been fast and loose about talking about redundancy as a way of guaranteeing AV safety.

So I thought I’d dig into that just a little bit and talk about the difference between redundancy and complementarity. So think of two [00:37:00] radars that a car might have, both of which are attached to the front bumper, right? And either one of which if it’s working, will provide inputs to the car’s control system that can be perceived as objects and all that sort of stuff, right?

So is that redundant or not?

Anthony: Is it, are they set up in a failover situation? So if radar A fails, we’ll try radar B.

Fred: Let’s assume for the moment that it is,

Anthony: I’m gonna say redundant.

Michael: Redundancy requires, doesn’t it require the, essentially the exact same system, just a number two? Oh, Michael,

Fred: you’re actually smart.

So that’s, Anthony, you may be smart too, but let’s just roll past that. Oh,

Anthony: it sounds like my guidance counselor in high school.

Fred: So no two physical devices are ever identical. So there, there’s that, right? You got manufacturing differences between them and [00:38:00] that’s inevitable. Even if you had two radars attached to the same bumper, they can be redundant with regard to distant objects because the angle of the object may be unimportant for what they’re trying to do.

So if you’re talking about objects very close to the car, then they’re not, because the fields of view and the fields of regard have areas that do not overlap. So you, when you talk about redundancy, you’ve always got to talk about redundancy for what purpose and what are you trying to do. So if you comparing, for example, a lidar to a radar, are they redundant?

No. Michael,

Michael: I don’t think that’s redundant. If you had two lidars who were checking each other, that would be redundancy. But a lidar and a radar can’t be redundant,

Fred: right?

Depends on what the, it depends on what they’re being used for, right? If you’re, if using both devices to look for, we’ll say the tail end of a car ahead of you, that’s a hundred feet ahead of you, [00:39:00] then you could say the processed information provides redundancy on a system level, because what you’re looking for is the back of the car.

You can also say they’re complimentary because they’re providing different kinds of data. So they may detect different aspects of the car in front of, you gotta be careful about what your end purpose for those sensors is going to be. If you’re talking about data fusion of different sensors and putting all that information together, come up with a consolidated result, right?

So it’s not just the tail end of a car, it’s the tail end of a car of, we’ll say an opal cadet, right? Because my lidar is now looking at it and it’s, it’s really getting in close and getting all that information. So if your objective is just to see the tail end of a car, then yeah, you got some redundancy there.

If your objective is to get information that’s only available from one of those senses versus the other, then [00:40:00] there’s no redundancy. So I think that was the point that the attentive listener was trying to bring out that there’s a difference between complementarity and redundancy. But now, if you think of it in other levels.

When people talk about redundancy, they typically say we have coverage, 360 degree coverage of the car. So it’s really good, it’s smart, they can see everything going on around it. Again, you’ve got a problem because the different sensors cover different areas of the car. So there are overlapping portions of the fields of view or fields of regard.

And the difference between those two is, is a little bit subtle, but field of review is if it field of view is if it’s stationary relative to the car and it’s just looking forward and it’s the angle that it can see. But if it can move the sensor relative to the car right and left, then you get a larger area, which is called the field of regard.

Anyway, that’s an aside, but the point is that we live in a 3D world. So if [00:41:00] your assertion is that you have 360 degrees of coverage, you’ve also gotta say how far up and down it looks, right? So in order for a. To discriminate between, we’ll see a bridge and a tractor trailer that’s crossing a road. It’s gotta be able to determine the vertical angle as well as the distance to say this clearly is a trailer because it’s only a hundred feet ahead of me and it’s only three feet off the ground, versus a bridge, which you would say it’s a quarter mile ahead and by the angle that I’ve got here, it’s clearly 16 feet above the ground.

So I’m gonna do that, I’m gonna use that. So even the claims that companies say about 360 degree coverage have gotta be tempered by your understanding of the angle of elevation that is providing data from which the combination of the two angles necessary to resolve a point in space are called the oiler angles.

Because [00:42:00] professor Oiler a long time ago determined that those are what’s required. And if you talk about angle and elevation. Those ular angles need to be associated with the data that you’re looking at in order to make a factual and supportable claim of 360 degree coverage. Similarly, if there’s a child close to the front of the vehicle, you gotta be able to look down towards the child’s feet in order to determine that there is something in front of your car really close in that you would be able to detect maybe with one sensor, but maybe not with another.

So again, redundancy versus complementarity is affects the safety of the vehicle when it’s trying to, for example, avoid children or navigate through a parking lot, versus being out on the open highway and trying to determine that there’s a truck a quarter mile ahead of you. It’s complex. People need to be skeptical and there’s no company that I’ve seen so far [00:43:00] that is reporting the full scope.

Of their coverage of sensors with regard to both angle of elevation and angle of angle of direction from the front of the car, both azimuth and elevation. So that’s more discussion. You have any questions about that? It’s complex, but the bottom line is that the information we’re receiving from the AV companies about the safety associated with their sensor coverage is very spotty and inadequate.

And it’s impossible to tell whether or not they’re sufficiently safe based upon the information that any of these companies has provided to the public.

Anthony: So don’t trust anybody over the age of 30

Fred: or don’t trust anybody over the angle of 30 maybe.

Anthony: Yeah. You’d think maybe they’d, you. Put this in some sort of federal regulation to say, Hey, this is what your coverage needs to be.

Is that [00:44:00] wishful thinking?

Fred: There needs to be something because we know that Teslas have behead at least two unfortunate owners as they passed underneath tractor to trailers or trying to pass underneath tractor to trailers that were crossing the highway. In response to that, I don’t think there’s been any federal regulation.

There’s been a couple of NTSB reports. We have no knowledge that Tesla has modified their control system in any way to avoid that in the future. And as they move ahead with their apparently self-driving vehicle for autonomous operations. You said it was gonna be in June, Anthony? That’s what my friend Kathy said.

I think the public should really know a lot more about how they’re going to be controlled and where the dead spots are in their. Sensor coverage.

Anthony: Yeah. Had to use the phrase dead spots.

Fred: Oh yeah. Unfortunate choice of words. Or maybe a fortunate choice of words, but that’s I think their dead spot is at the CEO level.

I don’t [00:45:00] know. He was one of the cranks that were available in the vehicle on the White House lawn.

Anthony: The men with the unfortunate gesture.

New York’s Congestion Pricing Controversy

Anthony: Speaking of unfortunate gestures, let’s do a little update on my home New York. How let’s have got a couple ones here. Where where did it go?

Where the feds, they’re like, Hey, you can’t have congestion pricing. Stop it. It’s against something. I don’t know what it’s against. It doesn’t really matter. As far as we can tell the date congestion pricing has been incredibly effective in the B Bureau of Borough of Manhattan the traffic incidences accidents are down.

The city’s more walkable. The local retailers and restaurants are happier. Everyone’s good except for the great Orange Man. And so it seems, I’m gonna say that some lawyers in the Southern District of New York, they quote unquote accidentally release their opinions to the court system, which is public information, saying, [00:46:00] Hey there’s no way this lawsuit works.

This is a dumb idea. And then they’re like, oops, we didn’t mean to do that. And they backed it out. And I guess maybe they’re looking for a job now. I don’t really know, but,

Michael: They might be, this is, it’s one of the, one of the things you really shouldn’t do as a lawyer is post your confidential memos to the court docket.

And when those memos explicitly talk about how poor your case is and I think anyone that, that has looked into this situation agrees. This is something that New York totally has the authority to do. And the federal government has very little authority to challenge it, but.

For whatever reason, and we’re still trying to figure out why people hate congestion pricing so much when they don’t even live in New York City and want to fight against it.

Maybe they’re maybe New Jersey has some significant lobbying power that we’re unaware of that they’re, they’ve got the ear of transportation, secretary Duffy and Trump.

But it’s it’s an incredibly [00:47:00] bad move by these lawyers at the DOJ and. A really bad mistake. It’s almost hilarious if you read the document that they posted because it, it is essentially, it sounds like us. It’s talking about how the congestion pricing has been an incredible success.

And also talks about all of the ways in which the Trump administration will lose a challenge if they try to file a lawsuit. But here we are, and the lawsuit still stands. They’ve removed that document from the docket, and we’ll see how the lawsuit proceeds. Although based on the opinions of the DOJ attorneys who were bringing the lawsuit, it doesn’t seem like it’s got a very good chance.

Anthony: No. They’re basically pointing out, Hey, this has already gone under federal review for a number of years. It’s already survived a number of challenges. This was a public thing that went on for eight years, I think. Something like that. So yeah. It’s too late. The the Tesla has left the barn. Wait, no.

Is that how you say that [00:48:00] phrase? I’ll ask Google and find out.

Tesla’s Direct Sales Battle in New York

Anthony: The next one is speaking of Tesla, New York lawmakers are trying to shut down Tesla stores. This is an article in electric where it’s talking about how I guess because of some old boy dealer network, back in the day that car dealers couldn’t compete against the manufacturers.

So if I’m Bob’s Ford Ford Motor Company can’t be like, I’m selling my own thing right here. ’cause it’s unfair competition. Makes sense. Tesla’s never had a deal in the network, so they’re like, we’re just gonna sell things direct to the consumer. Now as a consumer, at times I’m like, Hey, that sounds pretty good.

But the lawmakers in the great state of New York think Elon Musk, the dick. So they’re like, Hey, let’s stop this. Let’s, we have a law in the book. Let’s let’s poke this guy in the eye. That’s my takeaway and I will stand back. Yeah,

Michael: there’s a lot of states where they basically say, look, we’re gonna protect our car dealers lobby.

They get lost, put onto the books that say, general Motors can’t come into my state and open its own dealership and compete with [00:49:00] me. And these book and these laws were, on the books in many states for quite a long time. And so when a company like Tesla comes along that wants to sell their vehicles direct to consumers without opening up dealerships in those states or even if they want to, they have to get a waiver of some sort.

And so Tesla comes in lobbies for either a waiver or for a change in the law to allow them to sell their New York state. They gave Tesla a waiver to allow them to, I think they opened up a few dealerships in the state and are able to sell their vehicles directly to the public. There. And now New York’s saying, oh wait, we can take this waiver away from you.

And it looks like they’re considering doing that. We don’t have any information, I think on whether this is passed yet or not. It looks like it’s just a bill that’s making its way through the New York legislature. But that’s one way to poke the bear, if, I don’t know that this is going to stop the sale of Teslas in New York, I’m sure that people could still, order their cyber truck and have it delivered to them, or, cross the [00:50:00] pay a toll and cross the bridge and go buy one in another state close by.

But it’s interesting nonetheless that, Elon’s mouth is getting him into trouble in even more ways.

Anthony: Oh boy, what a misunderstood man. Now I think we understand him pretty clearly.

Major Vehicle Recalls: GM, Honda, and Ford

Anthony: Let’s go to recall. Strap in Recall. Now, first one up is from a company I’ve never heard of before in my life.

Dorell Juvenile Group which sounds like a law firm for juvenile delinquents. 1,790 100,000. This is, yeah, this is a big number. Almost 180,000 items. This is the Go Grow and Go Sprint, which is a car seat. Which it seems the kids are eating the foam of the headrest. What why, yeah. Is it because they, and this is something

Michael: that you should be familiar with from your childhood.

But these are basically they manufacture these car seats in such a way that, young children are able to, [00:51:00] take the headrest apart and stick it in their mouth and eat it. And small pieces of foam could choke the child. And so there are a number, this is an investigation I believe that NHTSA’s been conducting for I.

I wonder a little over a year, they’ve been looking into this with Darrell and they honed in on the headrest that are the problematic ones. And now Darrell’s gonna have to recall them. If you are an owner of one of these child seats, it’s important if you’re not registered that you reach out to Darrell because they won’t know where you are.

Unlike vehicles, child seats aren’t aren’t registered with your state and manufacturers don’t have access, to a list of owners like they would if they search state registration records. So it’s important for you to take some initiative, a as a parent and as the owner of one of these child seats and reached out to the company.

If you did register your car seat with the company, they should be reaching out to you sometime in the middle of June.

Anthony: What I wanna know why are [00:52:00] your kids managing to spin their head 8 180 degrees so they can chomp on the headrest? Oh, what I wanna know is removing

Michael: it. Yeah, I think they’re pulling it.

Kind of like pulling it off. Yeah. Yeah.

Fred: Hasn’t RFK Jr recommended eating plastic foam to prevent measles.

Anthony: He said we shouldn’t do that. And that’s how you get the parasite into your style. But I

Fred: digress. Yes. Yeah. That’s pretty good. Anthony, in,

Michael: In your impersonation list, that one may be number one.

Oh, hey. All. Show over. You’ve done some Yeah. Yeah. You’ve done some really bad Elon’s where he sounds just like Trump. But that one was, that’s a good RFK.

Anthony: Alright, that’s good. When did car seats come about? Because they didn’t exist when I was a child, or, are you were too poor and we were just eating head.

Did you have a child car seat as a kid? I

Michael: think I remember my brother having one. I think the first words came out, came sixties,

Fred: right around 1980 because, my first daughter was born in [00:53:00] 1977. They didn’t exist. And my second daughter was born in 1979 and they were expensively, optional thing you could get them, but they weren’t very common.

But it was the early eighties when people started to really think about them and talk about, making sure that kids were always in a car seat and et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah, my first daughter had to bring home in a bathtub because that was all that there was. Wow. Or they called ’em bassinets, but still it was basically just a little bathtub.

Anthony: I see. I imagined a a cast iron bathtub. Your daughter in the back of the pickup truck you is let’s put, we splash a little water in there. She’s good.

Fred: That’s how we did things up in the hills here.

Anthony: Next up we have a little company called General Motors 597,630 vehicles, the 2021 to 2024 Cadillac Escalade, the Cadillac Ade Escalade, ESV, the Chevy Silverado 1500.

The Chevrolet Suburban Tahoe, Sierra Yukon, [00:54:00] a whole bunch of them. Engine tear down analysis identified. The engine will fail. I lose propulsion. Oh. That’s not good. It looks like the crankshaft will have a manufacturing DK defect, which can damage the engine. Oh, you’re connecting rod or crankshaft falling apart.

Michael: Yeah. And this one’s not, this one’s interesting for a number of reasons. It’s a very large recall. And it’s something that Nitsa has been looking into for some time regarding General Motors. These are the big trucks and SUVs. From 21 to 24, they, if you look in the, if when we’re normally looking at recalls here, there’s a field says estimated percentage with defect, and invariably that number is going to be 1% or less or so, right?

Here it’s 3%, and that’s because. This is happening to a ton of GM trucks. They had the investigation in GM identified 28,102 field [00:55:00] complaints related to the engine failure.

Anthony: Oh my God.

Michael: And half of those 14,000 involved allegations of losing propulsion, which is where the safety issue comes in. And I think, that 14,000 loss of propulsion, if you compare it to the 597,000 vehicles recalled, is where that 3% number came from.

But that’s a, that’s an incredible, incredibly high rate of failure. Typically vehicle defects occur as a very small portion of the population of vehicles. It could be one in a thousands, anything over one in a hundred is a fairly high number. And here it’s, three in a hundred.

So that’s, that suggests that these are very bad engines, maybe even as bad as some of the Hyundais and Kias that were keeping us busy a few years back.

Anthony: Wow. Get that fixed people. Next up Honda, 152,800 vehicles. The 2014 to 2020 Acura, MDX Ute, an uneven ceiling surface moisture, can enter the [00:56:00] tailgate lid light and cause the light to fail.

So this is a wiring harness, short circuit ceiling thing. All right. It’s not the yeah, not the sexiest recall, but hey, it’s important,

Michael: It looked like that this, there’s, it mostly affects your rear lights, the taillights, but they’re behind me. I can’t see them. If the short occurs, it can also, it.

Screw up your whole light lighting system and I think, not really migrate, I don’t know what the word would be, but it’s gonna short circuit your lighting system until you may have no light. It’s a cascade, it’s a pretty significant safety issue. If this problem occurs in your vehicle, and it’s a large recall, it looks like this, 2% of these vehicles have this defect.

So we’ve got some pretty interesting defects this week with high rates. Owners can expect to hear from Honda Acura at the end of next month, right around Memorial Day. And it looks like you’re gonna have to go in and get a number of [00:57:00] things fixed to make sure that you don’t have this problem again.

So it might be a slightly longer repair. It’s not, probably not just gonna be a walk in and walk outta your dealership repair.

Anthony: Next up Ford Jim Farley. You always have an open invite to the show. 160,729 vehicles. The 2015 Ford F Super Duty F two 50. F three 50. F four 50 the 2015 Ford Expedition. The Lincoln Navigator Lincoln MK six.

Never heard of that one. But what’s gonna happen? This one? Come on Fred. What do you think this recall is? It’s Ford. It’s a recall. Come on. What’s the winner?

Fred: I’m guessing rear camera.

Anthony: Yeah, rear view camera That is right. Terminal header. Fretting corrosion results from a combination of they got solder issues and the rear view camera will fail.

All right. That’s all we gonna say. Yeah, that screws that

Michael: up. This is one of, one of two this week. Oh, don’t give

Anthony: it away. [00:58:00] Why are you why give it away?

Michael: I know you like your little Easter eggs, but that’s not happening. Oh. So they get, I don’t understand some of this stuff.

Terminal header fretting, corrosion. That’s gonna be some corrosion in the electrical system here, but it causes or results from damaged spotter, reflow oven at the tier one camera supplier. You don’t know what that means, but it looks like, ultimately you wanna know. Do you want to know what that means?

Anthony: That’s really late in

Fred: the show. Okay. So when they make the electronic circuit boards, they basically drop the circuit boards into a vat of molten zinc. Excuse me, molten tin. And that puts all the electrical connectors together in lieu of lead-based solder. ’cause lead-based solder has a lot of problems and you can’t use lead-based solder.

In Europe, for example Fred corrosion is when you take [00:59:00] a piece of metal and rub it against another piece of metal. And you’ve probably seen this in the hinges on your doors. Little bits of black stuff comes out. Those little bits of black stuff are actually oxidized tiny particles of metal because they break off.

When metal, that’s not lubricated enough, robs against other metal under pressure. That’s f corro. That’s what fretting corrosion’s all about. Okay, this is basically fretting corrosion associated with the printed circuit board manufacturing process. Rear

Anthony: view camera, that’s how I take it. Last recall looks like.

Oh, go ahead. You got something?

Michael: I was just saying it looks like they’re gonna just replace your cameras and your camera system and that, and you should be hearing about that in early May as an honor.

Anthony: Hey that’s soon. Last one, Ford Jim Farley still have an opening 128,889 vehicles, the 2022 to 2023 Ford Bronco.[01:00:00]

And this is dealing with what rear view camera. And this is the same thing, just listed differently or similar? Yeah,

Michael: it looks very similar. Like it’s hard to tell if it’s the exact same problem, this one is fretting corrosion causes 10 oxide formation on the internal camera connector due to thermally induced micro movement between the 10 plated contact surfaces.

Looks like this one is, looks cer a little different than the other one. This one says the rate of 10 oxide accumulation. The connectors dependent on environmental factors like temperature and humidity. So depending on where you live and the exposure of your vehicle to the outside elements, you might have, this occur quicker than others.

But at any rate it looks to be pretty much the same as the last recall. And the recall schedule is similar as well. Owners can expect to hear in early May about this one, and you’ll be getting the rear view camera replaced just like the previous recall.

Fred: I suspect that these are [01:01:00] actually the same, but just according, separately.

Michael: Yeah, that’s weird. Sound very similar. Hyundai and Keo, when they report the same, recall the same problem. They have differing versions of it, which I’ve always found weird, but to have Ford have two that are virtually the same and report them differently is even weirder.

Anthony: Yeah. The first one, they, they say the rear view camera will be blank or distorted.

And this one it says if you’re using their sync software, it will, might turn blue the screen. Oh, that’s it. It’s, it’s the, but it sounds like the same technical issue. Except if you have to use that sync software, it’s not Great.

Conclusion and Upcoming Guest Announcement

Anthony: Anyway, thanks so much listeners. Thanks for donating. Thanks for telling your friends.

Wait, you didn’t donate. Do it now. Until next week. We have a guest next week. Do we have a guest next week? We don’t we? We do have one

Fred: scheduled. Yes, sir. Bob.

Anthony: Oh boy. Oh boy. It’s a good one. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody. For more information, visit www.auto [01:02:00] safety.org.