Playing the odds with ARC airbags

Anthony: You’re listening to their auto be a law, the center for auto safety podcast with executive director, Michael Brooks, chief engineer, Fred Perkins, and hosted by me, Anthony Simonoff. For over 50 years, the center for auto safety has worked to make cars safer.

Michael: Good morning. Good morning,

Anthony: everyone. Or good afternoon, good night, good evening. Whatever they say in the Truman Show. Welcome, listeners, to another exciting episode of what happens to IAVs when they’re let loose on the road and will my airbag explode? Hey, that kind of rhymed. Look at that. Wow, two cups of coffee will do that to you.

Let’s let’s start off this week with the ARC airbag saga. How about we just do that? Because I think we have a lot of things to discuss on that, because a lot of it is confusing to, average people, technical people people on this podcast. Namely, me. Quick recap. This is airbags that that NHTSA investigated for about eight years, and after eight years of an investigation, which is a record, I believe, in the NHTSA timeline in that universe It’s close.

Michael: It’s not a clear record.

Anthony: It’s definitely up there. They said, hey these things are a problem. It looks like ARC Automotive, they might have left a little flux or something like that in the propellant. So when you do get into an accident, the airbag will release this propellant. It will also explode in your face, which isn’t great.

Michael: Yeah, basically there’s weld welding slag that’s left over during the process of assembling the inflator and that’s slag that’s produced. They use friction welding. So basically, they’re using the power of friction to join similar metals together. And what happens when you do that? The heat will produce some.

Basically, it’s the Yeah. The garbage that’s left over at the end of the friction welding procedure that needs to be cleared out of the inflator. And what’s happening is they’re not getting it all out. It’s remaining in the inflator. And then when the actual airbag deploys in a crash, they’re. The theory is that it’s clogging the orifice in the inflator, which effectively gives nowhere for any of that pressure to go.

And it turns into a bomb right in front of a passenger. And even when it doesn’t turn into a, a mini explosive device, it’s also causing. Poor deployments. So a bad deployment is going to allow for increased injuries and crashes. So that’s the other side of this one. That’s a little different than Takata.

The other big difference from Takata is that this is not necessarily a design defect, but it’s a manufacturing defect. Not all of the airbags on the road have this problem that ARC has made. Whereas in Takata, All of the airbags were degrading and subject to that condition at some point. So there’s some pretty key differences between the two.

Fred: I want to explain the welding technique just for a second. You can imagine if you take something, take a stick. You remember the Boy Scout trick of starting a fire with a stick, right? Because you, you take a stick and you grind it into one or other stick and the heat of that. grinding event causes, eventually causes the chips to catch on fire.

That’s a lot like what friction welding is except with metal instead of wood. So you grind one into another and the heat of that grinding causes the two pieces of metal to fuse. I want to just, the reason I bring that up is because that’s not the only way to connect two pieces of metal. You can do something called electron beam welding, which occurs in a vacuum using an intense beam of electrons, hence the name, to heat up the local area.

It’s a much cleaner, much better way of doing things. Things like implantable electronics that are used in medicine are usually electron beam welded because it is very effective and it’s very clean. The reason for using friction welding instead of electron beam welding is exclusively an economic decision.

So once again decisions being made for the bottom line that affects safety degrade safety. So we’ll talk a lot more about this later on about what these tradeoffs are all about. But I just wanted to bring that up that, there are choices that can be made. ARC tended to make the choice that produced the most hazard and,

Anthony: again, this is not like the Takata. The Takata is if you have one of those faulty airbags, you don’t have to get into a car accident, it will just explode in your face eventually. Horrible. This, the, you actually have to be in a situation where the airbag will deploy and unfortunately from what we’re seeing is from one of the NHTSA’s acting associate administrator for enforcement says, the likelihood of a future inflator eruption is about 1 out of 10.

Every 370, 000 airbag deployments. So by airbag deployment, they mean you got into an accident, airbag inflated, correct? That’s right. Okay. So out of every 370, 000 accidents, situations where that happens, one of those will be a situation where, Oh my God, why is my face hurt so much? Yeah.

Michael: Or, Oh my God, why did my airbag?

Not deploy properly. And I’m, my head hit the steering wheel or whatever happens in those situations. There’s a, depending on the angle and the force of the crash, there’s a lot of different scenarios that can take place.

Anthony: Or, Oh my God, did I leave the iron on, did I lock the garage door?

Oh, I’m dead.

Fred: Just to be clear, I don’t know how in the world they came up with those numbers, I tried to generate them myself. And it seems really wrong because the reliability estimate that the. ARC representative talked about in the hearing is way different than what NITSA was saying. So again, we’ll talk more about that later.

Anthony: Okay, we might later might become sooner cause this is a confusing thing different newspapers have had articles about this, and I love comment sections because it’s where crazy goes to thrive. And so a lot of comments on this are like, eh, whatever, it’s dangerous to walk outside across the street, why do I care if this airbag’s gonna explode in my face?

Whereas my argument is, hey, you know this… Product is defective. I’ll replace it. I don’t care if ARC Automotive goes out of business. Like that, I they sold a bad product. That could potentially kill people, even if it’s out of one out of every 370, 000. I don’t, that’s better odds than me winning Powerball.

By the way, if anyone is, wants to share Powerball winnings, please let me know. Didn’t win, sorry. No, nobody has yet. Maybe by the time this comes out, I have won and you’ll never hear from me again.

Michael: That’s the thing when you buy a Powerball ticket, you’re envisioning, your future winnings and what you’re going to do with them.

When you buy a vehicle with an ARC airbag in it, first of all, you don’t know if it’s in there because the manufacturers haven’t been clear about what vehicles have them. But second of all, you’re not imagining all the horrible consequences that could take place. I don’t think most people would be willing to take that risk of, one in 370, 000 is far better odds than winning this Powerball coming up next week or tonight.

When is it?

Anthony: I don’t know. Okay. So here’s the thing is, so NHTSA have they put out a recall or voluntary recall on this?

Michael: No, they can’t do that. The manufacturer has to do that, which is why NHTSA is. Making this determination because ultimately if they make a final determination I believe that’s going to happen.

They said comments were open to December. So maybe December may, maybe January, if they make a final defect determination here that’s when a recall would have to happen. The only real weird part about this whole situation is that arc is a. Tier 1 supplier, they’re sending these parts to manufacturers, and it’s the manufacturers technically and arguably legally that have to make this recall determination.

And they’re, about half of the manufacturers who have installed these airbags have seen no. No issues, they haven’t seen the defect in their fleet, so that’s 1 of the really kind of problematic parts here is that you’re asking a manufacturer that’s had, 0 evidence of this defect occurring in their cars to, to perform on, pretty costly recall.

So that’s another complicating factor here, but what we found out also as part of the hearing is that it appears that most of the vehicles involved are General Motors. We thought General Motors had recalled a significant portion of their vehicles when they recalled about a million of them a few months back.

Those were some of the vehicles that had, if you look at the incidents that are taking place in the United States, four of the vehicles involved are General Motors and we’ve, they recalled a million vehicles. It looked at the, they had eliminated that portion of the problem, but the Wall Street Journal reported that there were as many as 20 million or more General Motors vehicles with these airbags in them, which suggests that GM is the Manufacturer that has the vast majority of these in their vehicles.

So the odds are if you own a General Motors from, 2000 to the present, it’s got one of those airbags in it. So that’s. That’s pretty interesting. It’s been cast as oh, this is similar to Kata and that there’s this massive group of manufacturers who all have these airbags.

But what it’s looking more like is that the vast majority of these inflators are in General Motors vehicles and that some other manufacturers, use some that were made by Delphi or by other groups, and there aren’t that many. In these other populations that are really at risk.

We don’t know yet because manufacturers aren’t really coming out and telling the public, who has what in their vehicles.

Anthony: That’s always nice to find out. So from what we can tell, the inflators were installed in vehicles from 12 automakers, including Ford, GM, Stellantis, Hyundai, Tesla, and Toyota.

Since the launch of the investigation in 2015, automakers, including BMW, Ford, GM, and Volkswagen have initiated Eight recalls to address potential safety defects with the inflators. So the manufacturer the car manufacturers, they’re actually initiating these recalls prior to NHTSA saying anything.

Michael: They’re initiating those recalls in response to inflator ruptures that have taken place in their cars. And they’re doing it in small batches, basically. They’re arguing is we’re going to recall this batch of a thousand vehicles where we’ve seen one of these inflator instance, because that shows that on the date when this inflator was manufactured, they weren’t cleaning out the weld slag out of their inflator inflators.

So the defect could happen in that batch. What NITS is contending is that you have, there’s no way to figure out which inflators have this problem. Right now you can’t go up to a car with an x ray machine and figure it out so The only way to be sure that this problem Doesn’t continue is to recall all of them

Fred: So the root source of this problem has got nothing to do with airbag and inflator manufacturing The root source of this problem is the NHTSA As far as I know, it is the only agency in the world that has specified the use of something called an electro explosive device without also issuing a specification for how that electro explosive device is to be made and quality control associated with it.

That’s the heart of the problem. The manufacturers like Takata and ARC are merely taking advantage of this bureaucratic lapse by NISA to maximize their own profits and saying if NISA lets us build junk, we’ll build junk. What’s the problem with that?

Michael: And the problem in the Takata situation, for instance, was the selection of ammonium nitrate as the propellant chemical for their formulations.

And, if NHTSA years ago had said, Hey, you can’t use ammonium nitrate in these things. It’s unstable. It poses a lot of risks. We know it’s cheap. We know you guys want to use it, but it’s just not going to work and put out a rule saying, Hey, you can’t use it. We never would have had Takata.

Fred: Let me argue with you just a little bit, Michael, because if there had been a specification issued that said you need to make sure that the inflators.

Are going to last over their service lifetime, that there will be no ingress of water, that they’ll be tested sufficiently so that you have high confidence. These things are going to work. If that had been done, the ammonium nitrate would have been perfectly fine. So the problem wasn’t the specification of ammonium nitrate.

The problem was that NHTSA never required people to make sure that at the end of life, these things were still safe. That Requirement as ordinarily built into specifications for electro explosive devices.

Michael: I think the question there is, to, we’re saying that NHTSA should be able to come up with these rules in advance of auto manufacturers putting this stuff into cars and putting it out on the roads.

And the fact on the ground is NHTSA simply doesn’t have the resources to make these kinds of determinations. They need them desperately. They certainly need them now in software and cybersecurity. And in the past, they haven’t had them. So it’s a question of. Can the agency even address these types of things?

Or are we going to continue to see, what we’ve seen for the past 50 years, which is manufacturers basically putting on the roads, what they want and us reaping the consequences. Cause there’s not a truly effective, overseer for this type of stuff. Right now, they’re putting all sorts of software into vehicles cybersecurity standards.

In 10 years, we might be reaping the results of that in a similar way as we’re reaping the results of the airbag problem that we’ve seen with Takata and with ARC, or A R C.

Fred: I don’t think we’ll have to wait 10 years with the automated vehicles roaming the streets of the cities now in ever increasing numbers.

I, I think that comeuppance is going to come a lot more quickly.

Anthony: Everything will not be better in the future. Is that what you’re telling me?

Michael: No, I saw an ad for a Coca Cola flavor that was designed by AI, so I’m super intrigued.

Fred: That’s bound to be good.

Anthony: Yeah, it was followed by a diabetic medicine ad.

Okay there’s a problem with these inflators. Most manufacturers don’t have… GM unfortunately they got stuck, and it seems like they’ve got a lot of these, and so they’ve already recalled a bunch of things. ARC’s basically saying, Nah, you can’t tell us to do nothing, Nitza. You to toothless, and they’re, waggling their tongue at them.

And with That I think I want to go into the towel of Fred. How do we feel about the towel of Fred right now?

Michael: You’ve now entered the Tao of Fred.

Fred: That was a little early, but let’s give it a whirl.

Anthony: Look, it’s all related. And when we go into the towel of Fred, can I ask you to back off your microphone?

About a half an inch. Just a little bit. You’re getting a little, I’m no longer eating the microphone. Oh, that’s wonderful. Thank you. Alright so the towel of Fred, we’re gonna continue with the arc. Theme. And this is one of these things where, Hey, math, not my strong point, but art claims 95 percent reliability in their product.

And they are 99 percent confident in that. Now, again, not an expert in math, but that just sounds like a giant loophole.

Fred: You’re right on with that. When you first let me ask you, have you ever watched a rocket launch on TV? Yeah. Okay there’s a countdown, 5, 4, 3, and then you see the cables fall away from the rocket, 2, 1, 0.

Then… There’s a lot of flame and smoke, and then the thing rises into the air then MECO, burnout, right? Then they separate the first stage from the second stage. How does all that happen? All that happens because of something called an electro explosive device. And when the cables fall away from the rocket, somebody has pushed a button somewhere, or a computer’s pushed a button, that fires something called an electro explosive device.

Also known as a explosive bolt that on command breaks a mechanical connection and causes this action to happen inside the motors of the rocket. Typically, there’s another electric explosive device very much like an airbag inflator that will. Again, on electrical command flash into flame and light the rocket engines.

So then you see the smoke and coming out. And as it arises, they separate the 1st stage that’s burned down from the 2nd stage. Again, and more electro explosive devices that are in the rocket and electrical signal causes them to snap and then they break up the whatever the connection is between the 1st and 2nd stage.

Usually something called a marbling clamp, by the way that allows the stages to separate and then it goes on about the business. So these are common devices. that are used a lot in aerospace. It’s the same class of device that is the airbag inflator. So they’ve been made for a long time, and they’re made with certain reliability standards.

So the ARC representative said, it’s 95 percent reliability with 99 percent confidence. That sounds really impressive. But if you take it apart, what it means is that 95 percent response reliability means that you should expect 5 percent of them to fail. And 99 percent confidence means that if you did that same test again, you have a 99 percent chance of getting the same result.

So basically the 95 percent reliability is something you can expect to get over and over again if you were to test this over and over again. Okay, so that’s what those two numbers mean. So basically ARC is guaranteeing on the faith of their company. That 5 percent of these are going to fail. I don’t know why that’s not obvious to people.

Anthony: I don’t want any of these things to fail in my car.

Fred: So yeah, if you think 5 percent are failing and you look at the millions that have been put out there, I don’t know where in the world this NHTSA estimate of one in gazillion failures came from.

Michael: Does it even sound like they got it correct? Correct.

Does it sound like they misspoke when they said 95%? Even 99 percent and 99 percent sounds like there’s still a lot of room for errors that could, that can it sounds like problematic.

Anthony: It sounds like the efficacy of birth control Hey, 95 percent effective.

Fred: The gentleman who made that statement is either there’s three possibilities.

Number one is he’s badly misinformed or number two. He really doesn’t understand what the numbers are, or number three, he was just trying to throw out some scientific y numbers and, put truthiness into the discussion because there was nobody there to challenge him. So those are the three possibilities that I see.

Anthony: And what percent of confidence do you have with that?

Fred: I have in front of me. A document that talks about confidence for space qualified electric explosive devices. So I’m dodging your answer specifically. But okay, so let me ask you a question. What’s more important? The safety of a satellite that’s going to be deploying something in space or the safety of a human being that’s behind a steering wheel?

Anthony: I will vote for the human in space. Oh, wait. No the human behind the airbag human

Fred: behind the airbag

Michael: If the satellite’s deploying a technology it’s going to save us all In the next month, then it, it’s more complicated, right?

Fred: Could be, the, there aren’t a lot of satellites with that characteristic, but in the, so you’re voting for the satellite, Michael, instead of the human being.

Michael: No, I’m not, but I’m qualifying my answer depending on what’s on that satellite.

Anthony: He thinks there’s superpowers being deployed from that satellite. He doesn’t understand how satellites work and what they are. So that’ll be a future.

Michael: Like for instance, could detect every drunk driver on the road and shoot a beam that pops their tires.

Or disables their vehicles, then, I’m happy to die so that can take place.

Fred: All right. I’m glad you’re happy. ARC has ARC has clearly come down on the side of the satellite because they’ve been building these things for years and the requirement for satellites, which you can find with about three minutes of Googling, and we’ll put this link on our website for interested people, is that the, let’s see, ARC has The reliability of components shall be equal to or better than 0.

999 with a confidence level equal to or better than 95%. So what they’re saying is that they are requiring that less than 1 in 1, 000 rather than 5 out of 100 will be allowed to fail. And that there’s a confidence level of 95%, which means that if they did this test over and over again, 95 times out of 100 with this extensive test series.

They would come up with the same results. All right, blah, blah, blah, bunch of numbers. What does all that mean? It looks like that ARC tested about a hundred devices if there were no failures. Because with 100 device, with 100 trials and 100 successes, and Anthony forbids me from telling you what this distribution comes from.

Anthony: You can use the phrase once.

Fred: It’s called a binomial distribution, but I can’t say it again. All right. So with 100 trials, 100 successes, you can estimate 95 percent reliability with 99 percent confidence. This is what the gentleman from ARC was claiming. Now, if you want to use the standard that the European Space Agency uses, you need to have 500 trials with no more than one failure.

Okay, so ARC is only doing, apparently, based on the information we’ve got at hand, ARC is only doing 20 percent of the testing for airbag inflators that will be used in millions and millions of vehicles. Compared with the 500, so they’re only doing one fifth as many tests for these airbag inflators as the industry would do, anyone in the industry would do for them.

EEDs being used in satellites that would only be used tens of times, okay? So you can talk about the cost factor, of course, in this, and there is a cost associated with doing an extensive number of tests. But if you are able to amortize the cost of those tests over millions and millions of airbag inflators, It comes down to be a very small number, right?

ARC clearly made the choice to build junk. Takata clearly made the choice to build junk. Because when you do this qualification testing for the airbag inflators, it includes environments, it includes age, it includes humidity. Temperature, all of the things that could impact the life of the propellant or the ability of the E. E. D. or the airbag inflator to do its job as intended at the end of life. So that’s the heart of this. People’s lives in my mind, in my opinion, that people’s lives are at least as important as whether or not a satellite is going to deploy properly. Not as showy as again, this gets back into the fundamental problem of highway safety, which is that if you took all the people who are being harmed by these and put them into one event, nobody would ever allow the event to be repeated because they’re diffuse and they’re spread out around the country.

Each one occurs on page 6 of the local newspaper. The industry can get away with producing hazardous junk. So that’s my take on it. Five times the testing. That’s currently being done by ARC, apparently is what would be needed to produce a sufficiently or even customarily safe electro explosive device, aka airbag inflator.

Compared to what ARC is doing now.

Anthony: Okay. From what you guys have educated me on this show is there doesn’t seem to be a lot of regulations around air bla bags, how they’re manufactured, have the propellants used. We’ve learned from guests that they’re not designed with petite sized males or women in mind.

There there’s no It just seems still almost like the wild West. Now, am I better off just disabling my airbag?

Michael: I would say no, no, if the odds are, look, I don’t think you have the ability to disable your airbag in, in, in your car anyway, but

Anthony: I got pliers,

Michael: that’s definitely a no. Oh, okay.

Fred: No, you don’t but here’s the, even using air, she has numbers 95 percent of the time the airbag deploys. It’s going to save you from grievous injury or death.

Anthony: Okay, so airbags are good, it’s just the regulations around them are non existent, or poor.

Fred: I believe that’s correct, yes. And again, NHTSA doesn’t have a regulation, but if they just spend five minutes on the internet, they can easily find the regulations that are applicable to these airbag inflators, and they can just say, let’s do it.

The military’s got them. Commercial businesses have them. They’ve all got basically the same spec. The only organization I’m aware of that requires EEDs without a specification is NHTSA. Why is NHTSA such an outlier? That’s a mystery

Michael: to me. I

would suggest they’re an outlier because that’s what the auto industry has been lobbying for the last 50 years is less money.

So that lets NHTSA has less expertise in these areas. And the auto industry is. Continually tried to dumb down agency rulemakings to prevent exactly this sort of thing, anything that allows them to build, the cheapest potentially working product and get it out there in a vehicle is going to be what they shoot for.

Fred: It seems like they’ve won.

Anthony: So let’s talk more fun airbag news. Unfortunately, I don’t have the links in front of me. We’ll put them into the podcast description. So Volvo, they have airbags that will deploy on the outside of the vehicle to protect pedestrians. Is that right? They have one model right now where it looks like an airbag curtain will come down over the windshield.

So if pedestrians accidentally hit, their head’s not being crashed through the windshield, causing grievous harm, but instead they get to bounce off of that and then bounce onto hard asphalt. Why don’t we make roads out of airbags?

Fred: I’ve seen at least one article that said that Subaru has the same available in Japan, not yet in the U. S.

Michael: And the United States has been looking at the issue for a while. Just nothing’s been done on it. There’ve been preliminary agency looks at rulemaking to make. Not only, cars crash worthy for the people that are inside, but also for the people outside. And, most of this has just simply been thrown to the side because over the same time period, Americans have continued to buy, bigger and bigger vehicles that make it harder and harder to protect pedestrians because they’re colliding with pedestrians at, weaker points of the body, head height, neck height, chest height.

There aren’t sufficient protections for, pedestrians who are hit and then hit other hard surfaces of the car. In addition to the bumper rolling up the windshield, that’s one of the things that, that I think Volvo has is the bonnet protection on the hood. So that’s something that Europe has been far advanced when compared to the United States is actually getting cars on the road that, that.

Protect pedestrians to some extent in the event of a crash.

Anthony: Do the European or Asian countries have any regulations around electro explosive devices?

Fred: I don’t know you

Anthony: get your Google on.

Okay, we’ll just continue with the show instead. Another fun airbag we saw was, it was something you wear around your neck and it’s for bicyclists, and it will sense if you’re in a crash and it will inflate around your neck to protect your head. Which I thought was neat, but in the images you can see in the link we’re providing the…

Person on the bicycle lands right on their butt and doesn’t land anywhere on their head. So I thought it was a silly little illustration, but also, a helmet. Wouldn’t a helmet do the same thing? Is this just a cool, funny looking thing?

Fred: The helmet would transmit much more shock than the airbag around your head.

So the helmet’s a good start, but a lot of people still suffer head injuries in bicycle accidents.

Michael: Okay. And there’s a lot of, vanity in that, too. It functions somewhat as a helmet, but it’s a helmet that pops out when you’re… In a bike crash it’s, it’s, instead of, driving around your bike wrapped in a bubble, you have an insta bubble that pops out when you’re going to be in a crash, but at that point you, you’re relying on the technology inside of that to deploy it, otherwise you’re just the usual sack of skin and bones.

Anthony: Well, Speaking of the usual sack of skin and bones, I just watched a Tom Cruise movie and he’s riding around on his motorcycle. No helmet! Multiple scenes, driving really fast, no helmet! Tom Cruise, do better! Come on!

Michael: The thetans will protect him.

Anthony: Ha! You’re an SP, Michael.

Hey, speaking of p pedestrian safety, there was a fun article in Fast Company about a right on red… Ban. This is not some anti communist screed but this is about not allowing people to make right hand turns on a red light. And it’s interesting because it talks about the history of why this started why drivers were allowed to turn right at a red light.

Yeah, that’s right. From the Fast Company article But the 1970s oil crisis prompted the federal government to insist that states change their traffic laws, hoping that right on red would reduce gas consumed while cars idle at traffic lights. In 1975, the Feds demanded that states default to write on red or forfeit energy funding.

By 1980, the last holdout, Massachusetts, home of Fred Perkins, had complied. The federal rule is still on the books, by the way. Now the article goes on to say, there’s, it’s unclear if this did anything for gas consumption. I live in New York City, where write on red is not allowed at all, yet I see people constantly do it.

And the big thing they’re talking about is, it’s… A lot of it is pedestrian safety, because you’re going to make that right on red, you’re not looking to the right where you’re turning, you’re just looking at the traffic on the left. Oh, I’m good. And then BAM! Riding right over the person who has the audacity to walk in a city designed by Robert Moses, who hated people walking.

Among a bunch of other things that he hated.

Michael: I was fascinated by the history here too. I always assumed right on red was just a matter of, consumers and drivers demanding the ability to turn right on red when you’re sitting at a light and no one is coming from one direction. And, it just seems more efficient.

It seems like a better way to move traffic. But yes, I, I have learned over time and I think everyone has to be particularly careful in those situations of pedestrians. It’s a similar situation to when you’re turning left and crossing a couple of lanes of traffic, you’re watching the traffic in front of you.

And you’re not always watching that crosswalk. And a lot of pedestrian incidents happen in those situations as well, because you start to make a turn when you get a gap and boom, there’s a pedestrian that pops up. It was, it’s. D. C. just banned right turns on red I don’t think all the signage has gone up yet, but it’s, it’s interesting.

It’s also really interesting if you read the article how the federal government ends up bribing states into following its will and things like that. This and what they choose when and where they choose to do that. There’s a lot of, most people don’t know this, but, the vast majority of NHTSA funding doesn’t go into some of the things we’d really like it to go into hiring software engineers and developing the agency’s expertise, it goes into grants to States, to, to traffic enforcement and to, drunk driving seatbelt campaigns and just.

A lot of other things and those grants can also be used in a way that essentially, says, hey, if you pass this law that we want you to, we’ll give you a bunch of money. But if you don’t, we won’t. So it’s, it’s. In some ways legalized bribery to get states to do some things that the government wants to, and I didn’t realize that it had been used to institute rights on red.

Also makes me wonder, have you ever hit a situation where you can take a left on red? Yes.

Fred: Okay, so you two suffer from being young, so I’m going to clarify this for you a little bit.

Michael: I’ve had a couple of those spots. Here, one here, and one in Meridian, Mississippi, and that’s the only ones I’ve ever run into.

Fred: I ran into it in Denver. Double turn, or the sign said no double turn on red, or no double left turn on red, and I Couldn’t figure it out, but I got through without a ticket. Anyway…

Anthony: Hold on, Fred, before you educate us for being young, I have to point out, you said both of us suffer from being young, and then Michael ignored exactly what you’re saying, like the TikTok generation he is, and told you his story.

Sorry, continue.

Michael: That’s okay, he’ll… Okay, I’m the TikTok generation.

Fred: He’ll remember this years from now, but anyway… But when I was a kid, we used to call them California red lights because California was the only state that allowed a right turn on a red. And then the oil embargo came along, I think it was 1972, 73, something like that.

And the price of gas shot up, so some genius said it’s good for California, so let’s do it for the whole country. But the context is important because California at that time was well known. I think still is, but it was well known for handing out, liberally handing out tickets to people who violated the crosswalk laws.

And so in California at the time, and I suspect still now, you can be very confident that once you put a foot down in the crosswalk, that car’s going to stop for you, right? Because that’s the law. Unlike a lot of the eastern states where, it’s a sport. Both of those things were true in California, that the right turn on red after checking and carefully monitoring the crosswalks was allowed.

But the context was that people really did respect the crosswalks, and so it was not as unsafe as it has apparently become in a lot of other cities. I just wanted to give you that context, and that was, around the same time as Woodstock, so I know you guys just haven’t been there.

Anthony: Woodstock’s my favorite character from the Peanuts cartoon. I know exactly what you’re talking about. He’s a good guy. He is. Hey, you know who else is a good guy? You, listener. For going to autosafety. org and clicking on that donate button. Ah, I can feel the love right now. Speaking of the love, we got this link in from a listener named Peter.

He sent us an article about Connecticut adding drunk driving sensors to cars. The Connecticut Department of Transportation on Friday, this is a week ago, announced it’s launching a pilot program to equip vehicles with sensors that can detect drunk driving by testing the air, and it’s starting with installing them in department owned vehicles, satellites not needed.

And it’s interesting, the article talks about that it can, that it claims that they can figure out if the drunk air, all molecules, is coming from the driver or from the passenger. I, that would be fascinating. I love the idea of this. I think this is great, because if you’ve ever driven on the road, and you always see, oh my god, stay away from that car, because they’re swerving all over the place.

They’re either texting, they’re a Tesla driver, or they’re drunk. Either way, you gotta stay away from them. But it’s fascinating. Like this, I think, Michael, you’ve mentioned something like this before, like you’d love, this is part of your fantasy, right?

Michael: This is something that when we, I think Fred and I have probably both seen this at the auto show when we go in, in DC, they have a booth set up and they’re demonstrating this technology. It’s called dads. And what it does essentially is it instead of requiring the driver to blow into a tube to determine if they’re drinking, they just, it just monitors the air. It’s passive. There’s nothing that the driver has to do to make sure the vehicle starts other than not drink.

And they seem to be working great. And this is 1 of those situations where there’s a product. Or a safety measure that’s been created that most owners and people who drive cars out there, you’ll sense some resistance and then to the technology. It’s like speeding technology.

Drivers don’t want to be told how fast they can go on their cars and some drivers don’t want to be told when or where they’re going to be able to drive, even if they’ve been drinking. I think we all know people that drive drunk frequently. And. And when you can’t get something into directly into law as a state, it’s always nice to have, government employees who you can test this stuff out on in a way.

Now, what’s what they’re doing is essentially putting it on all the government vehicles. We’ve seen a similar movement. I think it’s in New York City, putting the. The speed devices into government vehicles there. So when it, when the populace won’t accept it, let’s, at least put it in our government vehicles.

And I think what this ultimately is going to do, it’s going to reduce their exposure to liability. It’s going to reduce, the number. Of state employees who are driving drunk because their car won’t start. In New York, it’s going to reduce the number of city employees that are able to speed on the roads and city vehicles.

For an investment of, and I think this technology is under 200 at this point, maybe even lower. I haven’t heard a number in a few years, but last I heard dad’s technology is, it’s not. Super expensive, it’s far cheaper than an interlock device that you’ll see problem drunk drivers have to put on their vehicles.

And it’s hopefully something that can be put into every vehicle as part of the infrastructure act a couple of years ago, there was provision directing that’s to issue rule makings in this area. So we’re hoping. That, dads or, any other system that can prevent this problem, even if it’s a satellite shooting beams from space we hope that can work and come into play because you’re talking about saving thousands of lives per year.

Drunk driving, even though it’s, it is lower than it has been in the past. Drunk driving is still a huge killer of Americans and, worldwide as well.

Anthony: Okay. So this technology works. It it prevents the car from starting by. Sniffing the air. So instead, I’ve got the car started.

I’m sober. I’m driving down the highway and then I crack open a sixer. Is it going to turn the car off on me?

Michael: That’s what I don’t know if your breath. If you cracked open a six year would, that’s enough to trigger it. going to drink. You probably have to drink most of the six year.

Anthony: That’s the goal because I get thirsty and I gotta, I gotta relax during the day.

Michael: And I’m sure there are so many different things they’re having. When you develop technology like this, what you’re really having to think about are all the different ways that humans are going to try to figure out to get around it and get that car moving which could be a lot of things hanging your head out the window.

Not breathing, there are many ways to get around the system that have to be thought about it and built into the design of it. And, that’s, part of the intriguing part of this technology note is seeing how it works and if it works and. The only way to find out is to get it out on the road.

And in this case, that’s something that Connecticut’s taking a step to do. So we obviously support what they’re doing.

Anthony: I love this idea, especially if I could have this retrofitted into my car and then my insurance rates would lower. Oh, that would be nice. I think if insure, I think that’s how this would move forward as insurance companies, they do the, Hey, if you, we do driver monitoring, we’ll lower your rates.

Hey, if we see if you’re drunk or not, we’ll lower your rate. That would be great.

Michael: Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. And I think that’s something that a lot of people would accept. I certainly would put that in my vehicle right now. And I’d love to have lower interest rates because I have a 20 year old daughter.

Anthony: There you go. And speaking of problems with with driving drunk, I think the next concern we have is what if you’re driving and a rat jumps out of your. From underneath your hood. That could be a problem. We’ve got good video of it. Happening is we got a video on CNN. This is scary as can be.

New York City driver coming down the road and they’re out in the country and all of a sudden RAT crawls out from underneath their car the hood of their car. Scary as can be. This is just funny and entertaining. And thankfully no one was hurt. Not even the rat amazingly enough. It just moved up to the lives and the cat skills out of Brooklyn.

Just like a lot of pandemic moves. Also related to that, we’re gonna have a link on a Netflix documentary about rats driving cars, basically researchers training rats to drive. I don’t know why we’re encouraging this behavior.

Michael: That’s a, that was a study at the university of Richmond where they’re.

Basically training rats to control little vehicles to, to achieve treats. I thought it was pretty interesting. But the usually when we talk about rats is because they’re eating cables and vehicles and causing safety problems. In this case, it just seemed to be a interesting story.

Anthony: Definitely an interesting story.

Don’t drive drunk. Don’t try and check your car for rats, I don’t know. What’s the takeaway?

Fred: I don’t know. It was a BMW. A lot of people like BMWs, but the rat had eaten right through the grate that’s between the the hood and the windshield. And so I was able to make an escape through that through that knob opening as it was hurtling down the highway.

I was putting all this together. Maybe Waymo and Cruise are looking to use rats as safety drivers. That would solve some of their, economic problems and safety problems as well. What do you think?

Anthony: I think that’s an excellent segue to mention Waymo. Cruise we don’t have anything this week and what cruise crash is into but we’ve got Waymo is expanding their service in San Francisco.

They’re they’re opening up their robo taxi service to tens of thousands of people across all 47 square miles of San Francisco. They’ve spent at least over a they’ve spent over a billion dollars working on these vehicles, and now they’re like, Hey, let’s try and make some of that money back. I think it’s a stretch.

But, as we’ve said before, Waymo has been slightly better, more open with its data than their competitors. But this is is interesting because this article in The Verge, Scaling responsibility is the watchword because Waymo has faced significant opposition, not just from residents, but also city officials and law enforcement.

The city’s transit agency and fire and police departments have all logged complaints about robo taxis and generals, and rollout. But as we’ve learned, the public utility commissions of California just says, nanny, nanny boo, tough doo. And this is,

Michael: I’m sure Waymo, in the past, what, six months, eight months, we, we’ve began to hear a whole lot more aboutGM Cruise.

They’ve been, putting stupid advertisements in papers across the country, telling how horrible humans are and lots of other nonsense. In addition to some, a lot of lobbying expenditures trying to get their bills passed in different states and even in, at the federal level And Waymo is, doing more of the things that we like to see.

They’re putting out better safety reports, they’re not going down the path of nonsense that GM Cruise has apparently set off on, mimicking Elon Musk and some of the other stuff that seems to be going on there. And they’re, they’re, but the problem is. Because GM Cruise is also operating in San Francisco and also operating in some of these areas, people aren’t, distinguishing between Cruise and Waymo so much.

They see, the autonomous vehicle and assume that, Waymo is causing the same problems as Cruise. There are some, I’m sure they do. Waymo vehicles do enter an existential crisis and that type of thing. Like we’ve seen with cruise vehicles, but frankly, as someone who, is constantly reading articles about this, whenever they pop up, Waymo pops up a lot less in these situations than cruise.

In some ways, they probably should be expanding faster than cruise.

Anthony: The truth comes out. Michael loves autonomous vehicles, whether or not a rat is driving them. Thoughts, Fred?

Fred: I think Waymo is making a good faith effort to make this stuff work before they roll it out in public. I don’t think it’s as market driven as the GM Cruise offering is and I don’t have any hard data to back that up, but just from talking with people in the industry and observing what’s going on, there’s just seems to be a lot less bullshit coming out of Waymo and a lot more science coming out of Waymo.

I don’t know, it’s hard to quantify that, but. That’s my impression. Michael, what do you think?

Michael: I just, I think that Waymo has done a much better job planning and, they’ve relied more on actually putting the product out there and making sure it works. Then PR which has, when you do a lot of PR and you start saying things about your vehicles that are inflated Inevitably, they’re going to do something dumb and you’re going to look silly and that’s, that seems like that’s happened over and over with Cruise.

Whereas Waymo is flown under the radar in many respects they’ve, I guess they’ve gotten a little cover from cruise, but, I still think it, the overall perception that people have is going to be based on the totality, not just what Waymo is doing, but also what all these other autonomous vehicle companies is doing.

And it’s. Okay. That’s why it’s important that, probably, it’s similar to, Tesla and the rest of the automotive market, Tesla is promising a lot of things and talking about robo taxes and all this and pushing these limits. But at the same time, that could damage consumer confidence and the ability of these vehicles to actually do what they’re saying.

They’re going. Do in many ways, crews might be doing the same thing, to the market in San Francisco and to other markets where they lose the confidence of the locals, they lose confidence of potential riders, and then that loss of confidence also impacts the other folks in the sector like Waymo.

So that’s still obviously got a long way to go to play out, but, right now if I was investing in one of those two companies, I would probably have to go with Waymo because Cruise scares me. That’s the way they’ve rolled it out, the way they’ve done things, they’re very brash, bold.

They seem to have way too much confidence in technology. That’s not there yet. And the way it’s advertised suggests that even they don’t fully have a grasp on what they’re doing.

Fred: We also know that Waymo has pulled out of the self driving heavy truck. Business for whatever reasons, and we don’t know what those reasons are they’ve taken a hard look at that and decided to sacrifice their prior investment in that.

So optimistically, hoping that’s because the safety analysis said there just can’t make it work. I’m optimistic that. Before too long, we’ll see that same judgment made about the self driving passenger vehicles.

Anthony: We’ll see, but listeners, I’d like to please note that Michael Brooks is not an investment advisor, so any investment advice you get from him, I’d please ignore, and instead, donate your money with a tax free deduction to the Center for Auto Safety.

Hey, what do you guys think about IKEA flat pack type furniture? You guys fans? Love it. Wait, one love it, one no. I agree. I hate it. I, it’s the, I’m

Michael: not a violent person.

It just falls apart, I’m rough on things. It falls apart. Yeah. Yeah. It’s always been a mess for me. I’m

Anthony: Not a fan. My, my years ago, my wife said, Oh, I look, I bought you a dresser and I put it together.

I followed the little cartoon instructions. The instructions were wrong and I took a hammer to it. And

Fred: I’ve, I read somewhere that 90 percent of. All children conceived in Europe have been conceived on IKEA beds, so they must be doing something right.

Anthony: Ah, interesting. Besides the meatballs. I’m not sure what websites you two hang out on, but there’s a Swedish company that’s making flat pack cars.

This is from CNN. This company, Lovely O. Creates this small little boxy car, which it looks neat. It’s a light urban vehicle. It is a micro car weighs 770 pounds. And it’s they’re not for you to take home as a consumer and get that little wrench and have that cartoon guy install it.

It’s for some manufacturer to build it for you because that’s required. But the thing of the problem is these. Micro cars they, they don’t have to follow federal safety guidelines. They don’t have to wait. Like what,

Michael: what’s the deal here? No they manufacture them almost in a Like this base package.

And then if you want to own one in the United States, you have to find a way to have that certified to federal motor vehicle safety. These standards, by the looks of it, it would require adding a lot of things to the to, to what they’ve got there. And it’s probably like seat belts. Something that would have to be, yeah, it’s something that would have to be taken on by a final stage manufacturer to make sure that it’s certified the United States.

It’s, it looks great. I like the idea of a mini car. I don’t know if I would look that great in one, but I do I like the idea of getting, 40 mile round trip to work and back in something that uses the least energy. Possible and, doesn’t clog up the roads and, I love that idea, but then getting into it and being surrounded by, massive mommy SUVs and pickup trucks and other things makes me wonder, the CEO in the article when they went over the crash worthiness of the vehicles made it seem as though, Oh, yeah, we just put some foam in between on each side of the driver.

And so we’re good in crashes, which is. And very much an oversimplification of what would happen, if you were pinned in between a couple of large vehicles, that’s. Overly optimistic. Once again, as we talked about with heavy electric vehicles, heavy batteries, physics is and weight is the reigning world champion.

And it’s really hard to mitigate the effects of weight and crashes and many cars. Almost no matter what you build them out of are going to be less able to handle the forces of a crash than larger vehicles.

Fred: I don’t think a crank operated airbag inflator is the way to go myself.

Anthony: So I want to put a challenge out here to listeners.

The next listen to donate $1, 000. We will arrange it that you get to sit with Michael Brooks inside of a mini car. Somehow we will make this happen. You can bring four more of your friends and you’ll live out your circus clown fantasy. It will be amazing. Okay, Michael, you agree to this?

Michael: Tentatively.

Anthony: Tentatively we will do this. There you go. Sometime in the next five decades.

Fred: You’re creating a Washington clown car. And I’m not sure that’s the way to go given the current leadership in the

Michael: House of clown cars in Washington.

Anthony: Alright, you’re getting a little too political. These things are funny.

The article the… The CEO of this company mentions, Oh, it’s F1 cars and whatnot. Ignoring the fact that F1 car drivers are put inside carbon fiber monocoque that they really crash test. And, these guys go 200 miles per hour into stationary barriers and they walk away fine.

It’s, it. Bit of an exaggeration, but anyway, how’s this for a bit of an exaggeration? RECALL ROUNDUP TIME!

Michael: Strap in, time for the Recall Roundup. It’s

Anthony: an exaggeration because there’s only one this week. Come on, I saw you shaking your head at me, Michael, that’s… There’s only

Michael: one this week and it’s there’s not, the good news for everyone with rear view cameras in their cars, this is the first week in what two months or so that we haven’t seen a rear view camera recall.

Anthony: Yeah, this is we have from a manufacturer I’ve never heard of called Rev Recreation Group, 2023 to 2024 Fleetwood Fortis. This is the external griddle way. Okay, sorry. The exterior griddle may be stowed while connected to the liquid petroleum gas. The exterior griddle may be stowed while in use, increasing the risk of fire.

I’m laughing because I did not expect a car to have an exterior griddle, but now I understand what kind of vehicle this is. An awesome one you can make pancakes while driving.

Michael: Now you understood why I snuck that one in there this week. There were a lot of other, 10 other recalls we looked at, but the exterior griddle really captures what I want in a car.

Anthony: Oh, man, I want to make, cause I’m driving, but things, my pancakes will just get cold cause I’m doing 50 down the road. I’ve got my exterior griddle and I’m flipping

Michael: them out there. Anthony, you clearly haven’t read the recall. You’re supposed to stow it before you drive. That’s

Anthony: the problem is it can still be connected to the gas.

Fred: Just think of how much fuel this could save if people could eat their breakfast, cook their breakfast while they’re driving to work instead of having to do it serially. I think there’s a, I think this would be a wonderful innovation for increasing efficiency and reducing fuel consumption.

And

Michael: increasing driver distractions.

Fred: Sure, yeah, that, of course, but, it’s only left hand, you don’t use left hand for that much when you’re driving.

Anthony: No, this is the perfect argument for robo taxis right now. I want Denny’s to make a robo taxi. Because then I don’t have to sit in the back, have moons over my hammy, it would be great.

That’s the roo look, Denny’s has got to make this, IHOP, not, Google and General Motors come on. I’m going

Fred: for Piggly Wiggly though.

Anthony: Ah, Piggly Wiggly. And with that we’ll do a couple investigations real quick. There is an investigation into Volkswagen investigating 184, 000 plus vehicles.

The Office of Defects Investigation has received 59 complaints, one early warning report of death and injury. Ooh. Several field reports alleging inadvertent activation of the front… assist automatic emergency braking system in 2018 to 2019 volkswagen atlas vehicles so it seems the Automatic emergency braking comes on unexpectedly

Michael: It looks like they’re, I don’t believe they figured it out, but it looks like the system activates when there’s no obstruction in the vehicle’s path.

What, this is what we’ve called phantom braking. You might hear other names for it, but essentially the auto and it’s something that NHTSA is. Currently supposedly covering in their rulemaking. We’re going to see how that develops to prevent this type of thing. But essentially what you’re having as vehicles, this has been going on for many years now.

There’ve been recalls with Toyota and Nissan. There’s an investigation with Honda right now, many of that we’re in the first or second grade when it comes to automatic emergency braking, as we’ve talked about endlessly on this podcast. And there’s a lot of growing up to do. And right now these systems.

Aren’t always making sure that there’s actually something in your way when they’re all of a sudden bringing your vehicle to a stop This is the first time i’ve heard the phrase What is it? Sudden vehicle deceleration usually we’re talking about sudden unintended acceleration, but in this case apparently there’s you know They’ve discovered complaints in their early warning records from five minor injuries in five minor injuries from basically slowing down way too quick or far more quickly than the Driver expects, because, normally, when you break, you’re prepared to break.

And in these cases, the car is just breaking functionally breaking independently of any object on the road or any input from the driver. And so you’re not even expecting the vehicle to break. So I could see how that. Could lead to, situations where a driver or passengers are injured and this is a huge concern with automatic emergency braking.

This is probably, one of the most important things that they get right going forward. Because if you have vehicles breaking for no reason, then consumers aren’t going to want to use this technology. They’re going to turn it off if that’s allowed in their vehicle. And, similar to. Thank you.

Some of the other technological things, if it’s not working right, when we introduce it to the public, they’re not going to use it and we’re going to lose the safety benefits.

Anthony: OK, get these things right, people. I like the automatic emergency braking just needs to be better. Fort Bronco they’re investigating an EcoBoost loss of power so that’s, I’m just going to run through these real quick, that’s 708, 000 vehicles that they’re looking into, nothing, again, these investigations, nothing for you to see here just yet but they’re looking to see, hey, what’s going on here.

Michael: Yeah, they’ve got a lot of complaints and I think they’ve gotten, what is it, 1200? It looks like no 861 complaints on these vehicles, which is pretty significant number when we’re talking about problems. And essentially what’s happening is they’re, stalling in the middle of the, in the middle of the road and they’re unable to restart and it’s a catastrophic engine failure and a lot of consumers have complained about it.

And so we’re certainly keeping a close eye on this one because it looks like something that is going to result in a rather large recall.

Fred: Eco boost by the way, is what everybody else calls a turbocharger. So it’s a turbocharger is a turbine that runs on the. Force of the exhaust gases and those exhaust gases turn the turbine, of course, which in turn turns a compressor, which crams more air into the engine.

So it’s a sophisticated system, and when it works, it improves the efficiency of the cars, but I don’t want people to be confused by that the brand name EcoBoost, just a turbocharger.

Anthony: Okay. Cause EcoBoost sounds like, Hey, I press this and it’s going to plant trees for me or something. And that’s not at all what it does.

So I’m not, yeah. Yeah. marketing lines on the mirror. The last one we have is general motors, Bluebird corporation, Dahmer trucks, Thomas built buses. They says 2000 vehicles are looking at only one complaint. This is a one complaint, alleging five transmission. Failures lossing to leading to a loss of motive power across the fleet.

Wait, so this is just one complaint that had five. So this is one bus that had five transmission flat failures.

Michael: It’s you know, these I only see one complaint period. But I think the concern here is that these cutaway vehicles are used for Basically, 2 things, transporting students to school or as ambulances.

And so maybe there’s a heightened concern on the part of the agency, because these are vehicles that are transporting precious cargo. There also are only, I believe, about 2000 vehicles here. The 1 failure in 2000 vehicles here is actually, a greater number of failures on a percentage basis than we see in the airbags we were just talking about.

Anthony: That’s a concern. Hey, with that, listeners what kind of pancakes do you like to have while you’re driving down the road at 50 miles per hour, crackin open a six pack of beer, and, blueberry gay. Great. Fred.

Fred: I don’t know, but I did want to take a moment to just correct something that I said last week.

Last week we were talking about the cruise vehicle that had stopped on top of a woman’s leg after a. An unusual accident in San Francisco, and I said at that time, essentially any jackass knows that what you need to do is move the car off of the woman’s leg. And apparently, I’m the jackass, because the more sophisticated analysis says, sometimes, or usually yes, but sometimes no.

It’s really situation dependent, and I apologized for that misspeak last

Anthony: week. I

don’t know if you necessarily misspoke, because I don’t think you’re the jackass in this, because I did the research into this, and the UK is the only place I can find some emergency response. What do you do in this situation?

They said if you’re compressing someone’s leg in that situation for less than 15 minutes, Get that weight off of their leg immediately, longer than 15 minutes. Don’t move it. Wait for professionals to show up.

Michael: The concern here is if a victim has clothing or something trapped in the axle of the vehicle, and they’re also being compressed and moving the vehicle could injure them or kill them.

So it’s best and most. Emergency everything I could find on the subject when I was looking into it suggests that, they’re using airbags or the jaws of life or some other mechanism to lift vehicles off of victims and rarely moving them. But in

Fred: any case, do not try this at home and rely on the experts to safely extricate the person from under the vehicle.

I think is a message.

Anthony: Yeah, I also want to jump into this. So let’s recap for listeners real quick on theGM Cruise running over the woman’s leg situation This was a couple weeks ago in San Francisco There’s a robo taxi at a traffic light and there’s a human driver at the traffic light pedestrians walking through the cars have a green light and the pedestrian driven car hits the Sorry, the human driven car hits the pedestrian, bounces, gets stuck underneath the robo taxi.

The robo taxi immediately stops and there’s a lot of controversy around, oh, how, the robo taxi did this, how long to respond. I think one thing we didn’t mention, no one mentioned is, if there was a human inside that robo taxi, if there was a driver there, they possibly could have noticed that, hey, There’s a jackass in the car next to me, they’re texting, they’re partying, they’re drinking, whatnot.

I’m not gonna gun it at this light. I’m not gonna move ahead forward. I can see there’s a pedestrian walking here, and stop. Because we’ve all been in situations, you’re at an intersection, you go, Oh, this bozo in the next lane, I’m gonna let them go ahead. I’m going to sit here and wait. Hey, just another vote for humans.

I know I’m old fashioned.

Fred: No, no argument. That’s exactly right. But I do want to state that I like being a designated jackass because if the bar of expectations for me is really low, then everybody’s going to be at least Surprised at my performance.

Michael: Plus you have a chance to be president one day.

Fred: There you go. There you go.

Anthony: Okay. To recap, folks Michael chooses blueberry pancakes. Fred chooses jackass pancakes. Thanks for listening. See you again next week. Thanks for donating.

Fred: Thank you. Bye bye.

Michael: Bye everybody. For www. autosafety. org.