Pollution is the new standard

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.

Tesla’s Delayed Taxi and Fisker Oceans

Anthony: Hey listeners, welcome to June 10th, two days before the supposed release of the taxi. Tesla non Robbo taxi. Taxi remote controlled nonsense.

Michael: Do you wanna redo that?

Anthony: No, I don’t wanna redo it. I wish. I wish we were recording when that thing was put out, but it’s probably gonna be delayed.

Michael: Nobody

Anthony: knows.

Nobody knows.

Fred: Pastoral always does what they say and you know that. And good morning everybody. Yeah.

Michael: Details

Fred: are scarce

Michael: then for good reason.

Anthony: Yeah. So I gotta jump in something a little personal. This is the weirdest thing, but I’ve noticed in my [00:01:00] neighborhood, not one, but there are two Fisker oceans driving around my neighborhood.

Wow. Did they not get the memo?

Michael: I, maybe they haven’t had to go in for a warranty service yet. I don’t know.

Anthony: The only redeeming quality of these cars is I like the paint job. Their colors are unique, but other than that, I’m like, oh God get it off the road. Come on. But anyway, speaking of getting things off the road, let’s start off with Sean P.

Duffy. The P stands for pretty, I don’t know, hi.

Sean P. Duffy’s Car Affordability Plan

Anthony: He’s announcing the key steps to make cars more affordable in America. Again. Which basically means saying, Hey, we hate the environment. Roll coal.

Critique of Fuel Efficiency Rollbacks

Anthony: What they’re doing is saying, Hey, the cafe standards, the corporate average fuel economy is too damn high.

We need to make cars less efficient. Hey, auto manufacturers, you know what you’ve spent the last 20 years doing, making your engines more efficient, you’re [00:02:00] stupid, wasting money, make them less efficient. My ride-on mower gets fine. Let’s do that. Put that in cars. They really hate breathing. And so that’s what they’re doing.

And they’re saying This will make cars cheaper. Will it?

Fred: No, of course not. It’s just, it’s stupid. There’s no warehouse full of clunky old cars that they can, or clunky old engines that they can put into new cars.

Technical and Economic Implications

Fred: These production is scheduled years in advance. Production chains and supply chains are working, to establish the products that they need to support their plans.

And it costs a lot of money to say no, we’re gonna interrupt our plans that we’ve been pushing for the last five years, and instead we’re going to develop new cars, new engines that are worse than the ones we’re doing now. And we’re going to, scrap these supply chains and investments we’ve made in all of [00:03:00] this apparatus, exhaust gas recycling, for example.

That’s in production. It’s all good. It increases mileage. It helps the cars run better. So now you’re going to change your supply chain and your design to remove that. If you remove that, it means you’ve gotta. Also changed the combustion chamber design because it’s gonna have different gases flowing in yada.

So you’re gonna have to invest a lot of money to make your engines worse. And this is gonna cost both you and your suppliers billions of dollars to make things that will be more expensive for people to operate. This is just the height of stupidity, which I guess is the new standard for political initiatives, make America Wheeze

Anthony: again.

That’s how I look at it.

Michael: It’s, it’s, there’s a there’s a lot [00:04:00] going on here. There’s a lot of stuff in Cafe that we can’t delve into on the podcast because then no one would listen because it’s just very convoluted. There’s, when Cafe Rule make come out the docket is just so full of.

Scientific papers and all sorts of projections and economic and so much stuff that it becomes hard to follow. And I know our listeners don’t want to hear all that. I don’t wanna read all that stuff. But essentially here’s the administration’s, doubling down on what, Hey Michael, can we

Anthony: interrupt for a second?

Yep. So for those of you not paying for the premium video version of this, Fred and I were just des stipulating wildly. ’cause your audio got very quiet. Yes. I’ll fix it in post. But you was, it was very you were talking in almost whisper mode. Is there

Fred: way we can You have to case to look at the screen, Michael.

Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. He’d see us flailing like freaks. You hear me? You hear me? Now I can hear you, but you’re very quiet. Let’s, that’s weird. It is very strange. Ah, it’s don like [00:05:00] you to be very quiet. Yeah. Little more, a little more on the gain.

Michael: How do I do that? There we go. Let’s see here. I, Hey. Hey. Yes.

Okay. Alright. Alright. I’m back everyone.

Anthony: Okay. Woo.

Electric Vehicle Mandates and Cafe Standards

Michael: I was whispering about this idea that there is an electric vehicle mandate that has been pushed. It’s basically forms the basis of this, really the only electric vehicle mandate in any sense in the countries in California.

And even that I think is. Under consideration as to whether they that can actually be met given the way the electric vehicles have progressed. But essentially here the secretary is saying, look, we’re going back to the 1975 law that Congress passed during the middle of the fuel crisis in the seventies, and we’re going to interpret current cafe standards based on that statute, which, they have the authority to do.

And we’re not going to allow nitsa to consider [00:06:00] electric vehicles and other alternative fuel vehicles in cafe standards because that pushes that, that means that gasoline vehicle manufacturers have to do oh, so much more to catch up with these more efficient vehicles. I think that’s a long way of saying we don’t want more efficient vehicles, right?

We want people and they keep. Putting it in terms of consumer choice, which ultimately here, automakers aren’t incentivized if they’re not incentivized anymore under, under this interpretation to make their gasoline power cars more efficient, which is the ultimate point of cafe.

And what that means is consumers are gonna pay more at the pump. And, while the administration continues to focus on consumer choice or choice of vehicles the real impact is that the auto industry is gonna be less incentivized to produce vehicles using alternate FU fuel sources like EVs, like hybrids, [00:07:00] anything else that might come down the pipe of technology that would boost our ability not to use gasoline.

So what’s gonna happen is you’ll frankly be getting less choice in the type of vehicle that you’re gonna be able to buy. And while selling the vehicles with lower fuel economy will allow manufacturers to save money, and, it also might allow vehicle, it could allow vehicles to have a lower sticker price because they’re not putting all this efficient technology into vehicles.

The amount that’s spent on fuel by consumers is going to counteracting these savings you get there. Plus, we’re still worried the impact of tariff is going to, of tariffs, is gonna ensure pretty much that none of these savings are passed on to the consumer. So all of this garbage going on at the top probably is not gonna trickle down and result in lower prices for any of us.

Fred: But more expensive at the pump, more expensive in the showroom, more expensive for, or you’re eliminating the market for the manufacturers because they’ll no [00:08:00] longer be able to sell in Europe or Asia because these cars just won’t go. It’s o the only objective here is to increase the profit margins for those few companies that are foolish enough to actually put additional investment into producing worse cars.

This is a very strange situation, which can only be written off to gross stupidity.

Anthony: Hey, I don’t wanna pay for a catalytic converter if it’s gonna get stolen anyway. What’s the point? But yeah okay. The US is, I imagine a very large part of the auto market, but as Fred just pointed out, yeah, you can’t be able to sell these cars in Europe.

You won’t be able to sell them in Asia. Even Latin America is putting in some sort of emission standards. So what’s the, this is the complaint they always have is oh, we have to follow California’s regulations for the us But it’s yeah, you gotta follow Germany’s and Englands and Japan’s and the whole rest of the world that says, Hey, we don’t wanna [00:09:00] breathe in particulates all the time.

It’s

Michael: yeah they’re building different cars here than they build for Europe, there’s a whole fleet of safety standards now in Europe that is more advanced than what we have in the United States.

Global Vehicle Safety Standards

Michael: And, if we talk about the Euro end cap stuff and in the podcast today and the interview with David Ward, the director there, there’s, it’s something that’s been happening since the 1990s.

America is being left behind by countries that are more willing to put regulations on the books to ensure that consumers are safe. And protected from harmful emissions and are saving money at the pump and have actual consumer choice. So we’re in a pickle here in America.

Fred: Yeah. Speaking of that, there’s, please go. Yeah I was just gonna say that speaking of consumer choice, let’s not forget that right now Chinese cars are prohibited from sales in the United States, and Chinese cars are now I think [00:10:00] getting to be the largest producer of automobiles in the world, right?

They’ve stepped up into doing that certainly for electric vehicles, vehicle. They’re producing them much cheaper, much higher volume than anyone else in the world. So while this is stupid at so many levels, it’s also promoting the comparative advantage of the Chinese manufacturers in the world market.

Michael: Yeah. And one day, with say the next administration comes along and re-institute a lot of the rules that, that the Biden administration did, the United States is automatically going to be behind these other countries because you’ve, spent the last four years not building your market towards electric vehicles and other alternative forms of fuel.

So it’s, I don’t, they, this whole I don’t know, it seems like this very specific American focus is ultimately going to hurt us in the long run by trying to [00:11:00] boost our status in the world economy now. It’s an odd way to go about it.

Anthony: Yeah. I wonder if manufacturers actually really pay attention to this too much.

Sure. I’m sure the US auto manufacturer, but like Toyota. They have a very different approach.

Michael: They have a very different approach period for everything. But when it comes to electric vehicles

Anthony: yeah, we’ll get to that. But you mentioned David Ward, the now recently retired Head of Europe end Cap, their new car assessment program.

And it’s an article I wish we could share, but unfortunately it’s play pay wall behind Bloomberg. And he’s talking about setting up safety standards. So when he came over to take over Europe end cap in the nineties, the US was ahead in terms of safety. They came in and said, Hey, let’s fix things and make cars safer.

Now, Europe is much farther ahead in terms of safety than the us. He’s putting in these put in place these programs in Latin America, in India and really standardizing things. So quoting from this article this is from David Ward saying, my view is that the more [00:12:00] governments around the world can coalesce around a common framework of vehicle standards, the better it is for industry because they can capitalize on economies of scale.

Right now regulatory standards and emerging markets are playing catch up as those countries absorb a huge expansion in vehicle fleets. It’s important to get emerging markets to embrace common standards shared with high income countries. Otherwise, we’ll get to a two-tiered world of car safety. He’s got my vote.

Michael: Yeah, I think it’s, that’s great. Until you realize that the United States has historically, even though we played a major role in setting up things like the United Nations, we’ve historically been very hesitant to, actually ratify and adhere to the rules that are created by international legal bodies.

It would be awesome if we had a worldwide vehicle safety standards that were very protective and that, countries couldn’t just opt out of. But given the United States history in this [00:13:00] area and a lot of the anti-global. Types that seem to infiltrate our government from time to time.

I’m not sure if it’s a feasible path, in the future, although it’s, it’s really paying dividends and other countries, especially since the nineties, the Latin America and India and Africa have all benefited significantly from some of the increased safety standards that have been put in place around the world.

Anthony: Crazy. I don’t remember what was gonna come out of my face, but it was gonna be really good. It was gonna be really good, but I don’t know what it is anymore. Let’s jump to aaa.

AAA Survey on Electric Vehicles

Anthony: AAA has a survey about that Americans are slow to adopt electric vehicles. And this is. Interesting quoting from their report.

In 2022, gas prices reached $5 prompting ing Americans to consider transitioning to electric vehicles as a cost effective option. In that year’s survey, 77% cited gas savings as their top motivation to purchase. Now the national average for a gallon of regular ranges from $3 to three [00:14:00] 50 or even higher, depending on states.

So they’re saying that, Hey, gas prices drop, people don’t wanna buy EVs anymore. Maybe, I’m sure that’s part of it. Also, I think people realize, wait, Tesla’s been lying to us. Ah they also point out that, people still have range anxiety and that there concerns about availability of electric chargers.

I think we’ve discussed repeatedly on this show that range anxiety for 99% of your life. Is completely irrelevant considering that most commutes are 30 miles a day. Something in that range.

Michael: Yeah.

Anthony: Which, you can do on a, the tiniest little battery possible.

Michael: Yeah. You could do that with a plugin hybrid, you don’t even need a fully electric vehicle.

Anthony: Yeah. And that distance so short, you just need a long enough extension cord and you can remain plugged in the entire time.

Michael: Ah, yeah. Some of the factors in here, they make sense to me. I think, having had a daughter 10 hours away in college would hedge [00:15:00] me against the long distance travel in an ev that, that’s 57% of the folks in the survey by AAA cited that, EVs are unsuitable for long distance travel.

As someone who doesn’t like to stop, likes to basically drive straight through and stop for, a few minutes, five minutes at a time to get gas, get something to eat quickly and get back on the road. Sitting at a charging station for an hour is simply unacceptable to me. And I can’t get around that.

That’s, and then between that and the simple cost of EVs, which, yes, there are a very few affordable ev EVs, speaking of consumer choice, they’re just you simply don’t have the options there at the price I’m willing to spend on a car. And so some of these, some of these factors resonate, pretty strongly with me.

I agree that EVs really aren’t quite there yet. They’re certainly [00:16:00] not as convenient as gasoline powered vehicles. But their upside may one day be far, some of these factors may be mitigating the future. Right now we’re seeing the Biden, the Trump administration go after the electric charging infrastructure, and that’s gonna be a huge problem since, most people are concerned about that and aren’t gonna buy an EV unless it’s just as easy to fill up at a charger as it is to fill up at a gas station.

So we still got a long way to go here. Before electric vehicles, I think and that kind of, that I’m glossing over some of the problems we talk about frequently, which is the sheer weight of the batteries going into and the increase in the size of our fleets and the impact that’s gonna have on safety.

So there’s still a lot of unresolved issues here. And I, I think part of the reason that there is such a backlash to electric vehicles is because, they, there, there have been a lot of promotion of electric vehicles and a lot of attempts to push them. There have been a lot of attempts to push them on America in [00:17:00] some way, perhaps before they’re completely ready for prime time.

And, that’s contributed to some of this political upheaval we’re seeing around electrification.

Anthony: Hey, listeners, do you have an electric vehicle? If so, maybe you got a couple extra box left over. Go to auto safety.org, click on donate. If you support electric vehicles, click on donate. If you don’t support electric vehicles, click on donate.

If you support Michael view that we need a one world government to regulate safety in cars, click on donate. Why not? Ah, I’m curious about the AAA thing. ’cause I imagine aaa, they’re just surveying their members and I think their members probably skew a little old and a little more conservative than average bear.

Perhaps I AAA’s

Michael: all also they’re very, I think they continually support the idea of vehicle choice. I don’t think they’re not in the same corner as the Center for Auto Safety when it comes to heavy electric vehicles. You. For whatever reason. I think that it’s because they [00:18:00] depend on a variety of members across the country and they like to play it safe politically.

Anthony: Okay. I can agree with that.

Gaslight of the Week: Wall Street Journal and Waymo

Anthony: Hey, let’s let’s play a little Gaslight fun. I’m gonna kick off some gaslighting. My gaslight this week is gonna be, and I don’t know if one of you guys have chose this. No, it’s not Kathy Wood. It’s not Waymo. It’s the Wall Street Journal. That’s thought that’s gonna be mine.

Oh, that’s gonna be yours. Ah, sorry. Ha. The Wall Street Journal has this incredibly stupid article and I’m a big fan of the Wall Street Journal. They’re reporters are top-notch. They are

Michael: and, most of them,

Anthony: most of, yeah. Their editorial page is written by people who don’t read the newspaper.

Anyway, this article is titled The Car of the Future Will Transform The Great American Road Trip, and it is literally a GM puff piece from like 1930s about Welcome to the future. It’s pointing out that, hey, we’re on the cusp of cars that drive themselves. We don’t need steering wheels and everything like that.

We’ll turn your car into a little movie theater, a salon, a [00:19:00] place for you to hang out with friends. It’s beyond absurd. It’s, they have Cadillac showing off these concept vehicles and I’d like to point out that Cadillac, general Motors, they can’t even get advanced emergency braking working at highway speed.

Yeah, I don’t think this is happening anytime soon. They can’t do anything basic like this. I’m not gonna trust them and be like, oh this car, I’m gonna watch a movie. Movie. Who again? We pointed out most commutes are under 30 miles. Wh why are, what are you doing? What’s happening here? So my Gaslight of the week, the Wall Street Journal, boo.

Michael: All I’m gonna, I’m gonna I’m just gonna go with the Wall Street Journal as well, because I wanna touch on a couple other things. First of all, everyone take a look at the picture at the top of this article if you can access it. It’s essentially a family and a dog in around a circular table with swivel chairs.

There’s a cat

Anthony: too. There’s a cat [00:20:00] drinking wine.

Michael: A drinking wine. It looks like there’s a glass of wine in front of a child too. Yeah, it’s interesting.

Anthony: That could

Michael: be French is no planet on which people are going to be able to be on roads riding around unrestrained in swivel chairs. And be safe. It, it’s, I don’t know where this world is, but it’s not a world where there are any human drivers on the road.

I don’t think anyone would be safe in that respect. There’s, the dad in the photo is standing up in this, what looks like a massive camper on the wheels. He’s

Anthony: got like an extra two feet of headroom above him.

Michael: Yeah, and it’s just an absurd idea to think that you can ride in a vehicle any moving conveyance really, other than perhaps a train or something like that, but without being restrained, there has to be such a gigantically low margin for error or crash there because if you’re unrestrained like [00:21:00] these folks in this picture are, and virtually anything happens to the vehicle, you’re going to be in a whole lot of trouble.

So that clearly the people you know who are writing these articles have their head in the clouds and, don’t really, aren’t really thinking a lot about the safety impact of, dogs and cats and people and wine glasses flying around. An enclosed space when you come to a sudden stop at 50 miles an hour.

So it just highlights the fantasy that, the Wall Street Journal is latching onto here.

Anthony: I agree. All right, that’s good. Fred, there’s two votes for the Wall Street Journal. Let’s point out to listeners, you don’t have the greatest track record of winning this, okay, last week maybe. But what do you got from me this week?

Fred: It’s gonna be tough to beat Wall Street Journal. I confess, but a perennial favorite of mine is a Waymo. Ah, that’s you gotta fight in

Anthony: chance

Fred: now. So this week, Waymo [00:22:00] published a video of a dog running across the street, and then on its return trip, a Waymo stopped. And so this is Prima faci evidence by Waymo of the safety of Waymo’s and get a nice thank you from the owner of the dog, and excuse me.

And Waymo said clearly safety is our first priority. That’s fine, but if you take it apart a little bit, number one, the dog was running illegally on the street. So that’s interesting. Number two you cannot tell from the video whether or not the dog would have been hit by the car number, but number three, and most important, clearly safety is not the first priority because the first priority has gotta be operations.

’cause if the first priority of Waymo were safety, they wouldn’t operate the vehicles. Think of it for a moment. If Waymo didn’t operate the vehicles, there is zero [00:23:00] probability of their causing an accident.

Anthony: So I like that. This is like you’re saying, if Smith and Wesson said, our number one priority is safety.

Michael: Shut down. But the entire auto industry shut down today and we eliminated cars. No one would die in car crashes. There you go. So

Fred: that’s, clearly safety is not the first priority, but operations. But we, we have to get places

Michael: though,

Fred: right? We have to be places.

Second priority has got to be revenue generation, because Waymo’s are not gonna run for free. And they’re, they’re very proud of the fact that they’ve got tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of paying customers per week now. So clearly safety is not their first priority. It’s not their second priority, which would be revenue generation.

So it’s possibly the third priority. Still good for them for not killing the dog that they probably wouldn’t have killed anyway because the dog was trying to avoid the Waymo. But kudos to Rover [00:24:00] for. Surviving the trip. I, what I think about in this situation is that if you were a human being and you put blindfold on and you decided to walk across the street with a blindfold regardless of the traffic, you would probably survive because other people would compensate for you.

Other people would try to avoid you. People, they try to avoid hitting people, right? And it would be thrilling. And every time I see people talk about the Waymo and how thrilling it is to ride in and there’s no driver, and gosh, I was so excited looking at you, Katie, Kirk it just reminds me of the fact that you would probably be just fine walking across the street with your eyes closed, hoping that nobody’s gonna hit you.

That would also be thrilling. I don’t know, at an all resolves to Waymo just trying to substitute rhetoric or safety engineering and saying, yeah, we got your back. We’d never do [00:25:00] anything to hurt you. But the simple fact that they’re out there, the simple fact that they’re vehicles are threatening dogs and humans and other vehicles unnecessarily because there’s nothing they do that a human being can’t do just as well, tells me that safety is not, and could never be Waymo’s first priority.

So I give them my gaslight again.

Anthony: That’s a pretty good one. This is a tough one to score this week because, Waymo is a favorite, but Michael and I both agreed on the same thing. I’m giving it a tie. Being magnanimous this week. Ah, that is, I’m moving up in the ranks. That’s good. I don’t know if you’re moving up.

You didn’t move down. Let’s put it that way. You didn’t go backwards. Yeah. Is

Michael: it scary, Fred, that Waymo is performing better than all of the other autonomous vehicle companies that we’re aware of on Earth at the moment, and yet we still have concerns about their operations?

Anthony: Again, limited operating design domain.

They’re only operating on City Streets only [00:26:00] operating at roughly 35 miles per hour at Max. Yeah. And again, I still don’t I’d like to ask the executives, the C-Suite at Alphabet, what’s the business plan here? Because you’ve already set over $10 billion on fire. You’ve eliminated humans, but that’s not really the expense in this.

Uber’s not sitting there going, ah, if we can only eliminate those minimum wage drivers who let us know when the cars have vomit in them, that we can clean and if tires are damaged and whatnot, if we can get rid of those pesky people, we’ll make more money. Like they, they’ve, not thought this out.

Unfortunately. I don’t think Google’s had a good idea since the late nineties, but,

Michael: Quick correction. Waymo is operating on freeways now, I think in La, San Francisco and Phoenix. I’m not sure how their la not sure how their LA operations going on at the moment, but I think they’ve sh they’ve temporarily shut down there.

But yes, they’re operating on on, starting to operate on freeways, which. As we discussed numerous [00:27:00] times, our, interstates are actually probably the safest place to be based on the data.

Fred: And to be fair, operating down the interstates in Los Angeles and San Francisco is still on 45 miles an hour’s.

Anthony: True. I, when I lived there, I remember the traffic going backwards once on the 1 0 1 and I was like, oh, why do I live here? Speaking of Waymo’s in la so there’s big protests happening in Southern California. And the protestors have a novel idea. They’ve been requesting Waymo’s to the protest site and then they set them on fire.

I don’t think this is an anti ev, anti autonomous vehicle thing. I think this is just an easy way for them to blockage streets,

Michael: i’m sure there’s some kind of anti billionaire, the hot thing going on there as well, maybe

Protesting ICE with EV Fires

Anthony: I don’t understand, but somebody pointed out, okay, so they’re protesting ice, the Immigration Customs Enforcement they’re protesting ice by setting EVs on fire.

Would it be better to set ice vehicles on fire? I keep it [00:28:00] consistent. Protesters well

Fred: probably be, people would, except, they, they have armed guard on the ice vehicle, so it’s a little inconvenient.

Anthony: They Oh, they have human drivers in the ice vehicles. I get ya.

Michael: They do, yeah. They typically yeah, the ice vehicles can actually get away.

I think is a big part of this. Whereas an autonomous vehicle that’s programmed not to take drastic action in the presence of humans is an easy target. As we’ve seen, from dozens of different articles in involving Waymo’s and a lot of the vandalism. They’ve been subjected to the poor Waymo’s.

Anthony: But

Michael: listen and other

Anthony: I was just, yeah,

Fred: go. In other countries people will often burn tires in the street to provide the same kind of obstruction. But in LA it’s easier to get way more than it is to get a tire. I think. So why not?

Anthony: Yeah, protestors, I get anger and frustration, but don’t set an ev on fire just because of the toxic gases from the [00:29:00] lithium ion batteries.

That’s the true danger of what you’re doing, is you’re creating a massive toxic cloud that, as Fred Perkins has pointed out numerous times, how many fire trucks does it take to put out a Tesla? At least 10. Ah, I thought it was 30. I told someone recently it was 300. Let’s see. No,

Fred: 3000 gallons.

300 gallons per per firetruck minimum. So we’re talking about 10 or something, but don’t forget it’s gonna reignite. So there’ll be plenty of opportunities for the home for the home viewers.

Michael: Alright, it looks like Wabo is also a suspending service in some spots in San Francisco as well, in light of the protests that are going on in that area too.

Anthony: Crazy.

California’s Autonomous Agriculture Ban

Anthony: Let’s continue with California ’cause this is a fascinating article. This is in nbc area.com. NBC bay area.com. I’m sorry. It’s talking about that California, which we all know has a bunch of autonomous vehicles out on the road [00:30:00] and, but in the world of agriculture, it is not allowed. There’s a ban on autonomous agriculture equipment.

Quoting from the article, when it comes to farming equipment, an operator must be stationed at the controls according to California safety regulations. Those rules were written nearly 50 years ago, long before autonomous tech was developed. That’s fascinating. This, is this just a holdover of an old law that hasn’t been updated?

Is this, is there a real safety concern here?

Fred: Agricultural equipment will often have 50 foot wide booms with cutting tools on them to, cut down wide swaths of corn stalks or rice or whatever. So there’s a lot of danger, a lot of a lot of blades, a lot of really dangerous equipment. As we’ve said before, many times.

Dangerous automatic equipment should be separated from human beings by physical [00:31:00] barriers so that the human beings don’t get killed by the dangerous machinery. This should also be applicable to EVs and autonomous vehicles, but the farmers are trying to turn that around to say if you allow the autonomous vehicles editors note, they should not.

But if you allow the autonomous vehicles on the road, then you should also allow them on the non road, because, gosh, what’s good for the goose? It’s gotta be good for the gander. This is a complete reversal of logic and human safety, public safety in the vicinity of automatic machinery.

Michael: Yeah, I think, I agree.

Larry Jacobs, the farmer who’s interviewed NAR article is, I totally agree with him that it doesn’t make a lot of sense the incongruence between allowing autonomous vehicle in the street and not allowing them in a field where presumably you’re gonna have a [00:32:00] lot less people at risk due to the operation of these tractors and whatever else they’re using out there.

But, I think the big difference here is that, there may be more of a I think there’s a better use case argument for driverless tractors, given the fact that, it’s farmers seem to be struggling mightily to find enough workers to operate this type of machinery on their farms.

I guess an analogy there could be made to the trucking industry, which is also somewhat short of workers and is using that as an argument to advance their belief that autonomous trucks are necessary. But. On the farm, there’s usually no one around. And the safety threat here, I think the safety threat here was actually that the reason that these, the tractors aren’t allowed to operate in California autonomously is because of California’s what is essentially California’s OSHA division.

So they’re looking at the occupational safety of farm workers who would [00:33:00] be around these, this machinery. I suppose perhaps, the autonomous tractors so far have shown that they can, properly harvest a field or plow a field, but they’re not able to recognize workers or stop in those situations.

Who knows. But for now, and it was a close vote, four to three by California’s occupational Safety and Health Standards Board which suggests that could change soon. And I would expect that it would change soon in light of the fact that the rest of the world seems to be rushing towards this kind of fantasy that autonomy is going to save us from ourselves.

Anthony: Osha, that sounds like some left-wing conspiracy started by the guy who started the Center for Auto Safety. Ah, if you like that, go to auto safety.org. Click on donate and continue funding that left-wing propaganda machine. Or we continue to talk about safety, but now we’re gonna talk about someone who is very non-safety.

Tesla’s Transparency Issues

Anthony: Let’s talk Tesla. Okay. I know. [00:34:00] We only got two Tesla things we’re gonna hit. And actually they’re all, they’re both related from the drive. Elon Musk’s Tesla cries competitive harm over self-driving crash data disclosure. So basically Tesla says, Hey, every time our vehicles crash where they’re using a DAS and autopilot and full self-driving and whatnot, we don’t wanna share that information with the public.

That’s right. We wanna put these things out on the road and not tell you when it happens. Nope. ’cause then our competitors will find out how crappy we are, or, and consumers really will find out, oh shit I’m paying $10,000 for a piece of crap. But if you ever sat in a Tesla, you’d realize, oh, it’s really cheap in plastic.

Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. This quoting from this article it really comes down to this. If Nitsa releases Tesla’s crash data to the public, it may weather directly or indirectly deter people from buying its cars and would be an unfair to compel the company to reveal them. How insane is this? Has there ever been any other car [00:35:00] or consumer product where we’re like.

Look, we can’t tell the public how dangerous and bad this stuff is.

Michael: Yeah. Oh, there has been. Oh, there have been a lot of that. The auto industry for decades now has been trying to keep evidence of its crashes out of the public

Anthony: trying Have they succeeded? Yes.

Michael: Ah, damn it. Yes. In many respects. Look, there are many situations where crashes occur and the victims in that crash are given a settlement and a gag order.

Essentially, they sign a nondisclosure agreement that says they can’t talk about it anymore. Before Nitsa made it clear in some of its I don’t know if it was a reg, it wasn’t a regulation, but I believe they basically let the auto industry know this. But they made it clear that. You can’t force people to sign non-disclosure agreements that prevent nitsa from finding out about crashes.

This is something that has gone on forever. The auto industry doesn’t want America to have good data and good [00:36:00] investigation of crashes involving, its because it’s for the same reason that Tesla is opposing this. They get, if Americans know which vehicles suck and which ones are great and safety, they’re not gonna buy the bad ones.

But Tesla here is performing a slide of hand because this is all coming out of the standing general order, which most of our listeners should be familiar with. But basically Tesla has to submit any crashes involving autopilot or full self-driving to nsa. And, but the problem is when they submit them and the data is made public.

If you or I go and click on the NSA website and download the spreadsheet, we’ll see a lot of Tesla crashes. But there will be very little information on, there’s gonna be no information on what actually happened in the crash. So a description of a crash happening on a public road in the United States is protected from disclosure from the citizens of the United States.

That should get everyone [00:37:00] paused right there. But also, Tesla’s argument isn’t that in court, they’re not saying, oh, we don’t want consumers to have this information. They’re saying because they’re asking for protection under confidential business information regulations that Nitsa has. They’re saying, we don’t want our competitors to have access to this information because it will allow them to plan around us and beat us to whatever it is, whatever.

Ultimate goal there is there. So they’re saying that it’s competitive harm due to the fact that competitors will be able to access our data. This data is nothing that competitors could use. At most it’s going to be, show what version of the full self-driving or autopilot is being used at the time of the crash.

It’s not telling competitors anything about the underlying mechanisms or software that’s working here. So the argument is bullshit. We’re certainly on the side of the Washington Post in this case because, we have [00:38:00] long. Wanted more information from the standing general order to be made public Right now.

Nitsa can see all the things that Tesla’s trying to protect from reaching the public. So Nitsa has that ability to evaluate this information. But, traffic safety, researchers, advocacy groups, a lot of other groups don’t have access to this information and it makes it very hard to evaluate Tesla’s safety performance if you don’t have that.

And that’s exactly what Tesla wants. When they’re selling this, giant lie about their cars being autonomous. The last thing they want to do is give the public any transparency as to the actual performance. They haven’t even released their rate of interventions and that type of thing where, how often their driver has to take over.

They don’t want the public knowing that because. If you compared their data with what Waymo is doing, you would instantly see that Tesla’s claims to autonomy are false.

Anthony: Tesla, the big [00:39:00] lie from an article in MSN, we’re linking to Tesla now. This is episodes coming out Thursday. This is the day that Tesla’s supposedly releasing the Robotaxis on the streets of Austin.

Hopefully no one’s been crashed into already. But this article, quoting Tesla, has reportedly sought to block journalist access to Austin’s public records concerning the company’s plan to launch Robotaxis in the city later this month. Okay, so now they’re preemptively suing, saying, Hey, yes, we’re gonna put something out there.

We don’t want anyone to know how shitty it is. Yeah. Now that’s a company with confidence. Yeah. That’s a company who’s we stand firmly behind our lawyers and not letting anybody know how shitty it is. Oh my God. Tesla, I. I’m not an investor, but I’d say short sell the hell outta this company.

But then again, the people who are investing in this stuff are lunatics. Yeah. Keep bidding it up. I don’t understand. Anyway,

Michael: it’s, this is a totally weird one too. And we’ve seen, a lot of the, we’re not even sure that, Thursday the 12th is [00:40:00] going to be the day where Tesla starts, its rollout of these vehicles or starts operating or starts taking passengers.

The details on the what actually is going to happen, like a lot of things involving Tesla simply aren’t available yet. And so it’s, there are a lot of promises and a lot of Twitter talk about things, but there are really no hard facts. Tesla apparently, was in a discussion or was submitting documents to Austin, Texas about, what their operations were gonna be, what processes are gonna take place, how, what’s your procedures, what’s your strategy?

And someone filed an a a request for those records an op, an open records request, and now Tesla’s objecting to any of that information being turned over because they don’t want the public knowing anything about their operations. And probably because, it, it would be quite easy to pick apart what Tesla is telling Austin for us at [00:41:00] least and to show the public that Tesla doesn’t have the proper procedures and strategy in place to safely deploy these things.

So there’s a, just a lot of shenanigans going on around Tesla and the supposed deployment of autonomy in Austin.

Fred: Those have the sound of desperation to it, doesn’t it?

Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, it’s

Anthony: very much

Michael: Like maybe your stock is tanking and you need a big hit.

Anthony: Yeah. I think when, sometimes you get into an Uber or a Lyft and whatnot, and the driver will supply you a little bottle of water.

Do you think the tobo, the Tesla Robotaxis will supply a little hit of ketamine? Ooh, no. I’m thinking that’s what it’ll be. Who knows? Yeah. A little ketamine. Little boff. It’ll be a good time.

Shipping EVs and Fire Risks

Anthony: And with that, let’s transition to a quick Tower of Fred,

Fred: quick Tower of Fred. Will dive right in to the ocean.

You asked Ocean, ooh, a couple weeks ago. Why are these ships burning? [00:42:00] Why can’t they ship electric vehicles without burning the yeah. This was a, yeah, there was the freighters ship last

Michael: week. Oh, shipping EVs. I didn’t put that out yet.

Fred: Sorry. So I decided to put a few numbers on this.

Any EV has got somewhere between, or or hybrid vehicle. It’s got something like 3000 to 8,000 individual battery cells per car. The morning Midas, which is the ship that is burning currently off the coast of Alaska, was ca reportedly carrying 70 fully electric and about 680 hybrid vehicles.

It was another, it’s still burning

Michael: A week later,

Fred: right? Yes. Yeah. Still burning. And they’re just gonna let it burn until it burns out. It may sink. We’ll, we will find out about that. But there was another fire in 2023 aboard a ship called the morning no, what was it called? It was called the something else.

Anyway, it had several [00:43:00] hundred cars on board by Volkswagen and they were shipping those to the United States. So if you crunch the numbers a little bit, anywhere around 500 cars, which is what that individual ship had on board means somewhere between one and a half to 4 million battery cells. So we didn’t know what the battery manufacturers were quality requirements are, but many companies try to achieve what’s called Six Sigma quality.

You’ve probably seen that in advertisements. Six Sigma, quality for manufacturing, repeatability and safety and all those good things. What that act, few companies actually achieve that. But assuming that the companies who are building the batteries are trying to do that means you’ve got 3.4 defects per million cells or something like five to 12 defective battery cells per [00:44:00] 500 EVs.

Which is a typical number that should have onboard a ship, right? If you include both the hybrids and the luxury vehicles, that’s representative of the number that’s currently burning off of the coast of Alaska. And it was on the ship that went down with the off the coast of the Azos in 2023.

Anyway, digressing a little bit here. But if you think of that, if you’ve got 3.4 defects per million or five to 12 defected battery cells per 500 EVs, you’ve got lots of opportunities and predicting of lots of defective cells in any ship that’s carrying a substantial number of electric vehicles.

So it’s not surprising that occasionally they’re gonna go, they’re going to fail and burst into flames. Not every defect is gonna cause it to burst into flames. But the problem with defects is they’re random and [00:45:00] among the numbers of things that can happen and the defect to cell is the defect of membrane separating the anode from the cathode.

And that will always cause a spontaneous fire. The problem with these fires is that they’re chain reactions, right? And when one goes, it heats up the one next to it and the one next to it fails, and so on until you’ve got the whole ship of blades. So that’s why we’re seeing that, and I think that’s, that is inevitable with EVs.

Now, what’s interesting about that to me is that if we’re talking about Six Sigma, which is, three failures per million batteries, something like that. The contrast vividly with what a RC was saying is a quality requirement for their airbag inflators, which is, if you recall, 95%. So there are orders of magnitude less reliability associated with the airbag inflators [00:46:00] than with what would be expected for battery manufacturer.

It’s interesting to me that the car companies don’t care about this and that they’re allowing this wide disparity in safety critical components to be put into their vehicles. Ironically, there was an Norwegian ferry company that is the leader in electric ferries that has banned electric vehicles from being transported on its ships.

Because of this, the poor safety of the lithium ion batteries in the electric vehicles and quoting from their announcement, lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles poses significant fire risk. Which is further emphasized after the Felicity Ace cargo ship sank almost a year ago. This is the ship off the Azores, following a safety assessment regarding fire risks.

A Norwegian ferry company decided to ban all but purely ICE vehicles from its vessels. This points out in my mind the difference between [00:47:00] the safety of vehicles that are forced to go through a third party safety review before they’re allowed to be used, versus the car vehicles or the automobiles where they vigorously resist any third party review of the safety of the vehicles.

It’s a vivid contrast between the safety that is available to car companies if they do the proper thing and get the third party review, like for example, through review all 4,600 audit versus the way they insist on doing business, which is to just put it out there. We fork to fail and then try to have a culpa that doesn’t sync the company.

So that’s it for this week folks.

Anthony: Fred, do you have any idea why? Actually, I think Michael asked this question. Why don’t these companies ship the cars with no charge in the batteries? Would that make a difference? No. Oh okay.

Fred: We can’t charging batteries ’cause they’ve gotta get, move them into and out of the ship, [00:48:00] right?

So there’s gotta be something there.

Anthony: Okay.

Low char,

Fred: the real problem is that the lithium ion batteries don’t need oxygen or any external fuel in order to burn. They’ve got everything they need inside of them. So once they fail, they’re just gonna go and you can’t have zero charge. For practical reasons.

You gotta be able to move the cars in and out of the, in and out of the freighter unless you’re gonna lift them out with a crane. But that, that’s not gonna happen. So yeah, there are handling requirements that require a certain amount of charge. They try not to have ’em fully charged, I’m not sure exactly where they draw the line.

Anthony: All right.

Volvo’s Adaptive Seatbelt Innovation

Anthony: Before we jump into recalls, let’s do a fun one. That’s right. I’m calling this a fun one. Volvo has invented a adaptive seatbelt quoting from this article in new atlas.com. In 1959, Volvo engineer Neils Bolen created the three point seatbelt and offer the design plans for free to auto makers around the world.

Everyone take [00:49:00] a moment and applaud Neil’s Bolen. How cool is that? He comes up with something that literally saves tons of lives, and he is yeah, everyone take it for free. We need this out there. Amazing. Further the new multi adaptive safety belts can use in use data input from interior and exterior sensors to customize protection, adapting the setting based on the situation and individual’s profiles such as their height, weight, body shape, and seating position.

In addition. Now this is the part I don’t like. The seat belt’s function is expected to get better over time, thanks to over the air software updates,

Michael: and that’s not a bad thing, right?

Anthony: I just,

Michael: I don’t know

Anthony: if know about software. At, it’s not

Michael: saying, at least, it’s not saying that AI is gonna do it.

That’s, it’s essentially saying that Volvo, as engineers, as, as the technology develops, we’re gonna be able to make your seatbelt, even more protective of you and update it over the air through the software. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m just happy, and I think all of us [00:50:00] on this podcast are happy because none of us are the five foot, 10, 170 pound male or whatever that’s used for crash tests.

You don’t know.

Anthony: I could be,

Michael: I just, I think it’s great that you know that they’re making a belt that could, we’ve talked a lot about how female bodies are not protected as well in crashes as males for a lot of reasons. A seatbelt that adjusts itself to the person in the seat.

And frankly, I. An entire occupant protection system that adjusts to the humans in the car is awesome. That’s a great use of technology. I think that’s far more useful than deploying autonomy across the streets of America. Making, we see a lot of, cer certain types of injuries happen to certain size people in crashes.

And it’s great that Volvo’s doing this, and hopefully, it, it’s, it took, the Volvo engineer that created the three point seat belt, it took quite some time before those seat belts were actually put into all occupant positions in the car. I know that all of us rode around us children in the backseat [00:51:00] with a lap belt only, which has some issues and crashes.

And it’s, it will be interesting to me to see just how long it takes other manufacturers to start putting this type of thing into their vehicles.

Anthony: We didn’t use the lap bolt when I was a kid in the backseat. You didn’t have to ’cause the cars had this, you didn’t use anything, right? No.

The cars had this amazing safety system that was this plastic vinyl covering over the seats and your body would just stick to it. So if you’re ever in an accident, you’re just, you’re not moving. Anyway let’s go to recalls.

Mazda and Cadillac Recalls

Anthony: Mazda one thou 171,412 vehicles. This is the 2024 to 2025 Mazda, Mazda three the CX 30 and the what’s going on here?

The battery becomes completely depleted, leaving the ignition switch in the on position for two hours or more without the engine running. There’s a battery issue. This is just it. The way it’s written is very confusing to me for the, yeah, it’s affecting the [00:52:00] sophisticated airbag sensor.

Michael: As oppo, as opposed to airbag sensors that, that don’t, are unsated, don’t drink tea with their peaky out.

So essentially this is a kind of a rare fault that happens. If someone leaves their keying ignition or the ignition switch in the own position, I’m not sure if these vehicles have keys or not, but if you leave the ignition switch in the own position, I’m assuming it’s a key for two hours or more without the engine running.

There’s a fault that’s stored in the airbag sensor unit. And then when the vehicle’s restarted, the airbag is non-operational. The airbag warning light comes on for owners out there, these vehicles. So you should have a warning of this but also don’t leave your ignition switch on for two hours without the in ignition, without the engine running.

I can’t imagine. It looks like this was a very random. Fault in the system. And it’s a good thing Mazda called it be before it caused any problems. Owners can expect to hear about this [00:53:00] in late July. It looks like they’re gonna it looks like they’re still developing the exact fix.

They may even replace the unit depending on what, what’s going on with your specific vehicle. Yeah,

Anthony: there’s I can’t imagine they actually have a physical key. I don’t. Do they still make cars with physical keys? Because this is a new car?

Michael: I think folks a number of manufacturers do. I know, I mean my Volkswagen has a physical key.

I actually like the physical key, but that’s probably just ’cause I’m a little old fashioned and haven’t fully grasped a button yet. It seems like having, from a human factors perspective, it seems like having a physical key that you have to put in that moves around with you makes it less likely that you’re going to leave the car on, possibly leave the transmission in the wrong spot, a lot of different things.

I like keys.

Anthony: Okay. With that. Moving on to the next one. 41,376 vehicles from Cadillac. The 2024 Cadillac lyric the 2023 [00:54:00] Cadillac Lyric general Motors has decided that a defect, which relates to motor vehicle safety exists in certain. Your Cadillac lyrics, the driver video display in these vehicles may indeterminate, intermittently go blank while driving.

God the infotainment. Stupid. Stupid, ugh blah. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t the rear view camera at least this time, but come,

Michael: no, it actually is. I is the rear view camera. Come on. That’s one of the things that’s not gonna be available. So yes, this is yet another rear view camera recall, but also your entire dashboard can go out.

It looks like it’s completely related to the videos display, the video displays, control module software. And some owners will get it. Some owners, they will actually get an OTA update to fix this and won’t even have to go into their dealership. The other folks are gonna have to go into their dealer and get the, software [00:55:00] update. And that should happen pretty soon. It looks like the plan on a notification date is next week.

Anthony: Crazy. Last one, not a recall.

Kia Windshield Wiper Investigation

Anthony: This is a office of Defects Investigation. This is for Kia and it is revolving involving their windshield wipers, though windshield wipers stop functioning while driving when snow or ice accumulates on or at the bottom of the windshield.

Oh, that’s that’s what I want my wipers to work.

Fred: Yeah, that could be inconvenient. It could be,

Michael: yeah. There’s not a lot of details on this, but this is invest the most recent investigation, I believe that was open by nsa on 24 25 Kia V nine. So there’s not a lot of information other than that.

People’s windshield wipers stop functioning when snow or ice accumulates there. Hopefully they’ll get this fixed before next winter.

Anthony: My guess is weak motors because we’ve seen similar Yeah. Things like this before. All right.

Conclusion and Next Week’s Preview

Anthony: And that’s it for now. Thanks listeners. We’ll be back next week and we’ll tell you all about what happened with [00:56:00] Tesla’s ro at Taxi.

Fred: Oh, thanks for listening. Stand by. Yeah. Thanks everybody. Bye. For

Michael: more information, visit www.auto safety.org.