Road to Safety: Waymo Incidents and Dangerous Intersections

[00:00:00] Introduction and Podcast Overview

[00:00:00] Anthony: You’re 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. Not

even going to wait for you. Look at this blue shirt. This day.

[00:00:32] Michael: We haven’t made it. We haven’t, Tickly Wiggly has not made it into a few episodes lately.

[00:00:37] Fred: Are we getting slacking off? It must be summer. It must be. It’s the heat dome. It’s the heat dome.

[00:00:43] Anthony: I’ve already hit the record button. People are suffering through this nonsense right now.

I’m sorry. Somebody loves us. They must be. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of their auto be a law or as the auto trans, the AI [00:01:00] transcription software calls it. They’re some weird, nevermind. This is stupid. Hey.

[00:01:05] Waymo’s RoboTaxi Incident

[00:01:05] Anthony: So we record the shows on Wednesdays, and what I’ve discovered is all the cool car news comes out on Thursdays.

It drives me nuts. Every week, we do a show, we record it on Wednesday, it comes out Thursday, and then at 7 a. m. Thursday morning, you see all these amazing videos. auto stories. For example, one that came out last Thursday was from the Burj, Waymo issues software and mapping recall after RoboTaxi crashes into a telephone pole.

Waymo the self driving RoboTaxi company that we’ve said is better than GM Cruise because anything’s better than GM Cruise managed to drive into a telephone pole. It’s very impressive. Waymo is issuing a voluntary software recall after one of its driverless vehicles collided with a telephone pole in Phoenix, Arizona last month.

The vehicle was damaged, but no passengers or bystanders were hurt in the [00:02:00] incident. Waymo goes on and says, We’re safer than humans.

[00:02:04] Fred: To be fair to Waymo, it was only one telephone pole. That’s true.

[00:02:09] Michael: Uh, it’s, they responded pretty quick, right? We see incidents that are a lot more serious than hitting a telephone pole involving other car manufacturers, autonomous or not.

And, Frankly, a lot of those times, you’ll have a crash, there’s a defect involved. The first thing that happens is, is lawyers get involved. The case may be settled before it even comes to court and no one ever hears about it. Waymo doesn’t exactly have that luxury since there’s so much, coverage of them and these incidents come to light pretty quick in the media.

And, they responded, within days. Two weeks or so from the incident with a software update and a new map that their vehicles use to run properly. Something we suggest Tesla and some other manufacturers [00:03:00] probably be using as well. But they’re going to get a new software update, a new map update.

I don’t have to tell owners when that’s going to happen because there are Waymo’s other than Waymo. So they’ve, they’re doing some new mapping to fix this. I don’t know if this was, is a problem that is arisen because, they’re trying to move a little faster than normal or what’s going on here.

But fortunately you won’t see, hopefully any more Waymo’s hitting telephone poles.

[00:03:29] Fred: Yeah.

[00:03:29] Challenges in Software Validation

[00:03:29] Fred: We’ve talked before about software validation. It’s not easy. And you need to go back when you make a change to software, especially complex software where there’s a lot of interrelationships among the different parts of the software program.

For example, the perception of an AV requires inputs from all of the sensors. It requires interpretation of all of those inputs from all of the sensors. It requires The processing of the data that’s coming in from [00:04:00] the from the cameras and conversion of those into virtual images that can be used inside the computer algorithms, et cetera, et cetera, there’s a lot to that.

And when somebody comes out and makes a change like this, which has got to be fundamental. How in the world can they validate it overnight? I don’t understand. Do you? I think the only way they can do that is to just run a bunch of simulations and say QED, we’re all done here. Video of Fred Perkins wiping his hands.

That’s not the right way to do things. And they need to validate the software. Using real situations, real vehicles, real sensors, and real images. And I just can’t believe that they’re doing a thorough job of software validation of an update. This critical, or say it’s a critical function, essentially overnight.

And then saying it’s great and we’re going to launch it out into the [00:05:00] world. This is a very complex and critical process that should not be treated lightly. End of rant.

[00:05:08] Michael: I guess I was, instead of I don’t know, what are they supposed to do in this situation, when they’re trying to validate new software to get a recall out, obviously there’s a, gotta be a happy medium somewhere between pure simulation and setting up a master road course full of telephone poles that emulates all the possible telephone poles in America, right?

Where’s the happy medium there where, I guess consumers and Waymo can feel comfortable with how well they’ve done a recall?

[00:05:40] Statistical Confidence in AV Testing

[00:05:40] Fred: This is where you get into statistical confidence, right? You need to have a threshold for statistical confidence to say it’s good enough. What is the threshold?

We don’t know. It’s apparently very low because they don’t require a lot of testing to do this. How could they do this? How could they approach it? In a perfect world, what they would do is they would first dive in, [00:06:00] understand why this happened, figure out where the margins are on, not just this telephone pole, but what is it about telephone poles and vertical structures that caused this failure to take place.

They would then find what the critical parameters were in that analysis and Set up a test somewhere where they can take the vehicle, run it through the test and make sure that not only does it detect this telephone pole, but it also addresses all of the other critical faults that they found, because they will find other critical faults.

And then, once they’ve run that test in many ways, say, running it a hundred times so that they can build up a decent amount of statistics, of statistical confidence, then you put it back on the road and endanger people. If you want to keep it on the track, if you want to keep it on the track, fine, do a crappy job and just let it run through the track, but when you’re putting it out in the public and you’re [00:07:00] endangering people, you’re endangering three year olds crossing the street holding their father’s hand a higher standard must be imposed on these than just it looks okay to me.

[00:07:11] Anthony: This is one of these things we’ll. Where we’ve talked about this before, where, okay, Waymo has said, Hey, we’ve done over 7 million miles of real world testing. And those 7 million miles is best. We can tell they’ve never run into a telephone pole before, right? But along that 7 million mile arc, they’ve replaced software and they’ve updated software and whatnot.

And the things we’ve talked about in the past as well, each time they do a software update, they have to revalidate their entire system. And I think this really highlights that because some software update, or it have been a hardware update. Caused it to now say, Hey, let’s hit telephone poles, right? In my, is that right?

Yeah. Apparently based on the videos and the reports. And I imagine it’s gotta be even harder to do the testing. If even the telephone poles out on a track in a real world is cause you’d have to recreate the conditions under [00:08:00] which it. occurred. What was the angle of the sun? Was that blinding some sensor?

Was something happening there? Was there some reflective material on the telephone pole itself that caused a sensor to fail or something like that? The more I think about it, the more complex this becomes.

[00:08:17] Fred: Yeah that’s the correct approach. You’re taking it the right way. And let’s say, for example, that it was caused by the angle of the sun.

Linting off or something. That’s okay. So that’s good to know. Now you say what are the limits on that? How wide can you open this window? And still get the same negative result, or the same, opportunity to run into this telephone pole. Was the telephone pole painted green?

Is it going to run into everything that is painted green? Or is there a juxtaposition between the green and the make up a color. Turquoise background of the garage that caused this to happen. It’s very complex. And, you can’t just throw shit against the wall and say, this sticks, so we’re [00:09:00] good.

You, you, again, people are at risk. Pedestrians are at risk. Motorists are at risk. People who have not agreed to be part of this test regime are now faced with a multi ton vehicle coming at them 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour. Which might run into them or a local telephone pole. Now it was interesting, Waymo put out a video last week showing Waymo going down the road and and how it avoided a car that was coming at them, that was making a left turn from the opposing lane.

And the takeaway from that is that Waymo successfully intimidated that other car, and if that other car hadn’t stopped, the Waymo would have been in a world of hurt. This is an acceptable approach. This is what they showed in their video. And really what it shows is that other people having to look out for these damn vehicles and in order for them to transit a road [00:10:00] with very light traffic in full sunlight, with no hazardous environmental conditions, this is the best they’ve got to show, and this is what they put out.

There’s a big gap here. We talked last week about the bankruptcy of their safety case and, we talked about that in detail and. No evidence that’s changed.

[00:10:23] Michael: It looked like in, reading through the submission to NITSA, it looked like that Waymo is assigning some sort of damage score, they called it, to objects that are detected in the vehicle’s path.

I’m sure all of us have, seen a paper bag or a. Aluminum can or plastic bottle or something in the road. It appears that Waymo is, assigning scores to certain objects that are not a threat to the safety of the vehicle or the passengers and ignoring them in some respects.

And that looks like, it assigned a Too low of a damage [00:11:00] score to this telephone pole that was, in a somewhat odd place, it was in the road before a curb. It was an unusual place for a telephone pole to be. And the vehicles essentially. Ignored it is how it looks like this happened.

So that, that’s an interesting part of this, you don’t want your vehicle, stopping quickly when it sees a beer can or a trash bag or some other objects, that’s not really a problem. And so that, that’s, there’s a, that’s an interesting part of this that I don’t think it received a lot of attention.

[00:11:36] Anthony: Waymo has been fairly open about more open than their competitors will say. So if anyone from Waymo is listening. I would love to find out if you rolled back your software, would that still run into the telephone pole? What was the actual point of failure? Was it a software update? Was it hardware failure?

Was it replaced hardware? Anything at all. So hey, if you work at Waymo, go to autosafety. org, click on donate, cause you’re getting [00:12:00] paid too much, and you gotta get the tax write off. Or, and while you’re there, you can click on contact us, send us a little note and be like, Yeah, I made a mistake. I pushed out the wrong software.

[00:12:10] Fred: Yeah, and that is contact at autosafety. org. Send your information. It’ll be safe with us.

[00:12:19] Anthony: Yes. There you go. And that’s that’s our Waymo update for the day.

[00:12:23] IIHS Survey on Anti-Speeding Tech

[00:12:23] Anthony: Here’s an interesting one from our friends at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. I didn’t expect this. It is an article titled, Most drivers would be okay with anti speeding tech in vehicles.

More than 60 percent of drivers would find it acceptable if their vehicle provided an audible and visual warning when they exceeded the posted speed limit. A new survey from IIHS shows. Perhaps more surprisingly, about half of drivers say they wouldn’t mind vehicle technology that makes the accelerator pedal harder to press or automatically restrict speed.

So what this survey shows is that you two are wrong, [00:13:00] and people are not afraid of America and freedoms. Because that’s the argument you guys have made. This will never happen because of America and freedoms. But this survey is showing that, we’re okay with a little restriction if it’s gonna save lives.

[00:13:12] Michael: Yeah, I thought it was a great study. I’m glad they did it. It’s a critical moment to do this research because the intelligent speed assistance is going to go live in all new vehicles next month in the European Union. And, as we’ve discussed countless times on this show, we feel that there’s a serious need for putting technology in cars that can crack down speeding now.

What they found was essentially that, a lot of 60 percent of drivers, generally agree to be acceptable for this stuff to be on every trip, and that went down depending on the technology. So intelligent speed assistance is going to give you. Audible alerts and warnings when you’re speeding.

60 percent of drivers, [00:14:00] overall seem to accept that. However, when you talk, when you ask them about do they accept restrictions that are based on the accelerator pedal? For instance, you could apply resistance, the accelerator pedal to prevent it from being pushed after speeding is detected, or to give feedback to the driver that, The, you’re speeding and you’re going to have to push harder on this pedal to go faster.

And then I think that the percentage dropped below 50 percent for the kind of speed technology that I think we most support, which is simply refusing to allow the person to speed, making it so that the car can’t exceed speed limits, but to any great extent. And also interesting is that the EU’s version of this is first of all, you’re going to be able to turn it off.

So if you’re a speeder and you don’t want to be annoyed and you’re in the EU, all you have to do is turn the thing off. I’m not sure if it’s every time you get in the car, like you have to do with your auto start button, or if it’s something that you turn off and it’s off as [00:15:00] long as you leave it for the life of the car.

But and also in Europe, if you exceed the speed limit by, one or two miles per hour, that chime is going to start. I think, that’s something that might not be as acceptable to American drivers. We could, I could see us. Something starting at five miles per hour over something like that might be more acceptable.

But ultimately, um, this is going to happen in America at some point when it does, I think it’s critical that we really look at what’s going to be the best way to prevent. Crashes and fatalities involving speeding and to us, it is something that literally forces drivers not speed because we know, at least in my experience, people who speed tend to do it fairly habitually and without regard to other people on the road.

And I don’t think that warnings or buzzers that can be turned off are ever going to stop that category of people.

[00:15:57] Anthony: No, but if my insurance company says, Hey, [00:16:00] if you put this in your car and you use it, we’ll knock off some percentage of your premiums. I’d be all for it. And I think most people would because my insurance rates are ridiculous, so

[00:16:12] Michael: they do that.

Yeah, they’re not going down anytime soon either, it doesn’t appear.

[00:16:16] Anthony: No, especially with the way I’m speeding all the time.

[00:16:19] Michael: Are you paying for a teen driver yet?

[00:16:21] Anthony: No, I am not. No. He gets the driver’s license. I

[00:16:25] Michael: started that a few years ago. It is not pleasant.

[00:16:27] Anthony: Oh no, if he wants that, he’s got to pay for it himself.

And the cost of, being a 19 year old getting a, your own insurance in Manhattan, I imagine is astronomical, because as an adult it’s astronomical.

[00:16:37] Fred: Oh yes, this might be a good time to ask for more donations, Anthony, because you’re going to need it.

[00:16:42] Anthony: You just send them directly to me at moneypit. com.

[00:16:48] DC Traffic Cameras and Speeding

[00:16:48] Anthony: Continuing with the speeding subject, there’s the Washington Post has an article titled, DC traffic cameras have led to sharp decline in speeding. In 2015, the mayor of DC unveiled a traffic [00:17:00] safety initiative called Vision Zero, with the aim of bringing traffic fatalities and injuries to zero.

Hey, clever. So they have speed cameras, and stop sign violations are a big part of this. And from the article, soon residents from Frustrated by reckless driving were demanded more of them. There were nearly 1, 200 requests for traffic camera installations last year, according to the District Department of Transportation.

To date, the city has installed 477, including 140 since November. The residents are actually begging for this stuff, because personally, there is a speed problem. Camera, not too far from me that I dislike, mainly because somebody in my household likes to forget that it’s there, and then I get 50 fines every month.

And I’ve, I think I’ve funded enough to repave this goddamn road, so But

[00:17:43] Michael: You’ve complained a lot about that stretch of road and the driving that goes on there, so I would have thought you would have been in favor of the camera.

[00:17:50] Anthony: No, cause I keep, cause it hasn’t changed behavior. Okay, it hasn’t changed behavior and

[00:17:57] Michael: I think there’s a big difference then between your camera [00:18:00] and especially the one on Wheeler Road that they cited in DC I think that when they first, the first month of installation, they had 7, 500 citations or so and then 18 months later only 316 which is a gigantic behavioral change.

It’s very impressive. Now, they didn’t see that type of change at every camera installed but they saw, I think that they saw fewer citations at at a rate of 15 percent and some, a small increase, maybe for the better, to 61 percent across the city. They look like they’re working.

I, when I drive to DC, I know where some of the cameras are. Waze will alert you to some of them as well. And generally people are, slowing down in those areas. I guess the critical point for traffic cameras like this would be when there’s so many of them that you just. That people who are speeding just give up, throw their hands in the air and say, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna stick to the [00:19:00] limit, which maybe that critical mass can be reached.

And we could see some real, gains and safety and cities that and states that deploy technology like this.

[00:19:10] Anthony: No, in New York, what a lot of people do is they put on fake license plates, or they obstruct their license plates somehow. Don’t do that. There’s actually somebody who goes around Manhattan and photographs people who’ve done that to their license plate, and I guess reports them, because the city will pay you money for reporting people who are committing that crime, which I think is great.

So

[00:19:28] Michael: You might identify with a big problem in, in, in D. C. ‘s enforcement, which is, That they can’t force people coming into the city from Maryland or Virginia to pay these fines which really hurts, hurts their ability to, affect the behavior of those folks, because if the fines aren’t going to stick and people aren’t going to be required to pay them, if they simply live in a neighboring state then it’s going to be a problem.

And if you’ve driven in D. C., you know that every other license plate is going to be from [00:20:00] Maryland or Virginia.

[00:20:01] Anthony: Wait, so I can go to D. C. this weekend and drag race and I get off scot free? Fred, what do you want to do this weekend? go drag race in D. C.?

[00:20:10] Fred: No, I’ve done that. I’ve done my time in D. C. I actually did get a ticket once for being bad there, but it was interesting because it was associated with a red light and the ticket said that I was decelerating.

But not fast enough. So there’s actually some intelligence built into these things to determine I guess as best I can, the motivation and the scofflawedness of the person who’s doing the violation.

[00:20:39] Anthony: Hey, speaking of violations.

[00:20:41] Gaslight Illumination Segment

[00:20:41] Anthony: Listeners, do you enjoy our relatively new segment called Gaslight Illumination?

Wait, you haven’t noticed this is a thing? It is! Once a week we’ll each highlight somebody from the auto industry that we think is gaslighting the public. And we’ll go ahead and do that. So I’m going to start off this week, because this week I’m throwing a curveball. Okay, listeners [00:21:00] at home, we send around a group email and we say, Hey, this is what we’re going to do.

We’re going to do this one. So this week, my nominee for Gaslight of the Week is Fred Perkins! Because, for the last all of the Gaslight nominees, I keep choosing the same company. A little company called GM Cruise. But this week, Fred Perkins said he was taking GM Cruise. Not on my watch, buddy.

What a

[00:21:23] Fred: crybaby. Okay, go ahead, you can have Cruise.

[00:21:27] Anthony: Hey, it’s my thing, okay? This is what I’m known for, okay?

[00:21:30] Fred: I didn’t know that was your jam, but now I know.

[00:21:32] Anthony: Look, review, read the reviews of this show on iTunes, it’s very informative except the host is obnoxious, okay, so that’s my jam, okay, I’m going to be obnoxious here.

[00:21:43] Fred: Alright, fair enough.

[00:21:44] Anthony: From Cruz’s Twitter feed, Houston, we missed you, today we’re resuming driving in Houston where we’ll build on the knowledge collected last year. We’ll start with human driven vehicles and move to supervised autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheels in the coming weeks, guided by safety.[00:22:00]

Do I have to add anything to this? Does it need more

[00:22:06] Michael: context? I

think most of our listeners by now understand your animosity towards Cruz.

[00:22:13] Anthony: Yeah. And people thought it was just Kyle associated. No, it’s the It’s just so dumb. All right, Fred, since I called, I’m sorry, go on.

[00:22:20] Fred: I was going to say, I’m surprised you haven’t personalized it yet.

Ever since Kyle left you’ve never gone out of homonym on their management.

[00:22:28] Anthony: They’re, it’s not lazy.

[00:22:29] Fred: You’re just lazy, Anthony. Come on.

[00:22:32] Anthony: They’re not going to stick around. They’ve already spent 8 billion. I think we covered this last week. They hope to generate hundreds of million in revenue in a few years.

I can do basic math. That’s still 8 billion in the hole. It’s, at some point, GM management’s gonna go wait a second, if I thought I carried the three. Oh, we’re just setting money on fire. Let’s sell more Hummers. So with that, Fred Perkins, please take

[00:23:00] away your nominee.

[00:23:01] Fred Perkins’ Nominee: Aurora’s Safety Claims

[00:23:01] Fred: All right this week’s nominee is Chris Urmson, who is the CEO of a company called Aurora.

Aurora’s kind of been Flying under the radar because they’re concentrating on heavy trucks, and they don’t get the same kind of coverage that we get. I’ve looked up some of their information on safety, and there’s a lot of it out there. If you go to their safety website, you’ll see a note by Chris that says, as you’ll see in this safety assessment, Our five pillars, proficiency, field safety, continuous improvement, resilience, and trustworthiness underlie our safety approach.

Now that’s interesting because they talk about continuous improvement, but they haven’t updated any of their website safety information since 2022. That seems like a long interval between. Declaring your continuous improvement process and actually doing something [00:24:00] they published a voluntary safety self assessment as required or not as required, but as hopefully suggested by our friends of NHTSA again in 2022.

So apparently no update since then, but they also go on to say, or he goes on to say Aurora will not launch our autonomous trucking product Until our safety case for our initial driverless operations is complete. They launched that in 2023. And I haven’t seen any updates that says their safety self assessment is, or their safety case is complete.

Now, safety case is a process for validating the requirements and having a discussion about what your requirements are. And, saying this is what it takes to actually achieve those requirements. Aurora has not published [00:25:00] any requirements. So we have no idea. What it is they’re trying to do.

So how do you then know that the safety case is complete? So I went to the safety case and they published it, which is good. That was a great thing to do. It starts a conversation. And anybody can do that. It’s on their website. But if you go into the safety case their whole approach for safety leans heavily on the safety case analysis.

But again, no requirements are there. So how do you know exactly what it is they’re analyzing in their safety case? There are the framework might be useful to validate this requirement satisfaction or validation, but absent of requirements, there’s no way to tell if the requirements are adequate. Or if the requirements are satisfied.

Now, if you go to that safety case, all the entries are qualitative. So they’re not reviewable in any meaningful way. What does that mean? A qualitative requirement or a qualitative appraisal of a car would say, you’re going to have enough wheels to keep it off the ground. [00:26:00] That’s qualitative. A quantitative approach would be to say, you’re going to have four wheels, and they’re going to be more or less at the corners of the vehicle to keep it off the ground.

So that’s the difference between qualitative and quantitative. One is a wish list, the other is a specific requirement that you can actually validate. Nothing in their safety case analysis is quantitative, it’s all qualitative. So basically it’s all a wish list. They talk about, and they go in to talk about fault tolerant, and they say that fault tolerance is an important part of what they do.

That’s great. But then they never go on to say, how many fault tolerant How many fault tolerance or how many faults can you tolerate? Is it one safety critical fault? Is it six non safety critical faults? Is it two safety critical faults? Now, most electronics [00:27:00] controls for jet aircraft are more or less quad fault tolerant.

In other words, you’re going to have four faults. And you can still operate successfully. But let’s say that you have two fault tolerance that you’ve designed into your vehicle. That’s good because they talk about redundancy or redundancy implies that you have two fault tolerance. They talk about having two computers in the, in each vehicle and that’s a fault tolerance.

So that’s great. But what do you do then if one fails? One of them sends out a message that says three and the other one sends out a message that says four. How do you know which is right? But two thermometers in your house, and one of them has a reading of 68 degrees. The other has a reading of 70 degrees.

There’s an old saying in experimental physics. Engineering that says if you have one thermocouple, you know what the temperature is. If you have two, you no longer know what the temperature is. So really, for vehicles [00:28:00] and things that are consequential for human life, you should probably go with three fault tolerance so that you’ve got some way of deciding which if one fails.

Is the actual correct number. You can have a vote there. Anyway, it’s complex, as I’ve put it through, but it’s, again, going to their fault tolerance and their safety case analysis, there’s really nothing in there that’s quantitative. Is it complete? They said this is going to be complete before they go out on the road.

There’s nothing in there about load safety, for example, if they have a heavy truck, which is what they’re doing, class A trucks. What do they do about their load safety? If there’s a fire behind the cab in the truck, what do they do? If their load shifts, what do they do? If they start dropping things off the back of the truck, what do they do?

I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s not included in their safety case analysis. Seems that probably ought to be. What if the car is running out of control? What if the truck is running out of control? How are the [00:29:00] police going to stop it? Not addressed. How are the police, state police, going to do a safety inspection on the side of the road, which is what they do for heavy trucks, right?

They’ll frequently stop the trucks, check the log, look at the vehicle, do an inspection. A lot of the safety critical features in these trucks are not accessible by visual inspection, right? They’re buried in the computer. So how is the safe, how is the state police officer or the highway patrol Going to know whether or not this truck is safe to have on the road.

[00:29:33] Anthony: They do when 18 wheelers, you see a lot on the road where they blow tread. No, the tread flies off the tires. These guys are not going to be using some new special tire, right? So what are these, what do they do when these 18 was eventually blow tread, like the tread flies off one of the tires.

[00:29:50] Fred: Oh yeah. That’s a good question. I don’t know. I didn’t see it in the safety case analysis. It’s just, it has some vague words about monitoring monitoring the truck itself. And Waymo, [00:30:00] or excuse me, Aurora says that their software is agnostic with respect to the hardware on which is hosted.

So they say it’s good for anything. And they’re working with Volvo in particular. So I don’t know, it’s not addressed in their literature. Good question though.

[00:30:18] Anthony: So then I did a five, I’m sorry, one, one real quick. So they’re claiming that their software is agnostic to the hardware. I don’t know, work with anything.

So just looking at the history of software No. No! Sorry. No.

[00:30:34] Fred: But anyway, continue. Yeah. Alright, so the final element here is that I went to our consumers AV Bill of Rights, and I said, Okay, let’s compare what they’re talking about with our consumer AV Bill of Rights. And there were twelve items in there.

What’s your guess as to how many of those are fully satisfied by the documentation available for Aurora? [00:31:00] I’m gonna say two. You’re gonna say two. Michael, what’s your guess?

[00:31:05] Michael: I’ll say

[00:31:05] Fred: four, just to be sure. four. How about zero? Ah, I knew it! So I win! I’m closer to zero! Now, maybe there’s a couple of partials.

There’s no discussion of authentication of the commands, but they do talk about cybersecurity. So maybe there’s partial credit there and it goes on and on. But basically importantly, there’s no evidence of insurance for the people who might be involved in a crash with these.

There’s no evidence of excuse me, duty of care. There’s no evidence of any programmatic issues. So apparently they’re throwing that over the transom to the

truck manufacturer itself rather than addressing that in the software. That’s an interesting gap. Between what Aurora is proposing in terms of safety and what the OEM is actually able to deliver in terms of safety, because there’s a lot of consequential [00:32:00] issues, as Anthony just pointed out about how the software is implemented and actually put in the truck.

So I could go on and on, but if anybody’s interested in exploring this bankruptcy in more detail, send us a note, contact at autosafety. org, and I’ll be happy to send you a graphic that describes their bankruptcy of their safety system on a balance sheet, which looks a lot like a financial balance sheet We’re helpfully going to send this to Aurora as well, but we’re going to wait for their request for that.

So my nominee is Chris Urmson from Aurora safety, who actually is offering a masterclass in gaslight for AV operation.

[00:32:51] Anthony: All right. That’s a pretty good nominee. Michael Brooks, can you beat it?

[00:32:54] Michael: All right.

[00:32:55] Michael Brooks’ Nominee: Fisker Automotive

[00:32:55] Michael: My nominee is company that we don’t talk too much about here because they [00:33:00] don’t sell a lot of cars, but it is, and I wanted to nominate them because they have filed for bankruptcy.

I may not get the other, another chance. And that is Fisker automotive. They are basically an electric vehicle company run by a guy named Fisker. You always got to wonder about those folks who named their companies after themselves. But they. They have made a lot of claims over the years. They’ve got they, they got a Tesla, Elon, similar playbook where they say a lot of things and they attract investors, but they don’t really they don’t really quite get there.

So a couple of examples of that, in 2018, they claimed that they had solved the Holy grails of EV production. That is the. The creation of a solid state battery. That’s something we’ve talked about a lot on here. They’re lighter. They don’t catch on fire. There’s a lot of advantages to them.

A few years later, Fisker came out and said Oh yeah, we didn’t quite do [00:34:00] that. But even better than that in 2021, they claimed that they had gotten together with the Vatican to create an electric tote mobile. Which was also a lie. So it’s a company that has been built on these forward looking statements that have no basis in reality.

And for that, before they head off into the sunset, I just want to nominate Fisker for gaslight illumination of the week.

[00:34:30] Tech Lunatics and the Vatican

[00:34:30] Anthony: That is good. Wait. So they claim they work with the Vatican to make an electric Popemobile and the Vatican’s who dis new phone? Okay.

[00:34:37] Michael: Yeah, pretty much.

[00:34:38] Anthony: Wow, I get these tech lunatics being like, I put it on my vision board, so it must be true, but then to be like, hey, the Vatican said this choose a different target.

Okay?

[00:34:50] Fred: Is that part of the Pope inviting comedians to come and talk to him? Because it, it sounds pretty funny.

[00:34:57] Anthony: Oh boy. Hey, listeners. Have [00:35:00] you donated yet? Have you given us five stars? Have you told all your friends? Have you? If not, you can keep listening, especially if you’re driving down the road.

Don’t donate or tell all your friends while you’re driving down the road unless your friends are sitting right next to you. Put down the phone, make sure you have your seatbelt on, and you, hopefully your airbag has not been recalled.

[00:35:14] China’s Self-Driving Car Controversy

[00:35:14] Anthony: Moving on to China. Got a lot of articles about China and their self driving cars.

And no as red blooded Americans, we cannot let China beat us, right? They, we must stop, they must have more advanced, different robo taxi technology than we do. No, what China has that we don’t have is called repression of the free press. Okay? Because they’ve been running these robo taxis. Really no different than what’s roaming through San Francisco and Phoenix and the main difference is Look,

[00:35:45] Michael: I think you could suggest that they’re doing it even worse based on the numbers we’re seeing, but

[00:35:50] Anthony: The main difference is that they’re like, Hey, if you try to report about how these things are bad and dangerous, we’re gonna come and put you in a little prison [00:36:00] camp.

So we’ve got a couple articles. The New York Times is a good one. It says, A fleet of 500 taxis navigated by computers, often with no safety drivers in them for backup, buzz around. The company that operates them, the tech giant, Badoo, said last month that it would add a further 1, 000 of the so called robot taxis in Wuhan.

This is this is They’re basically just going, they’re basically saying, hey, Kyle, can you run our robo taxi program? And so they’re really taking his playbook and just letting this loose everywhere. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

[00:36:32] Fred: Michael, I’ve got a question. Is it legal for Waymo to import software from China that might help them avoid running into telethon polls?

Have the Chinese solved that problem?

[00:36:46] Michael: Yeah, currently, I think it would be legal unless it falls under one of the recent executive orders around that. But I don’t see them doing that. I think the odds of that [00:37:00] technology being stolen from Waymo servers and offloaded into China, it’s probably a lot better.

[00:37:06] Fred: That was meant to be very funny, but it fell flat, but I just want everybody to know humor is difficult. Yeah.

[00:37:13] Anthony: Yeah.

[00:37:14] Michael: Apparently what else is difficult is. Getting your story out. If your family’s been killed by an autonomous vehicle and you live in China, because they will take it down off of your social media, they will prevent the news media from reporting on it.

And the government is completely involved in covering up when autonomous vehicles have crashes in China. The article sites for. Fatalities that we’ve heard of coming out of China involving autonomous vehicles. Who knows how many more there are in the United States, we’ve had a limited number where there was one fatality in Arizona, and we obviously have [00:38:00] talked about the severe injuries.

That were incurred by the pedestrian, the cruise incident in San Francisco. The United States already has a better record on AV safety than China, and we simply do not know how bad China really is and we may never know. So it’s easy to push an immature technology that threatens public safety in a country like that.

It’s not as easy here and it’s. I don’t think anyone or a very small percentage of Americans at most would be willing to accept that type of regime to allow for the mass production and deployment of technology like this.

[00:38:39] Anthony: So it’s a other New York Times article that Michael is referencing there talks about this robo taxi in China, the Aito M seven plus, where Catches on fire and unfortunately kills two passengers.

A woman posted a video of this online and then all of her postings were removed. Just magically. And [00:39:00] state run national media refrained from covering the crash for nine days after it happened. Then they posted a statement from Aedo Car that disavow disavowed responsibility. The statement said that the car’s automated braking system had been designed for speeds up to 53 miles an hour, but the car was going 71 when it hit the back of a road maintenance vehicle.

We didn’t do it. Our self driving car went rogue and drove itself above its safety threshold. Is that their argument? It’s bizarre. Yeah, but

[00:39:30] Fred: it runs counter to the whole idea that the AVs never speed, they never, they never hallucinate, they never do all that sort of stuff.

Apparently they do.

[00:39:39] Anthony: Why are why are some people in the United States afraid that China’s gonna win this? And what do they win? I don’t

[00:39:46] Michael: know. That’s, yeah that’s my biggest question here is there’s just this huge, and we’re going to see more and more of this over the summer as we reach Tesla’s August 8th robo taxi release date.

I’m still struggling to figure out [00:40:00] why people think that this is such a huge market and something that, that. Americans are just going to gravitate towards immediately and start hopping in robo taxis all over America. I just they’re only operating in places where it’s easy for them to operate.

Now, I foresee a lot of problems in other environments where they’re going to be need to operate to, to make a profit. And I just, I don’t know. We’ve, I think all of us have continually struggled as we’ve talked autonomous vehicles on this podcast for a couple of years now as to what exactly a Robo taxi brings.

How does it improve our lives? Why would we, what’s better about a Robo taxi than an Uber driver? And at this point, I just, I don’t, I still don’t have an answer for that question.

[00:40:51] Fred: If you let the Chinese in with self driving cars, the next thing you know, they’re going to bring high speed, low cost fuel efficient trains.[00:41:00]

Hey. And we can’t let that happen.

[00:41:03] Anthony: No. I’m on board. Yeah, yeah let’s snip this in the bud, okay? Because that will affect our self driving car industry, right?

[00:41:11] Fred: Absolutely, yep, it’s a huge danger. And so far, government’s been protecting us from the danger of the high speed trains.

[00:41:19] Anthony: Yeah yeah, good.

Good. That’s as confusing as intersections.

[00:41:25] The Dangers of Left Turns

[00:41:25] Anthony: That’s right, I’m jumping to a new subject here. Last week, it was one of my potential nominees for Gaslight and Illumination, the intersection. Get rid of them, okay? Don’t need them. Don’t need to go anywhere, okay? There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about how left turns are dangerous and part of it’s because of the intersection.

It’s very confusing. Quoting from the article, in 2022, according to NHTSA, about 44 percent of all traffic crashes reported to police involved an intersection, about 2. 6 million of the 5. 9 million crashes, and nearly a third of those crashes at intersections, about 800, 000, [00:42:00] involved a vehicle turning left.

Now so you come to an intersection, and you got an option, you can go forward, that’s a third of your options right there, you can make a right turn, that’s another third, or you can make a left turn. That’s a, another, third. Sounds about right that a third of the crashes at intersections would be involving a left turn, or am I missing something?

[00:42:22] Fred: Actually, as I read it, actually something less than a third of the crashes are associated with left hand turns. Oh,

[00:42:30] Anthony: you’re right. It’s nearly a third. You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry.

[00:42:33] Fred: Yeah, so it suggested that the left hand turns are actually somewhat safer, but it’s an interesting article, and I don’t know.

I don’t know.

[00:42:44] Michael: It’s a mystery to me. I wonder, there are a lot of intersections where there are cars going straight through, say 90 percent of the vehicles going through that intersection are just going straight, not taking a left turn or a right turn. And then maybe the left [00:43:00] turns and the right turns add up to that last 10%.

And so for. 33 percent of the crashes to be related to the left turn is actually significant. Am I reading that wrong? I’m just assuming that drivers that, you know that at any given intersection drivers are going to be going straight through that intersection more often than turning

[00:43:22] Fred: could be.

I think you’d need to have a lot of statistics and a lot of road observations to validate that assumption. I don’t know. I haven’t read the study itself, so I’m only

[00:43:34] Michael: Even then, I think where we’ve seen cities banning left turns, it’s even if they are less safe than others, but that’s not really the motivation behind cities banning them.

You’d see most cities do so during rush hours. I know that on my drive to D. C. through old town, Alexandria, Virginia, there are. Time restrictions. If you’re going north towards the city, then between 7 and 9 AM, you [00:44:00] can’t turn left in certain intersections and coming in reverse from 4 to 6 PM, the same thing.

That’s not really a safety measure, although it, I guess it could be, but it’s really a matter of speeding traffic up because you don’t have an entire lane of traffic blocked while one driver waits to make a left turn. And so that’s really why we’ve seen it in cities. I know that I think Philadelphia is a city I’ve driven in that has a lot of one way streets to get out, get away from this.

And there’s a lot of ways to do this. Whether it’s during rush hours or during certain times when they’re going to be more vehicles on the road or when, the times more fatalities or injuries or crashes related to left turns, maybe there’s a way to do this so that it’s.

It’s both protective, but also not confusing because I know it can get confusing when you’ve got, you can turn left here certain hours of the day and not other hours of the day. But it’s interesting. Another thing that’s interesting that wasn’t [00:45:00] included in the article is that J. Edgar Hoover actually banned his drivers from making left turns in the late fifties.

Because he had been involved in a left turn track crash,

[00:45:10] Fred: he didn’t like anything that ended left. Yeah. That’s well known. That’s a different thing. There we go. But I think the underlying assumption in this article is that slower traffic in cities is bad. But we’ve seen over and over again.

That slower traffic in cities is the most important parameter behind safer highways, right? I’m not sure that the logic behind this article actually holds water in terms of public safety.

[00:45:37] Anthony: Listeners, what do you think? What’s your experience of making left turns? Cause there’s an intersection just outside my window here.

And I gotta tell you, from that intersection alone, left turns should be banned. It’s mainly cause you can’t make a right turn at this intersection. And the people making these unprotected left turns they’re just like, I bet I can beat the guy coming at me. And the guy coming at you is I bet I can beat him.

And then they smash, and they Get on a reality dating show. [00:46:00] It’s a whole thing. Hey, listeners, have you donated? No. All right.

[00:46:05] Alpine’s New Driver Coaching Feature

[00:46:05] Anthony: So maybe what they need is this new product from Alpine. That’s right. Alpine. Alpine? Alpine? Alpine?

[00:46:14] Michael: It’s spelled Alpine, but it’s French. It’s

[00:46:17] Anthony: Alpine. I only know them as an F1 company that does really badly this year.

They make a little they have a new, the A290. It’s a little sporty kind of I don’t know, hatchbacky looking thing. And the cool thing about this. I like it. Yeah, it looks like my Corolla. It looks

[00:46:35] Michael: pretty

[00:46:35] Anthony: cool. Yeah. Yeah it looks like my little Corolla, but it’s French, so it comes with cigarettes.

At the heart of, from this article in Jalopnik, at the heart of each A290 will be a new coaching function that’s designed to teach owners how to get to grips with your vehicle. To do this, the car will use its new telemetrics function to highlight areas you can prove on as a driver. As Alpine explains, Alpine, whatever, ideal for learning [00:47:00] at your own pace.

This section includes the basic reflexes you need to adapt when driving a sports car, such as eye tracting. Tracking, trajectory control, and braking techniques. As you progress, the concepts covered, such as managing drift when lifting off, become more advanced. Oh my god, this, yeah, dude, what, no, yeah, can they geofence this so it only works on a track?

[00:47:23] Michael: Look, in principle, I think you could take a system like this and use it for Really good things, like driver education, improvement of drivers who make certain mistakes over and over again. If your car is keeping a scorecard on how well you’re driving, I would love for cars to have a feature that, takes points away from drivers who.

Seem to feel like they have to be six feet from my bumper at all times at 50 miles an hour. It would be great if cars could coach us as we drive. However, the Alpine car looks like it is really geared [00:48:00] towards training people, how to be performance racers or drifters. So I’m not sure if it fits within the good side of the technology that that I really am hoping for.

[00:48:12] Anthony: Yeah, I think if they could geo restrict this to racetracks or something like that, all for it, I think it’d be a great little coach for, teenagers learning to drive, be like, oh, stop sign, stop, so I don’t have to keep hitting a phantom brake in front of me.

[00:48:27] Fred: Have you ever driven on the beltway around Paris?

I’ve been in a taxi.

[00:48:31] Michael: I didn’t do the driving. In a taxi. It scared me to death. Actually.

[00:48:35] Fred: It’s actually quite frightening, but,

[00:48:37] Michael: yeah.

[00:48:37] Fred: There are three lanes, as I recall circling the city. And between the middle lane and the left lane, there’s an invisible lane that’s reserved for motorcyclists.

And the motorcyclists crash through that at about 20 miles an hour faster than the prevailing traffic speed, whatever it is. And you’ll get a lot of attitude from the motorcycle [00:49:00] drivers if you impinge on their invisible lane. So there’s a whole different ethos behind French driving than we’ve experienced here.

Just wanted

[00:49:11] Michael: to throw that in. They still have, and yet they still have crash and fatality rates that are significantly lower than ours in America. I think

[00:49:19] Anthony: you’re inspiring a new segment we can do is the dangerous roads around the world. What I thought of immediately was the road from the airport in Manila to downtown Manila.

That’s a fun road. All of a sudden it’s a five lane highway. Now it’s a one lane highway. And there was no indication that this happened. Now it’s three. Now it’s one again. Now it’s five. Now it’s six. Now you’re going the wrong way.

[00:49:41] Fred: Hey, Michael, will the Center pay me to do some experiments and, surveys of some of these roads?

There’s one between Melbourne and Sydney that I’d really like to investigate.

[00:49:51] Anthony: Yeah. He needs me to supply his water. So I think this would be a good idea.

[00:49:56] Michael: Yeah, that sounds great. We’ll get right on that one. All

[00:49:58] Anthony: Cool. Hey, [00:50:00] let’s let’s jump into some recalls cause we’re getting to that time of the hour.

How’s that sound? That sounds great. Awesome. Good. Hey. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Oh, no, you’re waiting on me? What do you need well, what do you want to talk about? I think there was a

[00:50:12] Michael: a Tao of Fred. Oh my

[00:50:14] Anthony: god, there’s a Tao of Fred. Yes.

[00:50:16] The Tao of Fred: Car Safety Tips

[00:50:16] Anthony: Oh, gee, I’m so Look, we’re flying with time, and this is a good one, because we’ve briefly touched on this one in the past.

It’s a You’ve now entered the Tao of Fred. Fred’s going to tell us that we’re all sitting in our cars wrong. No, that’s not he’s going to

[00:50:28] Fred: say it. All right, Anthony, have you ever seen the movie Jerry Maguire? Yes. You There’s a scene where there’s the, Jerry’s in the front seat and the kid’s in the back seat.

Do you remember anything that the kid was saying?

[00:50:39] Anthony: No.

[00:50:41] Fred: One of the things he said is, A human head weighs nine pounds. Human head weighs nine pounds. Okay, so that’s interesting. But that’s actually the he’s referring to the mass. He’s not a physicist. So he’s referring to the mass in the case of a one g [00:51:00] acceleration.

And that’s when it weighs nine pounds. Let me ask you another question. Have you ever seen a sumo wrestler? Yes they’re large. They’re large. When you’re in a crash at 40 miles an hour, based on typical accelerations, you’re really looking at about 30 G’s acceleration for your head. And 30 G’s is like, Where your head is rather than nine pounds.

It’s like having a sumo wrestler sitting on your head. Okay. So we’re talking 270 pounds. So you can survive that. Assuming the sumo wrestler is not going to fart on your head, of course, but you’d have to be very careful about surviving that, right? Because if you twist your head the wrong way, or the sumo wrestler is sitting on your head, it’s going to be bad.

So that’s what this is really all about. The devices in your car. Are there for your safety, particularly in the case of crashes. Consumer Reports put out a helpful article called the right way to sit behind the wheel of a car with 10 tips here. [00:52:00] And in relation to your head, it suggests that you have the headrest gently touching the back of your head, the center of your head, not the top of the bottom.

To restrain you in the event of a crash, that you have the seatbelt height properly adjusted, that you let’s see, use your seatbelt anchor properly, that you sit up straight and centered, your seatbelt should come, of course you should always use your seatbelt, and it should go across your hips, because that’s the big strong bone that’s going to keep you from accelerating into the steering wheel, which would be bad.

You have to make room for your view so that you’ve got the seat height adjusted so that you can see properly in front of the vehicle. You’ve got to be able to reach the pedals and have your hands properly on the wheel at about nine o’clock and three o’clock. It used to be 10 and 2. The problem with that is most vehicles now have an [00:53:00] airbag in the middle of the steering wheel.

So if you have them at 10 and 2 and you’re actually in a crash, it’s going to deflect against your hands. They’re going to go flying off in who knows what direction. So at 9 and 3, you’re going to avoid that impact on your hands. Your wrist should be able to rest your wrist on the top steering wheel, keep the wheel 10 inches in front of your chest because you want room for the airbag to expand so that in a crash you contact the airbag and not the not the wheel itself.

And I’m keeping this short, but I must say that if you follow all of Consumer Reports guidelines it’s good. It’ll keep you safe in the car. Also, however, if you’re tall as I am, you’re going to be in a fetal position the whole time. So I think that you have to address these with some degree of discretion, because if I’m 10 inches from the steering wheel, then my hands are basically [00:54:00] locked In a claw like position, so I gotta make some adjustments here.

But anyway, we’ll have this. We’ll have the link to this report on our website and you can refer to that. And please do. There’s a lot of good information in there. And that’s today’s towel.

[00:54:16] Anthony: I love that one, because I think we, we first talked about this maybe, I don’t know, it was last year. And one of the articles we came across then was to sit in your car and adjust your seat position to press down on the brake fully and make sure that your leg isn’t locked.

Because that’s what will happen. You want to be a little less than locked. Because if you’re in a crash, you’re going to automatically jam your leg forward like that. If you have your leg in a locked position, you’re just going to snap the bone. So you want to have a little flex there, if I’m right, if I remember.

[00:54:43] Fred: The accelerations you’re going to experience in a crash. are much higher than the accelerations you’re going to experience if you’re a paratrooper jumping out of a plane with a loaded a loaded pack. And if you’ve ever seen a movie that you know, they hit the ground, their legs are bent, they roll [00:55:00] to dissipate some of the energy.

You can’t really roll in a car. So you really do need to take advantage of the safety devices that are there because they’re only there for one reason, and that is to protect you in the event of a crash.

[00:55:13] Anthony: What if I jump out of an airplane and I’m strapped to a sumo wrestler? That would be adorable. To a sumo wrestler.

To a sumo wrestler. Yeah, that’d be funny.

[00:55:25] Fred: That would be fine, but you have some strange interests, Anthony. It’s interesting to learn about you as we go along here. Come

[00:55:31] Anthony: on, you’re talking about having a sumo wrestler sit on you. That’s some different fetish you got going on there. Okay? Look,

[00:55:37] Fred: we’re going way too far,

[00:55:40] Anthony: Far off topic, but yeah, but no, 30, 30 G’s.

That’s how much your head’s moving is 30 G’s. That’s insane. Typically. Yeah. How do people survive? Just survive

[00:55:53] Fred: by being strapped into the car and having their safety devices all work. So the 30 G’s is, [00:56:00] it’s momentary. It’s very fast. So it’s more an impulse than a longterm acceleration. If you snap forward, it’s really good to have an airbag there to cushion the cushion the landing of your head.

And if you get hit from the behind, you’ve got the headrest there to absorb the energy and keep your head from snapping back. You really need to have these safety devices deployed properly in order to avoid injury. In the old days, people laughed about whiplash in the car. That’s a real thing.

You get bounced around pretty badly when somebody hits you and that’s at legal speeds, okay? People don’t always hit you at legal speeds or from exactly the right direction. So this is very important things to note.

[00:56:45] Anthony: All right, folks, wear your seatbelts, set them up properly. Take a look at this infographic from consumer reports.

Very cool. If you’re as Fred likes to say, a very tall human, probably adjust more than 10 inches. So you don’t look like a T Rex holding the steering wheel.

[00:56:59] Recalls and Safety Defects

[00:56:59] Anthony: [00:57:00] Recalls. Hey, we’ve already talked about this one, Waymo 672 vehicles. They’re recalling the fifth generation automated driving system. And I assume this is over the air.

This is a basically about how they crash into a utility pole. So how does this, how does NHTSA verify this? Because it’s Waymo is the customer and the manufacturer. So just Waymo just say, Hey, yeah, we fixed it. Like how does that kind of work? Yeah, just, that’s exactly, that’s

[00:57:29] Michael: exactly how it works.

Yes. Waymo says we’re going to fix it and they are required to do

[00:57:34] Anthony: do they have to send anything back to NHTSA and be like, check done.

[00:57:40] Michael: They will send compliance reports. Like it’s basically their quarterly or not a compliance report, but a quarterly report that shows how many of the recalls have been completed.

I think in this case, they’ll send one quarterly report and about three months to say, yep, we fixed them all. And that’s it. All right. Pretty simple. [00:58:00] There’s not really any verification. In most recalls, the advantage of a recall like this is, you’re going to get a hundred percent completion whereas in most recalls, we’re only looking at people bringing their vehicles in and having them pick 60 percent of the time or so at best.

There are some advantages to one company owning a fleet of vehicles. And when there’s a safety defect, you know that all the vehicles on the road will be corrected. That’s

[00:58:22] Fred: All right, so we’re speculating. I would imagine Waymo is going to run a whole bunch of simulations and say look, we ran all these simulations.

Everything’s okie dokie. And Nitsu will say, yeah, that’s great. You ran a million simulations. Looks good to me. Simulations are doomed to success. They’re not an adequate way of validating a software fix on a hazardous vehicle that’s going to be used in public domain. I hope NHTSA does not accept a simulation based proof of compliance with the safety report.

And William Mary needs to do better.

[00:58:57] Anthony: Alright, our next recall we have is [00:59:00] from General Motors, the 2024 to 2025 Chevrolet Corvette. And my favorite part of this is the description of defect. And this is for 13, 000 plus cars. The description of safety risks as occupants who travel without a properly functioning seatbelt have an increased risk of injury if the vehicle is involved in a crash.

Yeah, no duh. So this is their seatbelt won’t retract. What’s going on?

[00:59:24] Michael: There’s, it looks like what’s happening is the when you pull on your seatbelt to pull it out of the pillar on the side of the vehicle and it won’t, sometimes it just won’t move. Have you ever had that experience?

Maybe not in your car, but in a taxi or something else, basically the retractor. Is locking up and not allowing the seatbelt to be pulled out of the, to be pulled out at all and used. They’re going to go in and replace all of these retractors on about what, 13, 000 vehicles.

[00:59:53] Anthony: Hey, if you’re just living on the cheap and driving a Corvette.

Time to upgrade to a Maserati. Isn’t that what we [01:00:00] think? All right, last recall. Chrysler, one million plus vehicles. Oh my god, the 2022 Ram 1500 pickup. They’ve made

[01:00:09] Michael: over a million of these. It’s more than that. No, it’s a lot of different vehicles. It’s Rams, it’s Jeeps. Oh, yeah. It’s Dodges. It’s

[01:00:17] Anthony: Jeep Compass, Jeep Wagoneer, Chrysler Pacificas, Dodge Durangos, Ram ProMasters.

Oh my word, there’s so much on here and and this is, hey, for you playing the home game, come on, it’s been a while since we’ve done this one. What is it? What is it? If you said rear camera, you’d be correct. They have some vehicles may have been built with radio software that may prevent the rear view camera signal from passing through to the media screen.

We’re seeing this more and more lately.

[01:00:46] Michael: This is my one of our biggest pet peeves around some of the new electronics and cars, the touch screens and other things is that you’ve got radio, a leisure related part of the vehicle interfering with the safety system. [01:01:00] And those should, that should not happen.

You should have designed the systems to operate independently of one another so that you don’t have leisure functions interfering with safety functions. Huge pet peeve of ours. And it’s something that manufacturers are going to have to come to grips with as they integrate more electronics into vehicles.

[01:01:19] Anthony: So this is a, if you have this problem, get it fixed. Do they have a fix in place for this one?

[01:01:25] Michael: I don’t know that they totally got the fix ready, but they’re going to notify owners in August. So they’re taking their time. So we’ll see.

[01:01:35] Fred: Is there any mention of collision problems in Piggly Wiggly parking lots?

I was wondering how this came to the fore.

[01:01:46] Conclusion and Safety Reminders

[01:01:46] Anthony: And with that, thank you listeners. That’s the end of our show. We’ll be back again next week and we’ll look back at what we’ve learned this week. Where are your seatbelt? Second thing, where are your seatbelt? Third thing, sit correctly [01:02:00] in the vehicle so that your seatbelt is as effective as possible.

And that, and I don’t believe the auto industry gaslighting.

[01:02:11] Fred: Thanks everyone. Bye. Thank you. Bye bye. For more information visit

[01:02:15] Michael: www.

[01:02:17] Fred: autosafety. org.