Robo-Taxi’s and NHTSA asks Tesla some good questions

Introduction and Podcast Overview

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.

Hello, this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Reminding you to put on your seatbelt and if you rent a car, it’s safe to lick the steering wheel ’cause germs aren’t real. Ah, that’s a fun voice to do, but it hurts. Yeah. Hi listeners.

Michael: Hey everybody.

Anthony: Welcome to another episode of What did Tesla Do This Time? Yeah, this episode we’re gonna have a lot of Tesla.

I. Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry. That’s we’re focused on safety in cars and Tesla. [00:01:00] They give us something to talk about each week. We’re not talking about Toyota each week. So anyway this is surprising.

Tesla’s Robo Taxi Plans Under Scrutiny

Anthony: Nitsa is asking Tesla how it plans to release its Robo Taxii service based on their, what they call full self-driving.

And this is interesting because maybe this is some internal political, internal, monarchy fighting going on, but we figured they would just back down and let Musk and co do whatever they wanted. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Nitsa sent a letter to Tesla saying, Hey, we’ve got a bunch of questions here because we’ve got a bunch of open defect investigations into your full self-driving supervised.

And you’re gonna have Robotaxis released on this stuff with no human driver. What are you nuts? And so they list out a bunch of questions. Oh, but actually, let me back up before that, because Nitsa in their letter, they say, Hey, we found out that you guys are doing this from reading Twitter. That was the most disturbing part of this.

Is like [00:02:00] what? When Fred and I roll out our self-driving taxi company in Florida, do we have to tell people or can we just put it on Twitter?

Michael: You’ve, you’re gonna want to tell people, right? So they know it exists. But I think it’s, I think nhtsa the only place where Tesla, I.

Or Elon really write things down that they can reference is on Twitter. Because they don’t have a press office, they don’t issue press releases and that type of thing. So if you want to track back and reference something they’ve said or done, you have to use a Twitter link. They’ve had to do the same thing for a lot of defect investigations where they’ve referenced things that Tesla has said that conflict with certain safety goals.

I think it was in one of the investigations where Tesla was posting a. Videos or liking videos of drivers not using their hands and that type of thing where NSA called those likes or retweets into question and said, you’re really, supporting [00:03:00] unsafe driving practices here, you’re, you’re telling us one thing that these vehicles are safe and that they’re, they’re fully monitored by the driver and that you’ve got all these safeguards in place and then you’re like, n videos on Twitter where it shows drivers doing the wrong thing in these cars.

So what’s the deal? So that’s why they’re relying on Twitter, because that’s one of the only places that Tesla communicates actively.

Anthony: Yeah. But I imagine they, they wouldn’t have to say, Hey, we’re doing this thing. Don’t they have to, I thought they’d have to get an exemption from Nitsa, or they just get an exemption from the local DMV.

Michael: Right now they’re in Texas, so it’s the wild West out there. They don’t have to get any permits to, from the federal government because they’re gonna be deploying, at least they say they’re gonna be deploying Model Y, which already meet motor vehicle safety standards at the federal level.

When that’s, for years now, autonomous vehicle companies have been talking about federal red tape. If you use a vehicle that’s already certified the F-M-D-S-S, then there is no red [00:04:00] tape, which has always been our comeback to that claim. And in Texas, like I said, there’s not a lot of regulation.

You just have to make sure you’re fully insured and tell the state you’re gonna operate and boom, you can go out and put your driverless cars on the road. Okay. That’s what’s going on.

Anthony: I like that. Maybe we we use Texas as our launch ground instead of Florida, Fred.

Michael: Florida would work too.

They’re allowing a lot of wild and wacky stuff there as well. Without proper, I would say without proper safeguards in place to make sure that unsafe vehicles aren’t driving their roads. Florida and Texas are about as wide open as it gets. Perfect.

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Anthony: So the Nitsa letter has some very specific questions.

One of them that I really enjoy is state the names of the systems that will be used in Robo Taxii development and deployment, as well as te Tesla’s position on the SAE level classification for the purposes of reporting under nitsa standing general order on crash reporting. This one does a number of things, which I find fascinating.

Tell us the names of the things you’re using. [00:05:00] Tesla’s names just made up nonsense. But then it’s, we’ve talked about this before and I, this is the first time I’ve actually seen it where they’re saying. Tell us, show us on the SAE, one through five scale, where you’re gonna be, which I think we’ve discussed and we’ve had numerous guests discuss how that’s eh, it’s not the greatest list.

Michael: Yeah. Tesla’s operating in, in California using the level two loophole where they say, oh, these cars are gonna drive themselves basically. But for the purposes of state classification, we’re only level two. ’cause we don’t want you to regulate us like we’re autonomous vehicles. And in this case, NITSA is basically saying.

What are you my favorite part of that first question that they were asked was, you’re developing an automated driving system based on an advanced driver assistance system. So it’s something we’ve pointed out frequently. You’re taking your level two system, removing the driver that’s there to monitor the system and the vehicle, and make [00:06:00] sure that it’s operating safely, and then turning that around and putting it out on the road as an automated driving system.

What’s going on here? That’s their very first question, which, which I liked a lot of these questions. They’re a lot of the same questions that I think we would love to have answers to, although we probably won’t be able to see the answers to this information request because it’ll all be subject to business confidentiality regulations at the DOT.

Fred: No, but it seems like they’re listening to some of the same people we’ve been listening to. They’re asking very sophisticated questions about the software heritage, about the rationale for moving from one software package to another about the progression of safety as they go through the different software versions.

Very glad to see that we’ve never seen that before, so I don’t know if they’re listening to us or the same people that we talked to, but NIS is clearly listening to somebody who’s having some correct thoughts.

Michael: Yeah. And then they, they start with that, tell us what the name is.

Tell us just [00:07:00] generally based on your public statements, what is this thing? And then, how are you planning to test and deploy it when it comes out? Give us details. They want details because a lot of what Tesla does is smoke and mirrors. They give you a little tease. Say they’re gonna do something grand, and then.

You never really see a real plan. You never really get enough information to even decide whether what they’re doing is even remotely safe or not. And so NSA’s asking a lot of questions about timetables, the number of vehicles, whether you’re going to be using any vehicles that don’t meet federal standards, because in that case, yes, you will need an exemption for us.

And also, what are you using here? What kind of teleoperation technology are you using here? Because presumably, if you’re taking the driver outta these cars in a system that requires drivers to monitor the vehicle. And you’re gonna have to have some sort of driver in place, and that looks like it’s gonna be teleoperation.

So how is, how is that gonna [00:08:00] work? How is that remote assistance gonna work? So that’s, there’s a lot of great questions here. And one another one that I like is, because famously I, famously to us, probably not so famously for most people on earth, but they say, just provide a detailed description of your operational design domain, which I think there was a Tesla engineer and a deposition a couple years back who was asked a similar question and basically said, what’s an operational design domain? N is getting ahead of it. And that’s really the big thing here. Tesla’s released autopilot around 2016, full steal driving came out a couple years later.

NSU was playing catch up the whole time on those systems here where Tesla is saying, okay, we’re about to do this in Austin, and Nitsa is saying whoa. We need some answers right now before, something bad happens, which if Tesla starts operating in Austin, I think something bad is going to happen because their systems simply aren’t up to snuff.

And that’s mainly because of something else they asked which is, describe [00:09:00] your describe your sensors. Describe how you’re gonna detect, how you’re going to detect things. What are the methods from detecting things in the road, your and detect how

Anthony: many sensors, where are they located?

Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. And then also, very. Which is very pertinent to that question. Describe how you’re going to ensure the safety of the robot taxii operations and reduce roadway visibility conditions like sun glare, fog, dust, rain, all of those situations in which we’ve seen Tesla’s camera systems not respond appropriately and put drivers in danger.

So they’re asking all the right questions. Good. On nitsa. Even after all of the worries that have been expressed about Elon taking over the federal government destroying nitsa, they still are putting Tesla’s feet to the fire.

Anthony: Yeah. Can Nitsa actually stop Tesla from doing this? That’s a doing.

Michael: You find that the, that the, if Tesla deploys a robo cyber cab or whatever they’re calling it they could stop it [00:10:00] if it was deployed and it was not in it didn’t meet Federal Motor Vehicle safety standards, which would be deploying a cyber cab without a steering wheel or pedals without getting exemption. That would be a relatively quick recall, I think.

But they could also, through the investigation and recall process force ne force Tesla to take the vehicles off the road. I think that would be a much longer process. I definitely think it would involve large lawsuits being filed and who knows how long the delays would be there. NITSA needs and frankly, needs more authority in that area.

They need a, the authority to act quickly on. Dangers to public safety. It’s something that, if you have, if we have a cybersecurity breach in a fleet of automated vehicles and they are literally killing people on the roads as we talk, NSA’s recall, authority is not enough to get them off the road because you have to have hearings, you have to have findings from [00:11:00] the Nitsa administrator and the Department of Transportation, and all of these things take months, if not longer and lawsuits can be filed to delay that process.

Nitsa needs something along the lines of an imminent hazard authority that would allow them to, order the suspension of operations by a particular company or within a particular fleet so that they can address a public safety issue. So that’s something that’s needed at the federal level to prevent, mass casualty incidents from occurring due to cybersecurity or other problems.

Fred: I. Sorry. I wanna remind listeners that the president of Tesla is in a position where he has been firing the engineers and administrators who are responsible for addressing these safety issues associated with Tesla and his pending operations. So it’s, we’re in a very unusual situation here where the fox is in charge of the chicken coop and the chickens are being decapitated.

Right and [00:12:00] left.

Anthony: Fred, I got some questions for you. You’re a member of SAE, correct?

Fred: Yes.

Anthony: Okay. And so you’ve been how many years have you been part of SAE?

Fred: Five maybe.

Anthony: Okay. And you’ve gone to a lot of meetings, you’ve read a lot of the notes and all this stuff, and you’ve participated True. Okay.

All, yeah. How many Tesla employees have you ever seen at these meetings?

Fred: Zero so far.

Anthony: Okay, so zero. So it is good. It’s easy to

Fred: keep track of it that way.

Anthony: And we’ve asked this question to other SAE members who’ve been guests on the show, and they’ve all been like none. We, Tesla has never participated in any of this stuff.

So what I like is Nitsa saying, Hey, how do you conform to this thing that every other auto manufacturer, every other part of the auto industry’s part of, and you guys aren’t how do you conform to this standard? It’s gonna be interesting.

Fred: It is. That’s a great point you bring up. And I would also highly recommend this letter to our friends in the AV development [00:13:00] community who’ve been avoiding all of these questions for so long, including through their shills, like the AV Safety Committee, A VSC.

And this is a lot of our different three letter organizations that could be named and won’t do that here because they might take it personally, but. Sooner or later you’re gonna get these questions asked yourselves, and you should take this letter from our friends of nitsa and compare it to the standards that you’re using to develop the vehicles.

Because if you don’t, you’re gonna run into this later rather than sooner. And the later you run into it and try to accommodate it, the more expensive and slow it’s going to be. So if you really wanna streamline your engineering development Tahi, read these, read this letter

Michael: and then, go to question eight and where it says, explain your methods and processes.

Establishing a safety case. That’s something, we’ve talked about for a long time since I believe we talked about it [00:14:00] first when the folks from Edge Case Research were on the podcast a couple of years ago and talking about, the continuous process of evaluating autonomous technology.

It doesn’t end when you put them on the road. There’s a continuous process. The safety case is ongoing as long as those vehicles are on the road to make sure that nothing’s coming up.

Fred: You bring up another great point, Michael, and the industry is coalesced around the idea that a safety case analysis is the right way to approach safety for these vehicles.

What it has not coalesced around is the idea that there’s gotta be a, an effective and independent evaluation of the edge of the safety case. In order to make sure that you’re actually getting a good appraisal of it. For example, if you look at the technology readiness level document put out by the general accounting organization or accountability, I can’t remember what they’re called.

Accounting Government

Michael: Accountability Office, right?

Fred: [00:15:00] Yeah. They put out a a document on technology readiness levels and how they should be evaluated through their technology readiness assessment team, which includes stakeholders from all the affected parties. Several of the organizations now are starting to reference technology readiness levels as they discuss their approach to AV safety.

But what they’re doing is cherry picking the ones that are easy and ignoring the ones that are hard. And, there’s a long tradition of not allowing people to have dessert until you’ve eaten the peas, right? Oh, you’re gonna do the hard work to do this right, rather than using it as a public relations vehicle to say that we’re doing the right things without actually doing the right things.

So we’ve had that up on our website before the GAO report, but anybody wants to find that. We’ll be happy to send that along. And also we’d be happy to send all this advisory from the nitsa, [00:16:00] which serves as a pretty good framework for how to think about the safety case analysis and how to evaluate it.

Anthony: Yeah, you can go to our website and search. It’s a really good search engine, not bragging. And you can find anything you ever want. And if you like Nitsa and you think, Hey, NITSA should be supported and whatnot, guess what? You can’t donate to nitsa, but you can donate to the Center for Auto Safety while you’re on our website.

Search around, click that red donate button. Do it once, do it twice. Do it price.

Tesla’s Market Challenges and Public Perception

Anthony: Let’s continue with Tesla. Oh, this is interesting. This is just a total aside. I ran across some someone did an article saying the cyber trucks design is reminiscent of some apartheid level material military vehicle that they would use to mow down people in South Africa.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m like, that sounds about right, that why else would this weird design be that way? But that’s not what I’m gonna talk about. Next, I’m gonna talk about apparently no one’s buying the model Y in cyber truck. And Tesla’s telling all their workers to stay [00:17:00] home which I mean, the model Y seems to be relatively safe as long as you’re not putting in full self-driving cyber truck recalled eight times.

Hey, maybe this prevents the consumer from making a mistake with a hundred thousand dollars consumer. If you wanna make a mistake with a hundred thousand dollars, donate it to me. But if you wanna make a good idea, donate to the Center for Auto Safety. Look at that two plugs. Yeah,

Michael: I mean that, again we’re, it’s basically, I don’t the model, I obviously has experienced some lower sales.

I don’t know, that’s some pushback on Musk. And also the cyber truck has got its own set of problems beyond Musk, which is, beyond being ugly and making everyone that drives it look like a dick. It’s just, it’s not selling at all. And they’re racking them up in storage lots right now because nobody’s buying them.

The Cyber Tuck, cyber Truck Death Watch continues.

Anthony: Fred you you’re a fan of civics, [00:18:00] right? Yes, sir. Okay. So you’ve taken part in some sort of civic engagement, and I’m not talking about that time you grew marijuana and an Abrams tank ran over it. That was more civil disobedience, or the time you cut the fence at Woodstock?

I. I’m thinking like, what do you do like when you see something in a newspaper and you’re like, this is Horace Pucky. What does a man like you do?

Fred: I’m not sure there’s another man like me that I’ve been told that I’m but we’ll put that aside for the moment. So there was a story in the Austin Globe a couple of Sundays ago, written by a woman whose name is Michelin Maynard, I think that’s a woman’s name who wrote a op-ed said, Americans need Tesla to succeed.

That means Musk has to go. So the basic thought behind that is that the national interest is closely aligned with Tesla, but Musk is a jerk and he should have to be kicked out of the [00:19:00] company. So that set me to thinking. Why and what can I do about this misapprehension? So I actually wrote a letter to the editor of the Austin Globe and surprisingly they published it.

I’ll just read it. That’s probably the easiest way to Sure. Before you start that,

Anthony: I wanna give you the exact title of the article ’cause it’s absurd. Tesla is too important to fail. That means Musk has to go. Is it like the old saying, what’s good for GM is good for America.

Fred: It’s very much like that.

So here’s my appraisal of that and what they published. So quoting from the letter, why? So the electric vehicles, Tesla offers are profitable in part because of extensive federal subsidies and Tesla’s slowness in fixing safety shortcomings that have already killed people. Investigations by the National Highway’s Traffic Safety Administration of those defects were crippled by Musk’s [00:20:00] Department of Government Efficiency and its firing of responsible engineers.

Add to all that the Biden Era rules effectively barring the import of all Chinese cars and trucks to the US market and the recent Trump tariffs on Chinese vehicles that are sold in the rest of the world for much less than the cost of Teslas. These are all measures that protect Tesla’s profits, not jobs, nor the public safety, nor their wallets.

Again, why is Tesla’s success and essential national priority subsidized by me, you and everyone else in the country? Let Tesla sink or swim on its merits, not on access to the Oval Office. We should instead open up the electric vehicle market to domestic and foreign competitors with safer and less expensive cars.

So that was fun. The letter I actually wrote them was a little bit more aggressive and talked about the fact that Musk is probably an illegal immigrant based on [00:21:00] what’s been reported about his fraudulent entries in his citizenship application. It’s also interesting that Trump is the richest person in the United States based upon or in the world, but based upon how many

Michael: You mean Musk, not Trump. Musk is not Trump. Yeah. Although Trump’s catching up with his fleet of free planes from Qatar.

Fred: Anyway, Musk and Trump both complain about federal money flowing to immigrants. So what are we seeing here? We’re seeing hundreds of billions of dollars flowing to an immigrant due to, government interaction, right? All that money’s coming from them, all the subsidies, all the ev credits and rebates. And in fact, Tesla’s even tapped into the, in Canadian rebates for electric vehicles, which are, their request is completely outta step with the actual numbers of vehicles they’ve sold.

So [00:22:00] something that fishy is going on there as well. Anyhow thought we shared that with you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Anthony: Absolutely. I loved it. Yeah, so that’s I think that is the end of our Tesla for this episode. So if you’re like, I only come here for the Tesla stuff, you can you can go off and go listen to something else now.

But for the rest of you who are like, Hey, what’s going on in New York City?

Congestion Pricing in New York City

Anthony: Stick around. So we’ve talked about congestion pricing. Congested pricing is this horrendous thing. Whereas if you enter Manhattan below 60th street between the hours of, I don’t know, 9:00 AM and 10:00 PM something like that, you gotta pay nine bucks.

Unless you’re a larger vehicle, then you gotta pay more. But the outer highways with the island of Manhattan, those are excluded and it’s anyway, some bunch of people who don’t live in New York and a bunch of people in New Jersey are like, I don’t wanna pay this. This is stupid. And New York’s we have a broken subway system, we need one to pay for it.

And so this has been [00:23:00] going on since January, and we’re actually collecting some real data now to find out what are the results of congestion pricing. Now I’d ask the two of you what you think the results are, but you’ve already read this article in the New York Times. What’s changed?

Here’s just some highlights. Cars in the street, fewer traffic speeds faster. Okay. Normally we’d be like, we don’t want faster traffic speeds from, that was a concern. Yeah. But it’s going from 10 miles per hour to 16 miles per hour. It’s not that’s great if you’re doing this, but local buses faster, less delayed traffic outside the zone.

So this is one of the arguments against this is, oh, you’re gonna push all this traffic and all this pollution off to people I really don’t care about except when it affects me and then I’m gonna care about them. Right now it doesn’t seem like this has been a problem. Still early data on that.

Michael: Yeah, the first concern I had was that the weather, the speed, increased speed or more open roads would result in more crashes more injuries or deaths.

And it looks like both of [00:24:00] those have declined around 14, 15% from the same period last year before the congestion pricing. So I was wrong and happy to admit it, because, less people are getting in crashes.

Anthony: Yeah, that’s, that was the amazing thing is that a car crash industry injuries down, parking violations also down.

My favorite though, traffic noise complaints also down, but I don’t live inside this congestion pricing zone. I live outside of it and suns of bitches are pulling donuts on my road anyway so I think this is really good and it’s literally in line with what we’ve seen around the world with London doing this with I believe Stockholm, where the downside is, I guess if you have to pay nine bucks to enter the zone, but.

If you’re doing that, you got nine bucks to spare. That’s my take on it. I don’t know.

Michael: And there’s good news from New Jersey, right? Their buses get into New York faster now.

Anthony: Exactly. Wait, that’s that. I live it. I don’t know if that’s good. I don’t know if I won. It’s no, seriously, like it’s helped improve the, in the [00:25:00] article, the only downside I saw is somebody commuting from New Jersey into New York, which millions of people do.

And she said yeah, I can’t find a place to sit down on the path train, which is a subway type system. And I’m like, yeah, I get it. That sucks. Hey, need more trades. Ah, hey, I agree. And the path system’s pretty nice. I’m okay with it. So I’m all for congestion pricing.

Fred: To be fair, there is another downside, which is of course having to pay the, having to pay congestion fee just to be, yeah, that’s said but clear.

I know you’re wealthy and don’t mind that there are others for whom that’s a concern.

Anthony: For others that it’s concern. If you’re low income people, they have some sort of you don’t have to do it. You get some discount. I can’t remember. They have, there’s a whole bunch of exemptions in there for a variety of reasons.

But most people in New York we’re on the subway.

Michael: Yeah. If you can afford to drive into the city and pay the congestion total, don’t, you’re having to pay for parking, which has gotta be worse.

Anthony: Bri, you’re paying for parking, you’re paying for car insurance in New York.

[00:26:00] Like the congestion pricing is not, it’s cheaper than crossing the George Washington Bridge, which is ridiculously expensive.

Michael: Yeah.

Anthony: That’s why I want, I would wish the cyber truck was submersible, like they claimed in one video that it could go through water.

Michael: It is submersible.

Anthony: Yeah.

Yeah, it is. It is submersible. ‘Cause then I would get that and just drive. Anyway, that’s that’s that update. We’d like to keep you updated with I. Stories we’ve come to, oh, no, I lied. There’s gonna be a mention of Tesla in this next one. I apologize. Brace yourself folks. This is from auto guide.com.

Titled Cars from these brands are involved in more accidents. Oh boy. Drivers in the United States were involved in 5,930,496 car crashes over the course of the 2022 calendar year, which is the most recent year that Nitsa has full stats. And so they did. Okay. Which car manufacturers have the highest accident rates in 2024?

Fred, have you already read this article? Have you I have.

Fred: I was surprised to find Subarus in number two.

Anthony: I [00:27:00] was surprised too that Subaru is number two. But yeah, number seven on the list is Tesla with 8.79%. I was honestly surprised it was that far down the list. I’m not fully sure how they got these numbers, but yeah, they’re, oh, this is, oh, this is the highest accident rates in 2024.

I just realized that they talk about. Oh, some insurance Fi crunch numbers determine which automakers had the highest accident rates in 2024 and they said Ram Subaru, Volkswagen Mini, Jeep, Genesis, Tesla, alpha, Romeo, Kia, Audi. Yeah, that’s that’s yeah, and they’re still saying that excessive speed is the largest contributing factor.

Alcohol, drug and medication impairments were cited in 11% of fatal crashes. Distracted driving only made up 5.2% and drowsy driving counted for 2.1%.

Michael: That’s, it’s some interesting stuff here. They’re doing it based on the accident rates, which I think is the number of accidents compared to the number of drivers each state, right?

Which is, Massachusetts is the number one state and accident rate. [00:28:00] However, and we’ve discussed this before, if you look at state by state fatalities per a hundred million vehicles, miles traveled, Massachusetts is consistently either a leader, number one or number two in that category.

So a lot of non-fatal crashes apparently happening in Massachusetts.

Anthony: And Fred hit a deer in New York though, but he lives in Massachusetts and it was in a Subaru. If you had that on your Bingo card, you’ve won.

Michael: So the other couple, a couple things that were interesting here. The, there were four electric vehicles in the top 10 crashes and the Kia Soul Ev was, above everyone else in, in the crash rate, which suggests that, either Kia soul owners are having trouble with the advanced acceleration of the vehicle or there’s something else going on there.

Anthony: Yeah, there was definitely very

Michael: surprising.

Anthony: But yeah, it, I think at this point I think it’s fair to say this is more interesting Yeah. Than anything that anyone would act on. I don’t [00:29:00] think this should change your driving decision, but it might change where, which state you wanna live in. No offense, Fred, Massachusetts is dangerous.

Michael: Look, we got through that. Without mentioning Tesla,

Fred: did you mention that Massachusetts is going to become tropical?

At some point. Absolutely. Yeah. There’s an initiative in a state house to declare that Martha’s Vineyard is a tropical paradise. So just standby. Okay. There could be even more reasons to move to Massachusetts.

Anthony: That sounds great. Everybody stay tuned for that one. Okay we’re gonna go to this one here.

Okay.

Steering Wheel Safety Tips

Anthony: So guys you all learned how to drive a car. You all have driver’s license. And when you were driving the car, we’ve heard this, I’m sure you were taught this. You’ve seen it in movies, TV shows. You put your hands at 10 and two on the wheel, right? Not noon and nuts, 10 and two. Apparently that’s not the safest way to hold the steering wheel anymore.

Part of that is because from an article at MSN, this is because vehicle [00:30:00] steering wheels and internal mechanisms have changed significantly over the years with steering in many cars becoming more responsive to movement, thus requiring significantly less effort on the driver’s part to steer as much as they need because of this experts.

Nitsa advise against the 10 and two, or they call it the two and 10 method, as it can actually increase dangers in VE vehicles with smaller steering wheels and airbags. I remember first hearing about this with 10 and two. The airbag go off. People are getting their arms broken or their wrists broken.

Yeah that’s, that happens sometimes. Yeah. So now it seems the better place to hold it is nine and three. Yeah. There’s a different, I thought

Fred: it was a different way to do it. I learned to drive in Massachusetts, we were always taught to approach the steering wheel with your thighs at four and eight.

Anthony: I dated a woman who did that for a while, and it scared the hell outta me each time. But I was young and dumb.

Driving Techniques: 10 and 2 vs. 9 and 3

Michael: Yeah. And there’s a, 10 and two o’clock is a handover hand motion turn, which is [00:31:00] just, that’s been drilled into me and that’s how I operate. I have not switched over to the newer way.

So I might get, maybe my arms will get injured in a crash. Maybe I need to learn this new way. Maybe I’m not as safe a driver as, I think the three and nine is more of a, I think they call it a push pull kind of way to turn the steering wheel. I don’t know. Maybe I need to learn something new in my old age.

Anthony: Yeah, I think I hold it nine and three when I’m on the highway. But turning still, it’s that 10 and two hand over hand is how I do it. I don’t I’m imagining and for those of you not paying for the premium subscription you could see us making weird hand gestures and body contortions as we’re, IM imitating turning a steering wheel, but I don’t know, does anyone, any listener out there, do you hold on nine and three and turn the whole wheel like you, do you not do hand over hand anymore?

Fred: That’s, no, that’s not what they’re recommending. They’re recommending that you shuffle your hands basically, and you pull with one and move the other one.

Anthony: Always use slide instead of hand over hand.

Fred: It’s the [00:32:00] electric, those are the electric slide in the case of electric vehicles.

Michael: Yeah.

It looks like your milk in a cow. There you go. That’s a nice way to put it.

Fred: You look in a circular cow. Yeah.

Anthony: So yeah, that’s that’s pretty interesting. So we’re all doing it wrong. Jumping another article from MSN we’ve talked about this issue a number of times. This article is titled, Connecticut Leaders Warn about Dangers of Hot Cars, and we’ve had experts on talking about this and how horrific this is, where even on a 70 degree day, your backseat can easily jump over to close to 120 degrees in one hour.

It’s, there’s been roughly 40 deaths each year from this, and they’re typically infants who get cooked in cars. It is horrific. States or, yeah, Senator Richard Blumenthal will join health expert safety advocates and local officials to push for a federal law that would alert drivers to check their back seats before exiting their cars.

We’ve talked about [00:33:00] this a number of ways doing this of like the reminder saying, Hey, check there, of what we had. There was like an internal radar system, I think is one to see, to check for a heartbeat back there to warn you. So this is great that it’s finally getting codified in the law, which would I assume Yeah, force car manufacturers to do something.

Michael: It’s been in the law since, in the Infrastructure Act in 2021. That, it required the, it required nets at issue regulation by November of 2023 to, mandate a technology that prevents hot car deaths. The industry is supportive, obviously, of the cheapest technology, which essentially relies on door sequencing.

So like when you got out when you’re getting in your car, if you open the back door, shut it, open your driver door, shut it. Then when you get out, the car knows that you opened that back door before you got in so that it will give you a warning that, hey, you may have left something in the backseat like a child.

The technology that we support and we think is a lot more [00:34:00] effective is the u use of, cameras or millimeter wave radar or, whatever technology you want to use as a manufacturer that can actually detect children who are in the rear seat and issue alerts, not just to the driver, honking the horn, letting you know anyone nearby or even, safety workers know, firemen, police alerting people to the fact that there’s a child who could be in the backseat.

NITSA has been slow. They have obviously not met the Met, met the deadline of November, 2023 to get that technology mandate, that technology in vehicles. And part of their issue there is they, there, there aren’t enough manufacturers out there who have actually put the technology into cars that they can test so that they can then write the federal standard mandating the technology.

Because in order to set a minimum performance standard for the technology, they actually have to have something they can look at. They just can’t create that outta thin air. So it’s been difficult for them to do because the manufacturers aren’t [00:35:00] really jumping on it. I think Hyundai and Kia have a system and Volvo has a system.

That NSA’s looking at. But there aren’t a lot of them on the road that have that type of technology. And it’s, it’s, this is the worst time of the year because, I think this weekend on Saturday, was the third death known death of a child in a hot car this year.

And, we’re just getting to the warm months of the year. And the numbers are, as they always do, are going to go up over the course of the summer. And, because there’s no technology going into vehicles to stop it. We anticipate this trend isn’t something that’s going away until, we have a sufficient mass of vehicles with the new technology on the roads, which could be over a decade or more from now.

So it’s just incredibly sad. This continues to happen and is preventable. And there’s technology that can stop it. There’s just it’s a. Literally the worst thing I get in my inbox every day are emails from Jeanette Fennels Group Kid and Car [00:36:00] Safety that document the death of every child in America, every time this happens.

It’s just something that is completely preventable and that shouldn’t be occurring.

Fred: There is an alternative approach, which is to always have an in-law, in the passenger seat in the front, because they’re sure to nag you. Yeah. They’re, they’re sure to remind you that you as a dumb ass have left your kid in the car.

So it’s, it is reliable. It works. And multi-generational households can often save a lot of money too. So I do recommend that approach. It’s never failed me.

Anthony: That’s good. I still stick with giving guns to babies, let you know you will not forget that. Oh yeah, my baby has a gun. Let me get ’em outta the backseat.

Or at least you’ll get your gun outta the backseat. But that’s but

Michael: not loaded.

Anthony: When I drive, I hand a, if I’m handing a gun to a baby, I’m probably pretty loaded. Anyway, I realize we haven’t done Gaslight illumination yet this week. Oh my [00:37:00] word. What’s going on Fred? I think you have one.

You have one all ready to go? I do. And

Fred: surprisingly

Anthony: it’s

Fred: not Tesla. It’s but you’re

Anthony: stealing one of my other favorites, but fine. Go ahead.

Fred: It’s my friends at Waymo. I went to the Waymo Safety page and we’ll provide a link to this and has a number of interesting things. It talks about the millions and millions of miles that the Waymo driver has driven.

And then they also post the fact that the Waymo driver, generation six was released on August of last year, which makes me wonder what are all these miles they’re accumulating? So they’ve been through five generations. And it seems from a statistical analysis point of view that you can’t really compare them as though they’re identical because the reason for going from one generation to another is presumably ’cause they have different software.

So this starts off being questionable, if not absolute bullshit as they go [00:38:00] through this. But diving in a little deeper let me continue that theme for just a second. So they percent, they have a chart in there. If you dig through percent of Waymo driver collisions with less than one mile per hour change in velocity.

So I’m not sure what this metric means, but I think it means that don’t worry about this. Nothing to see here, folks, but they’ve shown a graph and their words are, this graph shows the percentage of SGO reported crashes where the maximum delta V from either the Waymo vehicle or other vehicle was less than one mile per hour, meaning the collision resulted in.

A less than one mile per hour change in velocity. Delta V, less than one mile per hour usually results in only minor damage. This graph includes vehicle to vehicle and single vehicle crashes, but not crashes with pedestrian cyclists and motorcyclists. So we start with the observation that they’re cherry picking the data.

That’s [00:39:00] one way of doing it, but they also include a note that says, note comparable human benchmarks for less than one mile per hour. Delta V are currently not possible to estimate with high certainty. Okay? So that means they have an imaginary standard that they’re using to compare this speculative data, cherry pick data on the on the Waymo driver against, and then they go on to say it’s down 47% in Phoenix from this imaginary number.

Down 43% in Phoenix, or sorry, the 47% was for Phoenix and San Francisco, and then they break out, Phoenix is minus 43% and San Francisco is minus 49%. So I gotta bother you with a little bit of technical stuff here. So there’s a concept in data measurement, which is called significant figures. In other words, you can’t say something that’s 49.33347% different from another one if you’re only able to measure it [00:40:00] within a couple percent.

Makes sense.

Anthony: Makes sense. You can’t,

Fred: You can’t measure eyeball width using something, an odometer that only measures miles. It makes no sense to do that. So if you think about this for a moment, they’re saying 47% decrease from this imaginary number, but that means that you’ve got plus or minus 1% accuracy in the data.

Where’s that coming from? You’ve got a couple of things you’re looking at. Anytime you see information like this, which has cherry pick data and really questionable assumptions, you should always look for the, a statement of the uncertainty in the data. So in other words, cherry pick data compared with the unknown and unknowable baseline.

The numbers are meaningless. And the publication of these numbers implying high precision, two figures shown implies an accuracy of a plus or minus 1% is either an inadvertent or deliberate attempt to mislead the public. So the, the [00:41:00] gaslight continues from Waymo at an even higher level. And if the intention was not to mislead the public, I’m not sure what the intention of this was.

So that’s my nominee.

Anthony: That’s a good one. I every time I see these numbers out of Waymo and similar companies, it makes me think of, ebitda. Do you guys know what EBITDA is? Yeah. Okay. EBITDA is, for people who don’t know, is this total bullshit made up thing that public companies do. It stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

It allows companies that don’t make a profit don’t have enough revenue to be like, look, we’ve made a profit if you forget all this other shit that we had to pay for and do. But we’re we’re up there. And so that’s what I get with Waymo with these things like we’re doing great. If you compare us to only people driving 10 miles per hour in San Francisco on a Tuesday during sunny days between the hours of 10:00 AM and 10:30 AM

Fred: So it’s interesting to see the difference between Tesla and Waymo.

’cause Waymo intends [00:42:00] to just snow you with bullshit. Or as Tesla snows you with nothing,

Anthony: they just outright lie. But again I still stand that Waymo has no business model at all. Michael, what’s your whistleblower or Wow, what is this section called again? I don’t remember. Gaslight, I,

Michael: my gaslight.

‌

Michael: I think we have been gaslit to some extent by the people who are researching and developing and advertising the future of solid state batteries. We had an article, our notes this week about Mercedes and the, I think it’s a battery, a solid state battery company called Factorial. And we’ve been led here at least to believe that solid state batteries would virtually eliminate the fire risk of that we see in lithium ion batteries, no thermal runaway and that sort of thing.

But it doesn’t seem to be the case, and that article says, solid state. Batteries have one big drawback that explains why you can’t buy a car with one today. Such [00:43:00] battery sales are more prone to grow spiky irregularities, also, I think called dendrites that cause short circuits. And that the, the vast riches behind solid state batteries await a company that can overcome this problem and develop a battery that’s durable and safe as well as easy to manufacture.

And, looking into that, it’s absolutely right, there are some pretty significant fire concerns with solid state batteries. And I have. Previously on this podcast, probably on numerous occasions, suggested that solid state batteries are inherently safer than lithium ion.

And maybe they are in some ways. And maybe this isn’t as big of a problem as, I’m thinking it is, but, looking at what’s out there now, leaves me to question the safety of solid state batteries. So I, my gaslight of the week would go to the solid state battery industry and their it’s, some of their promotional materials suggesting that their batteries are gonna be that much more safe than the lithium ion.

They should be safer simply [00:44:00] due to their lower weight at, with higher energy density. As far as fires are concerned, maybe not so much

Anthony: cold fusion for via unlimited safe energy too.

Fred: We’ve been here before with solid, safe batteries. NY CAD batteries. They used to be in laptops, right?

Those are solid state batteries. The lithium metal hydride batteries that used to be used for rechargeable systems, those are also solid state batteries. There’s no magic in the solid state batteries. It’s a real question of the battery chemistry and what they’re advertising is a much higher energy density with these solid state batteries than you could get with the previous generation of solid state batteries.

But the energy density took a big leap when the lithium high lithium lithium ion batteries were invented. There were not solid state. So there’s a whole spectrum of things going on here. And one advantage may weigh another, but we’ve been through solid state before. We may get there again.

Lithium lithium [00:45:00] ion batteries are still the standard for high energy density use.

Anthony: Those nickel metal batteries, those were solid state. The previous ones and laptops. Previous lithium ion. Yeah.

Fred: Yeah. And they had the dendrite problem because if you ran your nickel academies down or nickel cadmium batteries down to zero, then the dendrites start to grow.

So you always had to keep ’em charged. And the spontaneously discharge at a much higher rate than the lithium ion batteries. So some specific defects that were solved, people have a long way to go with the solid state batteries to achieve the performance that could be acceptable for cars because of the large amount of energy that’s gotta be in there.

And I think that the breakthrough here is it’s an alternative solid state chemistry, solid state battery chemistry that has high enough energy density that it could be considered for a electric vehicle. They didn’t really report it that way, but I think [00:46:00] that’s what’s really going on here.

Anthony: Okay that still just seems to be, won’t everything be better in the future?

Fred: Gotta be.

Anthony: Yeah, I think so. All right. Mine is going to be, I’m not really sure who gets it. It, I think it’s California regulators maybe, or this could be federal regulators. This is an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about this little company called Zoox. So we talked about Zoox last week, two weeks ago, and Zoox had a crash and they recalled all their vehicles and stopped them.

And I was like, Hey, good job. You guys had an accident. You hit somebody we’re gonna recall everything. Figure out what happened. So they do that and they put their cars back out on the road. What do they do? They hit a cyclist. That’s right. And this is interesting ’cause according from the article, what happened next was captured.

This is a captured probably in stark detail by multiple cameras on a Zoox robot taxi. The company’s not required to publicly share its footage and has declined to do a thing. But the spokesperson at Zoo said that Zoox supplied the video to [00:47:00] regulators unlike GM Cruise. Hopefully it wasn’t edited but this is disturbing.

So we get to put these when Fred and I, we put out our robo taxis in Texas and Florida simultaneously we hit somebody. We don’t have to share the footage with the public, but the public’s Hey, we’re gonna subsidize this and we’re gonna let you beta test this death mobile out in the public streets.

Fred: Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. And this would never happen in the Piggly Legally parking lot though. Just for the record,

Anthony: our that’s interesting ’cause our entire operating design domain is restricted to Piggly Wiggly parking lots.

Fred: That makes ’em safe. There we go.

Anthony: Perfect. We’re all set. So yeah, this article is interesting.

And it’s a, the article itself is a bit of a gas life ’cause it ends saying these quote unquote experts who are like, yeah man, it was the cyclist’s fault. Always the victim’s fault. Yeah. It was totally the cyclist’s fault. The zoox could have stopped, but it it was like, it just, like it couldn’t which makes it strike me as being it’s fault that it couldn’t safely operate itself.

That was my [00:48:00] takeaway. Some sort of regulators, I think. I think if you’re allowed to put one of these complete beta at best Alpha really products on the road that can kill people you gotta be able to, you have to make the footage on all of them public. You have to.

Fred: Yeah, I wanna, it’s also important to note that every other instance of automatic machinery that has the potential to kill people is barred from public use, right?

You’ve got fences around steam rollers, you’ve got scaffolding around buildings that are being. Renovated, right? Because you don’t want this automatic machinery to kill anybody. Yet, somehow these vehicles are different because somebody said, oh, they’re not dangerous. Machinery roaming around without human supervision.

There are cars. So we don’t need, we don’t need to be safe because there are cars. This is an important point. I think that’s been completely missing from the public [00:49:00] discussion. Hey, look. ’cause

Anthony: no one ever saw a sci-fi movie where the building attacked somebody and the scaffolding protected civilization.

Whereas we’ve all seen movies where the car drives itself and it’s amazing and it’s a little Volkswagen bug and it rai races around a track and it’s adorable. It’s got a personality. It’s so cute. Michael’s got nothing.

Fred: I haven’t seen that movie. My kids are too old.

Anthony: Herbie, come on. That came out in my sixties.

Herbie has bananas. Alright. Yeah. That came out in the sixties. You’re come on. Your kids are old. Come on. Oh,

Fred: I, yeah, I lived in, I was brought up by wolves. We didn’t have any movies in the Wolf then. Oh,

Anthony: That’s a shame. And this

Fred: is before streaming it was, there wasn’t real disadvantages to being brought up by wolves back in the sixties,

Anthony: right?

I guess so. Alright.

Vehicle Recalls: Latest Updates

Anthony: Shall we move on to recalls? Yeah, I think that sounds great. Alright. First one up. Hey. Oh wait, I didn’t tell who sorry. Fred wins Gaslight this week ’cause he chose Waymo and Waymo’s always, top of my list. If he said Kathy Wood at Arc Investment, I would’ve been like, oh, he wins too.

Keep that in [00:50:00] mind for next week, Michael. First one up is Waymo. 1,212 vehicles. And now this is fascinating. They’re recalling their fifth generation automated driving system prior to the November 7th, 2024 software release. So I’d imagine since Waymo owns the entire platform this doesn’t, this isn’t out in the wild anymore.

So what are they really recalling? They just neglected a thousand vehicles that they never updated software on what’s going on here? Because they were just touting, Hey, our version six driver’s amazing man, it’s so good. I.

Michael: Yeah it’s hard to tell if they’re doing like, a retrospective recall here, just to ensure they’re complying with NHTSA’s recall regs.

They don’t get in trouble down the road. Maybe they’re saying, Hey, we’re gonna re, we fixed this, but we’re gonna issue a recall now. It looks like they were running into, I think most of us have come into a situation where there’s a gate that’s just a chain suspended between two poles.

It looks [00:51:00] like that’s something they’re not navigating, or at least in November before the release of their new software, they weren’t navigating chains, gates, and other gate light roadway barriers. No injuries or crashes that are associated with this. And owners won’t hear about this because there are no owners.

I.

Anthony: Ha. And remember, kids yeah. Cars drive. Computers drive better than people because they’ve got all these sensors and these cameras and they can see all around, but they can’t see a chain. Next up, Chrysler 778 vehicles. That is very specific. The 2025 Ram 3,500 oh some 2025. My Ram, 3,500 vehicles with a three and a half inch cluster and column shifter.

May experience A-P-R-N-D display delay in the cluster park. Reverse neutral drive. I figured it out because you go shift your car and it’s I’m in park now I’m in drive. And it’s Nope, you’re still in park. Okay, now you’re in drive. I don’t know why a ram [00:52:00] speaks with that voice in my head.

I.

Fred: I don’t know. It sounds like a cluster truck to me.

Michael: Yeah, it’s the cluster display that’s the problem here. The 3.5 inch cluster display basically doesn’t show you what gear you’re in quickly enough, there’s a delay that doesn’t comply with motor vehicle safety standard number 1 0 1. So if you’re an owner, you’ll be hearing about this, eh, around the start of June.

I, it doesn’t, it looks like they’re just gonna correct software. Hopefully they can get that done quickly so you folks know what gear you’re in.

Anthony: All right. Next up Volkswagen 89,417 vehicles. This is the 2022. 2024 Audi Q five Sportback, Quatro, the regular Quatro. And over time, the cylinder head screw may cover, screw may loosen.

If this occurs, engine oil may leak from the cylinder. Head to cover screw hole. Wow. And so you’re gonna get some smoke, maybe ’cause your oils linking on a hot [00:53:00] engine. And people will be like, Hey man, that your car’s smoking. You’re like, I know it’s the Quatro.

Michael: Yeah, this is basically a fire concern.

I think they’re just gonna inspect the cylinder head screws, make sure that they’re tightened properly and if they’re messed up or damaged, they’re gonna replace your screws and tighten them properly. That one is relatively easy fix. Owners will be hearing about it not until July.

It makes you wonder why they can’t get that done a little faster. But who knows? Maybe the screws have a tariff issue.

Anthony: Yeah, it’s interesting. It says, due to varying tightening torques during the screwing process of the cylinder head cover a permanently secure screw connection. And thus, yeah, no, the varying tightening torques.

Varying tightening torques Say it at home. All right, last recall. Volvo 413,151 vehicles. Geez, Volvo. Who do you think you are? Ford? The 2023 to 2025 Volvo S 60. It is a hybrid. Hybrid electric. The Volvo. Yeah. This is [00:54:00] basically

Michael: 21 to 25 Volvos. Yeah. 20. That’s a lot of them.

Anthony: 22 to 25. The all hybrid electrics though.

Michael: Yeah.

Anthony: Yeah. Oh my God. It keeps going. And

Michael: It’s our favorite recall type. It is The rear review camera. Yeah.

Anthony: Wait, is it, oh, I haven’t gotten that. Oh, man. Yeah, I beat you too. Camera. Ah, boo.

Michael: Ah, so they’re having problems with the rear view cameras is just something we’re continuing to see. To the point, we’re wondering what on earth is going on with the industry that they can’t get it together on rear view cameras.

This one looks like it’s gonna be.

Anthony: Oh, did he just freeze on me? I think Michael just froze me. Software.

Michael: Just a software.

Anthony: Oh, yep. Oh no, you just froze a little bit. So this is a software fix they’re gonna do.

Michael: Yeah, it looks like it’s just a backup camera software for all. And it should be quick. Owner’s gonna hear about it in about a month.

Hopefully it’s working.

Fred: Yeah. There’s another problem here, which is that [00:55:00] this shows that they’ve not quarantined the operational software from the entertainment software. That’s a huge cybersecurity risk. Something that should be eliminated in all computer driven vehicles. I clearly have not done that

Anthony: I then I gotta get another chip Fred, and that costs money and safety doesn’t sell.

Good point. Yep. This episode brought to you by Lee. I koga the ghost of Lee. I koga.

Conclusion and Sign-Off

Anthony: Alright, that’s that’s what we have. Thank you for listening. Click subscribe, tell all your friends, donate. And we’ll think you’re awesome. And if Yeah that’s all I got. That’s the end of my ranting.

Bye-bye. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Michael: For more information, visit www.auto

Fred: safety.org.