Self Driving keeps flailing and the Cybertruck is still ugly

Anthony: You’re listening to Their Auto Be a Law, the Center for Auto Safety podcast with Executive Director Michael Brooks, Chief Engineer Fred Perkins, and hosted by me, Anthony Cimino. For over 50 years, the Center for Auto Safety has worked to make cars safer.

Fred: Good morning listeners.

Anthony: Hey listeners, so this is a very important warning. I want everyone to be aware of this. What’s up? We record this in the United States, and as Americans, we like to bedazzle everything. If you don’t know what bedazzling is, we put jewels and little gems, you can put them on your denim jackets, on your pants, on your handbag, all over the place, and you can put them on your steering wheel, dammit!

And now… NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is warning consumers about aftermarket steering wheel decals that can potentially cause significant injury or death. Why don’t they want us to have sparkly things, Michael? Why?

Michael: iT’s similar to why they’ve done a few recalls in the past where manufacturers have emblems affixed to your, the front of your steering wheel that are coming loose.

When the airbag deploys, that emblem, if it’s loose or those bedazzled rhinestones you put on your steering wheel can cause significant injury. NHTSA cited the case of a driver being blinded in one eye, I believe by, uh, some rhinestone. Basically stickers on the steering wheel. And that’s really the crux of the issue.

There are, they’re basically little projectiles that people are fixing to their steering wheels and you should never do that.

Anthony: I want to get a Mercedes and just loosen the album, the logo thing and have it project and I get it smack in my head. So I walk around with a free tattoo.

It is a free tattoo with a little bit of brain damage on the side.

Michael: But it’s interesting, in this case. I can’t imagine how many people are manufacturing stickers to put on your anywhere in your car. It sounds like, you can take a sticker intended for any spot and put it on your steering wheel.

So this really doesn’t just apply to stickers specifically manufactured to put on your steering wheel. So there’s a lot of manufacturers. I think that Nitze would have had to go after here. It probably would have been fruitless. To do and so they, and this really isn’t a recall situation is what I’m getting at.

There’s a consumer warning aspect here. You have to understand as a consumer not to put stickers or any sort of objects anywhere near where airbags might be deploying. That doesn’t just go for your steering wheel. That could go for, by your knee, where your knee airbags are, passenger side where the curtain airbags deploy.

Basically, don’t bedazzle the interior of your vehicle. Bedazzle the outside of it. Hey, is today

Fred: Michael’s turn to be Debbie Downer? Because that’s usually my job. Oh, he’s switching

Michael: roles here.

Anthony: Yeah, can I still have a disco ball inside my car?

Michael: iF it’s firmly affixed in a manner where it won’t become detached during a crash and injure an occupant, I would say, Go for it.

You have that type of engineering background.

Anthony: Firmly affixed? I don’t think you understand the point of a disco ball, man. It can be affixed and

Michael: still rotate, Anthony. Hey, maybe that’s the

Fred: point of the lidars on the outside of the Waymo vehicles. They really look like disco balls. They glare and dance and spin around.

They’re very nice.

Anthony: Oh my word, so look, NHTSA, government regulations going after our freedoms to be bedazzled. Okay, all the time. Alright, don’t bedazzle your car, and don’t put knives in your vents. Is that what they’re gonna ask next? Don’t put sharp objects inside your car? Shameful.

Michael: People routinely drive around with loose objects in their car.

I know we all probably do it without too much thought. I do try to keep sharp objects and other things secured in the trunk if possible, but it’s, there are always going to be, groceries or all sorts of other things that are in your car that can injure you in a crash. It’s something that a lot of us don’t think about enough because of, the low odds of getting into a crash. But a lot of injuries are caused by objects in the vehicle that aren’t connected to the vehicle.

Anthony: Crazy. Speaking of crazy, Hey, welcome to the GM cruise. Sucks show. Okay, that’s not what it is.

I am I’m personally even getting tired of talking about GM Cruise But if you’re getting tired

Michael: about it, then I know I’m

Anthony: I know Kyle’s keep Kylan so As I think we mentioned last week California said GM Cruise, you can’t run in our state anymore. GM Cruise a couple days later is oh, we’re going to stop our autonomous operations throughout the entire country.

We’re going to reflect and stare into our navel and figure out what we can do better. GM Cruise’s board of directors is we’re going to hire a law firm to look into this and a consulting firm to look into the engineering on it, which if your name’s Kyle, that’s not a good Signed for job stability, when your board of directors is I think we’re going to hire some adults here to come in and look over Skippy’s work.

Let’s let’s think things through here. Yeah,

Michael: they’re looking, I think, specifically into how crews managed to omit from, press briefings and discussions with the California DMV and from their initial. Report standing general order report to NHTSA, how they admitted the fact that a secondary movement of the vehicle occurred post crash that could have enhanced the injuries to the pedestrian.

We don’t really have any information on that, but it’s, NHTSA opened an investigation in the last couple of weeks and now GM has come out and recall the software. They’re not recalling the car. Mind you, this is a equipment recall because the vehicle itself isn’t dangerous. It’s only a safety risk once they install the robot driver into the system.

If you’re looking for it under vehicle recalls on that’s his website, you won’t find it.

Anthony: Yeah, so the New York Times, they wrote an article about this, and quoting from that article, which we have a link to, Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong in a tech industry culture, led by the 38 year old Mr.

Vaught, that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. In the competition between Cruise and its top driverless car rival Waymo, Mr. Vought wanted to dominate in the same way Uber dominated its smaller ride hailing competitor, Lyft. Kyle is a guy willing to take risks, and he’s willing to move quickly.

He is very Silicon Valley, said Matthew Walensky, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York. That’s not what you want in a car system. He’s willing to take risks with, not with his life, but with your life. And the lives of just random people on the street. That’s probably not the best approach.

What do

Michael: One of the things that kind of stands out in this whole circumstance to me is if you were putting these vehicles out on the street and you have not contemplated how to properly respond in the post crash environment without, risking further injury to pedestrians or people in other cars or anyone who’s around the accident, then there’s gotta be something wrong with your, Entire planning here.

You’re not taking into account a lot of the things like to a human driver. It’s obvious that if there’s a person trapped in your car, you don’t move the car. It’s not obvious to the computer installed in these cruise vehicles. And that suggests that they probably haven’t thought about a lot of other things that could happen either.

And how are they going to ensure that they’ve taken care of those things before they come back out and put these on the road? I

Anthony: don’t know, but Kyle refused to be interviewed by the New York Times for this. And instead, he replied on Hacker News, which is, I don’t know, just like a little web board.

Because in the article, the New York Times writes that that Cruise workers, humans, need to intervene to assist the company’s vehicles every two and a half to five miles. Kyle’s hey, just want to let you know it’s actually two to four percent of the time we we remotely assist things. Which is, I don’t know why you wouldn’t respond to the New York Times versus being on some weird little message board.

But it’s great.

Fred: That’s because the New York Times has professional reporters.

Anthony: Oh, but this is great because you read through the thread and some people have some great questions in there. One person’s question was, where are these remote assistant human drivers located? And how have they been screened for temporarily driving the vehicles in these cities?

Do they have U. S. driver’s license? How is this regulated? And that’s a great question, like where are these remote assistant people located? Is it just, can it be anybody? Is there any regulations on who remotely drives a car?

Michael: No, there’s not. There’s also no regulations on how many vehicles they can be remotely responsible for at once either, which it seems there’s, I think that they said there were 15 to 20 that were one person was responsible for here.

And I’m, depending on the circumstances or how many of your cars are screwing up at once. I don’t know that seems like a very safe system, or at least a fallback system that relies on a human that’s going to be necessarily delayed in their responses. And I think there’s going to be some lag between, the vehicle’s operation, communicating what it’s doing back to headquarters, and then the signal going back out from headquarters, telling the vehicle what to do.

So this isn’t exactly a live or real time type of response that’s going on here. What would

Fred: you think the official definition of remote driver or remote assistance is?

Anthony: I have no idea. I imagine a little kid in his driveway with an RC controller. I…

Fred: The answer is there’s no official definition.

It is whatever the hell the manufacturer wants it to be. When they talk about remote drivers, we’ve all got this mind, idea in mind of what it is. Somebody who can intervene and actually take control of the car. That’s not what they’ve got a phone line and they have a message that goes into people and they actually have to have a human being come out to take control, physical control of the vehicle if they’re going to reroute or to, take over the operations, intervene in the operations.

Again you dive into the definitions and you find there’s no there, there’s there’s really just this fog of. confusion and greed that’s running this whole program.

Anthony: GM crews, they spend, it’s what, two, over two billion dollars a year on this project. They’re losing money, and one of the things they want to do is they want to get rid of human drivers because human drivers, safety drivers, cost money, and they go to the bathroom, and they Hey, we want, medical benefits.

They want to get rid of that because that’s a cost. And now, I imagine they can never fully get rid of these remote drivers. I imagine. They’re going to say, hey, where’s the lowest cost we can get for these remote drivers? And all of a sudden,

Michael: you’re going to outsource them to another country. Bing.

Yep. Doesn’t it really mess up your latency? Like, how do you send a signal to whatever, it’s presumably going to be somewhere not in this hemisphere. How do you send a signal that far in back to a car and expect there to be any safety margins there? It just seems like there’s. Too much time involved.

Fred: What could possibly go wrong when you have a person’s life at risk and you’re relying on intercontinental communications to save that person’s life? What could possibly go wrong?

Anthony: Nothing. Nothing. Everything’s good in the future. Everything’s good in the future. Speaking of the future, I apologize, listeners.

I pressed the wrong button for recording this, so it is recording, but I realize it’s recording to the cloud, so some of the audio may not be perfect, or may be perfect, and I’ve just figured out a way to save myself a bunch of time by not having to edit things as normally as I do. Sorry about that.

That’s just a little aside, and Michael’s giving me a smirk like, why are you here? No, I’m

Michael: just going to visit. Actually be recorded.

Anthony: It is going to be recorded. That only failed on us one time. It was a good time.

Fred: I think that was actually apropos for the comment about where are these interactions taking place for the cruise remote drivers?

Michael: Exactly. If you could happen to be in charge of it, it’s. Trouble.

Anthony: So another link in our in our description here we have is to a a CNBC video. And it’s interesting. It goes through the whole Waymo and cruise, getting in those cars throughout the city. And one scenario that was in the video that I never thought about, and we never mentioned this show was this woman’s in a cruise or a Waymo, I’m not sure which, and a car in front.

is stops because they’re trying to back in parallel park in a spot. But, as you normally do when you’re driving, like you’re a little farther ahead out of this person, put on their turn signal, that, Hey, can I have space to back up? You back up. The automated vehicle couldn’t handle this.

Everyday occurrence and instead the driver gets out and he’s shaking his fist kicking the car like what the hell is going on beep boop and Angry as can be and this woman’s in the back like I’m afraid and I think she contacted remote support and they’re like, are you do you feel safe? I don’t know like It’s crazy like that is a very common occurrence and that concerns me like they don’t have scenario programmed into their system?

Like, how many other basic things are they missing? What are they going to do? Drive into wet cement? Ha!

Michael: As many little weird quirks that these vehicles seem to have, you’re going to have to imagine that in, it’s going to create a little road rage. We definitely saw that in that video.

That guy was not happy. He was attacking the vehicle. I don’t know if, it certainly scared the passenger. I’m not sure if, her life was in danger, but that’s a scenario that I think has probably played out quite a few times in San Francisco and now probably in Austin and Arizona and other places where, can you imagine getting out of your car I would never advocate for anyone getting out of their car and confronting a driver.

It just doesn’t make any sense. But, if you do that and you see there is no driver, where do you take out your anger then? It looks like he took it out on the car. He

Fred: kicked the car several times and spit at it, and then the crews responded appropriately and went around the car, so maybe that’s programmed in, who knows?

Anthony: Okay, if an automated vehicle is in your way, spit at it. It will adjust to that. The car doesn’t want to get COVID. I get it. Until they

Fred: open up their source code, let people know what the parameters are. I guess it’s, as good a response as any. You

Anthony: dirty hippie. You want them to open their source code, huh?

Sorry, yeah, you won’t bedazzle anything in your life. Will you? Continuing with our lovely GM. I think I

Fred: did once bedazzle something, but it was a long ago. It was a youthful indiscretion, but It was

Anthony: when you’re hanging out with your buddy Tim Leary So anyway back to the present Be here now, like Eckhart Tolle would say GM Cruise was, Kyle’s been talking about forever about saying, Hey, I can, I’ve seen the Cybertruck.

I can create something uglier. I’m not even sure if it’s uglier. The Cruise Origin, which is the no, no pedals, no steering wheel Two bench seats staring at strangers vehicle that he’s been touting as being the greatest thing possible. They’ve GM Cruise said let’s stop production of that.

Let’s I think

Michael: No, they’ve halted. I don’t know if they’ve totally stopped, but they’re suspending production for now.

Anthony: What’s the difference between stop and suspend?

Michael: Stopping suggests they’re not going to do it anymore. I know Honda pulled out of this project last week. I think they were planning to introduce it into Japan at some point.

Kyle announced a few couple of three months ago that the regulatory approval for these vehicles was coming any day. We still haven’t seen that. And now they’ve shut down production of them. So I’m not sure what all this means. And, is it related to the cruise issue in their other vehicles in San Francisco, possibly?

Is it related to Honda pulling out possibly? Is it a combination of all these things? Probably and it’s not indicating they’re willing to approve it yet and some of the other problems they’ve had. I

Fred: think there’s a competition between Origin and Cybertruck for the ugliest possible vehicle. And with the latest pre production Cybertruck that’s been savaged and depressed in Los Angeles, maybe Origin thought it was time to take a pause and find some way to make that vehicle even uglier.

Anthony: Ha! How do you make it uglier? That’s the thing I don’t know.

Fred: There’s got to be a way. I, that you’ve seen the ugly dog contest that goes around every year, and I’m sure this is an equivalent ugly vehicle contest, but Cybertruck’s definitely in the lead right now. I think that it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays

Anthony: out.

Yeah, so I, I personally think they, they stopped the cruise origin because once your board of directors hires a law firm and outside consultants to review your work, they’re like, Hey, let’s let’s, who gave the gun to the baby here? Let’s let’s

Michael: make sure we connected all the dots on this other vehicle we’re producing.

Anthony: Because as somebody who’s done consulting for a living, when a client calls me up and says, Hey, we don’t trust our current consultant. We’re going to hire you to review their work. I always have that first conversation with them being like, Hey, I don’t want to be here. And you don’t want me here either.

Like you messed up. That’s why I’m here. And so I think that’s what’s going on. GM realizes, oh wait, we can’t really keep spending two and a half billion dollars for something that’s, not going to pay off this decade and possibly not next decade. But hey, I don’t invest in GM. What the hell do I know?

bUt back to the ugliness of the Cybertruck, there’s a a fun little article we have a link to where… Tesla’s Elon says that the Cybertruck, is supposed to come out in what, 2023. It’s coming out in three weeks, he claims. It’s coming out in three weeks. This is currently being recorded November 8th, 2023.

The end of November 2023. There’s been some pre production Tesla Cybertrucks seen out on the streets. They regularly break down. They regularly don’t work as trucks. There’s a good footage of them in some off road track and they couldn’t get up a little hill. There is a, their designer took them to some coffee and car thing and it literally looked like I assembled it.

Like it was a piece of Ikea furniture and that nothing lined up properly, but it’s I don’t understand now, could I be wrong? What, by pre production vehicle, does that, I’m under the impression that means that Hey, we’re just, finishing up tooling, like we’re ready to go. This is feature complete.

Or is that not right? Is this because it looks, it literally looks like it’s Ikea furniture that I assembled. I don’t

Michael: know. At this point, I don’t know if you should believe any of the crap that comes out of that company on some of the things like this. They drag it out forever. They use all sorts of words to describe things in ways that are misleading.

And it’s the ugliest truck on earth. I can’t imagine anyone driving it unless you’re a complete dick. So I’m just. baffled by the demand for vehicles that look like that. It’s going to weigh over 7, 000 pounds. It’s going to, the first time you drive through bugs on the highway, it’s going to mess up your stainless steel forever.

It’s just a nightmare. What do you really think, Michael? I just had to put that out there. It’s, I think I’m almost, I’m probably sicker of hearing and talking about Cybertruck as anyone, because they’re not even on the road yet, endangering people too much, but there’s just oh so much fluff in the media about their bulletproof nature and all these other things that really don’t make them, nothing they can do now will make that truck.

Something that your average human being ever wants to drive. And there’s no way they’re going to be wildly popular. They’re certainly not solving any environmental issues. They’re probably creating some issues with their weight on the roads and crashes and they don’t carry much at all. And they’re, I don’t know I’ll

Anthony: stop now.

Elon fan boys. You can write to Michael Brooks at contact at autosafety. org. yEah. So in this the one that was at this Coffee and cars event, it was wrapped in black vinyl. And this is not a safety issue so much, but I don’t, so it didn’t have that stainless steel DeLorean 1985 look to it. It’s still the Minecraft angles, but it was wrapped in black vinyl.

And this is a very naive question, but I’m familiar with vinyl. Like how do you, how do you wash this? Do you just run it through a car wash or do you I don’t understand.

Fred: I don’t know. I, maybe the answer is that they’re trying to generate some additional revenue by periodically slapping on more vinyl with advertising for Joe’s Plumber Service.

You’ve seen all those around town, right? Sure. That, maybe that’s how they’re going to finally make money off of this thing. But this article did go on to say that even though it was wrapped in crappy vinyl plastic, Tesla didn’t take the trouble to apply it correctly. And it was full of bubbles and gaps and, like a three year old had put it on there.

I don’t know. It’s a mystery. I think that my guess is that Mr. Musk is tired of dumping money into this thing. He just wants to either sell it or put a bullet in it.

Anthony: It’s just, I don’t know. Hey, it’s bulletproof, okay? Look, I don’t know.

Michael: The bullet will work,

Fred: by the way. They certainly proved that at the demonstration a few years ago.

Anthony: Yeah, exactly.

Fred: For the readers who don’t know, they demonstrated the indestructibility of the Cybertruck by hitting it with a baseball bat, which promptly broke all the glass that was whose invulnerability was being demonstrated. And

Anthony: it was a steel ball. It wasn’t a baseball bat. It was a steel ball.

And they’re like, look, and they had this graphic behind it that it could stop a nine millimeter bullet with however many grams and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, they just, they didn’t even throw the ball hard.

Fred: I stand corrected. Thank

Anthony: you for that correction. Sure. Listeners, I know you’re not average like Michael is and doesn’t want a Cybertruck.

So if you listen to the show, you’re above average. Tell us when you’re going to get your delivery of your Cybertruck. aNd let us know how that’s going to make you feel. If it will make you feel like a real boy. Yeah alright let’s continue with some Elon. How about that? There is is, it’s a bit of a problem with Tesla’s major design flaw.

For their ADAS, their automated driver assistance system, which they call things like full self driving and autopilot, and it’s just it’s no, really not that much different than what my Toyota Corolla has. Okay They so this is from a link in futurism. com. We find some fun websites. In a thread on the r slash Tesla Motors subreddit, a Tesla driver found that their brand new Model 3 has a major design flaw.

The defroster lines designed to quickly clear up fogged up or icy windshields apparently failed to clear up the vehicle’s driver assistance cameras, triggering repeated takeover immediately messages. And Elon has been a very big Proponent of saying we, our cars don’t need radar, they don’t need LIDAR, this is stupid, I’m a person, I use my eyes and it works fine, so why does my car need more than eyeballs and cameras?

And it turns out his eyeballs are fogged up and frozen over.

Michael: Yeah, and it looked like an internal, the fog developed on the inside of the camera. And, this all just points to cameras are not good enough on their own to do really any of the things that Musk has been touting Tesla’s as being able to do.

They’re going to need some different sensors, cameras are still going to be useful as part of their sensor packages, but there’s just not enough there. Fair enough, Danny. I don’t know this could go afoul of, NHTSA does have safety standards around window defroster and defogging system.

They, if they, typically they’re geared towards the actual windshield being defrosted or defogged so that the consumer or the driver can see out of the windshield. I don’t believe right now they apply to sensors. However. If that sensor is connected to the AE automatic emergency braking system or some other safety critical system, perhaps the NHTSA standards coming down the line on AEB will address that.

I’m not sure that they do though. But it would be great if, like we talked about last week or two weeks ago, if there were some type of, self test before the vehicle starts that can eliminate problems like this.

Anthony: That would be a great thing to have. The other… We talked about last week, I think it was last week, there was a super fog event out in New Orleans, and one of the questions I asked of Fred, he likes to ask us multiple questions, multiple guesses was, hey, do these cameras work in fog and whatnot?

And they don’t. And radar, lidar should work fine, but if you have a Tesla Pull over and wait for the fog to pass, is the best thing to do. Go

Michael: back to New Orleans. Yeah, turn around. The problem is you can’t turn around at that point, you’re on a very long

Anthony: bridge. Yeah, hopefully there’s a shoulder you can go cry on and Wait for the fog to pass and

Michael: it’s also a problem, you’re on a long bridge that doesn’t really have a place to pull over.

You’re almost compelled to continue to drive with traffic even just to reach the next exit and then get off. It’s there’s some, when you’re on the interstate with hundreds of other vehicles, there’s a little bit of Peer pressure involved here. You can’t be the guy that stops in the right lane because you’re not comfortable driving in fog.

You’re somewhat compelled to continue driving and that’s unsafe. I guess it’s a feeling many of us encounter when we get into a thunderstorm that turns really heavy, really quick, and it’s hard to see out of your windshield. Yes, this is

Anthony: the problem. We’re gonna get into ADAS a little bit more the automated driving assisting systems assistant systems assisting assistant

Michael: It’s advanced driver assistance

Anthony: system.

There you go. I’ll take that one as an answer Because Tesla I they’ve been promoting this as hey the car drives itself. They had this video out in 2016 We’re like that was great, but it was a doctored video and it You know, the car crashed into a dumpster. It did all sorts of things. But they’ve been saying this and they say, Hey, it was called Autopilot.

It’s called full self driving. Blah, blah, blah. An article on MSN has a great line on it. The biggest concern is that while Autopilot is labeled and promoted as a feature that enhances the driver’s safety, it appears to do the very opposite. Endanger the driver’s lice. Life. Ha! And probably their lice too.

Police have made arrests on individuals who are spotted in moving vehicles while the driver’s seat was empty. Judging from such behaviors, it’s clear that some drivers mistakenly understood autopilot as a self driving vehicle where you can literally take your hands off the steering wheel and eyes off the road and let the car drive itself.

Basically this article goes on to say that I Consumer Reports who did reviews of ADS, ADAS Systems and Tesla that are just like, Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I don’t know how Consumer Reports spelled that but like when I saw it I was like oh I get it, I know how to pronounce it, Eeee, and now I understand what a umlaut’s for, just to look fun. But, so this is another thing where it’s just Tesla’s, little little dangerous. They’ve had a recall, 363, 000 of them, because of the fears of the full self driving system, does not follow speed limits, and can be dangerous around intersections.

It’s got reports of phantom braking. People make fun of you. They think, ha. Okay, that’s just me. I honestly thought they were pretty cool, but then you two have ruined my

Michael: life. Yeah, there are a lot of problems that they need to address and they’re doing so in a way that’s far less than transparent and doesn’t really give, it certainly doesn’t give us a lot of confidence that they’re correcting some of these issues.

Anthony: oH poor Tesla. Okay, let’s jump to the other side of the pond. As as good Americans who are fully covered in bedazzled accoutrements we’ve been asking the question who’s liable with a self driving car? We don’t know. Is it you as the passenger? Is it you as, if you can buy these things, are you liable?

The good old king. The British government announced on Tuesday that under a framework for advancing autonomous vehicles, it would hold the manufacturers of self driving cars legally responsible for any accidents rather than the owners. A decision embraced by both insurance companies and AV startups.

The most surprising thing to me was that the, this decision was embraced by AV startups. Wow, this is wild. What are the odds of this coming across the Atlantic?

Michael: I, hopefully they’re good. I think that, for fully, vehicles that are claimed to be fully autonomous, this is almost necessary.

Who are you going to blame? You’re going to blame the guy who… Got on his Uber app and hopped in the Waymo when the Waymo hits another vehicle. There’s just, there’s really, I don’t think there’s a really good way under, the law we already have established in America, in most states and federally, that allows for someone to be liable for an incident where they really had zero control over what was going on.

So I, I expect that’s going to. happen here sooner or later? The real question is when you get into the level two and level three where there is a requirement for human takeover, whether they’re going to, whether the liability there will be, placed on the manufacturer or of the system, or will it be as we fear in level Two’s at least for now placed on consumers who, aren’t fully paying attention to the driving task or, pretending that their vehicle can drive itself when in fact it can’t.

That said, I think the other thing in this article I enjoyed was seeing that King Charles actually plays a role in announcing policy issues and. I didn’t expect a king to come out like that. I don’t remember the queen, his mom doing that. Do you? I don’t know. The queen coming out and talking about autonomous driving liability.

It just doesn’t seem like something that would have happened.

Anthony: I just love the fact that like to announce something like this, you have a guy like wearing a cape and holding a scepter and a silly little crown. Like how do you, maybe that’s why they’re okay with this. Cause they’re like, this is hilarious.

This is a 78 year old man. Trying to announce, oh, and full self-driving, like it’s ridiculous.

Michael: If that’s what it takes to get it done in America, then I’ll accept the king .

Anthony: So this is an article that we’re talking about from investing.com. And what it ends with is interesting is that the proposed bill to introduce procedures for probing incidences.

Enhancing the safety infrastructure alongside defining the criteria for classing a vehicle as classifying a vehicle as self driving car. So just what you’re talking about, Michael, between the difference between level two, which is like your lane keeping assist, automatic emergency braking things like that.

Versus a level three, which is what Mercedes has in Nevada, which, Hey, you can take your hands off the wheel in these certain circumstances. And level four and five with level five is just woo, take your pants off. Go nuts. No shoes.

Michael: I still don’t even understand what level five is. Now it’s, it is a unicorn that is yet to be developed.

Anthony: So that’s, maybe us. Legislators, as I say this I just picture members of the Republican Party saying no will help clarify and define what they mean by full self driving car and actually putting the liability on the manufacturers of said vehicle as opposed to the owners or occupants.

Michael: The British

Fred: Standards Institute is years ahead of NHTSA in promulgating rules and procedures and even even just the nomenclature associated with self driving vehicles. They’re really doing a pretty bang up job of that. No pun intended, but they’re putting a lot of energy and attention into it.

It was odd to see the King and all of the King’s regalia making such an announcement. But by the way, does that urban robe left over from his mother? Is that fit the same size robe or how does that work?

Anthony: Don’t know. There’s not

Fred: a big market for urine robes these days. There must have, must be some tailor involved there.

What is this Savile Row? What do

Anthony: they get their suits? Savile Row yeah. Is that where they make all the suits? It, it could be, maybe it’s just a leftover from King Philip and they sent it to the dry cleaner. I don’t know. Maybe they have, they’ve got, the male robe, the female robe, I don’t, hey, listeners, if you’re listening, let us know.

And if you’re listening and paying attention at home, this is two votes of Fred against America saying the British are better at something and he’s against bedazzling.

Michael: And I just want to note, listeners, please don’t let us know about that.

Anthony: Michael is wrong. While you look,

Michael: I’m done with the monarchy talk for today.

Anthony: bUt you can go to autosafety. org click donate. And while you’re doing that, you can tell us all about the monarchy. Cause I’ll read them and it’ll be great. But hey, speaking of listeners sending us information, let’s get into the the Tao of Fred this week. This is prompted by a a devout listener from Kingston, New York, who I once shared a bunk bed with.

he Was responding to our our… Questions and comments around EVs and Michael writes in, My previous car was a Prius, averaging 45 miles per gallon, at current gas prices, about 7. 5 cents a mile for fuel. He now has a Kona EV, and at current utility rates, 5. 7 cents a mile. Based on my actual miles per gallon and kilowatts per hour slash mile based on personal mileage, over a hundred thousand miles with my Prius and over 000 miles with my Kona repair maintenance cost much lower.

Plus my chances of being involved in a fire is much lower than an EV versus a hybrid. So he’s very much. On the EV bandwagon. And

Michael: he found an EV that’s relatively inexpensive, which is not easy to do.

Anthony: And I believe he got this EV used. I think it was, I think it had one year of use on it already.

I don’t think they got it brand new. But they love this car. We put this in front of Mr. Perkins and said, Do the math. Because this is a very, this is, it’s not clear of the total cost of overship of an EV versus an ICE vehicle. We, he put on his math hat, he bust out a protractor, took out an abacus and he went to work.

Fred: You’ve now entered the Taoist section. I guess we’ve waited long enough. First of all, thank you for the comment. We do read the mail and this is a particularly interesting note that we got. So I went ahead and I did my own little life cycle analysis. Excuse me. Of the EE versus. The hybrid and also the same vehicle with the I. C. E. internal combustion engine just to see how that stacks up.

And it’s interesting. And not only is it interesting, it’s complex because depending on where you draw the lines around your life cycle cost, you can come up with very the, at the propulsion cost So, if you look at the propulsion cost, Without considering depreciation of the battery or the vehicle you come up with, of course, exactly the numbers that have been recorded by our listener.

But if you extend it a little bit and you say what about the battery? They’re going to wear out. They’re going to be replaced. You’ve got depreciation charges you have to accumulate in there. And then if you look at the entire vehicle, All right, the balance of the vehicle it’s depreciating too, it doesn’t stay new forever.

And so what I did is I said, all right, let’s assume that all of these vehicles will go for 150, 000 miles, which in my experience is about when modern vehicles start to really crap out. And look at the trade in cost at that time, or the trade in value at that time as the basis for the depreciation, and that’s 90 percent of the value is gone in the first 150, 000 miles, so that’s the number that I used.

So if you include all that, if you include the battery depreciation as well as the fuel charge, I came up with a cost per mile for propulsion only, which is just the fuel and the battery. Of let’s see, I’ve got 0. 13 for the Kona ICE, 0. 12 for the Prius, which is comparably priced, comparably equipped.

I’ve also got eight cents for Prius using the uh, pretty extraordinary claim of a hundred and, what was it, a hundred and uh, 127 miles per gallon equivalent that Toyota uses. And if you do that, you come up with a number of eight cents. But that’s based on a replacement charge for the battery of about 15, 000 for the Kona with the EV. And much less about $3,500 for the replacement battery of the of the Prius, because of course it’s a much smaller battery.

Michael: But the Kona came in at 0.16.

Michael: I’m sorry, what? Didn’t hear the Kona EV came in at about 0.16 on the cost of, on the propulsion charge, right? Yeah, that’s

Fred: right. So that’s a little higher. But I think the real message here is that given the variability and the assumptions that you make and everything that’s going along with the curves, there’s really very little.

To choose from, the propulsion charge for these three vehicles, but if you look at the overall cost of the cars, the EV is much more expensive than the it’s not much more expensive. It’s a little bit more expensive than a comparable Prius. So you’ve got 33, 500. Is the MSRP for brand new Kona EV, the base trim, you’ve got 32, 675 for the Prius.

So I’m sure they compare against each other and come up with comparable charges for that. But if you subtract. The value of the battery from the resale value, because they assume the battery is going to be worn out at the end of 150, 000 miles in both cases. Then if you’re going to turn the car over to the next person, somebody’s got to absorb the cost of that battery replacement.

If you’re fortunate enough to sell the car to somebody who doesn’t understand that the battery is depreciated and what the charge is going to be then you’re doing okay. But

Michael: we don’t recommend that.

Fred: We don’t recommend that. That doesn’t seem great. And the same thing is true with the Prius, if people don’t recognize the battery’s wearing out and you’ve got to replace it then they’re underestimating the actual cost of the vehicle.

So I, looking at this analysis my own way and looking at the total cost for the two vehicles, they’re, they’re comparable. There’s not a lot to compare unless you credit the 75, 000, 7, 500 rebate that may be available for the EV. I don’t know that it is, those rules are complex, but it, there may be an offset.

Anthony: And different states offer tax incentives for EVs. Correct.

Fred: Yeah. Yeah, so that, that could be a factor as well. But it’s been reported in other venues that the resale value of the EVs is actually plummeting a lot because of people starting to recognize the cost of the battery replacement. That’s coming up.

Again, another variable that’s in there. But so

Anthony: there’s annual operating costs for an ICE vehicle that an EV doesn’t have. Very basic being, oil changes. Brakes inside an ICE vehicle wear out quicker than an EV if you’re using regenerative braking. So the annual, so my thought process is, okay, in 150, 000 miles, I have to replace the battery in my EV.

The frame structure of the vehicle should probably be more or less fine. Those cars don’t turn into rust buckets like they used to. There’s a lot less moving parts than that will fall apart and fail as in an ICE vehicle that are more expensive to deal with. But over that 10, 15 year period, I’ve saved a ton of money by not having to spend a whole bunch of, costs and time on regular ICE vehicle maintenance, which an EV just doesn’t have.

Fred: Maybe Another aspect of that though is that the ICE vehicle technology is quite mature, right? People know how to make engines that last a long time. And in my case, my Subaru needed to have a head gasket replaced at 150, 000 miles and I sold it to my brother. And I won’t tell you how much I charged him for it and he’s been running it for another 100, 000 miles after that.

So they can last a really long time. This is in contrast with the batteries, which are surely going to degrade and wear out after X number of X number of cycles. Also, I assume in my calculations that you’re charging a hundred bucks every 10, 000 miles for an oil change in both the ICs, both the Prius and the And the conventional I see as well as 1, 000 every 40, 000 miles for the higher level maintenance that you need in the ICS.

It still comes out, to have a comparable cost per mile and comparable cost of ownership. Now, I actually went to the AAA, which has a publication. They call your driving costs and they update that each year. And they look at lots of different types of vehicles, all the way from small sedans up to giant pickup trucks.

And for this year, they’ve broken out the hybrid vehicle versus electric vehicle on their analysis as well. What they come up with is a total cost per mile for the hybrid vehicle. Excuse me again. 54. 3 cents. And for the full EV, they come up with. 0. 56, all right, so 0. 54 versus 0. 56 per mile. Again, I think that those differences are unsubstantial because of the assumptions made and the variability in people’s cars and weather and where they’re located, et cetera, et cetera.

I’M not sure you can really say it’s 54 versus 64 or 44, it’s somewhere in that range. But the point is that it comes out about even, and I’m sure that the people who are pricing these vehicles, that the manufacturers are looking at each other to make sure they come out about even within a particular kind of vehicle class.

There is that. We thank the listener for the information that they’ve so carefully recorded. It’s very interesting stuff. I think, I think the real answer is that they’re comparable cost per mile energy is energy. If you get it from gasoline or you get it from the electric charge.

It’s, ultimately it’s going to come out about the same. It’s like water flowing through a system of pipes. It all comes up to the same level uh, more or less. And that’s what I’ve shown. Okay. But you can go to the AAA… Site and you can plug in your own numbers if you wish.

They’ve got a calculator there that you can use and come up with your own answer for that. Interesting exercise. A lot of people do it a lot of different ways. It’s a very

Anthony: important question. Yeah. And that’s what we’ve seen. It seems that it always more or less seems to break even.

It’s weird. I think in this listener’s case, I think they might get a, an advantage from one, from buying it. So they got a discount on it, but also they have solar on their house. So I think that lowers their cost.

Michael: One thing I’m concerned about here is, looking into the Hyundai. warranty, it suggests that the drive train warranty covers the battery and the drive train warranty cannot be transferred from the original owner to the secondary owner.

So your battery is functionally not covered by a warranty if you buy a used. One of these vehicles used is that’s a potential problem. One of the things that I was looking at here and I’m also wondering, are we just looking at an era where people are going to be getting rid of their cars quicker because no one’s going to be willing to pay, 10, 15, whatever the cost is, 1, 000 to replace a battery on a, eight, 10, 12 year old car.

Anthony: I don’t know. That’s. That’s interesting, but I think we’re still just in the very early stages of EV technology and battery technology for this stuff. But let’s jump into the second part of his his note was plus my chance of being involved in a fire is much lower in a is. That’s the case where we’ve run into where oh, EVs, they catch on fire all the time.

And that’s not true. It’s ICE vehicles, internal combustion engines. They catch on fire when they’re not on at a much higher rate than EVs. Now does an EV versus a hybrid, is that?

Michael: Hybrid actually, I believe has a higher fire rate than both because They’ve got both a battery and an internal combustion engine as part of their makeup.

So they come with all the fire risks of the internal combustion engine, plus the fire risks of the battery. Fascinating. I don’t have

Fred: access to any data that supports. That kind of analysis, so I simply don’t know. What I do know is that the EV batteries have many more cells than the hybrid batteries.

Michael: And the cells…

And the fires that they produce are going to be much worse, right?

Fred: And also the cell manufacturing defects, simply because there are more cells, are more likely to occur in the EVs. And the internal cell defects can propagate through the whole battery, I just, I don’t have information that says one type is more hazardous than the other.

I do know that in all cases, it’s still pretty rare. Yeah. I haven’t seen any. Indication that there’s one catastrophic design versus other designs.

Anthony: But this is an article if you’re a Wall Street Journal subscriber, or you can find out a way around their paywall. Not that we would suggest doing that.

There was an article that came out this morning. Of course not. Talking about how fire departments are dealing with EV fires, electric vehicle fires. And the best way to extinguish and… A flaming electric vehicle might be just let it burn out. From the article first responders in Franklin, Texas Franklin, Tennessee faced their first burning EV in September, a Nissan Leaf that ignited while charging outside the carmaker’s North American headquarters.

They spent hours pouring 45 thousand gallons of water on the car compared with the 500 to 1, 000 gallons that fires involving gasoline powered vehicles usually need. The fire marshal said, I think if we were faced with a similar scenario next time, we might need to let it burn. This is and again, this is, I think this is specific just to the lithium ion batteries.

I don’t know if the iron batteries, if they have the similar thing or if they propose sodium. Ion batteries are similar.

Fred: Those aren’t yet in production. So the lithium ion batteries are in production right now. What

Anthony: about the iron ones? The, what is it? LPF battery. That I think they had a

Michael: much lower rate of fire than the lithium.

Fred: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think in production, I don’t know that to be yeah, for

Michael: the lithium iron phosphate batteries, they’re a little heavier. They have a lower rate of fire. I think Ford, I believe is

Anthony: trying to make, has them and Tesla have them. Yep. Yeah, they have less range they take a little longer to charge but you can recharge them a lot more, they can go through a lot more cycles than a lithium ion battery.

Michael: They are not the solution to the weight problem. No.

Anthony: You’re the wrong way. Yeah. So listeners, yeah, we’d love more input on your EV choices and lifestyle and what kind of bedazzling you put inside your car. Cause maybe EV owners use a different type of a dazzle. I don’t know.

And we

Michael: wonder, on this, on that article, letting a. We’ve talked before about the products of, there’s some pretty scary products of fires that occur in EVs from a chemical standpoint. I believe in the article, it even noted that the firefighter compared the emissions from a typical internal combustion engine fire to past candy compared to what the electric vehicles are putting out.

So there’s, I don’t know what the solution is, whether it’s to let the, let it burn out or to soak it with water that’s going to leach its way into the environment, wherever the water drains to it’s a lose situation and hoping we can find ways to extinguish these fires quicker, um, without polluting so much and without using so much water.

Yeah, I’m going to

Fred: introduce a walk on topic here, and

Anthony: I’ll

Fred: allow it. It’s got to do with ADAS, though, and my recent experience having my car repaired. And it turns out that repair of cars with ADAS systems is an nearly eternal nightmare for the people who are responsible for that. in The case of my car, it took it took forever to get the body damage fixed.

I have a Subaru. And once the body damage was fixed, they had to recalibrate the eyesight system, which is the heart of the ADAS system that’s on board the Subaru. And so they tried to do that. They brought it in and set it up on the rack. And it turns out that very few people have the machinery necessary to do the calibration of these cars.

It costs about half a million dollars that they have to invest in the Repair facility, and when they put it up on the machine, they couldn’t do it because one of the cameras had died. So they ordered a new camera overnight, which took two weeks to come in. And then once they put the additional camera in…

tWo weeks later, which of course has costed me because I have to pay for the rental car. They put it up on their machine and they still couldn’t do it. They brought it to the Subaru dealer who was nearby, who also has a calibration machine, and the Subaru dealer couldn’t do it. iT turned out that they had changed the software version in the computer.

For the newest cameras that they were putting out and they had neglected to tell the service people worldwide that they need to download new software and so So after the two weeks had gone by the they brought it back to the original repair shop They tried to download the software for a day 16 times couldn’t do it just because of connectivity issues or who knows what they brought it back to the Subaru dealer, who was then able to download the software.

All of these tow trucks going back and forth across the city. Once they had downloaded the software, the Subaru dealer was backed up, so they had to bring it back to the original repair shop to put it back on the calibration rig. And recalibrate it, recalibrate the system, which they finally did.

I just want to point out that In repair of the ADAS systems, it’s a nightmare. You got a new, you got to put in a new windshield. You got to put in new systems. The whole repair apparatus is very poorly supported by the manufacturers. You’ve got all the issues associated with software upgrades being validated.

And also the regression analysis that’s necessary to make sure that it Works with the existing setup or alternatively to let people know that they have to upgrade their existing Setup so that they can use the new software What a nightmare this took, weeks and weeks to get resolved Just a warning for people who are buying the ADAS systems And a warning for the insurance companies that you’re going to encounter thousands of dollars of unanticipated expenses as you try to restore your ADAS system to its original performance

Anthony: level.

This is a warning for the auto manufacturers who realize, oh, if you’re becoming a software company, you’re becoming a software company because, oh, we’ve changed cameras in this model and our software only works with that. Oh, you downloaded the newest version of this software. It doesn’t work with your car.

Your car is bricked. That scenario is definitely coming. But this is good, because this goes into a an article from Repair Drive News. Repair Driven News. Repairer Driven News. Oh, that’s, they might as well just name a a car. This is ridiculous. But just real quick from this in a new report, the Institute of Motor Industry this is a UK thing so that while 44% of the UK cars have level two autonomy, by 2030, the industry will be short by about 51,000 qualified technicians at the same time.

They’ll need about a hundred thousand technicians to work on ADAS systems by 2030. Hey, if you’re looking for a gig learn how to fix an ADAS system.

Michael: Yeah. With NHTSA starting to mandate some of this tech to go into all vehicles, automatic emergency braking you’re going to see a need for this much more than ever, because it’s going to be coming out into every car versus the way it’s been staggered voluntarily into some vehicles over the last nine, 10 years.

So there’s going to be a definite shortage in America of qualified facilities to calibrate and repair.

Fred: There’s a shortage of capital, too, to set up the businesses so that they can actually do the calibration. So half a million dollars a pop is not something that the repair industry is used to doing to set up their garage.

Anthony: Hey, GM, they have repair service centers, right? General Motors? Yeah, okay, so hey, maybe if instead of spending two and a half billion dollars a year on Kyle’s toy, they could spend it on something that will actually turn a profit for them. Ha! And now, recall roundup. Let’s start off with the most adorable recall of all time.

This is from Mercedes. Yes, Mercedes 2020 Mercedes Benz GLS 580. Now, if you’re gonna spend that kind of money on a Mercedes Benz, don’t you think it should have a better name? Then GLS 580, it seems like very technical, sounds very German. Anyway this is, oh, number of potential vehicles involved is eight.

Eight vehicles. What? Mercedes

Michael: has a few of those small. Look, they are very, as far as recalls go, they are very responsible when it comes to finding them and ferreting them out.

Anthony: This is amazing. Eight. So Mercedes has determined that on certain model Y, model year 2020 GLS, The 167 platform on certain, specifically eight of them the sunroof control unit software might not meet current production specifications.

In this case, the sunroof might automatically close when the vehicle’s quote unquote carwash mode is activated. Now, wouldn’t you want the sunroof to close when the carwash mode is activated? Or do you want to… What’s the recall? And just for eight people, can’t they just show up at their house?

Bring some tea and like martinis or something.

Michael: They could just wash the car with Dawn soap and a sponge, it’s probably easier to go to the car wash and do it. Basically it, doesn’t comply with the federal motor vehicle safety standards. They have an anti pinch procedure in that standard that prevents things like fingers from getting caught in Windows that are rolling up and for whatever reason the automatic closure that’s allowed by this software by carwash mode which is certainly a new term for me it’s, it doesn’t comply with the motor vehicle safety standard.

So it looks like there’s, it’s just a software issue that they’re going to correct to fix it. That’s

Anthony: great. Good on Mercedes for recalling cars. I love it. Let’s move on to Toyota. Toyota isn’t telling the odors of 1. 9 million recalled RAV4 SUVs to park them outdoors even though the U. S.

safety investigators have four complaints about engine fires that can start with the vehicle’s ignition turned off. I think we mentioned the RAV4 issue of this last week. If not, we talked about it right after the show.

Michael: So yeah, I think we did. That was, this is an interesting one because Toyota, the skinny on it is Toyota equipped these RAV4s with a slightly different type of battery.

That’s got a different size. It’s not. A common size battery. And so they had a couple of years ago in 2021, my daughter has one of these cars, I got a recall, not even a recall notice, a customer bulletin type notice in the mail that gave me a sticker to put on the battery housing, which says basically you got to make sure you’ve got the right kind of battery in here.

It won’t fit. It can cause a lot of problems. Number one, it can be disconnected easily from, It’s providing power the vehicle because it’s been jostled around because the brackets not holding it properly. The fire issue is present. We even saw a crash where one of these batteries came loose after a deer hit a vehicle.

The vehicle shut down in the middle of the road with no lights and an oncoming vehicle struck the car and killed it. A couple of members of a family who were stranded in the road. So this battery has had, this battery design has had some issues. And NHTSA’s appeared, they opened an investigation on this.

So they’ve stayed on top of Toyota on this issue. They’ve looked into the fires. I’m still not sure why they didn’t issue a park outside warning. Because four of these fires have occurred when the vehicles parked. It could be parked under someone’s house or in a parking garage. So that’s.

Something that, that we could critique here, but mainly I think our critique is that it took Toyota so long to do this recall when there was a pretty clear safety issue they knew about in 2021, so this could have happened a lot longer ago and fires aren’t the only risk here. You’re talking about a loose battery that could, compromise your vehicle’s power at any time.

Anthony: Yeah, I don’t understand why they would use a non standard battery size. I thought all those 12 volt batteries, the 12 volt batteries inside a car, I thought they were all the same size. I thought they were all the same thing. Yeah,

Michael: and it looked like a miscalculation by Toyota as to how batteries are generally repaired, and it looked like they just didn’t quite do their due diligence on the repair problems that this would present.

Anthony: Fred, you’re muted, but you seem very animated. Fred’s just cussing. He’s Oh, engineering

Michael: battery’s so stupid. Deers cause all these problems.

Anthony: Now you’re still muted. It’s it’s sad. But I can read lips. We’re gonna get Fred out for the day. And Fred said that, Anthony, you’re a very attractive man, and you are the spawn of Satan at the same time. Very strange. Unbelievable. I don’t know why he would say that to me. But I’m back. Aw, dammit.

Okay.

Fred: No, I was just going to say the batteries are different sizes. A diesel car will have a much bigger battery than an ICE car, for example. They come in many different sizes, Anthony.

Anthony: Oh I liked what I thought you said better. Okay, last one. You guys might remember this. We spoke about this a few months ago.

The Death Wobble. This is about some Jeep owners claiming to experience violent wobbles at high speeds. I think it’s probably because their phone’s ringing off the hook, their accountant calling them saying, Why did you buy a Jeep? But this is an article from, we mentioned back in June, An Orlando man told Action 9 he fears getting behind the wheel of his Jeep Wrangler because of what he calls the Death Wobble, and people giving him silly looks, a violent shaking he’s felt at highway speeds.

So what’s going on with the latest of the Death Wobble, Michael?

Michael: What’s going on is that this is the, at least the second investigation that’s looked into over the years, they get a lot of complaints about this problem, so it’s happening frequently to people and it scares the crap out of people, but there’s literally in all the complaints and everything they’ve tracked down from the manufacturer, there are no crashes, no injuries, no fatalities, nothing I don’t, it’s a tough one, you really, you have to be able to show that there’s an actual safety risk if you’re going to pursue a recall, and here you can’t really show anything other than that it’s scaring the hell out of people.

Anthony: You ever seen a size one of these Jeeps? They’re just the size scares the hell out of me. And I’ve driven them, they’re a lot of fun to drive, don’t get me wrong, they’re hilarious, but they’re a little big.

Michael: And there’s also a lot of, I don’t know, there’s a lot of debate around what’s causing this.

There’s something in the suspension, there’s something going on, this is an issue that has plagued the Jeep Wrangler line for, I don’t know, probably almost two decades now. It’s a continual source of complaints, continual source of owners being scared of it. I’ve had neighbors with the issue and it’s just a baffling problem.

And it makes you wonder why. Stellantis hasn’t gotten its, big pause around this issue before now. I don’t think that it’s inherent to the design of the Jeep Wrangler, but apparently, and I’ve heard from many people that it may have to do with something involving the special suspensions that they have to enable off road driving.

But, who knows? Apparently, Chrysler doesn’t know either. They would have stopped as years ago and stopped scaring their customers.

Anthony: It’d be a feature. Hey I think that’s the end of our show. This is the first time in a long time where we’ve not had a rear view camera issue.

This is amazing. Who knew? And Fred did not mention that pig based supermarket chain once. So hey

Fred: the,

Anthony: the times they are a change in, Hey, listeners, thanks for listening. Telling all your friends, giving us a five star review, going to autosafety. org, clicking donate. Cause it’s that time of year. It’s that time. Year to open up your wallet and show your love for what we do. Thanks for listening.

Fred: Thank you very much for listening.

Michael: Thanks everybody. Bye-Bye. For more information, visit

Fred: www.auto safety.org.