Tesla: Autonomous Revolution, Illusion or Delusion?

This week we debunk Elon Musk’s grandiose claims about Tesla’s Robo Taxi, highlighting regulatory and safety hurdles, and the inflated value of Tesla’s stock driven by speculative products. Regulators can’t seem to keep up with the new safety needs of autonomous vehicles and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2X) but Gatik AI is making an effort by adopting UL4600. The EU states the obvious – the CyberTruck is for people that don’t care about people and recall roundup.

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Transcript

note: this is a machine generated transcript and may not be completely accurate. This is provided for convience and should not be used for attribution.

[00:00:00] Introduction and Greetings

[00:00:00] Anthony: You’re listening to there auto be a law, the center for auto safety podcast with executive director, Michael Brooks, chief engineer, Fred Perkins, and hosted by me, Anthony Cimino for over 50 years. The center for auto safety has worked to make cars safer.

Welcome everybody. Good morning. Yes. Oh, good afternoon. Good evening. Thank you And whatever else he said in the Truman show. It’s time for another episode of there ought to be a law. And I’ll wonder how the automatic artificial intelligent transcription software will write it this week. Isn’t that exciting folks?

[00:00:50] Elon’s Robo Taxi Reveal

[00:00:50] Anthony: Hey there’s a. Big thing happened last week. You know, big thing. It was so exciting. Changed the world forever. Oh my god, [00:01:00] put a dent in the universe even. Elon, I don’t even know what to call him. The Elon. Finally put out his robo taxi, and the world changed forever. Because it seems that people started realizing, wait a second, this guy’s full of shit.

This is What is this crap? He hosted this event on a movie lot and he had robots walking around that were sadly all remote controlled and it made me think back to, you guys remember back in what was 2000 where Honda came out with a robot, the Asimov, and that thing actually walked on its own.

It interacted on its own. It wasn’t 20 years releasing updates to it. And so Elon comes out and says, Hey, here’s something that’s worse than what Honda did in 2000. And my friend Kathy Wood over at ARK Investments this is gonna be amazing! Everybody’s gotta own this! Please pump that stock price up!

I didn’t watch [00:02:00] this reveal of the robo garbage. Did either of you watch this event?

[00:02:06] Michael: I read about it a lot. It was past my bedtime at the time it came on. It was at the proper time for folks who want to sit back and watch a fantasy movie, about 10 PM on a weekday, but I’ve, I’m sure some of you might join me and just not wanting to see.

Elon Musk talk at all. So I didn’t really, I prefer to read versus watch that kind of mess, it was produced at a Hollywood studio. So was it good, Fred? I know you stayed up late and watched it.

[00:02:34] Fred: Oh yeah, I think I stayed up till six o’clock in the afternoon, I think, but no I saw some of the reruns and the reruns were Pretty good.

They showed people getting out of a vehicle. That was exciting. They showed they showed a vehicle that looked like an Airstream trailer. That was pretty exciting. With zero road clearance. With zero road clearance, yes, and they showed some smaller vehicles [00:03:00] that reaffirmed what we’ve often said here, which is that in the future, everything will be better.

[00:03:05] Michael: Did they reveal their new sensors that they’re going to be using instead of just their cameras?

[00:03:11] Fred: They’re using SENT they’ve got a Bloodhound module they’ve built into it.

[00:03:15] Tesla’s Technological Shortcomings

[00:03:15] Fred: We’ve seen this before, actually I’m dating myself, but a long time ago, Brighton Whitney came out with a really advanced jet engine and General Electric came out with something that they called an unducted fan engine, which would have even better efficiency.

And they used that to successfully Suppressed sales of the advanced jet engine by Pratt Whitney until GE had their own advanced system to sell, and then they quietly abandoned their delusional unducted fan engine while Pratt Whitney sat in the sidelines and suddenly found themselves one generation behind.

In the technology that they were able to sell it actually [00:04:00] helped Brett and Whitney to go from 100 percent of the passenger jet engine, air market airplane market, I should say, to 0 percent in the same market over a span of some 30 years. Maybe that’s what’s behind this. I think, the idea that in the future, everything will be better is great.

But there’s no substance to it. And clearly Tesla’s getting pretty far behind in the technology right now. Their stock price reflects that. And I think, maybe people are finally catching up with the delusions here.

[00:04:30] Anthony: Hey, Elon says this future will increase Tesla’s value to 30 trillion, which sounds impressive, but then you realize that’s only half of what this podcast is worth in the future.

I’ve said it this podcast is easily a 60 trillion endeavor. podcast so he’s just shooting himself in the foot.

[00:04:49] Fred: When are we going public anyway with this

[00:04:52] Michael: next week? Also, when you realize, that what they’re, what Tesla’s proposing here is a vehicle that has [00:05:00] no steering controls or accelerator brake pedals.

And that’s not. Permitted on U. S. roads without an exemption from NHTSA, which limits that to 2, 500 vehicles. So how are you going to reach those valuations running a fleet of 2, 500 robo taxis? You’re not. And Tesla hasn’t even applied for an exemption of those rules or put forth really any type of Evidence that these vehicles are going to operate safely, which is something they’re going to be required to do in order to even qualify for an exemption of 2500 vehicles from the federal government for these vehicles.

So it’s the whole thing. Sounds like a pipe dream to me. If you’re going to, they say they claim that In 2027, they’re going to start building these robo taxis and, that, and they’re going to be selling them for around 30, 000, which, if you follow Tesla at all, and you follow the cyber truck, I believe when they started advertising it, it was going to be 50, [00:06:00] 000.

And now everyone who, Reserved a slot. There’s ended up paying about double that. I would suggest that you’re probably going to see the 30, 000 price of a robo taxi inflate significantly before they ever come to the road, if they ever do.

[00:06:17] Anthony: But there’s people who follow this industry much more intensely than we do.

And again, I’m going back to my friend, Kathy Wood at ARK Investments, and they tell me this is the future. And for weeks I’ve been asking them, Hey, can you share your research with me? Can you share your research? And after about a month of asking this, they finally shared where their sources for the research comes from.

That they can say, hey, the Robotaxi is going to do this and that and the other thing. And can we take a wild guess of where their deep research has come from? Where they’ve dug and got these sources? Fred, do you have any idea?

[00:06:48] Fred: Oh,

[00:06:51] Anthony: No, Michael. Come on. I know,

[00:06:53] Michael: not nearly that smart. I would guess that there’s a long list of links from Tesla’s website.

[00:06:59] Anthony: Bing bing. [00:07:00] We have a winner. Yes, that’s right.

[00:07:02] Michael: That’s where they get all their crap data. They’ve been spewing for years too. They essentially take Tesla’s assertions about security. Safety that have never been borne out by actual data that they’ve been willing to disclose to the public.

And they run with it to extreme levels. Essentially I can’t tell what ARK invest is doing, but they simply look to me like a group that’s just pumping Tesla stock until the end. If I think of Tesla almost in the same sense as some of those other stocks, like GameStop. GameStop, it’s a meme stock.

It’s really, there’s not really a product there. There’s a lot of hype and a lot of Kool Aid and a lot of people trying to make money as the stock rises. But underneath all that and underneath that veil, there’s really a company that’s, struggling to. Identify itself in the way it has in the past is this innovative wonder of a company You know, they’re going to be far behind and already are far [00:08:00] behind Waymo and some of the other actual robo taxi companies and You know their technology they’re full self driving and their autopilot are failing from a safety perspective as we’ve discussed Ad nauseum over the past couple years.

So you know In many ways, I think this event is not going to change at all. And it only backs up the perception that there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors going on underneath the hood at Tesla.

[00:08:27] Gaslight Illumination: Tesla’s Stock and Future

[00:08:27] Fred: We’re bleeding over into Gaslight Illumination, which this week is a multidimensional dive into this particular announcement, so I’m going to give my contribution right now.

So what I’ve read, what I wrote here earlier is that this is a desperate and pathetic attempt to pump the stock price where most of his wealth resides by selling vaporware to a gullible public. Pits bad pie in the sky by and by to throw shade at all their more advanced mobility companies. A stock price is [00:09:00] down 18 percent from its pre announcement peak, and it’s down 40 percent from its all time peak.

So perhaps the stock market’s finally waking up from its future ventilated delusions of Tesla. A vast multiple of the valuation for other car companies that produce far more cars.

[00:09:22] Anthony: I I think you’re onto something there. Michael, do you have a, do you want to contribute your take on Gaslight this week?

Yeah.

[00:09:28] Michael: I think we, we’re, I don’t think there’s any question that we would probably all agree that Elon Musk is the king of gas lighting. I don’t know if we’ve seen someone who’s done it quite as effectively in recent history in America. But I, if I had one gas light from the whole cyber tech, cyber taxi or whatever robo taxi event is when someone posed a question around, aren’t you putting, Uber and Lyft drivers out of work, and, he described, it was described in broad terms, a future [00:10:00] where people Lyft would one day oversee a flock of cyber cabs that they take care of a shepherd which, It’s I don’t know if I even have to say anything further on that other than, good luck buying those sheep to all of those, Uber and Lyft drivers out there who are going to, have be forced to buy a fleet of robo taxis in order to continue their operation and to continue to, make a living.

It’s just another, a slide of the hand by Tesla and by Mark. To, pretend that they are looking out for other people. And in fact anyway, it’s never going to happen. So I don’t think those Uber and Lyft folks have too much to worry about from Tesla. I think they might have more to worry about from some of the more established AV companies that are, actually putting safety into their systems.

[00:10:50] Fred: Yeah, but I’m going to follow up on what you just said, Michael, about, peoplethe sheep buying the sheep, actually, is what he’s proposing. But this is a new model of capitalism [00:11:00] that has come out, and it’s enabled by computers everywhere, right? So what we’re seeing with Uber, for examplewell, let me back up.

In the old days, capitalism worked by people borrowing money and getting investments. To build a factory and then people would come and work in the factory and so you’d have a clean break between capital and the workers, right? So what we’re seeing now with Uber and it’s astronomical capitalization and Airbnb and a lot of the other gig economy stocks is that what they’re really doing is they’re forcing the workers to capitalize their own workspace.

And that’s why they’ve got such a huge valuation, because they’re a capital free capitalism, right? They’re not, they’re no longer financing the means of production. What they’re doing now is they’re forcing the workers, To finance the means of production, [00:12:00] and they’re only providing a communication vehicle for the workers to try to extract value from the capital that they themselves are providing.

This is, this is the sub agenda that’s going on here worldwide. And nationwide, and what Elon is trying to do is to tap into that for his own financial benefit. I don’t think he’s going to do that, but I think, our listeners need to be aware of this transition of capitalism from. It’s traditional mode of, people using capital to build assets to instead force the workers to finance their own.

So we’re really slipping into a classic example of socialism. Where people own their own means of production, except that all the profits are being siphoned off to go to a third party. It’s a really weird transition we’re going through, and it seems to be unremarked by most [00:13:00] people.

[00:13:00] Anthony: Wait a second, all three of us work from home.

Wait, we’re paying for our own ca Are we so Unionize! Unionize! Alright, I’m not gonna do that. I saw, my, I’m gonna do my Gaslight’s gonna be a little different. You guys both went, chose Elon. I’m choosing the enablers of Elon. That’s right, the dumb media, the dumb Cathie Woods. People like that who are like, whatever he says is great.

And specifically, I’m gonna call out Deutsche Bank. Ha. Aren’t they best known for laundering money for drug dealers? Was that Deutsche Bank? I don’t know. I

[00:13:35] Michael: can’t, I can’t remember that. If it was that or, protecting World War II illegally seized monies and artworks. I’m not sure.

[00:13:43] Fred: They also financed orange flavored politicians when nobody else would.

[00:13:47] Anthony: Anyway, there, as a highly reputable bank they estimated that robo taxis could bring Tesla an additional 4 billion in sales and another 1 billion in pre tax earnings by 2030. The [00:14:00] RBC, I guess it’s the Royal Bank of something or other pegged the total global revenue for robo taxis at 1.

7 trillion dollars by 2040. 1. 7 trillion dollars. Ladies and gentlemen, in 2023, Uber, which operates around the globe, generated 37. 2 billion in revenue. Huh? I’m not the greatest mathematician in the world, but they’re saying in what, in 15 years, this market is suddenly going to multiply a lot?

Really, there’s that kind of growth in taxi services?

[00:14:31] Michael: Yeah, I think we’re going to need a lot more people.

[00:14:34] Anthony: And so that’s it. So we got two votes for Elon, one vote for the Elon enablers. And the winner is the Elon enablers. Cause we’ve hit up Elon too much, but Hey, let’s continue with our talk of Tesla and all things lost.

I’m sorry. Oh, sorry. I’m sorry. Before we

[00:14:49] Fred: do, shouldn’t we have some kind of prize that we. Give to our winners for Gashlight Illumination a Piggly Wiggly shopping cart or something.

[00:14:59] Anthony: [00:15:00] I used my Piggly Wiggly shopping bag two days ago, loved it, it was great.

[00:15:05] Fred: They are nice. I liked it very much.

[00:15:07] Anthony: Yeah, you can send me whatever you’d like.

Cause I chose the winner and I chose myself.

[00:15:11] Michael: We should create our own NFT for the podcast with our faces on it and send a, send one to everybody. Ooh, I like that

[00:15:18] Fred: idea.

[00:15:20] Michael: And then we make some, a non fungible token or whatever they call those things.

[00:15:25] Anthony: Gentlemen, we’ve gone so far off the deep end here.

We have. Okay.

[00:15:30] Cybertruck Controversies

[00:15:30] Anthony: Let’s talk cyber truck. Okay. There’s one in my neighborhood I see parked and every now and then I’m like, I wanna get a chair and just sit outside it and just see who the owner is. And be like, Woohoo! Look at you go! Yeah, anyway. Wired, we’re linking to an article from there talks about the Cybertruck and Euro NCAP, which is the New Car Assessment Program.

Quoting from the article, Based only on the car’s visual appearance, there are several aspects of this vehicle that look like they may be a threat to pedestrians, claims Euro NCAP’s Director of [00:16:00] Strategic Development, Matthew Avery. You cannot fail, Euro NCAPI ads, but you can get a bad score. And further in the article, Still, it takes a particular kind of customer to buy a car knowing it has a low star safety rating for the occupants and potential Mad Max style lethality to those outside the vehicle.

The kind of customer who would buy a Cybertruck. This is a brutal takedown. I’m jealous of how well they did this.

[00:16:32] Michael: What, what actually happened here, I believe it was, there was a guy in the Czech Republic that wanted to import and register cyber truck and ran into a lot of problems with the European union’s pedestrian protection.

Regulations and with the end cap that has the pedestrian testing for safety scores. And so the vehicle couldn’t be certified under European regulations. [00:17:00] Apparently, the Czech authorities allowed the vehicle to be registered, but they required the vehicle to have little rubber bumpers put around the vehicle on all of the seams on all of those sharp edges.

That in the check authorities minds apparently prevented pedestrian injuries and made the vehicle Work under the EU law. I don’t think that the EU is going to go along with that. I think they’re probably going to resist certifying the cyber truck based on their regulations. But one there’s one now, one cyber truck in Europe is the outcome of that.

[00:17:40] Fred: And it has weather stripping. So it’s ready for winter.

[00:17:42] Anthony: Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, cyber truck, cause you hate the world. You love the Center for Auto Safety, so go to autosafety. org and click on that donate button, tell all your friends, send a link, pause, pull over to the side of the road right now, relax, [00:18:00] enjoy the dulcet tones of this podcast, and call up your friends, be like, hey, what are you doing?

Oh, I’m listening to the Center for Auto Safety podcast. Oh yeah? Get help. No, that’s not what your friends would say. They’d say, hey, can I donate too? And you’d be like, yeah. There

[00:18:14] Michael: was something else that was interesting in that article. I’ll just go back to you real quick. In order to drive a vehicle weighing over about 7, 700 pounds in Europe, you’re required to have a what they call a category C license I believe is.

Functionally equivalent to a commercial driver’s license in the United States. So essentially, if any of these giant pickups that we’ve seen come out on the roads lately, many of them weigh over that amount. In America, if we had that, the people buying them would have to have a commercial driver’s license.

Which is a really interesting thing, I know, and it shows, I think, that European authorities have their eye on the ball a little more than we do in the United States when it comes to vehicle weights and the people operating those [00:19:00] vehicles. Anyway, I digress. I just noticed that in the article.

[00:19:04] Anthony: Okay. Hey, let’s move on to something fun.

[00:19:07] Seatbelt Reminders and Safety Regulations

[00:19:07] Anthony: I don’t know if it’s fun, but the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety they have a new article out talking about how automakers have moved quickly to install louder, more persistent seatbelt reminders since IIHS began rating this, that feature in 2022. The first year, only 70%, 17 percent of new models earned a good rating while 65 percent were rated marginal and poor, but manufacturers have already flipped those numbers.

62 percent of the 2024 models tested so far are rated good. Only 24 percent are rated marginal or poorer. I love this because this is the fact that, hey, IIHS can go out there and shame automakers into making their cars safer. I don’t see any downsides to this. I think this is great and great for IIHS.

[00:19:52] Michael: It’s great. And then, I guess the only negative here is that NHTSA isn’t doing this work through its NCAT program. And this is what. The [00:20:00] NCAP program was designed to do was to punish the poor safety performers out of the manufacturers by giving them bad ratings, thereby potentially driving their sales down, which, is an incentive for all the manufacturers to continually be upgrading the safety systems of their vehicles.

NHTSA has struggled to implement new technology into the NCAP testing. IHS is unburdened by a lot of the requirements that government agencies have to deal with when putting programs into effect, has moved forward in a lot of these areas where NHTSA hasn’t been able to, and, in this is also an area of seatbelt reminders where there is a requirement that’s that we’ve spoken about before on the podcast, that NHTSA has this rear seat belt reminder rule that it’s been struggling to put in place now for many years.

And we’ve reached the point where that is coming in the next few years and manufacturers are catching up, going ahead and implementing that into their systems. And so that’s, I would guess that’s [00:21:00] part of the reason that we see this much higher, this shift in the last two years and in the insurance institutes testing is because manufacturers are, it’s not just just because they’re testing for it.

It’s also because manufacturers are preparing for this regulation that’s soon to come into effect for rear seatbelt reminders. But the most interesting part to me in the article was that it found that, You know, what really matters with seatbelt reminders is a sustained audible alert. It’s got to be obnoxious in order to get people to buckle their seatbelts.

If they forgotten, I believe, the federal government requires something like a six to eight second audio audible. Reminder, and then a visual reminder that stays on your dashboard for a certain amount of time. The insurance institutes tests require or give better scores to vehicles that have the longer audible alerts, because it showed that the longer audible alert was equivalent to things [00:22:00] like, not letting the vehicle speed up over 15 miles per hour.

If you don’t have a seatbelt on, that’s which is a very, a pretty rigid punishment. Essentially. That would require people driving somewhere to put their seatbelts on. So audible reminders appear to work and they appear to work. Great. And, now it’s time to get them into the backseat.

[00:22:20] Anthony: I love that. Wait, did you say it was IHS that said that the vehicle can accelerate more than 15 miles per hour?

[00:22:26] Michael: So they had a study about the reminders. And they found that the persistent audible reminder, the 92nd of just, Totally a reminder was just as effective as putting a speed limiting interlock vehicle that kept the vehicle speed under 15 miles per hour unless the driver buckled up.

Which shows you, that’s shows you just how effective the audible reminders could be if they’re just as effective as essentially preventing a trip over 15 miles per hour.

[00:22:54] Anthony: Who’s not wearing their seatbelt these days. Come on, people buckle up already. It’s not that [00:23:00] bad. So you said NHTSA has been working on this and just remind listeners.

What’s the delay? Is this politics or is there something else going on?

[00:23:10] Michael: Yeah it’s politics. There’s been a requirement for NHTSA to put a rear, but to force manufacturers to put rear seatbelt reminders into vehicles for well over a decade now. And it just, For whatever reason, we have a hard time even identifying why it’s been so slow.

We went to court to try to force it to move faster seven years ago. And it’s just progressed at the speed of sludge. And it’s, and it’s a relatively slow process. simple rulemaking. You’re essentially, we’ve already got seatbelt reminders in the driver’s seat, often in the passenger seat, and they’re fairly simple mechanisms.

They’re simply detecting whether a seatbelt is buckled. So it’s really, shocking that it’s taken them so long to get these into place. And it is because of [00:24:00] resistance by the manufacturers. But it’s also because, we had four years with essentially a non functioning rulemaking department over it.

And that’s during the previous administration and, it’s. It also makes me concerned that when we get to more complex problems, like we’re talking about with Tesla or self driving vehicles and the regulatory efforts that need to be made there, if you can’t get a seatbelt buzzer into vehicles that covers the backseat, how, and you can’t get a regulation out requiring that, how are you going to get a regulation out ensuring the safety of automated vehicles or overseeing the implementation of vehicle to everything technology?

So it raises questions about rule making competency.

[00:24:43] Anthony: That’s why we exist to help pressure these things.

[00:24:46] Fred: Another aspect of this is that we as a population have gotten complacent about the idea that 40, 000 people a year are dying on the highways. It gets no when was the last time you saw an article in the New [00:25:00] York Times headlining the fact that 40, 000 people, a good sized city, are dying every year?

This is craziness. And, I’m not, I don’t know what people need to do to recognize that this is absolute carnage on the highway. That’s half a million people every 12 or 13 years. There’s a lot of people dying out there. There are some very simple measures that can be taken to dramatically reduce the carnage on the highways, and it’s astonishing that not only is the government not doing anything to do that to support those safety measures.

But also the people just don’t seem to care. I don’t know if that’s a function of advertising and people are captivated by, SUVs driving on dusty roads with commercials and, all of the pickup truck commercials on the football in the football games. But something strange is going on.

I just, I don’t get it. [00:26:00]

[00:26:00] Anthony: Maybe we should run TV ads where it’s your SUV and it’s bright and shiny, and it’s, backing out over your kids. The guy keeps going, cracks open a beer, keeps going, doesn’t have his seatbelt on, woohoo! And just show him killing a bunch of people over and over again.

[00:26:16] Fred: The cigarette companies are forced to put warning labels on packages of cigarettes.

Why isn’t there something comparable for Automobiles. Comparable numbers of people are dying every year. I don’t get it. Technically, the controls on a vehicle are now capable of alerting people to many safety critical situations, attached to seatbelts, yes, but also on the highways and driving too fast and approaching curves and, all those sort of things that kill people are within the realm of what computers and these cars could be warning people of.

[00:26:55] The Push for Autonomous Vehicles

[00:26:55] Fred: Don’t understand why there’s no imperative to take advantage of that for the [00:27:00] sake of saving people’s lives rather than just making people take their damn hands off the wheel.

[00:27:07] Anthony: I don’t know. And that’s what keeps getting pushed as well. The car will just drive itself. And that’s happening now with 18 wheelers, I guess this would be.

Related to this is company Gattic AI. And GADAC is, am I pronouncing that right? GADAC, they they work on autonomous transportation technology for basically 18 wheelers, large vehicles.

[00:27:30] Third-Party Safety Evaluations

[00:27:30] Anthony: And they’ve come out and said that, hey, we are committed to not launching a driverless operations until its systems satisfy a rigorous examination.

third parties. Edge case, research friends of the show and Tuv Sud, some European company, cause it’s got lots were brought on to provide that outside perspective and validate its development and safety process. So here’s a company outside of government regulation is trying to at least [00:28:00] Take safety seriously.

Is this advertising? Is this a real deal? What’s what’s your take Mr. Perkins?

All your take is muted, but it was definitely well intentioned because he leaned in, he got all earnest.

[00:28:16] Fred: So far, it’s a good news story because this third party evaluation is something we’ve been advocating for a long time. And we participated in development of UL 4600 in a minor role, but we are certainly behind the idea that UL 4600 or its equivalent should be used to provide independent third party validation of the safety.

Of self driving vehicles, including, of course the heavy trucks. Maybe especially heavy trucks because of the enormous amount of kinetic energy they’ve got. We’ll see how it plays out, but so far it’s a good news story. All

[00:28:54] Anthony: I like to hear that. A less good news story. Actually, I don’t know if it’s a less good news story, to tell you the [00:29:00] truth.

[00:29:00] Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Technology

[00:29:00] Anthony: So we’ve talked a lot in the past about V2X, which is vehicle to everything. So your vehicle on the streets and road traffic, everything’s connected. So it gets your vehicle can have a better understanding of what’s happening on the road. Hey, traffic, slow down ahead, or. Hey, there’s a speed limit change, or a lane closed, or ice up ahead, something like that.

I know you two probably have better examples, but that’s what I’m coming out. This hasn’t really been deployed.

[00:29:25] Cybersecurity Concerns in V2X

[00:29:25] Anthony: It’s very early stages, but the University of Michigan has said, Hey we gotta protect these, when this comes out, we gotta protect it from hacking. And I love the fact, just like we’re doing with autonomous vehicles, is they’re getting ahead of the curve and being like, this stuff can be hacked from an article we’re linking to.

While prior studies focused on individual sensor security or simpler collaboration models this study introduces sophisticated real time attacks tested both in rigorous virtual simulations and real world scenarios at their test facility. And they, the LIDAR based [00:30:00] data that appears realistic in the system but contains malicious modifications By a physical access to the hardware and software, they used zero delay attack scheduling, a high risk cyber attack that uses precise timing to introduce malicious data without lag or delay.

In virtual simulated scenarios, the attacks were highly effective with success rates at 86 percent on road attacks on three vehicles and the environment triggered collisions and hard breaks. Now this is great, I think, because. Again, this, these systems are not deployed anywhere in the world yet, but they will be at some date in the future and you got to start putting in, Hey, this is all the holes in the system.

These are all the potential problems. These are all fixable problems, or at least ones that can be addressed in some way.

[00:30:48] Michael: Yeah. Look, Frank, they actually are deployed in the city of Ann Arbor where a lot of this testing is going on. So they’ve got curve speed warnings.

They’ve got intersection [00:31:00] broadcasting is what they call it. It’s basically a V2X module intersection that can communicate to vehicles approaching that intersection. They’ve got pedestrian and other types of V2X. I think they have a couple or a hundred of these systems deployed throughout Ann Arbor that they’re studying this on and they’re finding that, they’re pretty easily hackable and pretty easy to send false data across these networks and which is going to confuse vehicles.

And. Cause safety issues could cause crashes. Like everything that’s connected V2X is going to have to get a robust cybersecurity plan. Either by regulation or by, the companies voluntarily deploying one that works before we start to see the spread of V2X. And we’re looking at, V2X, there’s a long horizon on, because we’re not even, we were delayed by the FCC spectrum issue with the [00:32:00] wireless V2X.

They’ve moved on to a connected system that’s based on telematics. And, data. And so it’s going to be a while before we start seeing the good things that come out of V2X. A lot of cars aren’t, most cars aren’t equipped with any type of V2X now. So it’s a long way into the future. So in this.

respect. We have time to go ahead and set up a robust cyber system that, by the time this technology starts to percolate out onto our roads, we can get these false detection rates and other problems that were, that came through in this study taken care of.

[00:32:37] Anthony: Yeah. And unlike what the tech bros spout about self driving vehicles and whatnot, this is, Actually something that will make a huge difference and it’s not phantom and fiction and even something that the robo taxis would actually require to make them more safe and more effective.

[00:32:54] Fred: I need to point out though that this is one specific kind of attack where [00:33:00] somebody has physical access to the software and hardware. So they got into the cars and introduced some malicious software. So it’s great that they did this. But nobody should think that this means that the cybersecurity problems associated with software driven vehicles have been solved, in any case.

Great to alert people, but we’re a long way from a cyber safe future.

[00:33:25] Anthony: You don’t even need physical access with over the air software updates. Someone just needs to compromise that server, sending that data out and can put something in. All right.

[00:33:34] Fred: Or you can also put messages into a billboards, for example, that only the LIDAR could read or only the cameras could read there’s an infinite number, an infinite universe, essentially of software hacks that could defeat or attack the cyber systems of connected vehicles.

But

[00:33:54] Anthony: if we start attacking this stuff now, solving these problems now, ideally. The next decade will be [00:34:00] more prepared. Oh, look at that pre planning. Isn’t that a wonderful idea for safety? I think it is though. It’s also a good wonderful idea for safety go to autosafety. org click on donate Okay, let’s go into the Tao of Fred and today Fred is going to climb into his battlebot costume and have humans versus machines begin

[00:34:24] The Tao of Fred: Machines vs. Humans

[00:34:24] Michael: You’ve now entered the Tao of Fred

[00:34:26] Fred: Oh, good morning.

Again, still morning, right? Who knows? I’ve just been sitting back thinking globally about this sort of stuff and I’ve come to the conclusion that we now live in a world In which an international cabal is building and fielding malevolent machines financed by remote, murky corporations and by involuntary tributes from the populations they endanger.

Machines that are beyond human control, roaming the streets at will, randomly frightening, injuring, and killing pedestrians and motorists [00:35:00] with impunity from control by police or the judicial system. All at the behest of ignorant and corrupt public officials, immune to protests from the people most at risk, with no clear advantages for the affected populations.

This sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie, but this is actually what the people in San Francisco and Los Angeles and I guess Austin, Texas, and a few other places, Our encountering the, but the band plays on an army of well paid lobbyists are spreading this plague across this nation and other nations.

[00:35:39] The Legal and Ethical Dilemma of AVs

[00:35:39] Fred: So how did we get here? I read the constitution and there’s no language in the constitution that I’ve read conferring rights to machines that are senior to human rights. Yet that seems to be what we’re encountering here. The machines can go ahead and kill people, and there’s really no recourse for the people who’ve been [00:36:00] killed through the legal system, right?

Because they may have signed some disclaimer somewhere. Michael, what do you think about that? There’s are there, do machines have rights?

[00:36:10] Michael: I would suggest that the machines produced by corporations, do get a benefit of, do get to the benefit of the corporate personhood that corporation has been granted under some, various misguided interpretations of the Constitution by the Supreme Court.

But when it comes down to it I think you can see how that’s happening on the ground in San Francisco, where large corporations are coming in there, politicians, Democrat or Republican love. The idea of economic growth, of providing jobs for their citizenry, of bringing companies into their cities and oftentimes sweetening the deal with tax breaks and other things that the rest of us are never going to get.

So yes, I think, corporations and their machines. Do have [00:37:00] certain rights, because they lobby for them that your average human might not have. And in some circumstances, I think it’s quite fair to say that corporations have more rights than your average human walk around on the street.

[00:37:12] Fred: Yes but the machines, I’m specifically talking about the machines, right? Machines. So this is a bizarre world in which we’re feeling machines that have no rights. They are actually being treated as though. Their rights to operate are superior to the human rights. Now, there’s a common good that everybody has by virtue of their being born, right?

Which is the ability to walk around safely or to exist safely. This is not the first time that industrialists have exploited a common good for their own private interest. And my position is that the ability to walk down the road safely Or operate safely is a common good. Too many businesses continue to pollute the environment in support of their own [00:38:00] in pursuit of their own profits.

And that’s really what we’re looking at here. The pollution of the public safety environment. Too many businesses force workers into unsafe conditions as the price of their continued existence. Look at Uber. Look at Musk’s delusions about where the Cyber taxis are going to go. Too many businesses continue to introduce unsafe devices into commerce or profit from laws that specifically, based on laws that specifically excuse them from the lethal consequences of the product they sell.

The gun industry, the tobacco industry, and now the A. V. industry. And this is the happy situation that A. V. developers are busily creating for themselves at the public’s expense. The Republican really has seen no benefit from these technologies. Yeah, there are, there are people talking about in the future everything will be better.

But to date, [00:39:00] there’s been no demonstration of any benefit. And in fact, If these companies are going to get anything like the kind of profits they’re pursuing, it’s going to make transportation and safety on the highways much more expensive for everybody so that they can achieve the profit objectives.

I, my question is, do we need new constitutional amendments assuring the primacy of human rights over machine rights? We, we need to stop sliding into this abyss without thinking about it. Somehow, citizens have got to regain control of public spaces from the capitalists who seek to capture its value and sell it back to us one credit card transaction at a time.

Technology development is fine and dandy, but technology development at the expense of our legal rights and abandonment of liberal democratic ideals cannot go unchallenged. End of rant.

[00:39:56] Anthony: Look Fred, guns don’t kill people. My [00:40:00] machine gun robot kills people. Okay? And it gets away with it. It’s the perfect criminal.

I call it GM Cruise. I’m with you. Yeah that’s the thing we’ve talked about with a lot of these AVs. They’re exempt from traffic laws. They have passes, like in San Francisco, they won’t get tickets. I spoke to a cop in New York City. I was like, with a robo taxi what do you do with a robo car?

He’s yeah, we have no idea. Who do you give the ticket to? How do you pull it over? I think they’ve figured out how to pull it over, but who’s getting the ticket? Like, when that Waymo ran into a traffic, into a light pole in Arizona. Who gets the ticket?

[00:40:41] Fred: Even if you do give a ticket to the company, how does that affect the individual behavior of the machine that just killed somebody?

It doesn’t. It has no impact. This legal system is not up to this challenge.

[00:40:55] Anthony: It seems like Michael, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems a lot of these jurisdictions like San [00:41:00] Francisco and Phoenix and Austin are giving these companies just waivers to commit traffic violations at a minimum.

[00:41:09] Michael: Yeah, depending on the state and most states really right now don’t have a lot of regulations around the autonomous technology. So you’re right. It’s the wild west out there. And as we’ve seen with with the uber and some of the situations that happen there, if if you’re in one of these vehicles and something bad happens to you or one of you and you happen to runs over you and you happen to have agreed to a terms and conditions document by clicking on your cell phone screen at some point, you may not even have.

The ability to avail yourself of the civil justice system and take them to court. So there’s, there are protections, beyond the original protection that all the people that are building these technologies have, which is, their corporations and, the people behind that corporation are somewhat.

Shielded from liability, they are adding additional layers of liability on top of that in [00:42:00] the form of arbitration clauses and, in the form of lobbying city and state leaders for perks and for things that the average individual is not going to qualify for. So there’s, there are a lot more protections for the machine in that respect, I believe, than there are for humans.

[00:42:19] Fred: Yeah. And again the key is that there is a public good, which is freely available to everybody, which is the right of the integrity of your body when you are not infringing on the, this freedom or safety of other people. And, that has value. And what these companies are doing is they’re trying to capture that value and sell it back to us.

This is madness, how we cannot continue sleepwalking into this.

[00:42:47] Anthony: I’m on board. Let’s have a scenario here. I lend Fred my car, and then Fred goes out and runs over a bunch of people. Now, Fred’s gonna get arrested. I’m not gonna get arrested, right? Cause I didn’t do it. Sure, it’s my car.[00:43:00]

Fred’s going to jail.

[00:43:01] Fred: Unless you, unless I happen to be drunk when you did it.

[00:43:05] Michael: Yeah, there’s a number of, there’s, there are a number of ways there, depending on, if you knew there was a problem with your vehicle. There are a lot of ways you could get roped into that situation.

[00:43:15] Anthony: So what I’m getting at, is, so when software engineers and hardware engineers, they produce something that winds up killing somebody why do they get away with it?

Why do the executives come? I think back to Volkswagen diesel gate where folks first Volkswagen was like, it was just one lone programmer. No, it was the entire company and they got fined billions and billions of dollars. Why isn’t there? And that was just for cheating on. There’s,

[00:43:40] Michael: It’s just it’s very difficult to get to, that’s functionally the whole purpose of a corporation is to shield employees.

Okay. from the law and to put the, basically hold the corporation out as liable for any acts or admissions by its employees. That’s a basic function of the law is protecting [00:44:00] employees from that kind of thing. You have, you, you have to see really outrageous behavior by executives before you see anyone going to jail.

Frankly, the Volkswagen example that you gave is. The example of what needs to happen more often, but in fact rarely happens, which is, seeing corporate bad actors and corporations actually go and serve prison time for doing bad things. Most of the time, the company pays a fine, which often isn’t enough, and people walk away scot free.

And don’t have to take any accountability for their actions, other than maybe a hit to their retirement or their bonus for that year. So that’s a big part of the problems.

[00:44:41] Fred: So far, the corporation has succeeded in insulating not insulating, I should say isolating people who live in communities where these are operating from the ability of regulating the vehicles, right?

They’ve gone to the state governments to make sure that the people most affected have no impact on the safe [00:45:00] operation of these vehicles. I’m sure. I don’t know. I’m projecting, but I imagine if we were somehow successful at the state level of putting authority where it belongs onto the programmers and developers that they would then focus more on the federal level.

They haven’t been able to do this at the federal level yet. But, there is a whole army of lobbyists out there. Who are very effective working at the state levels to make sure that every state has the same level of autonomy for developers that we now see in Texas, Oklahoma, and California.

[00:45:38] Anthony: Hey, Michael Moore, this is the idea for your next documentary.

It’s an update to Roger and Me. It’s called Robot and Me. End of rant. That’s not rant. That was a suggestion. I just want, I don’t even need a cut of the proceeds. Like a nice t-shirt would be cool. Yeah. I think

[00:45:54] Fred: an official rant has gotta travel over a couple of paragraphs. Yeah. This can’t be just one sentence.

[00:45:59] Anthony: [00:46:00] I, that’s a Quip rant. That’s a quip . No, man. It was a pitch, it was my pitch idea to, to Michael Moore. I don’t even know if he still makes movies, but it was for him to go ahead and go to the Auto Center, Florida Safety and click on donate.

[00:46:13] Exporting Crashed Cars Overseas

[00:46:13] Anthony: You guys ever wonder what happens to cars in the U. S.

when they get crashed and mangled in an accident? You ever wonder how they wind up in Europe? I have an article from the BBC or for those of you who are more local, The Beeb, quoting, one of the largest car parks in the former Russian state or former Soviet state of Georgia is owned by Caucus, Caucuses Auto Import, a company that buys used cars from auctions in the U.

S. The vehicles have been so badly damaged in accidents that they’ve been written off by American insurance firms. That’s right, your car is totaled, but they’ll still buy it in the lovely state of not a state, the country of Georgia. The state of Georgia is just I don’t think so. [00:47:00] This is scary, and it makes me glad that I don’t buy used cars anymore.

In the former Soviet republics.

[00:47:08] Fred: Yeah, I like the part about where they say it takes so long to get them fixed in the in America that, it’s not economical. We fix them much faster and cheaper. They don’t talk about the quality.

[00:47:21] Michael: This isn’t just a Georgia and former Russia Republic thing.

The vehicles that are crashed in America that Americans are no longer willing to use go. All over the world and very large numbers. And one thing that happens on their way as they’re functionally stripped of a lot of the admissions and safety equipment that’s required in America, but not required in those other countries.

So you’re essentially. You’re seeing a lot of catalytic converters are going to be stripped before they’re sold in a country with no emissions because the catalytic converters and the rare metals that make up the [00:48:00] catalytic converter and parts of it are more valuable here. And so you, what you essentially are doing is passing on vehicles to countries without any safety or emission standards and we’re essentially Offshoring our own problems, if I think there was a figure floating around that in some countries at 90.

Five or higher percent of the vehicles that are purchased in certain countries are used vehicles coming from elsewhere. And so essentially what we’re allowing through this export of bad vehicles in the United States is shipping our bad emissions and our bad safety problems off to other countries.

So it’s something that I think. That I, the United States should look at restricting. I believe the European Union is also looking at restricting this because essentially we’re, cleaning up our own house saying that, we’re able to raise the number of EVs in our country while at the same time sending a lot of vehicles [00:49:00] offshore to countries where we’re essentially delaying their adoption of.

Vehicles with better emissions and better safety technology to a later date. It’s a bad practice and something that everyone should be aware of.

[00:49:14] Anthony: Okay.

[00:49:14] Recent Vehicle Recalls

[00:49:14] Anthony: With that, I think it’s time for some recalls. I’m sure all of these cars that were crashed in the U. S. and sold overseas were recalled, but that’s not how things work.

Let’s start off with Honda. Honda recalls nearly 1. 7 million vehicles. Oh my god, for steering problems that can lead to crashes. What is happening here, Michael?

[00:49:35] Michael: This is something we’ve seen a lot of complaints on. NHTSA had an investigation that announced earlier this year A lot of civic drivers, but this also goes beyond civics, too.

I think Acura, Integra, Honda CRVs and HRVs from 2022 to 2025 then to open this investigation into complaints that fault steering was sticking while they were [00:50:00] driving, and they were having to overcome that by using A lot of effort, not a non usual steering effort. I guess I would describe it as in order to actually turn the wheel.

And so about six months into this investigation, I’m assuming that so it was putting the screws to Honda behind the scenes saying, you need to do a recall here. Honda has announced the recall. So owners can expect to see, I think they’re going to let me see, I think they’re going to.

Replace or inspect and replace the steering gearbox assembly as part of this recall. So owners should be looking out for that in the next couple of months when they’re notified.

[00:50:39] Anthony: Get it fixed, listeners. Next up, Nissan 37, 236 vehicles. This is the 2024 to 2025 Nissan Rogues and certain Infiniti QX80s.

And this is, oh, no, is this a, this is. It is a rear view monitor. I, Oh my God. It’s always, [00:51:00] no,

[00:51:02] Michael: it’s yet another rear view camera system. That’s running through an infant infotainment system and is encountering interference and not producing the proper image when required, when someone’s reversing. So it’s a problem.

It’s something we think that needs to be taken care of. I think what ultimately needs to happen is the safety components need to. be able to override all infotainment functions of the vehicle whenever they’re required. We continue to see problems with the interface between infotainment and safety equipment in electronics and something needs to be fixed there.

There needs to be some type of regulation that assures that safety features are going to be able to operate regardless of what an infotainment system is doing or whether the infotainment system has the proper software. Safety features need to take priority.

[00:51:57] Anthony: Yes, there needs to be a separation of [00:52:00] church and state there.

Cause this is way too common. We see last recall BMW 11, 579 bills, the 2023 to BMW X I X drive 28. I look, if you’re going to spend that much money on a car, like what, come on I want to pay for something. And this just continues with all of these ridiculous X something, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah brake module is issue.

[00:52:27] Michael: Yeah, not only that it’s, there was a recall that was issued, I think, around February that it basically screws around with the analog brake system, stability control. You’re still able to stop the vehicle, but. When you encounter situations in which you need stability control or analog breaks, there’s, it’s not functioning properly.

They put out a recall for this in February and found out pretty quickly that recall was not actually going to fix it. the problem. It was not working. [00:53:00] And so they had to go back and now are conducting this new recall to fix the problem they thought they had fixed before. So that’s it looks like they’re replacing the integrated break module with a Different brake module entirely.

And owners of all these number and lettered vehicles made by BMW can expect to hear from them late in November.

[00:53:26] Anthony: All right. That’s that’s it. We’ve done some investigations. I’m not going to get into those right now, but more review cameras. I’m sure that’ll be a call in the future.

[00:53:33] Conclusion and Farewell

[00:53:33] Anthony: But for now, thank you so much for listening, listening listeners.

And till next time, ciao. Alright,

[00:53:40] Fred: thank

[00:53:40] Anthony: you. Bye bye. Thanks everybody.

[00:53:42] Fred: For more information, visit www. autosafety. org.