Total Bullshift or Anti-Geek-ite

Anthony: Yeah, so let’s start off this week while we’ve already, let’s let’s talk about I 95, cause this was, it’s horrific.

Part of I 95 collapses in Philly due to a fire, not from an electric vehicle, from it seemed like a fuel tank stopped underneath an overpass, and we don’t know yet. I don’t think caught on fire, melted the brood melted the

Fred: road. The latest report I saw says that there was apparently excessive speed.

The gasoline tanker left the road and just the sparks or whatever set it on fire. And unfortunately took down the, or killed the driver, took down the the highway itself. My daughter pointed something out though, which is putting aside the tragedy of the the driver being killed. In a sense, it was fortunate that it was I 95 in Philadelphia, because it’s mostly a local highway.

All the through traffic is going down the New Jersey Turnpike to get from New York to the Piggly Wiggly down in Atlanta, where they’re be processing jack’s. What a jack’s?

Michael: I have no idea. You mean Jack’s? Like you throw a Jax with the ball?

Fred: No. I’m trying to think of the pork rinds jack’s.

Pork rinds, yeah. Oh. Come from New York and head. Anyways the interstate traffic is probably okay. This is a big annoyance for the local traffic in Philadelphia. But yeah, it was just a horrible crash.

Anthony: And there’s nothing that can be done. I shouldn’t say nothing. What can be done to prevent things like that in the future?

cause you’re listening to there oughta be a law ought to be a law.

Fred: Michaels talks about speed limiters.

Michael: Yeah, that’s one thing. I think there’s a lot of things that, the trucking industry fights very hard against putting in their vehicles and has for many years. I think if you look if we talk about it today, the ProPublic article that’s I’m talking about the kinda the history of.

Heavy truck under ride and how the industry is pushed back against the rear guards, which are now required and have continued to save a number of lives. And the side guards, which are not required yet, but probably should be, although the, and the industry continues to raise a lot of roadblocks to getting that done.

So it’s, there’s a lot of a lot of problems there.

Anthony: Let’s talk about the article. Oh, go

Fred: on, Fred. I was just gonna say the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, IIHS predicts that side guards, effective side guards on those trucks would save over the order of 800 lives per year.

Seems like a big number to me. And I don’t know why are they pushing back so hard, Michael? Is it just reflexive or do they have a real economic case? Before we even

Anthony: get into that, let’s explain to listeners. What are you guys talking about with side guards on trucks and the rear guards on trucks.

We have a link to this Pro Publica article. There’s an image. I think you can get an idea, but what,

Michael: yeah, and I would encourage listeners to take a look at that article online because it has a lot of, striking visuals of crashes. And what the real issue is here is the height of the ve passenger vehicles versus the height of the tractor trailer.

And you’ll see images of insurance Institute vehicles being tested and, you’re basically coming in to the rear of the. Semi-trailer at head height or into the side of it at head height. And so we see devastating injuries and deaths from this type of collision. It’s been raised for many years.

I believe this was the cause of death in Jane Mansfield’s car crash, 60 years ago plus. And it’s just never been completely addressed, by either lowering the trailers, which I’m not even sure is possible given those loads, or by putting some type of guard in place. The issue that I think that we’re facing right now in side guards, NHTSA just did a cost benefit estimate of, what it would cost to, to put these in per, life saved or injury prevented.

And it’s a, it’s, they’re tough numbers. Now those are, you’re looking at thousands of dollars going into every one of these vehicles that needs to be upgraded or retrofitted. So it’s a it’s not quite as clear cut a case as, say, automatic emergency braking or something like that.

Where the calculated benefits that NHTSA has to use just clearly outweigh the negatives caused by crashes, all of the societal negatives. So It’s something that, I think we need to figure out whether we figure out a new way for, maybe the Tesla semi is going to figure this out and lower the vehicle and run it on hot wheel tires.

I don’t know. There, there’s gotta be better ways to transport goods that don’t, people put people at risk basically due to a simple in incompatibility in the size and shape of the trailer versus the size and shape of the passenger vehicle.

Anthony: I think we’ve already solved that. Problem is everyone needs to buy a giant s u v so your ride height is higher than the cab on a semi-truck problem

Fred: solved.

No, maybe that’s the logic behind these big pickup trucks that we’re seeing now.

Anthony: That and laser beams on the front of your car. So if you’re in this accident, automatic laser beam deployment shoots open the tractor trailer. Ideally it’s full of kettle corn and you get cooked kettle corn too as you drive past.

Michael: Plus, if you look at a cyber truck, it looks like it would just wedge right under the trailer and push it up over you, and it’s made outta stainless steel. So maybe that’s why people are plunking down a hundred dollars for those things, which are three years late now.

Anthony: There’s an lovely article in ArsTechnica, which you have a link to.

Basically the leaked Tesla report talking about cyber truck leaked. Tesla report shows cyber truck had basic design flaws. No kidding. Okay. I don’t know if a few people have seen a drawing of the cyber truck, but it looks like a four-year old came up with a design and said, look, mommy, aren’t you proud?

And mommy would be like, you’re a genius as a four-year-old. But as a car company, it’s just silly. And as a truck, just there’s these weird angles. Like the thing with the truck is you wanna make it easy for people to put loads inside the truck bed. This has some weird angles. It’s stainless steel as Michael’s pointing out.

I don’t know. Fred, how does stainless steel do in a, in a. In crash testing, like I, what we have crumple zones, like most of our cars, the fronts are, there’s steel structures in there that are designed to give way, but a lot of it’s plastic and things like that, that are designed to crumple and slow down the impact stainless.

Fred: There’s a perimeter for steel called ductility, which is, which has, it does not have anything to do with feathered animals. It means that it’s the ability of the steel to stretch and bend without breaking. And what you want to have in a crumble zone is ductile steel that will bend and deformed to absorb the energy that’s involved in the crash.

Stainless steel is not particularly ductile, so it means that you have a lot of limitations on how you’re going to shape it and form it, and in its response to participating energy in a crash. So that’s the real problem. It looks, the cyber truck looks as weird as it does because you have a lot of limitations in forming the panels that you simply don’t have with a ductal seal that’s used for side panels in a car, for example, where, you’ve got a big press that squeezes it into shape.

Does that make sense there?

Michael: A weight issue with stainless steel as well. Is it gonna, it’s probably gonna be heavier than carbon fiber or some other aluminum materials, right?

It’s really the same problem because the stainless steel isn’t as ductile, so you can’t you can’t form it as well into very thin shapes and still have the structural rigid, or still have the structural strength that you need for the panelists to resist, normal things, people sitting on the car or what have you, things that can deform in the panels.

Anthony: And so this article has some Basically quotes from engineers walk, working on this that say that it’s failing basic things around noise and vibration. And other people in the auto automotive industry comment that this is really surprising cause this is problems we’ve all solved, 50 years ago.

Why isn’t new car today running into these problems? So for those of you who put your a hundred

Michael: dollars down, I know. Yeah. None of whom are farmers.

Anthony: None of whom is listening to this show. That’s, unless it’s pink listening,

Michael: the cyber truck just looks like an angry dishwasher to me. It’s a lot.

Anthony: It came out of Minecraft. That’s totally what it looks like. It’s the Minecraft aesthetic.

Michael: There’s a Minecraft aesthetic?

Anthony: Sure there is. Come on.

Fred: That’s interesting. I thought Minecraft was the opposite of aesthetic, but that’s just me.

Anthony: Hey, art is something\

Fred: I tried to play it once and it wasn’t, I. It wasn’t very much fun the first time. It’s kinda like golf. I tried that once and it didn’t work out for me either.

Anthony: Is the windmill really gotten your way?

Fred: No, I used to work on windmills, but that’s a different story.

Anthony: Oh my God. Alright, so we’re jumping around a bit. Let’s let’s talk serious.

Shall we, so Fred just sent this one our, yeah, I think Fred, you just sent this one around this morning about electric vehicles and the electrical grid. And this was fascinating to me. It talks about how the auto industry moving to electric vehicles is not talking to the utility industries that supply this stuff.

And I think in my mind what does that matter? The article points out that the fuel industry, the gasoline industry has a tight-knit relationship with auto manufacturers, which makes sense. Hey, how does your product work? How does your product work? Let’s make them work better. This article points out that the electrical grid, starting in the mid nineties, they notice some horrible things happening.

As soon as everyone’s air conditioners kick on, you get something called voltage sag. Correct. Fred will correct me if I’m wrong. So power drops. So these air conditioners will say, Hey, give me more power. And they all try and do it the same thing at once, and it winds up crashing the grid. And so they’re utility engineers, electrical utility engineers are worried this is gonna happen when everyone plugs in their EVs, what’s gonna happen?

Are these gonna say, Hey I’m running low on power, give me more and crash the grid. And they’re having a tough time finding who the engineers are to talk to about this issue.

Fred: So it’s it’s really a micro versus a macro issue. And it as always gets back to physics. So if you have an electric motor, When you turn on the electric motor, the first thing it does is it absorbs electric power from the grid and then starts to turn every power source voltage drops when you put a load on it.

And the immediate load when you start an electric motor is very large because it has to be because it’s starting up. There’s inertia to overcome, there’s conductors and all that. But the other thing that happens in an electric motor is that as it starts to spin, it generates reverse voltage. In a sense.

It’s called reverse emf, because the same thing that causes Electricity to be generated when you spin a rotor in electric, current is happening as the motor picks up speed. So it not only does it absorb energy from the grid to start, it starts to generate backwards electrical energy as is our spin.

So you can see that there’s a balance that occurs and as it reaches full speed, then the amount of hour it’s absorbing from the grid is balanced by the amount of electric power that’s is sending back to the grid. Does that make sense? This is a balance there. So on you. So there are two consequences of this that are important for this discussion.

One is that when they all start at the same time, you have an incredible amount of power that’s being absorbed from the grid. Now the grid is relatively large. Oh, I’m sorry. The second issue is that if you stop the motor, suddenly. It injects a lot of electric power back into the grid. You gotta dissipate that somehow.

It’s gotta, it’s gotta be absorbed by the grid for that same reason. You’ve got a spinning rotor in a magnetic field. There’s just a lot of energy in there. So that’s gotta go somewhere. So the problem that arises is if the grid is large and the electric motor loads are small, it’s really not a problem because the grid can absorb the fluctuations in power that are caused by the electric motor starting and stopping.

The problem is when you have a lot of electric motors and they become more or less the same scale as the electric generating system itself. If they all start and stop at the same time, then you can overwhelm the. Power available in the system, and circuit breakers start to pop and things happen if you’re the kind of person that I was as a kid and stick electric wires into electrical outlets to see what’s gonna happen.

You’ll see that the circuit breakers do their job and they trip, okay? Because you got too much current coming through the wire. It’s designed that way to protect idiot kids like me who are sticking wires into the outlets. But the problem is that it’s not designed to continually deliver power and also absorb all the energy that’s caused by idiots sticking wi wires into outlets or alternatively air conditioners being all turned on at the same time which is the same physical phenomenon as the idiot kid.

So that’s what’s going on. Now the question is you could say that’s not a problem because these are all gonna be operating intermittently and it’s not gonna all happen at the same time. So what’s the problem? It turns out that there are times when it does all happen for whatever reason, at the same time, and does in fact overwhelm the system.

There is some historical examples of that. The problem that is being articulated here is that if everybody comes home from work at the same time, ALA Simpsons drives their car into the garage, plugs it in, jumps in front of the tv, that’s a huge that’s a huge power load coming in. There needs to be compensated by the electrical grid and the systems associated with that.

If everybody does that at the same time, Then you’re gonna have a situation where you’re sucking tremendous amount of power out of the grid all at the same time. It becomes the equivalent to the idiot kids sticking the wires into the outlet. You just have way too much current coming through. The system is designed to interrupt the power if you overload the system, because they don’t want the utility wires to burst into flames, which only makes sense.

So that’s the problem that, that is being anticipated here. And the author was saying we don’t know if this is going to happen or not. We don’t know what the requirements are. We don’t know how long the EVs that are charging are gonna have excessive loads coming in, excessive needs for power. And nobody is thinking about that.

Nobody is thinking about the electrical requirements that are needed. By the needed to be implemented by the electric vehicle manufacturers in order to sustain the safety of the electrical grid. Make sure that they don’t become the equivalent of, 10 million, 88 kids sticking wires into the outlet.

So that’s the problem. And there’s no solution just yet. People are not talking to each other cause who do you call? There’s no Ghostbusters in this situation.

Michael: And the manufacturers don’t appear of automobiles don’t appear to be incentivized to cooperate with the folks in charge of the grid.

They just wanna sell cars, leave it, sell cars, figure it out.

Fred: That’s the job that, that’s, and people talk about silos and tunneling of engineering, but these are all engineering silos that people work in because that’s what they get paid to do. They get paid to solve the problem of how to plug in the car and charge the batteries.

They don’t get paid to solve the problem of how do you preserve the electrical grid. Against the demand of the electric vehicles.

Anthony: I imagine though that the ev charging companies like the Supercharger Network and EV America that they’d wanna work with the auto companies cause the, and the auto company engineers would be like, Hey, what’s the fastest way I can get charged out of your system?

I imagine they’d wanna work together on that to say, Hey, now we can charge 5% faster if we use EV America or some network like that. And then you’re also having having the charging networks. They would wanna be going back to the grid and being like, Hey, how do we pull this kind of stuff without destroying our business?

But I’m being optimistic, aren’t I?

Michael: I mean you, I don’t know. I guess we’ll see once there’s a big major blackout that’s proven to be attributable but to EVs right. And what the response is.

Fred: Don’t to today it’s still a micro versus macro problem. An individual charging station is still a micro problem for any grid.

And by the way, it’s not the grid. There were several grids. Texas stands alone and West Coast stands alone. And the east coast is all divided up into lots and lots of grids. You know that, that’s important too. But all of these are macro considerations that need to be addressed and need to be addressed soon if people are gonna be putting up the charging stations all over the country, as is motivated by the current legislation.

Anthony: And so if, I think if you’re an engineer working on this issue, if you work for an auto company, there’s at least a couple of you out there. We know it. Contact your local grid operator and be like, Hey how do we work together better? I don’t imagine it’s a long, drawn out year long conversation.

Imagine it’s just Hey, I got your contact info. You got mine. We can start talking. Hey, did you donate to the Center for Auto Safety? I did. Oh, I didn’t yet. I’m gonna do that now. Walk me through it. Oh, you go to auto safety.org or Gene? You click on the support us Donate now button. That’s so cool.

Great. I really like the way your alternating cart works. I like the way your alternating card works. This is getting very strange now. So is America ready for EVs? This is an article in the Wall Street Journal the paper of record and it’s talking about the issues that the current generation, which is really, let’s be honest, the first generation of EVs is running into software glitches in accurate range estimates and things that are scaring people off.

With that, it’s what we’re just talking about of what kind of charging plug do I use? How do I access a charging network? The big thing I always see with EVs is people who are not using Tesla’s network is always complaining that they’re Ev ChargePoint or Ev Electr, Byam America.

The systems are down. And now it looks like GM and Ford have said, Hey, we’re gonna skip the, what the rest of the world uses for charging plugs. We’re gonna use what Tesla uses. And it. Sounds and feels like to me Apple’s proprietary charging thing for your phone versus what the rest of the world uses.

I don’t know if there’s an engineering need for this. If there’s some thing from a consumer’s point of view, I look at it and go smaller is better. Wait, what? Yeah, the smaller cable system seems better than the large clunky thing, but I don’t know, gentlemen. Is America right across some EVs?

Michael: The, the one thing in the article that’s we’re all, it’s all happening to all of us, whether we have an EV or not, is software problems. That’s unconnected to the evening pad, although, EVs do typically have more electronics and more stuff going on in the brains because they are trying to appeal to a, more technically advanced segment of our population in most cases.

The software issue applies to everyone. Some of the other issues involved are specifically EV issues, and one of them that’s, we talk about quite a bit is the range and range anxiety. And one of the things that we worry about is whether we’re gonna use advances in battery technology to give people cars that can go a thousand miles without to charge or reduce their weight to, to make outcomes and crashes better for everyone.

At this point, I think we’re all aware that the charging structure is inadequate. That’s something that was provided for in the Infrastructure Act a couple years ago. They’re rapidly expanding America’s charging infrastructure. Whether or not that’s the best way to go. We’ve talked about battery swapping and other things.

It’s really undecided yet. I think this is the way America’s going to go is a rapid a large charger network versus battery swapping, which might make more sense from some perspectives. But that’s certainly a problem as they point out. And then, there, there’s always the issue and particularly I guess if you’re renting a vehicle on vacation and you’re not familiar with your, your charging stations and it’s, it can be difficult to do.

I think that. When you’re looking at EVs, you really need to plan your trips probably a lot better than you do when you have an ice vehicle, because you’re going to have to know with without with internal combustion engine, you know you’re gonna run across a gas station sooner or later, unless you’re in some really far, remote areas of the country where there may be a hundred miles or more between a gas station.

But you know that with the EVs, you really need to make sure that, because the estimates of range can vary, you can’t really get in the vehicle and rely on it to go a certain distance with a certain amount of power because there are variations due to weather and temperatures and things that can affect the range.

So there’s a lot of planning involved. And so it is a, it’s, it’s a new type of driving for many and if you’re going to invest an EV or drive an EV or use an ev. You’re going to have to there’s a little bit of a learning curve around charging and range that everyone should, take the time to understand before putting themself into a potential bother.

Anthony: The range estimate also strikes me as a software issue. Right now. It just, they haven’t. Written algorithms that are smart enough. Our cars do it. Like my ice vehicle has, Hey, this is how many miles you can go. And it’s doing an estimate based off of my current speed. If I start going faster, it will drop, Hey, this is how far you can go.

If I go slower, it will increase it. It doesn’t, they’re not huge wild swings, so I can’t imagine that somebody could write a clever little algorithm for an EV being like, Hey, it’s winter outside, so maybe we’ll drop the range estimate here and it looks like we’re at this altitude. They know where you are, so we’re gonna change this range here, versus it being a warm summer day and it looks and already know your route.

cause that’s the thing is in these EVs. You’re essentially telling it where you’re going, so it knows your route. It should know the inclination declination that you’re going

Michael: maybe, are you telling your ev where you’re going? You might be telling an AV where you’re going, but an EV is, you can still use ways and not tell your car thing.

Anthony: Wow. But the thing is that’s the thing is like you’re telling your phone like, hey, where, how do I get to the nearest Piggly Wiggly? And so your phone, it’s they should know this sounds expensive. No, it doesn’t sound that expensive. No. They just make better guesses and just, set aside 5% as padding or something.

I don’t know. Fred, you’re an engineer. What do you think?

Fred: I think you’re talking about a conflict between marketing and engineering.

Anthony: Yeah, I know. I dunno. I think

Fred: it’s difficult for marketing purposes for the companies to be forthright about limitations on the range. You keep reading articles about.

People who were doing exploratory trips a couple years ago was a trip from Washington to New York, if I remember right, or Washington to Boston in the Wall Street Journal. And this was a trip from New York to Montreal, right? Maybe it’s the thrill of exploration that people like, maybe it’s the whole idea of chasing yourself into the wilderness and hoping for a good outcome.

Maybe that’s what this is all about. Aspirational ideas of adventure. But from the engineering perspective, if you knew the destination, you understand the weather conditions going back and forth, you understand how nice the roads are and bumps and inclination and declination and all those good things.

Yeah, you could do that, I would think, but it can get complicated and it would be inaccurate. And I think from a marketing perspective, you’re better off just leaving that out of your console. Yeah.

Anthony: But for a consumer I’d wanna know, and it, I you, I imagine you can get it as close as accurate as your fuel estimate range in an ice vehicle.

Maybe not as quite, but cause my fuel c my car doesn’t know how much weight I have in it. It’s not doing that for its, or it’s fuel range calculation. It’s not tracking my route. It’s just saying, Hey, this is how fast you’re going, we assume is what we’re gonna do. Sure. Give a trip. It says, range computer said you got 60 miles for a gallon.

And I’m like, no I didn’t.

Fred: It’s also inaccurate. Yes. I have a lot of hills where I live and I just want to go down the hill. It is always telling me that it’s 99.9 miles per gallon. When I’m coming up the hill, it tells me that it’s about 10 miles per gallon. So you’d say that on average I should be getting about 50 miles per gallon.

Right? 10 on the way. 10 on the way up. A hundred on the way down. But that’s not the way the aggregate works out. So there’s. I think there’s a lot of built in inaccuracies and whether or not that’s intentional or just difficult to estimate I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that the range estimates are all wrong sometimes independent of what the instant mileage estimates are.

I,

Anthony: I think you just solved the climate problem there. Everyone just go downhill. Yeah, drive downhill. We’ll reduce fuel consumption. It would be good. Yeah. Now for some more nonsense. We talked about this and I don’t think it was Toyota while back, but the fake shifting sounds and electric vehicles, was it Toyota the last time?

Because this is Toyota Toyota’s engineers are wasting their time on putting in. Fake shifting sounds and roaring engine sounds into their electric vehicles and on top of, and they wanna have it give you the feel of driving which is absurd, but yeah. Give you the feel of driving whatever that means, including, Hey, if you shift incorrectly in a car that doesn’t have gears and need to be shifted we can stall you out.

Like they’re contemplating the and the fact this comes out to a news article, cause this is really a two in the morning conversation with engineers who are a little punchy and we like, Hey, we’ll make the EV stall. Yeah. Let’s give it a blown head casket sound. Let’s have the radiator overheat.

It’s hilarious at two in the morning. But for some reason Toyota’s PR team has no sense of humor and said, Hey, we will tell people, and it’s not even their PR team, it was their head of EV engineering who has no sense of humor. And it’s this is what the guys told me. Yeah we’ll make it so we could stall the car.

Wh why?

Fred: Why the market works in funny ways. About my understanding and what I’ve read is that B m BMW has been doing this for a long time with their EVs because there’s a characteristic sound of a BMW for bmw and they wanted to preserve that characteristic sound with their electric vehicles.

So they pump noise through their radio so that it sounds like it’s got pistons and it’s doing the BMW thing. So I actually like this idea because it’s a good way of discriminating among different classes of vehicles. So you could have for example, in a small vehicle, you could say that the automatic shifting or the manual shifting is a dog shift maneuver.

And then in a bigger car you could say this is this is a horse shift maneuver. cause my, my. Medium size ev is actually total horse shift. And then for the really big EVs, like the Hummers 9,000 pounds hazard to everybody in destroying bridges, you can say that’s a total bull shift.

And I really like those categories.

Anthony: I caught onto what you’re doing.

Fred: What do you mean?

Anthony: This is just something where I’m it upsets me cause these are very smart engineers and they’re wasting their time on garbage.

Michael: The stalling part of it just can’t be put on the market.

That’s a defect as soon as it is. I, and literally they, I don’t know if they wanted to create, Just the feel of stalling with the system or if they were actually stalling the vehicle to give you the experience. It was a little unclear in the article, but either way, that seems like a problem.

It

Anthony: seems ridiculous. The feel of stalling. What do they do? They change the climate system to give you flop sweat.

Michael: Yeah. They’re doing more than just noise in the Toyota. They’re doing an actual feel, and I, that raises an issue for me. If you’re receiving feedback from the vehicle that’s, False.

Does that ch that’s obviously going to change your calculations for how you continue operating the vehicle. In what manner, how, whether you’re hitting the accelerator a and what you’re doing is going to be impacted by the information you’re receiving about the vehicle state.

So I think there’s, the potential here if they’re not careful in how they implement this to give drivers, false information about their, the way their vehicle’s operating and that couldn’t, that could be unsafe.

Fred: I had a Volkswagen once 1960 Volkswagen Bug that did not have a fuel gauge in it.

And the way those operator was, they had a little reserve tank. And so you would drive down the road. As happily as can be until all of a sudden the engine stalled. Then you had to lunge under the dashboard and manually turn a valve to open up the reserve tank and then restart the engine using the inertia of the car to continue your trip.

And then, you needed to get to Afghani station. I really like this idea for EVs that they would just, spontaneously stop running and you’d have to launch under the dashboard and flip a switch to, recreate that field of the 1960s. Love bug. I would love that. That would be a really fun thing.

Michael: That and the crank for the Ford Model T. That’s the one I really want.

Fred: That’d be a great way to get started. To put a little extra generator on there. It’d be like those old time movies of people blowing up the railroad tracks, they had to crank up the mechanism and then plunge the plunger down, and then the rails would expl.

I, I really that idea, Michael. That’s a good suggestion. For

Anthony: those of you just tuning in, you are listening to the Center for Auto Safety Podcast. There oughta be a law with a plethora of bad auto safety ideas. Continuing with Toyota. Toyota’s been getting beat up cause they’re like, we’re not doing electric vehicles, this is a bad idea.

And they’re not really saying what they’re doing, the rest of the industry and the rest of the world saying tough, we are doing it. So Toyota’s recently clarified their electric vehicle offerings. They currently have one car on the road ugly. Not very Toyota like at all, and apparently not very good.

Which is surprising cause Toyota is known for making cars that will last a really long time and are practical and good. So Toyota comes out and says hey this is what we’re going, we’re gonna have solid state batteries by 2028, which is a pretty aggressive move cause as far as I can tell, these solid state batteries have yet to leave a lab.

Michael: Maybe they’re just getting into this whole line of, if I’m gonna make EVs, I just have to bullshit consumers to get sales.

Anthony: Toyota is not Elon Musk. Come on. That’s why I’m saying it’s, they’re not one of the BS companies. Okay. They generally not do anything, say anything crazy enough.

Michael: I’m a Toyota Anthony. Let’s be honest here. We need to, you need to disclose your affiliation to the listeners. Yes.

Anthony: I paid them money to, for a little car that I hope will last forever. Forever. cause I never afford

Fred: another. I bought a Toyota minivan once. Remember those old minivans? Sure. And it had a built in air conditioner

or

Michael: a

Anthony: window unit you’d put

Fred: And after.

And also had an inadequate brakes. So after, after driving that van for a couple years, I really believe the Toyota does in fact have a sense of humor.

Anthony: So they say they’re coming out with solid state batteries but they’re, first they’re gonna start with the iron phosphor batteries. Do we what are our thoughts on

VO: this?

Michael: On Oh, my thought was that there was a mention of a battery that will get you to 932 miles. So we’re almost already crossing the thousand mile barrier with some of this nonsense. The solid state batteries, if they can get them into vehicles by 2028, I would be very impressed because while there seem to be a lot of research and.

Just a lot of press around solid state batteries. I haven’t seen any evidence that someone’s going to be getting them into cars in the next two or three years, and, five years is not a long time away for the manufacturers. They’re already designing vehicles that are gonna come out in 2028.

We’ll watch that as a developing story. Solid state batteries are great. They weigh less and they don’t catch on fire apparently. So that’s something we really want to come in soon.

Anthony: But are they the Blu-ray of batteries or, Hey, it sounds great. No one never bought it. You guys both have blu-ray players, don’t you?

Fred: I just got rid of mine not too long ago, as a matter of fact. Yeah, so I do know about that. I think that the battery technology is advancing very rapidly. It’s advancing in the right direction. It’ll have a lot of impact on a lot of things that need to store energy. So I actually applaud this initiative by Toyota, whether or not it’s just throwing smoke into the eyes of other people who are thinking of electric vehicles right now and saying in the future everything will be better.

So you should hold on for a few years. I don’t have the answer to that. I’d be surprised if there’s not some of that involved in this marketing initiative. But ultimately they’re headed in the right direction. They will be safer, they will be lighter. Hopefully they’ll be able to deliver on that schedule.

So keep your fingers crossed

Anthony: and hopefully they talk to engineers at your local utility grid so we can all work together nicely. Continuing his criminal enterprise, Kyle from Cruise. Can I call it a criminal enterprise? I am. I did.

There you go. I, oh, I can’t.

Fred: I thought you were gonna be talking about me again, but it’s nice to have the focus shifted.

Thank you. Look,

Anthony: I clearly, the listeners understand everything comes out of my mouth is parody and protected onto the law. Kyle Cruise, their their car is still in San Francisco, still on the street, still without anybody behind the wheel. And now they’re blocking the road and preventing the police from getting to shootings.

Boy, you gotta love this company and their technology. Of course, Cruise comes out and says, none of this happened. This isn’t true. And the internet responds with, here’s video footage of it. And the police department responded very commonly and said, we’re investigating this.

Michael: No, it doesn’t even matter if this one incident is true or not.

They’re, we’ve seen dozens of other incidents and I’m sure the folks in San Francisco can name way more than we can, where these vehicles have interfered with their daily patterns, their commute cause congestion, prevented emergency vehicles from getting where they’re going, threatened to run over fire hoses, not responded to officers, hit buses, trolleys, the list goes on.

And I think that a lot of those incidents could be completely avoided if you put a safety driver in the vehicles. And, we keep seeing the circumstance. I think it happened, on Good Morning America, one of the national news shows when they were looking at it, when they were riding in a cruise vehicle, it stopped and they had to call an engineer who takes, up to half an hour to come out and rectify the situation and move the vehicle so that traffic behind it can move again.

That just sounds stupid to me. Get a safety driver in these cars. California I believe, is going to be requiring them in the heavy trucks and the semis that are going to be deployed. And San Francisco’s experience is just, dis just ignoring the fact that having a safety driver in these vehicles to take over when there’s a critical safety incident where a human needs to respond.

Taking that out of the question, just the congestion and the giant pain in the ass that these cars are causing on the streets could be alleviated with the safety driver. So why don’t they just put a safety driver in the vehicles? I think it’s going back to, they want to show they’re in shareholders and their investors that these cars can drive without a person in them.

And that’s the only reason I can’t think of another reason. Certainly from a liability perspective, you probably want a safety driver in the car. That they’d really want to show these vehicles transporting passengers without a driver in the car. So at this point, it’s, it might be a battle getting, requiring a safety driver in California, you’re taking on, Waymo and which is Google.

Yeah. Which is Google and companies that have a lot of political sway in that state. And so it’s. We may not get a safety driver back in these cars, and I think that’s going to be a huge loss going forward. And I think it’s something that the d o T and NHTSA really need to take a look at and establish federal standards to make sure that they’re safety drivers.

I don’t think there’s, I don’t think we can rely on states doing the right thing when they’re surrounded by lobbyists from the industry all the time lying to them.

Anthony: A as we’ve spoken about numerous times, NHTSA has a lot of issues it’s gotta deal with. So we talked about it last week briefly.

The the NHTSA Office of Inspector General Report and how they’re doing really badly at rulemaking, at enforcing things, of coming up with things. And how do you pronounce the name? Rodella? Rodella. Rodella resigned last week from NHTSA to go work for, wait for it. Wait for it. Zoox, the silliest looking car.

That is definitely not crashworthy at all.

Michael: Yeah, Zoox is, that’s an interesting situation for a lot of reasons. We, I don’t know that’s why Mr. Rid left NHTSA. It was very, maybe the timing was just coincidental. Who knows? But, he was overseeing enforcement at that agency and which includes compliance enforcement and, Zoox is underactive investigation for certifying their vehicles, certifying that they comply with federal motor vehicle safety standards, when there’s some pretty serious questions about that.

And I’m just wondering, it is. What happens there, are, do you recuse yourself from those issues while you’re at the agency? Do you recuse yourself from them when you move to zoo’s or, is this just the typical and it’s a revolving door scenario? Obviously this isn’t the first person that’s moved to or from NHTSA, from industry.

And Mr. Rid himself, I believe moved over from T R W, which is an equipment manufacturer. Airbags, I believe, in other things to NHTSA and is now moving to zoo. This. It happens a lot. We think there probably, not even probably, there should be rules around, the type of work people can do when they’re moving to the government or from the government.

So that there aren’t, clear conflict conflicts of interest that take place, that put the public at risk. In this situation, it smells Zoox appears to be, buying up a couple of NHTSA, influential NHTSA people here and there. And, maybe they’re serious about trying to keep this vehicle that’s not quite certified on the road.

We’re not sure yet, but that’s something we are certainly interested in looking into as that investigation develops. But the other thing here that, From our perspective, NHTSA’s Office of Defects investigation has turned into a black hole in the past eight, nine years or so. And I don’t know if we can put it at one person’s feet if Rodella was involved in that, I’m sure there are, there’s some involvement there, but there’s also some bad Supreme Court cases that came down on confidentiality and some other factors at play, but, NSA’s the Office of Inspector General Report really honed in on that problem.

And it’s something that’s plagued NHTSA defect investigations for years now. 10 years ago, we weren’t happy with what NHTSA was doing 10 years ago, but what NHTSA was doing in this space 10 years ago was far better than what they’re doing now. They’re not getting documents into their investigation docket for many months, and in some cases many years after they’ve been submitted by manufacturers.

And it really gives the public, it gives the center fraud of safety and other safety groups. Far less information to work on, to work with when we are looking into these safety issues because NIT is basically a black hole. And we see it with the Tesla investigations that have been going on forever and don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

The autopilot, full self driving are still out there actively killing emergency responders and motorcycles and others and injuring many more. And w we don’t see any movement from NHTSA and we have no way of really tracking what the hell they’re doing because they’re not posting documents or updates to the investigation in a manner that allows us to keep up with what’s going on.

So it’s, I’m hoping that situation is rectified. Maybe by following the numerous recommendations that the Inspector General put out, they also put out a number of recommendations on the timetables We’re seeing in in, in safety investigations. They’re taking way, way too long. And, when an investigation into a recall takes eight years instead of two and you reach the same conclusion, then you’ve got a six year gap there where you know people are still exposed to the risk.

And we’d love to see the timetables shortened immensely on the nits investigations. And we think that the best way to do that is to give NHTSA a lot more money so that they can compete in higher good vehicle engineers, software engineers, a lot of different. Staffers that they’ve never had in that building before.

From a perspective, 20 years ago it was a lot of mechanical engineers and software was a new thing. Now it’s everywhere. And they need that expertise and they need a lot more money to compete in that market.

Fred: Isn’t part of the problem that the government separated the, in some sense, the investigation from the regulation?

They’ve got the National Transportation Safety Board, which provides a lot of detailed recommendations for improving safety on the roads. These are routinely ignored by the folks at NHTSA. What’s the cause of that? Does NHTSA have a dual role in both promoting and regulating motor vehicles?

Michael: That’s they shouldn’t, it’s certainly I would say an accusation that’s been leveled at them before being too cozy with manufacturers. And there were some of that actually in the Inspector general report where nits a’s staff were literally saying, we really need to work hard to improve our relationships and continue our relationships with manufacturers.

Now that might sound a little weird, but the manufacturers have the knowledge advantage over all of us who, who look at the auto industry. They know what’s in all their confidential documents in their tests and, they, and NHTSA has to have a relationship with them. A good example is, te I’m not sure how good of a relationship you can have with Tesla at this point, Tesla has a lot of software in its vehicles that you can’t.

NHTSA can’t just take a Tesla and reverse engineer it and figure it out. They have to get Tesla’s, technical input in order to figure out what these defects are, what’s going on in the car, why is this happening? They can’t just do that on their own. And so cooperation with manufacturers is, and always will be, I think really important and a big part of MIT’s job.

But I think that sometimes we see, when you see, the revolving door that we have here and you see the chummy relationship sometimes that’s built between certain,

Anthony: oh, he froze. Just at that point. He was so animated,

Fred: his hands, and he was getting right to the climax too.

Sometimes

Michael: when I’m having to think really hard, my, my hands move.

Anthony: I love it. But the problem is you were just this, you were doing this mar so impression of being frozen over zoom.

Michael: That was my internet connection there. In a nutshell, NHTSA do better on transparency and finish your investigations quicker.

Yeah.

Anthony: There you go. NHTSA. And look at that. You heard Michael say you should have more money in your budget. Look at that. Yeah.

Michael: That’s a must. Yeah. That means request more money when it comes time. And I found

Anthony: a way to get you more money. Congestion pricing. Are we ready for the towel of Fred?

Let’s go. Okay. This week it’s gonna be congest congestion price. Oh my god. This week it’s gonna be congestion pricing, which I love cause it’s first gonna happen in New York City where I live. My favorite part of this is the people of New Jersey. Hate it. Take it away, Fred.

VO: You’ve now entered the Dow of Fred.

Fred: Congestion pricing is something people have talked about for a long time, and it’s actually being implemented in a beautiful city called Copenhagen with very beneficial results. The heart of this is that people talk about freedom, and yet every time they talk about freedom in relation to cars, they are saying I want to be free to enclose myself in a metal box that’s very large, very expensive hard to move around a city, and then I have to find a place to park for it.

And so I’m gonna circle the block four times. That’s a strange kind of freedom And congestion pricing is really all about providing people with alternatives to move within this city. Without crippling the transportation system. The approach that has been talked about in New York so far, and you’re an expert, Anthony, correct me if I’m wrong, yes.

Is a you to use a bludgeon to say everybody who’s downtown between nine o’clock and three o’clock is gonna have to pay extra. And don’t worry, we will read your license plate and send you the bill and, everything will be fine. And people don’t kinda like that because that’s a big brother approach.

Copenhagen took a very different approach, which is to first get buy-in from people on the parameters that would be allowed to be considered within their congestion pricing approach. And they’ve come up with a, wonderful matrix that talks about not only the costs of the transportation as it exists today, but also the benefits that could be accrued to people.

If they look at certain alternatives, like using a lot of bicycles rather than using a lot of cars, bicycles are a lot smaller and cheaper. And by the way, they, if you’re able to use them, you’re probably into being healthier. I see the same thing in Japan when I was over there. A lot of bicycles, people use the bicycles to interact with the public transportation system.

Huge parking lots with, just thousands of bicycles in them. Okay. So what do you do in their rains? In Japan, they put on waterproof gear and they put an umbrella up over their head. They ride down the street with that. It’s a little different. And how did they accomplish that in Japan?

They used bigger sidewalks and people share the sidewalks with pedestrians and the bicycles. It works. They move, many more people through the cities using far less public far less, far fewer, I should say, vehicles than is in any American city. The problem that arises, there’s not that people don’t like it cause they do like it.

The problem that arises isn’t that they can’t do it because they can do it. The problem is we have invested so heavily in a very heavily subsidized surface transportation system based on automobile. That we would now have to take a look at it and look at some alternatives to that. Look at, maybe we don’t need all these parking spaces.

Maybe we could take away these parking spaces and use bicycles. You’ve first gotta get people to agree to use the bicycles and you’ve gotta, look at the angry people who are gonna say, I need a parking space, dammit. You’ve gotta provide the alternatives to people to move around because they still want to do that.

While at the same time, moving people away from the current transportation system to a different mode that’s gonna require investment. We’ve talked about that before. There’s no free lunch here, but if you value the real estate in a city properly and you don’t say it’s gotta be committed to the vehicles, and you say each square foot and downtown New York City is worth x, what is the best way to, for the public to get value out of that?

Very valuable real estate. Is it to use it for a car where you’re gonna get, a buck and a half every 30 minutes to park the car? Or are you gonna use it to move a hundred people through that same space in the same time using some of the kind of transportation system like bicycles or buses or what have you, where I think these are

Anthony: this parking space in New York that only costs a dollar 50 for every half hour.

Fred: cause I haven’t been there in a while. I, that’s what is going right now. I know Washington’s up around

Anthony: I think a parking garage would charge like 10 bucks minimum. Yeah. We didn’t say hi. You don’t even park there. You just drive past, they’ll like, give us 10 up

Fred: bucks. So I undervalued the real estate there, but, still the point remains.

But there are alternative uses for that real estate besides the commitment and the subsidy for conventional vehicles. Also the whole idea of. Trailer trucks being bumper to bumper are along the streets in the city and, in the garment district or what have you, loading or unloading there’s gotta be a better way to of doing that.

There’s got to and there are better ways of doing that, but they require the investment in the system. We have along in this country tried to externalize the cost of public assets to the private sector by saying we’ll build a highway, but it’s up to you guys to build the trucks and trains and cars and vehicles that are gonna be using those highways.

So that public investment is a significant subsidy for all of these surface vehicles that are congesting the streets. If the investment were deployed in a different way to get the goods and people in and out of the city without having to use the vehicles. Ultimately you would end up with a, a cleaner, quieter, more livable city.

But it’s gonna be a battle getting there because, we heavily committed in the last century to this whole automobile orientation and we’re still headed down that road with the EVs and the avs all trying to put technological bandaids on a system that was inherently poorly designed.

I

Anthony: think New York is a great test case for this because. There is if you’re I was joking about the commuters from New Jersey being upset about this, but if you live in New Jersey and you commute into New York for work, first of all, what century is it? Everybody’s working from home. But secondly, there is amazing mass transit options.

It’s, there’s bus systems, there’s a subway system, there’s ferries, there is everything to get you in and out of Manhattan. No problem. It’s much easier. You don’t have to go looking for, parking and it’s cheaper. So I think this is a good case of cutting down on an unnecessary convenience.

Oh my God, did I just become a little fascistic there? Is that’s very anti-American B, isn’t it?

Fred: Yeah. Why do you hate Freedom, Anthony? Come on let’s be fair about this. It’s just

Anthony: freedom of new jerseyans. Yeah. There’s no need for you if you live in Hoboken, get on the train.

Okay. If you live anywhere where you have to commute into New York City and you are not carrying 18,000 pounds of concrete, get on the subway

Michael: Or plumbing supplies or, they’re a minute right there. There, there’s

Anthony: definitely commercial uses where it’s absolutely necessary. Like my up s driver, I don’t live in the part of Manhattan where they put.

Congestion pricing in, but where I live, people crossing the George Washington Bridge, it’s a common thing. People get out at that subway stop and they meet somebody there who’s driving across and be like, Hey, can I get a ride with you? And so they all do that because heading into New Jersey free heading out of New Jersey, you gotta pay $15 on the bridge.

And so people regularly stand outside the bridge and be like, Hey, get in my car, I’ll drive you across and we’ll split the fair. Wow. Which makes sense. Because there’s no subway across where, up here?

Fred: There are other things to think about too, which is that with, if you have the congestion pricing area, you have a lot of disincentives for people to drive into.

The city people are going to fill up the vehicles a lot more. Even this extends to commercial traffic. I think if you were to look at all of the tractor trailers coming into New York City, you’d find a lot of ’em are only partially full. They’re, if you had incentives to fill them up all the way.

They would probably do that, right? Just as you’re talking about with the cars, people’s, people filling up the cars to get across the bridge and splitting the fee. So I think, from my perspective, it’s all good because I don’t have to drive to New York City every day

Anthony: either. Do I? I just wanted

Fred: from here, it would be interesting to see some of this happen in smaller cities as well.

I’ve seen no in no evidence at all of smaller cities or medium sized cities looking at congestion, pricing, or even trying to redesign their cities for use of alternative transportation systems. The nearest small city, to me is got bike lanes on some of the roads, but then they just end, and people, you know how you’ve gotta have a system that lets people get from A to B, not from a to a prime.

Anthony: Brett lives in a Shell Silverstein poem.

Fred: So anyway, those are my thoughts on congestion pricing. Copenhagen’s a beautiful city. I encourage anybody who can to go there and see how it can really work. If people are dedicated to the idea that you are not a slave through the automobile and that the way that you live and your access to beauty and peace and happiness is important to the city Planners

Anthony: red pushing Copenhagen.

Next, he’s gonna push free healthcare and free education. Wanna know why he hates America? Let’s go into recall Roundup strap

VO: in time for the recall

Anthony: roundup this week we’ve got a couple of them Jeep Coil Springs. Oh boy. Oh boy, boy. Let’s see, potentially 331,000 plus vehicles. This is for the 2022 to 2023 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which I love the fact that body style, s u v the real Coral Spring may not be correctly installed, allowing the coil spring to come out of position.

Is this gonna hurt me or others, or just make my car look

Michael: bouncy? It is probably going to do all three if the worst case scenario happens, right? So the Quill spring looks looks like a big cartoon spring that you’d see. So I think that there was a warning in this one because there’s a potential for these springs to become disengaged from the vehicle and, basically fly off and hit bystanders or pedestrians who are around when it happens.

And it appears to happen at somewhat random times. So beyond that it’s an important part of your vehicle’s suspension and, you’re definitely gonna have some handling issues when this occurs. So there was about, 330,000 Jeeps Jeep Grand Cherokee Keys. So that’s one to look out for if you do own one of those vehicles.

And, it looks like they open investigation into a 2023 vehicle in March and have wrapped it up with a recall. In a couple of months. So that’s a good job by Jeep as opposed to what we usually do here, which is bang them over the head with the bad jobs they do over the

Anthony: spring. Mercedes 8,281 Mercedes-Benz EQ S four 50.

Oh, the four 50 please. That’s where the poor this is a hybrid electric car. Let’s see, the hidden due to a deviation in the development process on, that’s never a good start for a software problem due to a deviation in the development process, the electric drivetrain software may improperly respond on the invented in the event of a detected fault at a specific plug connector within the electric drive.

What.

Fred: Get it. Analog versus digital analog. Ver So we’ve talked about validation of software and validation of software always assumes that the analog parts of it are working properly and case not, this is not that case though. This is a case where an analog input, which is the connector isn’t properly considered by the software itself.

So they would have to have injected a, a de a a fault into the system that says I’ve lost this connection, and the signal’s going through this connection in order to do the validation of their software and their response. This is the kind of thing that only comes up with experience and with some time of, hardware in the loop and testing that really replicates real world conditions.

So it’s a very difficult kind of thing to detect in advance and Good for them for identifying this and working on the working on the fix. How many vehicle, sorry.

Anthony: You were really excited. Analog versus digital. Analog versus digital. How many vehicles? It was

Michael: 80

Anthony: 208,281. The 2020 2 23 Mercedes-Benz EQ S four 50 colored blue.

Now it doesn’t matter your paint color, get this fixed. Have some engineer with a pocket protector, dweeb glasses. Just plug in the connector and that solves it. Now am I anti geek? Last one. Ford, I think we did touch on this one briefly last week, but this is an update. This is for over 125,000, 2020 to 2023 Ford Escapes, Ford Mavericks, and 2021 to 23 Lincoln Corsair vehicles.

This is effective vehicles at a two and a half liter hybrid electric or plug-in electric vehicles. And basically what are they saying here? Their, the Ford advises customers to safely park and shut off the engine as quickly as possible. If they hear unexpected engine noises lose power or see or smell smoke.

This is just another cartoon recall does the Carl.

Michael: This is actually, I wanted to point this one out because it’s a new warning from Nisu. We see a lot of park outside and occasionally do not drive warnings from NHTSA, but this is one I wish they’d had a few years back when we were looking and they’re, the problem’s still ongoing.

But when we were looking into the Hyundai Kia fires, because this is exactly the type of scenario that we were seeing there. People were, their vehicles were catching fire while they were driving. In many cases they didn’t even know and were alerted by other drivers to the fact their car is on fire.

But it was a similar situation where you need to pull over quick. And particularly if you have, occupants in the vehicle everybody’s gotta be out, be able to get out of their car in time, because once, in this case I believe there’s fuel vapor involved that’s a pretty quick fire.

And that creates a need to egress from the vehicle as fast as you can.

Anthony: Do we know what the cause of this is?

Michael: Oh, I think it was, there was an engine failure and there’s the possibility that when the engine fails, it’s going to release either oil or fuel vapor into areas that of the engine or the under the hood where there are ignition sources, so causing a fire.

Anthony: Okay. That’s one vote for removing everything from underneath the hood. If it’s not there, it can’t catch on fire.

Michael: Make it a frog. Yeah.

Fred: Maybe that’s why they need such big hoods on these cars or these pickup trucks. I don’t know. There’s gotta be a reason for that. Yeah.

Anthony: These are, oh, these are the kind of Yeah, the Ford Maverick Atlantic.

They’re smaller. Truck. The Ford Escape is like their minis u V, right? And I have no idea what a Lincoln Corsair is, but if it’s a Lincoln, I think

Michael: these are probably all the Mercury for, it’s not even a Mercury The Maverick. I don’t know what a maverick is. I guess that’s a I

Anthony: think it’s a small truck or it’s a

Michael: a, I’d replace the Ranger, the ranger size truck.

I don’t know. That’s what it looks like.

Anthony: If you have these vehicles, get it fixed. Get it fixed. The fix is what? Free. Why? Cause it’s a recall. Who recalled it? The government. Who? The government. How dare they make me get things that are dangerous, fixed for free.

Michael: I know. They won’t make you unfortunately, right?

Anthony: But you should cause it’s free and you are like, ah, shaking your fist at the government. Ah, but hey, look at this, you get something for free. It’s not free. It’s wasting my afternoon where I could be sitting around drinking beer and staring at my feet. I don’t know if people do that.

Fred: It also may save your life.

Michael: In Germany, they take your license plates away. If you don’t get a recall, just keep that in mind. Folks. Wait, in

Anthony: Germany, they take your license plates away. If you don’t get a recall.

Michael: Yes. Oh, you have to get your recalls performed. Or they send someone to your house and bye-bye. Your ability to drive.

Anthony: Oh, I love it.

I love it. One vote.

Michael: Can you imagine putting that system into play in America? You know the guys who repo cars, just the, people shooting at people in driveways all the time these days, right? Just for nothing. And can you imagine someone from the recall police force coming to take your tags off your vehicle?

Oh, we would probably have more people dying from that practice than we would in the vehicles. Who knows?

Fred: Hey, let’s I would like to solicit our reader’s help. We’ve tried to coin two phrases here in this episode. One is Anthony’s phrase, anti geek I, which I think is, has a lot of legs on it.

The other was my phrase Now total bull shift. Yeah. So I, the readers could just send a note and let us know which of those you prefer or your own suggestion of a coin phrase. Be glad to hear from

Anthony: you. Hey, I think you just saved me a lot of brain power, cause that’s gonna be the name of this ex episode.

Total Bullshift or Anti Geek-ite. Wonderful. Thanks. Kyle from Cruise, let us know what you vote for. Hey, listeners, thanks for listening. Again, thank you for donating. If you didn’t donate, shame. You can keep listening for free. That’s hilarious. I sang that and now Zoom asked me, are you playing music?

No, that was not musical at all. So thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with more recalls, more ta of Fred, more dumb things that Tesla did. How do I know? Do I know the future? No, I know Tesla. Thanks listeners. Bye.

VO: Thanks

Fred: here.

Bye-bye.