Volcano of Innovation

Introduction and Greetings

Anthony: You are listening to There Auto Be A Law. The Center for Auto Safety Podcast with executive director Michael Brooks, chief engineer Fred Perkins, and hosted by me Anthony Cimino. For over 50 years, the Center for Auto Safety has worked to make cars. Safer.

Hello and welcome to another episode of their automobile law. Today is Wednesday, June 18th. Hey guys. Hello World.

Fisker Ocean Sightings and Tesla Robotaxis

Anthony: So I got two updates. One update. I noticed The third Fisker Ocean in my neighborhood. Wow. What is going on? Why there must have been a dealer around here who like was handing them out afterwards?

I don’t get it.

Fred: I think there’s a real estate dealer who is trying to sell ocean front property and that would qualify a lot of the apartments in your building.

Anthony: Oh boy. The other thing, Hey, how you guys, everyone’s loving the te tesla [00:01:00] Robax, right? Because that came out. No, it’s just like full self-driving.

It’s been delayed.

Government Exemptions for Automated Vehicles

Anthony: Okay let’s go to Mr. Sean P. Duffy. The P stands for progress. The, he’s, they decided to streamline the exemption process for non-compliant automated vehicles. And I think to work in government, you have to come up with the most technical jargon that kind of confuses the brain to title anything I’m gonna quote from this.

The exemption will continue to allow manufacturers to sell up to 2,500 motor vehicles per year that do not fully comply with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. So this is saying, Hey, you guys can sell 2,500 of these vehicles a year that don’t have steering wheels and brake pedals, and things like that.

Michael: Yeah, who are they selling them to? Nobody’s buying these things yet, right? They’re they’re just deploying them on the streets. This

Anthony: is [00:02:00] my question. So if Waymo or, brand X comes out with a vehicle that doesn’t have these things and they manufacture them, are they selling them to themselves or can they just give themselves 10,000 of these a year?

Michael: How does that help?

Safety Concerns and Exemption Process

Michael: It appears that they’re working under the, the assumption that operating 2,500 vehicles as a four hire taxi type service is the same thing as selling them to the public. I that’s the going interpretation. But, there is some, there’s probably a little wiggle room in the law that could be used negatively or positively by these companies.

Anthony: But again, nobody’s manufacturing these right now. They’re manufacturing them. They’re just

Michael: not selling to the public right now.

Fred: Now you gotta remember our friends at Tesla who are good to use this as a backdoor to say once they get their FSD in use as robotaxis, they could say, now we’ve, we’ve got this exemption since these are all Rob [00:03:00] taxis, we don’t need to abide by all these nettlesome F-M-D-S-S.

So there could be a backdoor strategy by our friend, Mr. Musk, here to try to get away from having the regulations that everybody else needs to adhere to.

Anthony: So what do you think happens? Like you take your Tesla in for service and then you get it back and there’s no steering wheel and break pedals.

Fred: I like that it’s just an exemption, right?

So it doesn’t have to be steering wheels and brake pedals. It could be exemptions for other things. It could be exemptions for airbags in the driver’s seat. Could be exemptions for, pesky things like seat belts. There’s no specification in this announcement as to what kind of exemptions they’ll be talking about.

Michael: That’s part of the problem, I think, is that there’s not a lot of specification in this announcement. They’re essentially saying, Hey, we’re going to make this process more flexible. And this is the, it’s the part five five temporary exemption process that Nitsa uses. [00:04:00] There have been a number of companies that tried to avail themselves of this process over the years.

General Motors and Waymo, Google alphabet, whatever we wanna call them, attempted to do this and the process. Ford, I believe did as well the process. Took so long because frankly, at the time, NITSA did not have an Office of Automation safety. They did not have the technical expertise in place to evaluate these applications after what Doge did to Nitsa.

We’re still not sure if the office of automation safety is up to the task, but. This is Nitsa and Secretary Duffy, essentially promising the industry that they’re going to fix the Part five five temporary exemption process and make it work in a matter of, maybe weeks, months, not years. And the way they’ve outlined it is very nonspecific.

It’s impossible to say what it’s going to look like, but it looks like they’re looking at putting in some kind of continuous guidance. Or continuous [00:05:00] monitoring of these companies as they deploy. And it’s, it but again, the details just aren’t clear. They, there’s a lot of rhetoric used in this announcement, but it’s very light on details.

But one positive out of it is that it looks like they’re actually using. The Part five five Temporary Exemption process, which does require manufacturers to make a showing that, their noncompliant vehicles are just as safe as vehicles that comply with the Federal Motor Vehicle safety standards.

That’s a good thing. And they’re not relying on something that we pointed out. I. In the past, which they suggested they would, which is the 49 USC 31, 31 1 4, a special exemptions process that is essentially a decision made by the Secretary of Transportation that has no safety showing required that would put fleets of these vehicles out on the road.

So I, that’s it’s not a. Completely bad thing that NS is doing that, but again, it’s going to be necessary to wait for [00:06:00] the details, which appear like they’re coming out soon in the form of instructions that manufacturers need to follow to avail themselves of the new process.

Anthony: How does that work?

How do you prove that you’re just as safe and tasty as the real thing?

Michael: I think that is the number one issue here, and it’s something that we’ve probably discussed ad nausea on the podcast and it’s something that all these companies are struggling to do. How do you make a showing of safety? It’s something that I think Fred might get into and his gaslight today.

I. Involving, Waymo has been doing a lot of work in the area of trying to show that its vehicles are actually as safe as a human driver. And doing that requires some very detailed statistical and data analysis of, crash rates in the United States and other things.

It’s. How do you, how you do that is exactly why I think it’s so hard to for us and for everyone really to make a determination [00:07:00] at this point with so few miles driven by autonomous vehicles of whether they actually are as safe as a normal good driver, or whether they’re safe as, a normal, bad driver.

There’s a lot that goes into making that determination and. Exactly how Nitsa does that is going to be critical to whether or not the vehicles that are ultimately exempted perform safely on the road.

Fred: There’s really three dimensions to it in my mind. How do you establish safety of avs?

First is magic. Second is crafty rhetoric, and the third is compliant regulators.

Fred’s Poem and Fundraising

Fred: So I actually have a topical poem here, right along these lines. So only 18 lines. Bear with me. When the LA child was the big boss, she looked for some rules she could toss. ’cause the avs, it seemed, with their lies in their schemes, meant their magic was safest from loss.

A report that she never had read and the number had put in her [00:08:00] head said the future would be great. And she just had to wait for AI to put safety to bed. But now we know it’s all a scam. Published bullshit is just what it am. AVS now run amuck while the public is stuck. Dodging dangerous Battery Rams Pulitzer Committee take note.

Anthony: Yeah, if you that’s pretty good, Fred. I

Fred: expected worse.

Anthony: Ah, I thought that was amazing. I think you’ve made the wrong career choice in life and oh, I’ve often done that. Yeah. It’s not too late to change, but Hey, listeners, how,

Fred: look, how would I look in one of those funny hats to Pope Wears?

Anthony: Excellent. Okay. Listeners, if you enjoyed the poetry of Fred Perkins, go to auto safety.org and click on Donate. Show us how much you appreciate it. If you donate $50, we know that you’ll love it. If you only date 25, you’re like, it was all right. If you donate $3,000, we’ll send Fred to your house and he’ll sit on your lap.

Some restrictions may apply.

Michael: Yeah. How much does it cost to get Fred to produce a poem [00:09:00] every week?

Anthony: We can’t afford that. Yeah. Okay. I don’t know. Gimme something to do. Don’t sell yourself short. Come on. We’re doing a bidding war. Okay.

Waymo’s Safety Guidelines

Anthony: So since we’ve already opened the can of worms Fred, do you want to go into your gas light and talk about Waymo, which, as the record will show.

It’s been one of my peral favorites, but hey, if you want to take it from me, I will hand you Waymo this week.

Fred: Thank you. First, I know some of these people, they’re nice people. It’s hard to understand how this was put out, but it was offered by a committee, so maybe there was some undue management influence anyway Waymo recently published an article called Determining Absence of Unreasonable Risk Approval Guidelines for an Automated Driving System Deployment.

So it’s all about how they do it, how they make their own decisions. And it is as [00:10:00] part of their transparency project, it’s a clear fail because this is really hard to understand what’s in here. And I also point out that all the information is qualitative. There’s no numbers involved in this, everybody’s welcome to read it. We’ll have a link for you. The paper provides an overview of how the determination of absence of unreasonable risk can be operationalized. That’s a quote another quote. The imple implementation of the presented criteria requires the existence of appropriate safety management practices in addition to many other cultural, procedural, and operational considerations.

Now, they don’t say what those other considerations are. And they don’t say what an appropriate safety management practices might be. So there, there’s a lot of opacity in here. Another quote, we further argue that contra posing these two types of measures, both aggregate and event level types of indicators.

IE at [00:11:00] the aggregate and at the event level. In light of the longstanding philosophical debate across utilitarian and deontological perspectives, as a mischaracterization of stakeholders positions, that has naturally resolved through a more holistic approach to safety. For more. Simply, the combination of both perspectives is essential to a holistic approach to safety, which thus needs to be based on multiple complimentary methods and metrics and supporting processes.

What the hell does that mean,

Anthony: Michael? That means no, I can answer that. What that means, and it’s very clear, is that someone needs to justify the cost of their undergraduate tuition. That’s really what that came down to.

Michael: Michael, your

Fred: philosophy major.

Michael: I. Yeah, I’m not even gonna make a guess at that.

But essentially it sounds like they’re saying we need multiple perspectives on safety and we need to consider a broad number of criteria rather than singular criteria. But, for us, the, ultimately, I guess it would come down to [00:12:00] crash data and seeing, how often Waymo’s cause safety issues.

I think it’s pretty simple. And you don’t need all these other words and wishy-washy phrases to to figure that out.

Fred: I think they’re after something else here actually. Okay. I looked up the source of all wisdom of Wikipedia, what it says about deontology, and it says, deontology is an ethical theory that focuses on the morality of actions based on rules and duties.

Rather than the consequences of those actions, it emphasizes that certain actions are inherently right or wrong, regardless of their outcomes. What I think this means in this context is that they figure they get a, get out of jail, a free card if they just think that they’re doing the right thing, right?

Because they picked the word, I didn’t pick the word deontology, which separates the actions from the consequences. In any event, I wouldn’t call it holistic and [00:13:00] transparent, that’s just me. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, they could start by using simpler words that a bumpkin like me could understand. It would be helpful if they wanna be transparent,

Fred: it would be really helpful.

Anthony: I think transparency is not really their goal, do you think? I think so. I think it’s more of just, Hey, C-Suite at Alphabet keep paying for this shit.

Fred: They go on to say it is understood that the set of criteria may not be set in stone and any substantial methodological changes and or the addition of novel evaluation.

Approaches may alter the set of criteria being considered. So I just counted up the number of considerations they’ve got in here and lemme make sure I still got it up. And assuming that each of the considerations takes one second to assemble into a database and and process appropriately and the number of combinations they’ve got, I.

I just assume they’ve got something like 1200 different considerations because they talk about [00:14:00] the ODD and driving around and maps and all sorts of things. So 1200 considerations and if they only look at five at a time, right? One second Per consideration, I came up with an estimate of 651,624 years.

Do one iteration of the simulation. So if they do it for let’s say that five variables isn’t enough. Let’s say they do it for 10. Now we’re up to 52 quintillion, 73 trillion for, so anyway. Practical. They basically demonstrate the practical impossibility of doing a thorough analysis. A lot of the considerations that they’ve articulated in this paper, I, they don’t highlight that fact though, that, I.

Let’s assume that you’ve got a really fast computer and it only takes one 10th of a second. Alright, [00:15:00] now you’re down to 65,000 years. That’s much better,

Anthony: bro. You don’t get it. It’s just what we do is we hand the data to ai, and AI is Hey. This is what it is.

Fred: That’s a good point. I’m, yeah.

Clearly not appreciating the power of ai. They also don’t say who is actually making these decisions. They talk about ai, holistic stuff and crap and safety case evaluation. They don’t talk about who’s to making that evaluation, nor do they ever mention any participation from the public or regulators.

And how those decisions are being evaluated. We hear a lot about safety case analysis, which is good. We don’t hear very much about who is evaluating the safety cases. And it’s great to have a safety case that says, show us that this is gonna be safe. But if the only people who are evaluating that are people with a vested interest in the commercial aspects of it you gotta question exactly how useful it is.

Anyhow. I could [00:16:00] go on more, but I won’t we won’t let the time won. Let, so that’s Waymo, once again gets my nomination for Gaslight of the Week.

Anthony: That’s pretty good. I think you miss, you didn’t give enough emphasis to the fact that they’ll like we could be wrong and anytime we’ll change these criteria.

Which you just, yeah,

Michael: It seems like that user agreement or that pops up on your phone, the new one every week, every time there’s a change on their end, they modify their contract with you and you don’t have any choice in the matter. Nope, I swipe away.

Anthony: I’ve never touched Agree. Just, yeah, I don’t touch

Michael: them, but apparently I’ve agreed to them anyway,

Anthony: no. I don’t know. I’m gonna, Samsung’s

Michael: pretty sneaky.

Fred: Yeah. And it’s presumably, inconsequential because I have the right intentions, so the consequences are outta my control.

Michael: But I

Fred: can modify

Michael: my intentions any moment.

Anthony: And you don’t

Fred: have any control over

Michael: that?

Anthony: Oh my God, whatever happened at 23 and me

Fred: I think maybe there, were hoping nobody would read the paper, but sadly I did.

Anthony: Before we get to yours, Michael, ’cause I wanna piggyback on yours. I’m gonna do my Gaslight of the Week and my Gaslight of the Week. Peral [00:17:00] favorite Kathy Wood Arc Investments. That’s right. They have a headline to, in their newsletter, Tesla Prepares for its Robax rollout in Austin during the next week or so.

I love that. So even they’re hedging. Yeah. So this is great. A quoting from them. Our research suggests that Tesla’s Robo Taxii platform could account for roughly nine. Lemme stop you there. Let me finish our research. Research. What is that? I’m gonna get to their research. Their research is great. So our research suggests that Tesla’s Robo Taxii platform could account for an estimated 90% of its enterprise value in 2029.

Their research, when you look at it, is a blog post that they posted a year ago where they just take quotes from Elon Musk’s Twitter feed. It gets even better. One of their notes is at scale, in quotes, assumes 100 cars per remote operator. So I don’t know where they pull that nonsense from, but they’re [00:18:00] assuming that the Robo Taxii fleet.

We’ll have it when it’s at scale. Don’t know what that means that there’ll be one remote operator monitoring 100 cars at the same time. Bullshit. No. And,

Fred: Let me, if I may, let me add another dimension to the bullshit. So they assume that every mile accumulated under any version of software.

For a particular brand of vehicle, regardless of its physical manifestation, is included in the database that establishes the safety, and that is simply not the case. It takes a very sophisticated analysis to accumulate data from different systems and different software and different vehicles in a consolidated database to use as a justification for safety.

You can’t say that ants and grasshoppers go together just because they both happen [00:19:00] to be arthropods. Hey, listen, ASOP.

Anthony: Okay.

Fred: Alright. Too much for me?

Anthony: No first of all, there was no mention of safety. I don’t know where you implied that. They gave a shit about safety. That’s not a thing. Okay.

Michael: Safety is the security you get knowing your Tesla stocks going up every day.

Anthony: Oh my God.

Tesla vs. Waymo: Data and Safety

Anthony: Okay, so this is just gonna lead us directly into Michael’s Gaslight which is we have a link to this article in Electric about Bloomberg. And Bloomberg is the third. Reporting is generally top notch.

Yeah. It is the best short, billionaire funded news agency that I’m aware of. So take it away. And this is

Michael: technically, this is, Bloomberg Intelligence, which is a. Oh, I guess it’s separated in the company somehow, but they, based on this they should be calling mis intelligence.

Anthony: So tell us ‘

Michael: cause it’s, they wrote a piece and also there’s a TV segment where the Steve Mann, who is the reporter and the [00:20:00] guy who’s getting my gaslight appeared. And we’ll post that to our website so that y’all can watch that part. But essentially. The report frames the driverless car discussion and looks at Tesla and Waymo, and claims that Tesla, in many ways is far ahead of Waymo’s.

But the problem is the report is using there’s a number of problems. First of all, the report is. Conflating the Tesla data. That is basically all the Tesla data that has been gathered so far is collected on level two A-D-S-A-D-A-S Systems that are, have nothing to do with autonomy.

These are systems that require the drivers attention at all times. The drivers are constantly having make micro corrections or interventions to avoid having the Tesla on full self-driving or autopilot make critical safety errors. And it’s, there’s a driver in the car all the time doing this as opposed to the miles that Waymo is driving, [00:21:00] which although there, there may be a safety driver, the Waymo has also has been operating without a safety driver for many millions of miles now, and has actual data on that.

Tesla has, the only non the only miles that Tesla has accumulated autonomously might be the few miles they’ve been driving around in Austin. And even there they, they’ve got a safety driver it appears in the vehicle. I think they’re they recently posted a picture of one of their robo taxis and they conveniently left out the passenger seat where apparently there is a, an employee with a kill switch.

And probably a number of other ways to contact headquarters when something goes wrong. There’s a question as to whether Tesla has collected even one mile of the type of data that Waymo’s collecting. Also the article and continues to conflate, it uses the Tesla reported data, which is collected from vehicles that are on mostly and supposedly supposed to be only on [00:22:00] highways or interstates.

And compares those safety rates with the data that Waymo is collecting, which is primarily city arterial road, the more dangerous driving statistically where cra more crashes happen and more deadly crashes happen at a higher rate than on interstates. You can’t compare the two. Also Tesla data is you have to be very skeptical of Tesla data because they only count crashes as crashes if an airbag or a seatbelt pretension deployed, there’ve been studies that show that’s only about 18% of crashes.

So Tesla is purposefully excluding 82% of all potential crashes in its fleet and claiming that it’s safe. And then those are just the beginning of the problems with this report. It honestly did not appear to be a very journalistic exercise or certainly not an exercise in in, in truth seeking it.

It really seemed like Tesla propaganda. I think even Elon took the study and retweeted it. It was so [00:23:00] favorable to Tesla and it’s just so wrong. So for that reason, it’s going to be my Gaslight of the week. Take it away.

Anthony: Yeah. I I’m just gonna, I’m gonna spoil a surprise. Michael wins this week.

He, to me, he, sorry because this one was too good. I watched the video that we’re gonna link to, and Steve Mann, the Bloomberg reporter he’s basically focused on the cost of Tesla versus Waymo. And he’s yeah, basically, Hey, if the Tesla’s seven times cheaper to make, then it’s better.

Michael: Yeah. And it’s scalable.

It’s easier to scale just camera systems that ultimately will probably kill a lot more people. So it’s right. It’s a, it, there was no safety, on display in the report or in Steve Mann’s mind,

Anthony: it gets even better ’cause this is a direct quote from Steve Mann saying we are not at that moment where cars are driving themselves.

What the fuck was your article about you asshole? What are you talking about? And so what he further says is, what’s really important is the training data. Tesla has tons of [00:24:00] it from around the world. Does it level two vehicles with the driver? But does Tesla have this data and is it usable because from what leaked out and what we’ve been able to see.

The use the data they have is not useful. That’s why they’ve asked for roads to be repainted so their cameras can see divider lines. That’s why they have people hand mapping routes on roads. So Elon’s commute is better. You can have all the data in the world, but if you can’t do anything with it, it’s just chat, GPT.

It’s just smoke and mirrors that

Michael: data. That data is only from vehicles using a video camera only. System. So it, it’s not LIDAR data. It’s not infrared camera data. It’s not, other levels of radar and other type of sensor data. It’s just all data from this camera system that we know is not going to work in bad light conditions.

It’s just,

Fred: Hey, now wait a minute. In touchless defense, they’re the only company that’s used their [00:25:00] autonomous technology to run into fire trucks all around the world.

Anthony: That’s an excellent point. You’re right. Waymo and Cruz, they only did it in San Francisco. That’s right. Yeah. That’s pretty lame.

Pretty lame. Okay,

Michael: so we’ll continue the Tesla Robax watch whenever it occurs. Yeah, who knows. But Steve

Anthony: man at Bloomberg, like I. Yeah. Are you trying to work for Kathy Wood? What the hell is going on? Yeah, Bloomberg

Michael: General. Yeah. I think he should go ahead and start submitting his resume to, to, to some investment firm that wants a bullshit synopsis of a safety problem.

Anthony: Yeah, that was ridiculous. Yeah. But let’s get into something not ridiculous.

Mitsubishi’s EV Battery Swap Network

Anthony: This is something we’ve talked about before with the EVs, and this is another article from Electric titled Mitsubishi Debuts EV Battery Swap Network for cars and Trucks in Tokyo. So we’ve talked about people having range anxiety.

Oh, it takes too long for me to charge my car. I have to wait 30 minutes. And I, with my eyes truck while I’m towing my boat.

Michael: Hey that’s my, I talked about it [00:26:00] last week. That’s my number one issue. And why I think that, for me electric vehicles wouldn’t work or be convenient enough because I’m.

It’s the time that it takes to charge when I’m on a road trip.

Anthony: Come on, you pull into the gas station, you’re not just getting gas, you’re going inside, you’re getting your coke and beef jerky and your beef jerky and everything that keeps the American healthcare system running.

Fred: That’s, they got those hotdog rollers in there and I don’t see

Anthony: them anywhere else.

That’s a good point. So anyway, this Mitsubishi program is talking about swapping the battery. So you go into a place a hundred seconds later, boom, you got a new battery. That would be

Michael: perfect. This is pretty cool. That would solve my problem.

Anthony: That would totally solve your problem. And Mitsubishi’s really doing this, and it seems like it’s really good for their trucks at least.

And one of the comments in the article points out saying, Hey, this is stupid. This doesn’t make sense. But somebody points out in Japan they have space limited. Like they don’t have space for all these EV charger things everywhere. Their grid can’t handle it given the. Their current state of their [00:27:00] grid.

So it makes sense. I’m curious to see how this plays out over the next year or so.

Michael: I think it makes sense for another reason and a reason related to safety that we talk to a lot because. It ultimately, no matter how good batteries get and if they can, increase the energy density, the batteries, and reduce the weight required to reach a certain range, there remains the question of whether manufacturers are going to use that technological advancement to reduce the weight of the vehicles.

Are they simply going to. Make very high range vehicles that can go, up to a thousand miles or more on one charge. The battery swapping allows vehicles to, use smaller batteries that, that, that won’t take you at far. But the ease of swapping them out means that you can put a much smaller, lighter battery in a vehicle.

Battery Swapping: Convenience and Safety

Michael: That goes, a couple of hundred miles versus a thousand, and then you can just instantly swap it out [00:28:00] and that makes things both convenient and safe.

Anthony: Listeners, would you buy a car that allows you to swap the battery in and out? Let us know. At contacted auto safety.org. I’d swap a battery.

Why not? Yeah. Fred, would you swap a battery?

Fred: I will be interested in seeing how this works out because it seems to. A multi ton battery that can easily be swapped out in 10 or 15 seconds. Would be susceptible to separating from the vehicle if it ever gets in a crash. ’cause that’s a pretty big bump. Surely they’ve thought this through, but it is gonna be interesting to see how that plays out.

The other thing is it for this to be commercially successful, in my opinion. They would have to get the entire industry to standardize on battery size and weight and all those good things. Think of it, if you go out to buy a battery for, you’re a flashlight, you can get aaa, you can get a double A, you can get a C or a D, right?

There’s all these different [00:29:00] battery sizes, but everybody agrees on what those sizes are. So everybody who is in battery business makes that. Particular size of battery coin, batteries, whatever, but Right. They’re all interchangeable based on the size. It took a lot of work, took a lot of time to get that done.

So how is a car industry gonna do that when they won’t even exchange data that’s related to the safety of their,

Michael: yeah.

Fred: Of their offerings. Maybe a bridge too far, but good for them for trying. It’s got all the virtues, potential virtues that Michael talked about.

Anthony: Yeah. If’s Mitsubishi, if it’s just their vehicles, their things, maybe it’ll work.

We’ll listeners, we’ll keep you updated on how this goes.

DIY Activism: The Makeshift Crosswalk

Anthony: Hey, you ever, you guys ever get really frustrated at the government and I’m gonna take things into my own hands. You ever do that? You ever? Not me. No. Not you. I know. We know about you. You’re felon. And so there’s a man in Charlottesville, Virginia quoting from the 29 news.com website.

After pleading with the [00:30:00] city for a crosswalk here to no avail in his local neighborhood Cox decided to take measures into his own hands. Last Saturday, he made his own makeshift crosswalk in that area, cheered on by a small group of supporters. I walked across the street with a line marker with a can of spray chalk, not paint.

And so he was arrested for doing this dangerous intersection. I guess he’s been talking about it and complaining about it for years. I. No one would do anything. So he is screw this. I got some spray chalk. Never heard of spray chalk before, but I love it. Went ahead and did this, and then the police arrested him and the saying that he used spray paint and he destroyed things, whereas they could have just taken a hose and washed it away and been like, you old crank you.

Fascinating.

Michael: I mean there’s certainly white marking chalk and things like that are used spray chalks. That should come off. Maybe they didn’t come off that easy, this is one of those issues where. Your activism, even though everything is right, apparently someone was killed on this section of road [00:31:00] and the neighborhood has been pleading for a crosswalk in this area, and Charlottesville hasn’t been acting on that.

When you take it into your own hands, it can result in some bad things, although I’m hoping that. His trial date’s coming up on July 14th. I’m hoping they’ll be lenient on Mr. Cox because, his heart was in the right place and, he probably knew he was taking a risk of getting into some trouble like this, but, we’ll, I’m interested to follow this story and see if they have, first of all to see if his activism actually results in a crosswalk being placed there, because I think it might, after all this mess.

Anthony: I love it. It reminds me of, I think it was in DC in the early two thousands where some neighbors, they were upset about people speeding through their residential part of town. They installed their own curb and planting and whatnot to shut off the road. And I was like, there you go. I like this.

Fred: I think that, he could probably plead a deontological defense, right?

Yeah, [00:32:00] this really intended well and he is not responsible for the consequences. Your Honor let’s go back to the Greeks. Yeah. It’s holistic vandalism. There you go.

Anthony: Yeah. Listeners at home, if you’re playing the home game, you are deontological. That’s right. It’s time to drink. Just not while driving.

Okay. There we go.

Smart Tires: The Future of Road Safety

Anthony: Let’s move on to something fun and technical. That’s right. Smart tires. From friend of the show, Jonathan m gl, Gil, God Gitlin. Why can’t Gitlin come on. I know. It’s embarrassing. It’s in an article in R is Technica Smart Tires will report on the Health of Roads and new pilot program.

The idea was to develop a better tire pressure monitoring system. One that could tell the car exactly what kind of tire, summer, winter, all season and so on was fitted in even its state of wear, allowing the car to adapt its settings appropriately. But other applications suggested themselves.

Potentially a cyber tire could warn other road users about aquaplaning. Then again, we’ve been waiting more than a decade for vehicle to vehicle communication to make a difference in daily driving to no [00:33:00] avail. So I love this smart tire idea, even just on a local vehicle where your car’s Hey man I’m out.

I’m done. You gotta replace me. But then I also think, is it like my HP printer where it’s like you can only use my printer to ink toner, printer parts, paper, something.

Michael: It’s interesting a lot of ways as far as, alerting from a couple of perspectives, alerting local authorities to bad road conditions, to potholes, to all sorts of things that the tires interact with when they’re on the road.

The aqua planning thing is really interesting to me because that’s something, frankly, I think they should take this tire and test it in Alabama. Having driven across Alabama in the past week, I can assure you the roads here are a great place for a tire that reports on roadway to be used and aquaplaning, which I experienced briefly on the Gulf Shores Parkway a couple of days ago.

It’s. It’s great. It just really ultimately as you’ve alluded [00:34:00] to what matters here is how, what’s done with this technology, is it actually going to be used to inform state authorities to inform other drivers? Are we going to have a vehicle to vehicle reporting system that allows the driver ahead of me to report, hey.

I aquaplaned a little, and I think we call it hydroplaning at least since I’ve been young. That’s what I referred to it as. That would be awesome if you could get those reports going back to drivers behind you, because I frequently see people in rainy conditions who are driving far too fast for the condition and putting themselves and other drivers at risk.

Anthony: And remember, if you start hydroplaning, what you do is you slam on the accelerator pedal as hard as you can, right? No, you do. No. A, you need to slow down. You slam on the brake pedal.

Michael: Yeah. If you’re on a road that you’re not familiar with and you don’t know how well it’s drained, or if you’re in extremely heavy rain where a lot of roads aren’t built to.

Combat that you need to stay pretty slow. I would, there [00:35:00] seems to be somewhere between 45 and 50 for me is where my current vehicle, I think it all matters how much your vehicle weighs, what kind of tires you have. There’s a lot of factors in it. For me, in my experience in 45, that area and highers where you start to see some significant hydroplaning and that is not something to be messed around with.

Anthony: Indeed. Alright, Mr. Perkins. Has everybody at home have you missed the sound of Mr. Fred Perkins? Are you ready for our rant? Alright, everybody, before we get into this, I want you to stretch, okay? We’ve been working on this a lot. Okay? So extend your arms above your head. Fred’s actually doing this now.

Oh my God. Let’s go to the Tao of Fred, the rant of rage.

Fred’s Rant: Government and AV Safety

Fred: I. No. A very few examples were democratic governments intentionally endanger their citizens. You’d think that people who’ve been endangered [00:36:00] by specific government actions would vote them out of office, but that doesn’t always happen. Best example I can think of is the existence of denature and alcohol.

Denature and alcohol was invented by the government to poison. Citizens who wanted to drink alcohol during prohibition, so they intentionally added poison to ethanol, to kill anybody who deigned to object to prohibition. Now, I think that avs are in much the same situation. They’re clearly a danger.

They’re clearly dangerous to pedestrians. To motorists, to bicyclists. It is a multi ton vehicle traveling at, I don’t know, highway speeds in certain cases, 40, 45 miles an hour. You don’t want to get in the way of that yet, the governments are allowing these [00:37:00] vehicles to operate on the roads, and in the case of the Teslas that are coming up, there’s no distinguishing characteristic.

If you look at Waymo. They’re funny looking. Okay, but you’re assuming that for defensive purposes, somebody’s going to be able to look at that funny looking car and say, oh, that’s an av. I need to be especially alert to avoid that. I think it’s just an incredible dereliction of duty for the government to allow these vehicles on the road with no warning to pedestrians or other motorists that there is.

Enough kinetic energy inches away from you to easily kill you. When industrial equipment is dangerous and it’s being used, there are physical barriers to keep you away from it, right? We’ve talked about this before. If there’s a construction site for a skyscraper, there’s a lot of weight overhead.

There’s, all kinds of things that can drop on you [00:38:00] and hurt you. There’s cement mixers there, all kinds of stuff going on. And the government requires the developer of the skyscraper to put up fences around it, to control access to it, to make sure the people who aren’t supposed to be there don’t get in the way of harm.

We’ve all seen this somehow by calling these dangerous vehicles, automobiles, the entire industry has gotten away from the idea that they need to protect people. From these dangerous vehicles, and the government is complicit in saying yeah, that’s okay, but they’re cars. Everybody knows cars, right?

We will just, we’ll just let ’em go ahead and run rampant on the road. We can’t let

Anthony: China beat us. Come on. What about China? No, they’re gonna beat us if we don’t do this. So some Americans die. It’s in the progress of saving lives.

Fred: There is that’s right. And in the future, everything will be better because AI is gonna take over.

I recognize that. But we don’t live in the future. We [00:39:00] live in the present, unfortunately. And if you are in San Francisco trying to cross the street, there’s no warning that a non F-M-V-S-S compliant vehicle is speeding by just inches away from you. Now Nitsa wants to make this approval easier and less transparent.

Less data going out to the public, less opportunity to review the approvals before they go out for the for the variance from the non, from the F-M-V-S-S compliance and why you’re putting people at a risk. You’re not giving them notice, you’re not giving them the opportunity. To defend themselves and you’re clearly not giving them the opportunity to defend themselves in court because these use of these vehicles will usually come with a a waiver and force you into forced arbitration.

And if you [00:40:00] are struck as a pedestrian and killed, which happens. You are gonna go to court and the companies are going to argue that it’s a, it’s product liability product is absolutely fine. We’re doing what we intended we’re, the government uses the deontological perspective and we’re, we have a get outta jail free card and screw you public.

I’m sorry you’re dead. Business has gotta go on. And in the meantime they say the safety is the number one priority when in fact, operating these vehicles and generating revenue. Is the company’s main priority, and the governments are allowing this hazard to occur because they figure I’ll make some money off of it somehow.

I guess I’m not involved in those processes, but I hate to use a word that the Orange Menace uses, but this is just a disgrace and it’s there’s no engineering basis or assuming that killing a number of people is going to have a beneficial result. There’s no use case for these vehicles that [00:41:00] cannot be accomplished by a living human being.

I I’m more or less speechless, so end of rant. I’ll leave it there.

Anthony: That’s that’s pretty good. I think you hit something that, yeah. The goal is to generate revenue, not to generate profits. ’cause hey, if you work for one of these companies. Can you just, we’re not asking for any secret sauce, like, how are you gonna make money?

I still don’t understand that. I still don’t understand how Waymo ever breaks, even. I don’t get it. But hey. I’m not as smart as Sunar. I don’t know how to pronounce the guy’s name, and I’ll butcher it and sound horrible.

Michael: Oh, in the meantime, we can just keep sacrificing people, throwing them into the volcano of innovation, right?

Anthony: Oh, the Volcano of Innovation. That’s a title for the show now. Oh, I like that. That’s good. That’s cool. Ugh, I gotta write that one down. All right.

Road Deaths and Policy Failures

Anthony: We’ve got before we’re gonna go into a plethora of recalls we’ve got an interesting op-ed in [00:42:00] Forbes. Is it Forbes? It is Forbes, yep. And it’s a good one to read and it’s talking about I’ll give you the title, road Death Surge and Black Families Suffer Most.

And it’s, I’m just gonna quote from a little part of it. Since 1899, car crashes have killed nearly 4 million Americans. That’s according to the US Department of Transportation and the National Safety Council. Think about that. That’s more than all US Wars combined, even when combined US deaths from all these wars, guns and COVID-19 Don’t reach 4 million.

Holy shit. Wait. Really? Yep. Cars are bad. Donate to the Center for Auto Safety, go to auto safety.org, click on donate, like I 4 million. Wow. That’s I had no idea. We talk about the roughly 40,000 people a year who get killed in car crashes. And I had no idea.

Fred: Oh, that’s everybody in Los Angeles.

That’s the entire Los Angeles [00:43:00] metropolitan area.

Anthony: It’s

Fred: 4 million. That’s

Anthony: it. Yeah. I figured Los Angeles was bigger. Either way. That’s that’s crazy. The continuing from this, the amount of money we spend on car crashes is mind-numbing. Traffic crashes cost the US economy 340 billion a year, or 1.6% of GDP according to Nisa in 2022.

This is let that just sink in listeners.

Michael: And then you look at that number and you look at, you break down the statistics. You’ll also find that, black Americans are, you are going to make up a disproportionate share of those number of deaths. Black Americans are more likely to be killed while driving 73% more likely and 118% more likely while walking.

And that’s accounting for the same distances, walked and driven. So it’s bad. And unfortunately, with some of the things that the current administration is doing deprioritizing things that require people to slow [00:44:00] down, the special lanes in cities that have the road diets that we’ve talked about before, that function very well to slow things down.

The, those are being defunded and a number, dozens and hundreds possibly of infrastructure projects are being defunded at the moment, or they’re finding their funding is not being provided by the federal government. And these are things that, you know. We’re big accomplishments under the previous administration to get some type of relief to these communities that are suffering from the traffic, particularly the pedestrian problem that we’ve seen grow so much in the last few years.

There’s just, it’s, we’re going backwards in many ways on safety for poor communities, and that’s a really bad thing. And one thing I really liked about the article, we, that was just one quote, traffic deaths are not accidents. They are policy failures. And I think that says a lot.

We talk a lot on this show about, I. Technological innovations [00:45:00] that could help us. Right now, we know that there’s the capability that exists to reduce vehicle speeds, limit vehicles to safe speeds. That’s a technological possibility and can be done relatively inexpensively.

And yet, this American desire for freedom to drive as fast as we want to is standing in the way of that and saving. Probably thousands of lives per year. A, a significant number of the lives lost every year, and a significant number of the injuries caused every year are due to speeding. We know that we have technology that can help.

It’s not perfect yet, probably, but it can help reduce impaired driving. And that’s also being resisted by the current administration after Nitsa started a rulemaking under in the previous administration. So even, we’re losing now, we’re going backwards. And, the longer it takes to get these technologies on the road, the more people are going to end up dying.

Anthony: You heard it here. [00:46:00] This is not a car crash. This is a failure of policy. But I think the current administration, they’re gonna get their act together and they’re gonna. Work on safety and making the world a better place, right? I admire

Fred: your

Anthony: optimism and I’m drunk.

Recall Roundup: Latest Vehicle Issues

Anthony: All right, let’s do recalls. Ah, first one, Rivian 27,882 vehicles.

The 2025 Rivian. R one SR one T. This is a one or both front turn signal lamps may not illuminate and flash and therefore may not fulfill the requirements of F-M-B-S-S 1 0 8 oh. So you go to turn on your turn signal and it doesn’t work. Oh, that’s not great. But you do get a message that says, turn signal, light’s not working.

Service it soon. That’s good. Turn signal, light’s not working. Service it soon. Soon. Iss a little too vague, get off the fucking road, get this fixed now should be the better message. But maybe it’s too wordy. I.

Michael: Yeah. And the [00:47:00] rivian owner’s a little sensitive to that kind of talk from their car.

Come on. It’s, this is apparently a supplier issue. At least they seem to be pointing at the supplier in their report. And it looks like owners are gonna be waiting about another month before they I, I think they’re gonna have to go in and get, it doesn’t look like it is a, something that can be fixed via software over the air.

So it looks like they’re gonna be going in to get this fixed in about a month. If you’re a Rivian owner, you can expect to get a notification sometime later in July.

Anthony: All right, up next, a rare entrant Harley Davidson. 82,117 vehicles, the 2018 to 2024. Harley Davidson, FFL, HCS, the 2022 FXRS. They’re, these are horrible names.

FFR, X-R-S-T-F-L-M-O-U-S-E. And this is a, the soft tail motorcycle using, utilizing a particular style of real shock adjuster [00:48:00] and what’s happening here.

Michael: The shock adjuster. I think the. Shock adjuster may fracture it fractures, and then it can pop your rear tire, which is obviously a terrible thing to happen.

Aw, if you’re on a motorcycle because one tire does not work and that’s an instant crash. If you lose a tire in a car, it’s a lot less life threatening, although it is dangerous than losing one out of two. Should be obvious. I don’t know why I need to point that out.

Anthony: Does it have a message on your screen saying Rear tire failed service soon.

Michael: I don’t know if, I don’t know if, I don’t think motorcycles have the tire pressure monitoring systems that vehicles do. So you wouldn’t even get that, although it probably wouldn’t be much help. A tire failure on a motorcycle is instantly recognizable, whereas on the car, there’s a potential that you might not immediately be aware if you’re not very tuned in with your vehicle’s performance.

But it looks like. Wow. It looks like this one’s gonna be scheduled. They’re already notifying owners [00:49:00] on this recall, so you should be hearing about this now. And it looks like you’re gonna be able to take your motorcycle into your dealer, almost immediately and get this fixed, which is a good thing ’cause it’s such a dangerous recall.

Anthony: Oh, that’s great. All right, up next, another rare entrant Kawasaki 17,792 vehicles, the 2025 Kawasaki Ninja. ZX six R and in 2024, Kawasaki ninja of the same flavor. What’s going on with these guys? Certain vehicles may lose engine power during operation due to a seizure of the number five metal crankshaft bushing.

Oh, that’s not good. And it says this is a compressed natural gas vehicle. That’s what I’m,

Michael: there’s a, this recall report was not completely filled out and it, so it’s difficult to see. What the issue here, nitsa has this listed as a do not drive. So folks who own the 20 25, 20 24 Kawasaki ninjas of this size.

Don’t get on them. My general advice to the public is [00:50:00] don’t get on any motorcycle, but in this case, certainly don’t get on these, but we’re not really certain what, because Kawasaki apparently didn’t go to part five seven three recall report school. They didn’t fill out their recall report.

We’re not sure when the dealer notification or the owners are gonna hear about this. Hopefully Nitsa will post a more complete report soon. But in the meantime, don’t ride your Kawasaki ninja.

Anthony: But wait, let’s focus on where it said fuel type compressed natural gas. Is this what’s going on with these things?

They don’t run off of gasoline.

Michael: I don’t know. I

Anthony: they chose the wrong, I’m

Michael: not too fluent on Kawasaki Ninja motorcycles, but I’m assuming they’ve got a compressed natural gas bike. They do.

Anthony: All right. I’m gonna move on. Next up Mercedes 92,851 vehicles, the 2025 Mercedes-Benz, GL C3 50 E four Matic.

Oh, and the 2023 through all these? Yeah. Same sort of thing. And [00:51:00] the yeah, it’s all these, oh, the a MG versions as well. Yeah, the,

Michael: essentially it’s, I think it’s a lot of different Mercedes that have been built in the last three or four years that have a particular panoramic sunroof. Yes.

So if you have a panoramic sunroof, you should probably be concerned what Mercedes has found. This is what I like about Mercedes, and this is where they are, get a gold star from the Center for Safety. They. They seem to continually test their vehicles even after they built them and put them out, and they, in here they found that the head injury criterion for rear seat occupants might exceed the limit in F-M-D-S-S 2 0 1 I.

For Unbelted documents. So they’ve been building these cars for three years or so, and then all of a sudden they find that this is a risk. They’ve never seen a crash involving this. They’ve never seen X, Y, and Z. And they say, oh we’re gonna go out and fix this on, 92,000 vehicles at our own expense and add a different rear roof lining [00:52:00] and whatever else they’ve decided.

To do to fix the problem. Another gold star for Mercedes.

Anthony: I’m gonna suggest the reason that they’re doing that is because the Euro end cap standard is so much tougher than the us Ah. But we’ll get to that in a future episode. Ah, up now. Last recall, Mitsubishi Motors 198,940 vehicles. That is a lot from Mitsubishi, the 2023 to 2025 Mitsubishi Outlander Fib.

The 2022 to 2024, just Mitsubishi Outlander. Due to improper software programming, the alliance and vehicle infotainment may freeze or display a black screen. If this occurs during a backing event, the rear view camera image could be lost, blah, blah, blah. Really? You had to hide this in there as the last one, didn’t you?

Yeah. Yeah. It’s okay. Yes. Son of a since

Michael: I knew it would get you, but Yes. And they’ve been looking into this problem since September of 20, no, may of 2023. They [00:53:00] knew that the, there was a software and a non-compliance here. And yet it doesn’t seem like they did anything about it for two years until now when they recall it.

So hopefully there hasn’t been anyone affected by this problem that have, that has resulted in a crash in the last couple of years. But owners emotionally,

Anthony: I’ve been affected and I’m crashing because of this. You do? Yeah. Your voice

Michael: When you started to realize it was a rear camera recall tells me you have been emotionally impacted by it.

Yeah. For you, it’s the sheer number of rear view camera recalls that you’ve had to announce on this podcast. But,

Fred: Anthony you’re a delicate flower. I’m not sure that you’re in the right business here. Yeah. Business, it looks like

Michael: also, it looks like they’ve reprogrammed them as of April.

So if you’ve bought a vehicle since April, that’s one of these, you wouldn’t be, you wouldn’t need the repair. So they’re gonna go back and repair all of these vehicles that they’d known have been screwed up for two years, starting around the middle to late. Part of this month, you should be getting a [00:54:00] notification and you should be able, it looks like you’ll be able to get a pretty quick software fix so you won’t have to worry about backing up.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Anthony: Alright, with that folks, that’s another episode. Gone, done, completed. I hope you’ve learned things such as your infotainment systems, probably piece of garbage and will fail on you. Tesla lies constantly, and there’s an obscene number of Fisker oceans in my neighborhood. Until next time, bye.

Michael: Thanks everybody. Bye bye. For more information, visit www.auto safety.org.