Zoox, Drunk Driving tech and those pesky door handles

Hey everybody. Welcome to Fred Sings. You missed it, but Fred was doing his best Bill Weathers impersonation. It was I, this,

Fred: this on demand. I could do it again.

Anthony: Yeah, he can, thankfully this is not a live show and no one can demand it. I it is Wednesday, October 8th. A lovely day. It’s it’s very cloudy and rainy where I live, but maybe where you live, it’s beautiful and sunny and everything’s great and Nitsa is gonna allow Zoox to do whatever the hell it wants where you live.

Oh, we all live there. That’s right.

Zoox Autonomous Vehicle Discussion

Anthony: Let’s start off with Zoox. You guys remember Zoox? It was that Amazon based autonomous [00:01:00] vehicle startup. That’s adorable looking car. It looks like something out of the Pixar studios. They are right now. They’re limiting, they’re running a limited test trial in Las Vegas around about a mile and a half loop.

And Nitsa gave them an exemption for this. ’cause the exemption is for research and development, and that’s fine. I guess you’re in slow, you’re in a very tight defined area. Not a lot of high speed travel. There still. I’d wanna get into one. Fred says no he’s also told me not to jump out of a plane and I’m gonna take his advice on that one.

But now Zoox is looking for a further exemption from Nitsa saying, Hey, let’s go everywhere on the roads. Let’s go ahead and do this. We don’t have. Pedals. Steering wheels a human driver. We’ve got the internet and a dream and NSA’s response is, yeah, we’re reviewing this. Is that about right?[00:02:00]

Michael: Yeah, that’s about right. I don’t, I show’s over UN unfortunately at the moment. I don’t think that Nitza is reviewing anything due to the shutdown. But this is a petition that Zoox submitted a couple weeks ago. We’ve had guests the last couple weeks, so we didn’t really get to it. But essentially what’s going on here?

We, we discussed zoo’s previous, exemption, which is essentially a exemption that comes from the Secretary of Transportation that says you can test these vehicles in, somewhat limited numbers but you can’t deploy them or, turn this into a robotaxis service commercially, it’s making money.

Concerns About Zoox’s Safety Standards

Michael: What Zoox is doing now is a petition to be allowed to do that. They are specifically petitioning nitsa for exemptions on a number of safety standards. Some of ’em, are clearly areas where the. Safety standards never contemplated computer driving. They, safety standards were [00:03:00] based on the idea that there’s gonna be a human behind the wheel.

And some of those standards pose significant barriers to companies that want to deploy technology that doesn’t have a driver. There’s really no way around that. Nitsa has been slow to update those regulations, to accommodate this type of vehicle. We think that some of that slowness is probably a good thing to prevent some some of the industry who might want to put vehicles out there that aren’t safe enough yet.

But there are, there are some problems with Zoox, petition. There are some areas that, I’m, I have concerns about, one of the bigger concerns I see when looking at the petition is, they’re gonna have people sitting sideways, facing the side of the vehicle and they have created kind of this new wraparound airbag system that, we don’t really have any informational, whether that’s system’s going to be appropriate, whether it’s going to, meet safety standards at the federal level and [00:04:00] whether it’s, gonna work to protect people in crashes in those vehicles.

But even beyond that, there are other areas like windshield wipers and windshield defrosting and window glazing and things where. It, it really doesn’t seem like they’re considering the role of the passenger, when entering or exiting the vehicle. We saw I think it was a cyclist get seriously injured.

When someone exiting a Waymo doored the cyclist I think that zoox doors are probably sliding doors so that the dooring part may not be a problem. But, you have to say, as a passenger, one of those vehicles, I’d like to be able to take a look out of a rear window or a side window to make sure there aren’t any cars or e-bikes or scooters or anything approaching the vehicle at a rapid pace before I exit.

You really have to wonder if. They should be exempted from some of those systems that provide v visibility to people who are entering and exiting the vehicle as well as visibility. I’m [00:05:00] not sure we haven’t completely reviewed this petition or whether it even discusses, the ability for passengers to, engage an emergency stop mechanism or to request a stop due to, a circumstance that the passenger might see going on outside the vehicle that the vehicle’s unable to see.

And in that case, I think it’s pretty clear that passengers need to be able to have an unobstructed view of their surroundings. And so we’re definitely concerned about a couple of parts of this petition and whether Zoox needs to go back to the drawing board on some of those systems and implement them into their vehicles to meet motor vehicle safety standards, rather than getting an exemption from them.

Definitely concerns.

Fred: Let me dive in here.

Fred’s Analysis of Zoox’s Petition

Fred: ’cause on request I have reviewed this and I wanna first point out that the expression zoox petition, excuse me, can be rearranged to state ISP tent, [00:06:00] which I think is a good analysis of this application. I don’t know how, but,

Anthony: okay, good.

Fred: Continue. I’ll tell you how.

So first of all, safety is undefined in the petition. It’s it’s really just a distracting pompom. They wave repeatedly in their av cheerleader petition. So I looked throughout their websites to see if I could actually find a definition of safety. Yes. And I could not. So they include some references in their petition, like one is building the redundancy into the zoox taxi.

That sounds pretty good. But then inside of that, they say we have drawn inspiration and best practices from other transportation sectors, including aviation, industrial applications, and automotive design. That’s good, but the first rule of industrial applications for hazardous machinery is to keep people away from them.

Using barriers and [00:07:00] lights and warnings to make sure that nobody gets in the range of lethal problems or hazards associated with that machinery. They’ve not done that with Zoox. Then another reference is titled, keeping Riders Safe at Every Part of the Journey. And then they aspirationally say, mission Control monitors our flights, our fleets at a high level functioning a bit like air traffic control at an airport.

They never talk about the worst case latency from this remote operation center. And also by stating that it’s very clear that this is not truly autonomous. It’s partially autonomous ’cause they’ve all got human control, but they never talk about how many Zoox vehicles an individual controller is responsible for.

So another big gap. Those are the references. And again, no definition of what safety means, but how much time have we got here anyway?

Anthony: I don’t know. I’m waking back up. What? [00:08:00]

Fred: But overall, there’s no evidence that there was any testing at all allowing comparison between perception of and response to either common or extraordinary events reasonably expected by comparable human driven vehicles.

And there’s no evidence of warnings provided to other vehicles, pedestrians or other VRU if a collision is imminent. So this seems like the minimum that should be provided. And it’s, IM also important to point out that a gap exists in the F and VSS, which, as Michael said, were, or might have said, if he’d done it this way implicitly include the presence of a competent uncompromised driver.

And the f and VSS are all associated with allowing that human driver to stay safe and keep the passengers safe. So you can be both compliant with F-M-V-S-S and be wildly unsafe because you don’t have adequate controls, [00:09:00] simply because there’s nothing in there in the F-M-V-S-S that says you have to interpret using sensors what the world around you includes, what the hazards are, and how you’re gonna resolve them.

This is the minimum that should be discussed in a petition for autonomous vehicles on highways. And it’s not at all discussed. Everything in the Zoox petition that came close to empirical auditable data has been redacted. The only things that are included in the petition or the references are qualitative information.

So I think that this is just, at best, a b plus for a sophomore in engineering. And I also wanna point out something that was puzzling when they published the document Building Redundancy into the Zoox Robax. They quote that excuse me, that’s a different one. Keeping rider safe at every part of [00:10:00] Journey.

No. Introducing Zoo Safety Innovations. Ah, that’s the one. Quoting from that data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that 94% of crashes are caused by human choice or error and quote signed by Mark Kin. And no, it doesn’t do that. There’s no NITSA data that says 94% of crashes are caused by human choice or error.

It’s surprising that Mark was sign off on that since that misinterpretation of data from NITSA was produced by an agency that he once led. So I don’t know what the hell is going on out there, but it’s not engineering and no evidence of objective Safety. Safety isn’t even defined in the petition or in any of the supporting documents, so I, this is not good.

End of Grant.

Anthony: Did you just put in two gaslights in there? Zoo’s and Mark [00:11:00] Rosen kind. Is that what you’re saying? Oh, I got another one. You have to come. Oh god dammit. All right.

Autonomous Vehicles and Connectivity Issues

Anthony: So my question with these autonomous vehicles without steering wheels, these level four vehicles is what Fred touched on a little bit there with latency.

But what happens when there’s no longer cell service available? Not that you’ve gone out into some rural area, but you’re in Las Vegas and let’s say the cellular network that you’re subscribed to goes under or you stop paying the bill or there’s some event that cause it to lose connectivity for 5, 10, 20, 30, 45 minutes.

As a passenger, what do you do? ’cause you’re pressing contact support and that’s not gonna do anything. And you take out your phone and you’re like, how do I call? And that’s not gonna do anything. So what happens? They did discuss one

Fred: detail associated with that, Anthony, which is that they have three parallel cellular connections, three different networks running it all the times.

Okay, you would have to have all three out. What they do not discuss. There’s a latency associated [00:12:00] with cellular communications between the remote center, the remote driving center, and whatever phenomenon the Zoox vehicles may encounter.

Anthony: Okay. So listeners, if you like your cell phone company so much that you’re like, I’m gonna get into a car and it’s gonna be controlled by Verizon, sign up for this.

That’s what they’re saying here at and t. You think it’s great? Get in a car, at and t will be your lifeline. That’s insane. I don’t think there’s anybody on, like, when you put it in those terms, there’s no one’s gonna oh wait. That’s what I’m relying on. No. Can you hear me now? No, you can’t. ’cause you crashed and the doors won’t open.

Fred: End of my room. You changed it to, can you drive me now?

Anthony: Yeah can you let me out of the car now? Not in the middle of the freeway though. Michael, you mentioned something very important in your opening bit about how this petition’s in front of Nitsa, but right now. Living in the land of the free home of the Whopper nitsa, like every other federal agency is shut down [00:13:00] currently.

And so they can’t really do anything with say recalls, which we’re gonna get to later on. They can’t do anything with these kind of exemptions for companies like Zoox. What’s, what does that mean for us as the individuals out on the road right now are, should we all be wrapping ourselves in space blankets and hiding and eating donuts?

’cause that sounds really good.

Michael: If you look at NI’s recall data, they are continuing to post recalls that have come in after the day of the shutdown. So I it’s hard to tell if that portion of NSA is actually shut down. I’m assuming they, they do have a lot of there there’s an argument certainly that, that is a safety agency that has, it has to be on task at all times, and therefore would be covered under some of the exemptions for agencies that operate, law enforcement divisions, things like that. And, technically NHTSA’s Office of [00:14:00] Defects Investigation does have some law enforcement powers. And it could be argued that they should continue operations.

I’m not sure if their investigations division is continuing to operate, it, it’s unclear. They don’t really give us a list of who’s still at work. And it’s just like they didn’t when they were firing a fifth of the agency at the start of this administration. So it’s it’s hard to know what’s really going on there.

I’m assuming that much of their research and operations are shut down at the moment, so they’re certainly not, looking at the Zoox petition during this time. But, there are some critical functions that the agency plays that, that should continue no matter how long a shutdown extends.

Anthony: All right. That’s good to know because I imagine the folks over at Rivian are gonna need to get some maybe some things approved by nitsa or at least get a little stamp of approval.

Rivian and Tesla’s Door Handle Safety

Anthony: We’ve talked about this problem before with companies. The primary focus has been on Tesla, where they have these electronic door handles, and when [00:15:00] they get into a crash, a lot of times these door handles fail because they’re electric.

The 12 volt battery system dies fortunate. Unfortunately, people get trapped inside and die, not because of a crash, but because they couldn’t get outta the vehicle in time and the fire consumes them. Rivian has a similar project product. Similar shortsighted design, we’ll say with their electronic handles and whatnot.

But now they’re like, Hey maybe we should fix that and come out and redesign that. And we’re gonna redesign that for our next model, the R two. So if you own the R one or the R, whatever good for you. You had a hundred grand to spend. I think they’re cool looking. Other people disagree, but if you can get the R two, it looks like you might be able to get outta your doors.

And related to this what’s that guy? Fritz Van? Fritz Van Hall Hausen the chief designer of Tesla recently confirmed that his team is working on new door handles that are easy to use in a panic situation. [00:16:00] The specifics are hazy, but the new handles will reportedly merge electronic and mechanical doors release mechanisms.

And that’s from car scoops.com I quoted. And I think you know what that means. I think that means Fritz Van Husen, the guy who designed the cyber truck, has been listening to this show. I know, right? He’s been listening to this show and listening to both Fred and Michael saying, Hey, how about if you pulling the handles twice?

It goes mechanical. They open, I’m guessing I’m bating 20 Wi wiggly, Piggly wiggly coupons. I don’t know if they still have coupons. I don’t know what they’d be worth, but I’m bet betting knows that’s what their solution is. Panic situation. Somebody jerks on a handle twice. Door opens. Who’s with me?

Fred? Unmute yourself.

Fred: How’s that patent application

Michael: coming on that Michael, or, yeah that’s the solution. I think that GM and some of the other automakers use either a, one long hard pull on the handle or two pulls on the handle, will engage the manual release.

This is. Pretty good news, right? [00:17:00] You have Rivian who, in their previous version, I believe, like their 2022 and that era of vehicles. They had both an, an electric door release and a manual handle on their doors. And then I think they moved into the 20, 24 or so model year on some of their vehicles.

They took the the manual handle out on the rear sheets and replaced it with what we’ve seen in some of the Teslas, which is a manual release that’s somewhat hidden or obscured from, and not obvious or intuitive to occupants in the vehicle. Following Tesla’s lead in that area.

And that’s ultimately what we were and remain super concerned about is, the having two separate. Door handles one, the operating electric and one that’s for emergencies, yet hidden is a serious safety issue in a crash when there’s a fire or other reason to escape the car instantly. [00:18:00] And so what Rivian has done is basically completed their redesign and said, in, in their next model, they are removing that hidden manual release and into, and, reintroducing the manual door handle for all of their doors.

Which is great news. And, like everything Tesla says, I think, verification is really important. They say a lot of things and whether they or not, they fought through on it remains to be seen. But Tesla and Rivian to some extent were the standout problems here in, in this area where we were really concerned that a lot of electric vehicle manufacturers, in order to save costs, were going to start, removing the ability to open your doors from one place, whether it’s manual or electric, and starting to hide these emergency releases to save a few bucks on a car which would’ve made escaping during emergencies really difficult for passengers, essentially. It would’ve put the burden on every occupant of every vehicle in America to [00:19:00] learn how to escape that vehicle no matter what it is.

You would have to learn how to escape each model of Tesla, each model of a ribbon. And that’s why we still think it’s important that. The federal government get involved at some point here and set standard, even if Rivian and Tesla changed their designs, make them more safe, that doesn’t, prevent other manufacturers from doing the same stupid thing in the future.

A federal standard there. That’s just it’s not, it’s a very minimal standard. It’s gonna essentially standardize the location and placement of these manual releases so that people can get out of cars easy in emergencies. And it’s something that much of the auto industry already does.

So when you’re not asking the auto industry to change its practices in any super expensive way, you’re just trying to get some standardization in place so that people aren’t dying in situations where otherwise they would’ve been able to escape a vehicle.

Gaslight Awards: Rivian’s Safety Claims

Fred: Can we slide into Gaslight now because I’ve got a follow on here, [00:20:00] please.

My, my gaslight is Peruvian this week surprisingly because. Your CEO gen gentleman named Mr. Senge. I guess forgive me if I’m not pronouncing that correctly. He was quoted in Bloomberg News saying, quote, ultimately Rivian are the safest SUV and the safest truck you can buy today. Quote I think he’s gonna get into a bullshit fighting contest with Mr.

Musk on that because they both make essentially the same claims. We have contacted Rivian and asked them to provide the data that supports the safety claim, and unfortunately, they’ve not provided a response yet. So we don’t know exactly what they’re meaning in this, but I do think it qualifies as a very respectable Gaslight award nominee.

Anthony: Excellent. I like that. Didn’t define safest even. Come on. [00:21:00] I like that. Okay, Michael, what do you got?

Gaslight Awards: Anti-Drunk Driving Technology

Michael: Mine is getting into another article that we’ve got on tap this week, which is, was from the Detroit News and talked about anti drunk driving technology. Congress passed in the Infrastructure Act a few years back a law that says.

Nhtsa, you have to mandate anti drunk driving technology in passenger vehicles and the mandate, could be argued to go beyond anti drunk driving technology. There’s certain technologies that can detect drunk driving that also can detect, people who are driving aggressively, people who are driving recklessly, people who are driving stoned people.

The capabilities are endless for technology that’s based on monitoring the vehicle’s operations to prevent things like that. Speeding. There’s just the list goes on and on. And one, one thing that’s been in development for a long time, which is essentially what this article is about is.[00:22:00]

Dads, it’s driver alcohol detection system for safety. And it’s an ongoing project that’s, I think Fred and I have even set, we sat in a car once at the auto show in DC and w watched how this worked and it’s basically a monitor. They’ve got a couple of different forms of it that can detect whether or not the driver has consumed alcohol, is going to go out on the roads and get drunk.

And they’ve overcome a lot of challenges. They have been supported with some donations from the auto industry as well as mothers against drunk driving. And the technology is very promising. They claim to have reached a 99.9997% accuracy. Fred, I believe that’s, what’s that called?

Six Sigma or something? That’s not six.

Fred: It’s more like. Perhaps four or five, but it’s still

Michael: pretty damn good. Which is really important with this kind of technology because false positives are a problem. People who don’t drink, and I, if their car’s telling them they can’t drive because they’ve been drinking are [00:23:00] going to be very upset.

And so accuracy is critically important and they believe they’ve achieved that. They’re, they’ve made three different sort of systems. One is a system where the driver would need to blow towards a monitor before the car can start up. There’s another that would, the industry is much more happy with because it doesn’t require anyone to do anything outta the norm.

Norm, which would be, it just between the time you open your door, get in the car, bulk of your seatbelt already start the car, the sensor collects air from the vehicle passively to determine whether or not the alcohol content of the drivers is too high. And they also have developed a a touch sensor, like a finger sensor that can, I do not know the technol technological, under te technological underpinnings of that, but it’s very it’s it’s also being used to possibly be integrated into these types of systems.

And they’ve come up, the dads engineers and they’ve come up to basically the [00:24:00] point and. Their project where, it’s time for manufacturers to start taking this technology, integrating it in to their vehicles, integrating it in with suppliers, working on getting it into cars and the industry.

And this is where my light comes in. The industry is basically saying, oh NITSA hasn’t really written the rules on this for us yet, so we don’t know about integrating that into our cars. Which is just incredibly disappointing for so many reasons for us because we see the industry putting high tech stuff into vehicles every day that, could have safety impact, could, face acceptance issues from, customers and owners, and they go ahead and throw it in there. If it’s something like, a massive distracting, touch screen if it’s like the electric [00:25:00] doors that, that we’re just speaking about, these cool tech features that have some significant safety issues. But, the whole whizzbang tech fo tech thing, how drive sales of them we see summon parking modes that are meant for, purely for human convenience.

And, importantly we see, this unproven driver assistance technology going into vehicles and, NITSA hasn’t written standards for any of those. That for the industry to, to stand behind this argument that they need, that nitsa to write a regulation before they could put it in the car is just pure plum.

And we see this on safety equipment. It, this is, these are areas where, the industry drags their feet on deployment. We see it in, in intelligent speed assistance, speeding prevention, tech. We see it in child presence detection to prevent kids from dying in hot cars or being left in cars alone.

We, we’ve seen it for almost two decades now, just getting rear seat [00:26:00] belt reminders into vehicles, which is absurd. And we’re even seeing it with the industry’s current attempts to weaken and delay the federal a EB rule, and we saw it with airbags decades ago. In industry continues to stagger the deployment and implementation of safety equipment until NITSA puts out a safety standard.

So they save a lot of money there. But when it comes to all this other tech that may or may not have negative safety consequences, they’re perfectly happy to go ahead and put it in car. It’s problematic. The technology for dads is there ready, it can detect alcohol. Nitsa has some work to do, right?

There’s a whole, there’s a lot of work between, hey, we can detect this. And then what is done after that point? Do you shut the car down for a certain period of time? Do you allow the car to drive but call the police? There, there are just so many different things that can happen after the alcohol is detected.

Ultimately, we just, don’t want drunks to [00:27:00] be allowed to drive. And we think that, manufacturers are scared here to take the first step. They’re scared to be the first or organization or company to put this stuff in cars ’cause they think it’s gonna diminish their sales. And they can reduce that possibility just by getting the tech right.

Working on the human factors and making sure that the system is integrated as seamless, seamlessly as possible into the driving experience with as few false possibles as necessary. And it’s that foot dragging that, that and the industries, claims that it needs a safety standard to come out before it starts implementing this stuff, which is my gaslight of the week, because that’s simply not true when you look at how the industry incorporates other technologies into vehicles.

Anthony: I like that one a lot. I foresee a future game show or drinking game, but alright. Okay. Let’s see who’s gonna drive the car tonight? Oh, you failed Bobby, you’re up next in the driver’s seat. Nope. Not good. [00:28:00] I like this technology a lot. I think it’s good. And it begs the question, which auto manufacturer has the most drunk drivers?

There must be data collected on that. ‘Cause it’s not gonna be, somebody driving a Volvo probably. I don’t know. Maybe you’re in a Volvo. You can afford a bod bottle of Pappy Van Winkle. I don’t know.

Michael: You probably wanna look at that by rates versus numbers, since there are obviously gonna be some manufacturers who sell a lot more vehicles than others.

Yeah.

Anthony: Let’s, but I’m curious by rate, per capita, who’s who’s the most drunk drivers of different brand of vehicles? Hey, here you go. This is not going to surprise anyone. Oh. Oh, wait, hold on. Let’s, come on. Give Fred I the opportunity to bet on this. Okay. Okay. This is all the manufacturers Yes.

Available the highest rates of drunks in cars. Fred? Yes. Age before beauty. Go for it. What’s your guess? I’m going with Dodge. Dodge. Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. I’m [00:29:00] thinking specifically GMC.

Michael: Okay. I’m gonna say your guesses aren’t that great.

Anthony: Ah, boo. So

Michael: we’ve got a range.

Range, yeah. This is an article, range Rover, obviously we picked this up real quick. We haven’t verified the data, but this is an article that was published, just a little over a month ago on a website called Visual Capitalist. Which card brands rank up the most? DUIs coming in first place?

BMWB.

Anthony: Of course, God

Michael: damnit. Yeah. Makes sense. That’s obvious. Obvious, right? Ram, for the Dodge Gas came in second, but Dodge actually came well down the list. 10th or so. GMC is about eighth. Oh. EMW Ram and Acura actually kind of Acura. Audi and Volvo and Subaru are all third, fourth through sixth too, which is, maybe Subaru isn’t love.

Anthony: Well Subaru, it’s a bunch of fermented kombucha they’re drinking. I think that could be it.

Fred: Wow. To be fair, they have different models, [00:30:00] but Anthony, what’s your Gaslight nominee this week? My

Anthony: gaslight nominee, okay. So listeners you don’t care about this, but I had restart my computer. I lost my notes, but so I, it’s okay.

I gotta backup.

Gaslight Awards: NYC’s E-Bike Speed Limit

Anthony: My backup is Mayor Adams of New York City. That’s right. I live in the great city of New York, and this mayor is the chef’s kiss of corruption and incompetence. But that has nothing to do with this. Instead, I’m gonna quote from an article from CBS News quoting New York City’s 15 mile per hour speed limit for e-bikes and scooters will take effect.

In October, mayor Eric Adams announced Wednesday the new rule will officially be enforced as of October 24th. It wasn’t immediately clear how the administration intended to enforce the speed limit.

Michael: Ding,

Anthony: ding. They will not enforce the speed limit guaranteed positively. 100%. Why? Because I’ve rarely seen an e-bike actually on the road.

They’re generally on the sidewalk. New York City laws, you’re not allowed to ride a bike on the sidewalk unless you’re under the age of 12. You [00:31:00] don’t know how many times I’ve walked down the street and I just wanna knock over a 50-year-old on a bike and just be like, get off the sidewalk. Or riding through parks.

You’re not allowed to ride bikes through parks. Stop it. Get out. And I’ve seen the police, like kids on dirt bikes riding through my neighborhood, going full bore. And my wife one day had a full Karen episode at the police and said, why don’t you stop them, get them. And the police officer sitting in his big SUV said, if we go after them, they’ll just run away.

It’s what’s your job? What? Okay, so I can go out and commit murder and just, ah, I can get away. Hey cops, I’m gonna run. You’re not gonna case after me. Yeah, this will never be enforced. I wish it would. I wish they could just put, I wish again, this would have to be big brother in the federal government coming in and putting some sort of governor on these.

Motors, they couldn’t go above 15 miles per hour. There’s a

Fred: My e-bike has one that stops the power assist [00:32:00] once you hit 18 miles per hour. So you’d get a ticket in my neighborhood class. One E-bike is considered that. So the standards already in place for that. Perfect.

Bicycle Speeds and Safety

Michael: And what is the typical speed of, a manually powered bicycle on the road?

Are we

Anthony: like an average person, you mean? Yeah, or

Michael: Or, a courier who’s going from place to place and, at relatively, I would assume they’re reaching speeds over 15 miles per hour.

Fred: Yeah.

Michael: Based on my

Fred: bicycle group going uphill, they are about eight or nine miles per hour on the level they can run 25, 20, 25 miles per hour under Huon power.

Anything, anything above 25 is basically outta range for human power.

Anthony: And Michael, I think you’re thinking of the eighties movie Quicksilver, which I think started Kevin Bacon as a bicycle courier throughout New York City. Those, that doesn’t exist anymore. That’s not a thing.

E-Bikes and Urban Challenges

Anthony: They’re on e-bikes. [00:33:00] And the problem in New York, and I’m sure in other places is that these, anyone can get on an e-bike, you can rent run from city bike, and they just get on these bikes, start going fast without a helmet. Now Fred, I assume you and your bike buddies you’ve got helmets on, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. In full spandex, the whole thing. Oh, yeah. Where draws a picture? No, don’t draw me a picture. Nevermind. Pull wons. Yeah. I applaud the words for this, but the come on. Like they. I don’t know what laws are actually enforced in the city. It’s lawless. Haven’t you heard New York City is a lawless hellscape?

Enforcement and Registration of E-Bikes

Michael: I think the first thing they would have to do is make, wouldn’t they have to require e-bikes to be registered so that they can track them if they plan on doing any type of enforcement? It seems just a, not a very well thought out approach.

Anthony: How dare you insult my city?

Humorous Take on Enforcement

Fred: If Trump continues with the deployment of the National Guard, they could use Apache helicopters to enforce the speed [00:34:00] limit. The technology’s well in hand for identifying an individual bicyclist and shooting a missile at ’em. That sounds expensive. Oh, yeah. But, the objective is there.

You gotta keep that in mind.

Anthony: I will no longer be doing this podcast from this current location. With that in mind, I, it’s a tough one of who won this week. I don’t know necessarily that Michael won, but I want his technology more than any other technology.

Fred: I’m voting for Michael.

Yeah, I’m voting for

Anthony: Michael too. Okay. Mine,

Fred: mine is individual and yours is unattainable. Michael’s actually is something that could matter.

Anthony: That’s good. We like things that can matter. All right.

Waymo and Autonomous Vehicles

Anthony: Let’s go into geez, when, it’s when let’s go into the world of of Waymo.

How’s that sound? Here’s a a fun lighthearted article from, oh, this was gonna be my gaslight. Now I remember it from The Guardian titled, California Police Stumped after trying to ticket driverless car for an illegal [00:35:00] U-turn. Quoting. Since there was no human driver, a ticket couldn’t be issued. Our citation books don’t have a box for Robot reads.

The police report, the police department said that it alerted Waymo of the glitch and that hopefully the reprogramming will keep it from making any more illegal moves. I wanna be a computer driver. Oh, sorry, just the glitch. I didn’t mean to go 90 in a school zone and do an illegal U-turn and donut. It’s just a glitch.

Report it to my master, like this is just gross.

Fred: I again, Apache helicopters. I think that’s gotta be a part of the solution.

Michael: Oh boy.

Legal and Safety Concerns with AVs

Michael: Yeah, there’s a law that was passed last year and signed by the governor that comes into effect next year on July 1st. That requires autonomous vehicle manufacturers to do certain things that might help out here.

For one, it will allow, [00:36:00] emergency officials to say, Hey, you need to get your vehicles out of X area right now. We have an ongoing emergency. We don’t need your silly driverless cars. They’re blocking emergency vehicle traffic. How

Anthony: does that, how does that happen though? They, what are they?

What do they tell? Is this going back to the, I think that’s why

Michael: they were two years between essentially the pass of this bill and that date to give them some lead time to set up the system. Okay. So I’m not really sure how it works yet, but you have to they’re basically directing them to leave the area within two minutes of getting, they’re calling it an emergency geofencing mess message.

Also that bill and this bill, the bill doesn’t put that same July 1st 20, 26 date on this, but it authorizes peace officers to issue notices of autonomous vehicle non-compliance when they see violations of vehicle code or traffic ordinances. And so it requires them to identify the violation, time, location, license plate, all that, and then require the manufacturer to provide the department.[00:37:00]

With the Department of Motor Vehicles, with a, with a copy of that notice within 72 hours. And then, so there is some sort of enforcement mechanism developed here, but it still doesn’t seem it’s going to be in line with what humans are given where, and I don’t think that Waymo is going to get getting points against its computer driving license like a human would in these situations.

That raises the question of whether, whether they’re really going to be, brought to justice for these types of violations.

Anthony: I think they should have the police go into the programming software, programming offices of like Waymo and just putting points on the license of an entire software development team.

I’m sorry you’ve made the same mistake a dozen times. You’re all getting three points on your driver’s license.

Michael: You can no longer develop software.

Anthony: No. You can keep developing software but you can’t drive your car anymore ’cause your insurance premiums went up. This is what’s happening. Really just go to the executives and be like, oh yeah, here you go.

You this ticket’s for you. Now you’re the responsible party. ’cause there’s a responsible [00:38:00] party. If you have a vehicle, you’re driving it, you are the responsible party. You can’t be like, it wasn’t me, it was a computer. You run the company.

Michael: That’s gonna make it tough when you’ve got, a fleet of a thousand vehicles that are all feeding points back onto your license.

Hey, that’s, but those guys don’t have to drive anyway. They’re riding around in black cars.

Anthony: Oh yeah. But still, you do something like that and you change the behavior. All of a sudden they’re like, oh my God. I can’t drive, or I can’t, maybe I don’t drive, but my wife and my kids do and we can’t afford insurance.

Michael: Yeah. That sounds about the same chance of succeeding as, jail sentences for white collar offenders over the years.

Anthony: When I’m king, they’re first against the wall.

Fred: Yeah, that seems to be how you get to be king, to have those white collar convictions.

Anthony: If you like this, go to auto safety.org and click on donate.

Okay.

DC’s Automated Traffic Systems

Anthony: That was weird, but I’m gonna do one more story before we jump into today’s tower. How’s that? ‘Cause similar related, this is from Washington DC We’ve talked about this before about DC put all of [00:39:00] this automated traffic systems, these cameras ’cause there’s a speeding problem in DC It’s a hellhole I quoting from WSA nine DC Attorney General Brian Schwab’s office announced Wednesday that it won its first court judgment under the Steer Act securing $77,100 from a Virginia woman who accumulated more than 200 drain dangerous driving violations captured by the city’s speed cameras.

That’s great. I love this. This is technology at work. It’s good. We caught a scoff law and so what happens? Some republican lunatic in Congress is let’s get rid of this camera systems. This is just a money grab. ’cause that guy or his brother-in-law or somebody’s got like $50,000 in tickets coming his way.

Michael: Yeah. That’s craziness. I don’t understand the, I mean I guess it’s the same as the arguments we see against things like drunk driving protection against things like speed [00:40:00] prevention mechanisms. But, it’s clearly going to, and it, I think, I don’t think the data is really questionable at all when you put in automated speed camera systems, they’re going to slow people down and they’re going to save lives ultimately.

And it’s, it, yeah, there are, there is a money grab side to it because a lot of these cities that have put these cameras up are, basically contracting it out to a third party and taking a percentage of the profits. And so there’s, they’re definitely making money on, actually, it could be argued the DC wasn’t making money on it till recently ’cause they were allowing so many repeat offenders to get away with it.

So yeah, there is a money grab side to it. However, it’s a great money grab because in the process a lot of, drivers are essentially being taught not to speed in these areas. And that’s a great thing. And it’s something I think everyone needs to get used to. Maybe it won’t be here in the next 10 years, but at some point we’re going to have [00:41:00] vehicles that have built-in speed prevention.

As much as, people who like to drive fast don’t like that. I think it’s coming and I think it’s necessary and I think it could save thousands of lives every year. And, the selfishness of speeding compared to the lives that could be saved is a non argument for me.

Fred: I can testify on my own personal experience that it was very effective in reducing my speed in Washington.

I can’t testify that it saved my life, but certainly that it reduced my speed on, especially on E Street and E Street throughway. So yeah, this stuff works

Anthony: alright, and you’re alive today, so that clearly it saved your life.

Fred: I’m either that or ai, but I don’t think AI would really be focused on me,

Anthony: you don’t know what you look like to me. I’m not pretty enough anyway, with that, are you ready for your tau time? Yes, sir. Great. Go.

Fred: A lot of the AV companies are saying that they’re pretty safe. In [00:42:00] fact, some of the claims are pretty outrageous. And so I looked into this a little bit, particularly Waymo, and now Waymo to its credit has put some information out in public on their website that allows you to at least understand what they’re talking about.

One of the studies they put out was done by a company called Swiss Re, which is a big insurance company that looks at statistics and, looks at the oh I can’t remember the word right now, but anyway, looks at the causality of accidents and accidents. Swiss Re looked at the insurance records of Waymo and found that based upon the numbers of accidents where Waymo was at fault, that it is, reasonably safe and comparable to human drivers. So why would, why not just accept that and say this is great. There’s a couple of problems [00:43:00] with it. This is actually an example of p hacking. Do you know what p hacking is? Anthony? I, this is not the right podcast for

Anthony: that.

Fred: P hacking is a process by which you want a particular answer from statistics.

And so you keep hacking the statistics until you get that answer. And that’s really what this is all about. Because by looking at only the accidents or the collisions where the vehicle was at fault, you’re really filtering all the data to a very small fraction of the actual numbers of collisions where Waymo was a factor.

So if, think of it, it’s if you have homeowner’s insurance. And you have a leaky faucet. The leaky faucet exists whether or not it’s supported to the company, right? So if you only looked at the numbers of claims that are associated with defects in your house you would say your house is pretty [00:44:00] darn great because you don’t claim that often.

If on the other hand, you looked at all the different maintenance things you had to do, paint the house, fix leaky faucets clean up after snowfall, whatever, vacuum say, man, this house is a burden I need to do a lot. So when Waymo decided to only look at crashes where they were determined to be at fault, by the way, they didn’t say who made that determination, but that’s a separate issue.

They were really filtering very heavily on the numbers of collisions that were actually there. And if they looked at all the collisions in which Waymo was a factor, and let’s remember that. Waymo is a factor in 100% of the crashes that Waymo was involved in. They would’ve come to a very different conclusion about the overall safety of the the Waymo offering.

But the real slight of hand here is that in any case, at fault [00:45:00] is a legal determination. It’s not an engineering evaluation. And if you’re gonna do an engineering evaluation, you need to look at a comprehensive set of data. So stating that only insurance claims where the AV is found at fault matter as Waymo has claimed, makes, really makes no engineering sense.

That’s, again, roughly equivalent to saying that your house never had any maintenance issues because you never filed a claim that was paid by your homeowner’s insurance policy. The consequences of that are that Waymo is wildly misrepresenting the potential for. Their vehicles carrying passengers to be involved in a crash.

And it’s misleading. Whether or not that was intended to be misleading is unclear right now, but it’s really fundamentally a conflation of legal terms with incomplete or non-existent engineering [00:46:00] data that really limits the ability to understand what’s going on. None of these crashes are traced to root fault.

And so it’s really of a very misleading representation of the actual safety and the potential for injury to passengers and vulnerable road users from these vehicles. So I’m calling it this practice. I’m calling p Hacking. In service of public relations or, AKA, ignore the man behind the counter curtain.

Ignore the man behind the curtain. So that’s my that’s my time of week. My complaint about p hacking and misrepresentation of the safety of these autonomous vehicles in the service of the public relations department.

Anthony: I like it. I feel I’ve learned something. I feel better. And I [00:47:00] also suggest we make a t-shirt that says Waymo is a factor in 100% of the crashes it’s involved in.

Fred: I like that. That would be revelatory for them. I,

Anthony: I think that’d be great. Listeners, if you wanna do that, go to auto safety.org, click donate, and then send a little note saying, Hey, it’d be cool if you guys made this t-shirt. I need a medium in Teal. And we’ll say, we’re not gonna do it in teal.

Heels doesn’t work with our brand identity. Lemon, yellow always. Nope. Michael doesn’t like lemon yellow.

Recalls and Safety Notices

Anthony: Hey, with that, we’ve got a boatload of recalls to go through ’cause we’ve had guests the last few weeks. Is everyone ready for some recalls? Yes. First up, the number one Drunk driving Car of America.

BMW. What? This is confusing. BMW. It isn’t it? Yeah. Okay. This is gonna be something 196,355 vehicles. Vehicle one again, the category is BMW, the 2020 to 2022 Toyota [00:48:00] SRA HA. 2022 MW two series. 2020 to 2022 M BMW five series. And yeah. The BMW four series in there. They’re just c.

Creativity in the name people come on something. BMWX three. And this is an issue with the engine starter. Oh. The there’s a thermal event with their engine starter that the positive battery cable connection to the engine starter was either damaged or not connected. Why is Toyota the first list here?

Is, that’s because made by BW.

Michael: Yeah, that supras are made. I think it’s the same chassis, the same engine, a lot of the same components as BMWs. I think they’re made Austria,

Anthony: ah, park outside.

Michael: Yeah, this is a park outside warning. So this is essentially park outside warnings are what you’re gonna see when there are fires that are occurring on [00:49:00] vehicles that aren’t being used at the time, they’re not in motion.

It’s, you pull your vehicle into your garage, it catches fire, it takes down your house, or it takes down the parking garage you’re in. That’s why you want these vehicles parked outside.

Anthony: How clean are people’s driveway garages that they can actually fit a car in there?

Michael: I, yeah, I know a lot of people that have garages that just use them for storage.

So I, you, I don’t know.

Anthony: Yeah. Hey, I’m impressed if you can do that. Next up Ford. That’s right. The reigning champion, 4,632 vehicles. The 2020 Ford Expedition. 2020 Lincoln Navigator. And this is a the, this is related to a short circuit in a circuit board. Oh no Overheating. A printed circuit board.

The printed circuit boards in the battery junction box were produced with improper solar mass solder, mass coverage, and limited conformal coating uhoh. So if water gets in there, [00:50:00] it short circuits,

Michael: that’s some kind of corrosion that occurs over time. And basically, leases, short circuits. This one also park outside.

Yeah, this one’s also parked outside. This one can occur while you’re driving as well. So it appears they’ve cited that, it’s while the vehicle is parked or off, but that, that people have also reported smelling, smoke, smelling a burning smell and start seeing smoke from the engine compartment while they’re driving.

A double whammy there for this. But it looks like they’ve got a pretty quick fix. They’re supposed to already has started mailing own notification owners to, to. To notification letters to owners. I like notification

Anthony: owners to letters.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. And so you should already be receiving this.

Anthony: Alright, that’s good. So if you’re driving this and you smell smoke, pull over. If you smell toast go to an er. Yes. Great. Next up, this is not come on. Why is this new Flyer of America? That’s right. [00:51:00] 655 vehicles. This is a, the 2021 to 2025 new flyer. XE 40, the XE 35, the X 60. This. Yeah. You don’t have to get through all this.

They’re buses. They’re buses. That’s why I’m like, why are buses in here, man?

Michael: Which is, it’s, this one is also a park outside warning. A lot of those this week, but this is buses that are being charged above. 75% seem to be the problem. So if you electric a fleet of buses, yeah. If you on the fleet of these buses, you need to not charge them above that state.

You basically stop it. What they’re going to do is they’re saying a, they’re gonna deploy a vehicle program update to limit the maximum state of charge to 75%. That’s bad. So I buy this bus. Yeah, that doesn’t sound great. Yeah. You’ve already lost

Anthony: 25% of your range, right? Yeah. Boo. Replace my battery.

Michael: Yeah, that’s. [00:52:00] It looks like that is an interim remedy. Okay. And that they’re still working on the final remedy. So hopefully if you bought one of these, you’re not gonna be limited to three quarters of your range. It seems like that’s pretty important on a transit bus that probably has a very large battery that takes a long time to charge.

Anthony: Yeah,

Michael: well, depends where you’re going. Yeah. And who are your people on the bus?

Anthony: Alright, next up. And

Michael: this is a, it looks like this is a roof mounted battery pack. I’m not sure if it’s an actual electric bus or not, but

Anthony: hey, if you drive a new flyer bus, tell us where the battery pack is. And yeah, we’ll do that.

Next up Nissan one 19,077 vehicles. The 2022 Nissan Leaf, 2021 Nissan Leaf. The quick charge port, the level three charging via Chad demo connector has an issue. The lithium iron battery, it may experience excessive lithium deposits within battery cells increasing the electrical resistance, and potentially [00:53:00] causing a fluctuation in state of charge.

Oh wait the, so the excessive lithium deposits, that’s a manufacturing defect I assume.

Michael: I don’t know any other way for excessive lithium to get in there.

Anthony: I dunno, but surprisingly this is not listed as park outside.

Michael: This one is not, which is somewhat interesting. Since it occurs while charging, where do you assume the vehicles will be parked?

So that’s, essentially what they’re telling you to do for now is to not use level three charging, but it doesn’t look like Nissan has a remedy yet. It looks like they’re preparing remedy software that prevents this from progressing to a fire. And that they’ll notify owners then. But for now, I think they’re just saying, don’t use your fast charging on these vehicles.

Or you could have a fire.

Fred: Yeah remember the fast charging has currents as high as the industrial welder, so there’s a lot of electricity flying through these [00:54:00] things. In fact, I’ve been surprised that more problems haven’t popped up associated with the fast charging. It’s hazardous stuff.

So interesting.

Anthony: All. Coming up next Kia, 39,536 vehicles, the 2021 to 2023 Kia Sorento due to a suspected wire harness supplier quality issue. The connection between the blower motor resistor and connector can overheat when using the HVAC system on fan speed three while the ignition is on. In rare cases, this condition may lead to a fire.

I love how specific this one is, like they really dug down and figured it out. But basically it says the supplier used a thinner, the nominal wiring gauge trying to save a couple bucks. Bill Copeman talked to us about this couple weeks ago. Yeah. And they got bit in the patootie with this also not listed as park outside.

Not park outside.

Michael: No. This one looks like it can only occur [00:55:00] during driving. Drive outside then. Yeah, you’d have to be parked with the vehicle on for the HVAC to be operating anyway. So this is a cool down that actually heats you up. The remedy here is gonna be available, it looks like in late December.

It probably won’t be able to get one until earlier next year. But owners will get an interim notification for now, letting them know what to do. In the meantime, I’m not sure if there is any hints or tips we can give to folks other than maybe don’t turn your fan a above three. It’s on, yeah, it says can overheat when using the HVAC system on fan speed three while the ignition is on.

So apparently anything other than fan speed three is Okay, so make them,

Anthony: oh, so I was thinking only below three, but you’re thinking you can go 1, 2, 4, 5.

Michael: I don’t, they need to clarify that. If not each of

Fred: the, each of the fan speeds has an individual resistor. That’s how they. Yeah. That’s how they manage the [00:56:00] current. Going through the fan.

Anthony: I figured it was just a potentiometer you just sweep through.

Fred: Potentiometer is continuous, but Right. Discrete resistors are discontinuous and they typically would put discrete resistors on print the circuit board using, the micro technology as they can just pop ’em in.

So

Anthony: the micro technology,

Fred: that’s probably where this is coming from. It’s a micro component that’s controlling the voltage on a another device that’s feeding it to the fan. I,

Anthony: I don’t know, listeners, if you got this vehicle, do some experiments for us. Go out there. Put on, oh, Michael tells me Stop.

No, don’t that, don’t do that. Oh, come on. You guys are no fun. Last recall, Jaguar 3,818 vehicles. The 2023 Land Rover, range Rover icu. What? What kinda name is this? Oh, come on. Really rear camera, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

Michael: It’s a rear camera. This one’s due to [00:57:00] something we’ve seen a lot, which is water intrusion.

I think this water intrusion is, gets into the actual camera. Yeah. And they’re gonna replace your camera, so sometime around Thanksgiving and owners will start getting a notice on that.

Anthony: Okay. When we talked to Phil about the rear camera stuff, we never talked about the water intrusion, which we’ve seen a number of times.

And that does seems more of a, less than an engineering issue and less of a cost issue and more of a lazy issue.

Michael: I don’t, yeah, I don’t know. It could be an engineering issue. It could be a lot of things. It could be they didn’t seal all the area properly. The camera itself has some ceiling issues that they got from the supplier.

Who knows? But, again, this is a problem that, that relates to them not, fully testing and validating the, their parts before they go in the vehicle. So it’s not good engineering.

Anthony: Look at that.

Conclusion and Farewell

Anthony: Alright, with that, ladies and gentlemen, fans of the show, enemies of the show, our haters are lovers.

[00:58:00] Our that’s the show. Thanks. We’ll be back next week. Thanks everybody.

Fred: Thank you. Bye-bye. For more information, visit www.auto safety.org.