Zoox, Tesla and Waymo. Oh my.

Introduction to the Podcast

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.

Hey everybody. Welcome to August 13th, 2025, the only podcast that has negotiated a 0% export rate. Well done gentlemen. Excellent.

Michael: Yeah, we’re not gonna be extorted.

Anthony: No. I’ll gladly give him anybody 15% of the revenue we generate. No. Wait, that’s not Absolutely no.

Zoox’s Controversial Exemption

Anthony: Anyway let’s start off with a little company called Zoox.

They make a adorable little car that looks like it was, came out of a Pixar movie, but it has no steering wheel, no pedals, things like that. And they’ve been trying to pull a fast one on NHTSA for a while. [00:01:00] And with a new administration and enough donations, political donations, you can get whatever the hell you want in this new world.

And so NHTSA has said, all right we’ll give you an exemption and you don’t need steering wheels and pedals, and you can go ahead and get out there in the world. Interesting. So who

Fred: is

Anthony: who is Zoo’s owned by? This guy who’s addicted to human growth hormone? Jeff Bezos.

Fred: Ah he owns some other companies too, doesn’t he?

Anthony: Yes. I don’t know which ones though. I can’t. I’ve never heard of ’em. They’re pretty obscure. Anyway this article in MSN it talks about the revised process. To fast track these things. Quoting the revised process involves an expedite expedited application that allows companies like zoox to receive exemptions for testing and demonstrations and eventually commercial operations.

Previously you get to self-certify, right? Is that true, Michael? Now they get to self certify and be like, ha, fuck you. What? Yeah, [00:02:00] I Zoo’s

Michael: actually tried that. This is, this all kinda came out of an investigation that’s opened in 2023 where zoo’s basically put out statements saying, we’re certified to the F-N-V-S-S with this new vehicle, with no steering wheel, with no pedals, and with a lot of other issues with certification.

And that’s a kind of said, what, how do you certify a vehicle with no steering wheel? No pedals with different windows seating configurations. There were a lot of issues. They, so they said, we’re gonna open up an investigation. Basically Zoox was trying to bullshit its way through certification.

NHTSA called them on it and then, miraculously, two and a half years later, here we sit and nits has given them an exemption as an American manufacturer under a provision that was never intended to do this kind of thing.

Anthony: Lovely. This vehicle doesn’t even have side view mirrors. Do we know if it has a big red stop button inside for when it eventually goes rogue?

Michael: I don’t know about the [00:03:00] stop button. What I do know is that there were, I think probably a dozen areas, nits actually sent a team out to inspect them and to take a look at the vehicles. Zoox hosted them for an inspection and they, there were problems with the windows. They were using the wrong types of glass on certain windows, which is an egress issue that we’ve discussed a number of times.

There’s some issues with their occupant crash protection. The vehicle is built to go forward and backwards and so there’s some interesting. Things going on there. What’s the front of the vehicle? What’s the rear? There were some lamp issues, windshield issues, brake system visibility concerns.

Michael,

Fred: weren’t there also seatbelt issues? You’ve got rear facing passengers. Yep. And that was, there’s no certification standard for rear facing passengers.

Michael: Is there, I, there’s, there are some provisions for it because I think you, most of us, at least Anthony and I probably remember the big station [00:04:00] wagons that had the rear seat in the back way

Fred: back.

Michael: Yeah. Those were fun to write in, but there’s, there they had a lot of short, just to keep it short, they had a lot of certification issues. And so essentially, rather than go through, there’s basically two processes now that NSA has announced they’re going to be using. One is specifically for American manufacturers that really try to push the patriot drumbeat here on American made autonomous vehicles.

And so they’re allowing them to come in under this provision that I will probably discuss later in Gaslight that I doesn’t really apply to autonomous vehicle fleets. And they just swept it right through. There’s no safety requirement that they make a, statement of, or demonstrate, how are they rectifying the conflicts with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety standards before they put this thing on the road?

There’s [00:05:00] no ability for the public to have any input here. If a company comes in and does what was supposed to be the way manufacturers get these things out there, which is part five five, a temporary exemption, they have to show and put on the record for public comment before a decision by the agency how they’re rectifying the conflicts with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.

So this other process that has been created out of thin air. From a bad interpretation of the regulations, essentially allows the Secretary of Transportation to say, I want that guy to get an exemption for his vehicles and they don’t have to show us anything. How much does that

Anthony: cost?

How much do I to donate? Because Fared and I, we have our AV company in Florida, right? We just gotta know how much, what does it cost us to get that exemption?

Michael: I would buy a major newspaper and, oh, make its political reporting, go a certain way, maybe donate to an inaugural fund here or there.

Those kind of [00:06:00] things, okay,

Anthony: that sounds about right to

Michael: me. But this is, it’s. I’ve never seen a NHTSA investigation essentially turned on its head and become, this is an issue where we thought Zoo should be fine. They should be facing civil penalties for essentially a bullshit certification to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.

These vehicles could not be certified. They were claiming that they were certified and putting them out on the roads for testing. And the investigation basically, says, we are closing the investigation because now we’re giving them a full clean bill of health and they can go do whatever they want with these vehicles.

Really odd really odd fact pattern there. It’s not something we’ve ever really seen as a result of in its investigation. And I’m not sure how happy actually the folks conducting the investigation are with this decision. Because, I think their concerns are safety, and this is one of those decisions that I think [00:07:00] pretty clearly is coming from the top down at the DOT.

So it’s concerning. I guess the only bright spot here is that it’s not going to allow for commercialization, right? You can’t get this simple, stupid political exemption for your company and then go out and commercialize your fleet and scale and all that stuff. You can are you

Fred: taking bets on that?

Michael: Are you taking bets on that you can test? Yeah, that’s, that is, that’s, no, I’m not taking bets on that because the way they use this provision from the start has been a little dishonest from a legal standpoint. And it’s, I’m not taking bets on that, but the way the law reads, if you want to commercialize a vehicle, you have to use the part five five temporary exemption, and you have to make a public showing of safety and you the opportunity for the public to comment before the nits administrator makes a decision is written into the code.

So that one’s harder to get around. This provision that they used is, [00:08:00] one sentence, very general wishy-washy with no standards, which is why they’re using it, because it’s easy to slip things through it and pretend that’s what it was intended to do

Fred: michael? Yeah, I think you’ve, I think you’ve become a conservative, Michael, you’re.

Relying on standards of the past that have no relevance.

Michael: I’m a law and order conservative, huh?

Fred: Yeah.

Michael: That’s interesting since the conservative wing of government seems to become in socialist and meddling with every company they can these days. So it’s an interesting juxtaposition we find ourselves in.

Anthony: So back to the script. You keep saying part five five, but correct me if I’m wrong, it’s part 5, 5, 5, right?

Michael: Part five. Five, five.

Anthony: Okay. Just checking for those. Playing the home game.

GM Cruise’s Rocky Road

Anthony: Hey, let’s jump into the next story. You guys remember there was a company it was I think we’ve barely ever touched on this issue.

It was a company called cruise. Do you guys remember this sound?

Fred: Vaguely familiar. Yeah. I remember the end of the cruise when they [00:09:00] had an abrupt landing.

Anthony: Yeah, so this company, just to remind people who are new to the show, GM had a subsidiary called GM Cruise, where it was an experiment to, for General Motors to see if they could light about $10 billion on fire and get nothing for it.

And so what they did is they had this, these self-driving cars that they hired a guy who ran a video game company to, to to to run. And they eventually drove over, a pedestrian, dragged him, and then lied about it to investigators. So a bunch of people got fired. The kid behind the video games, he got to resign which is always lovely, but now GM wants to bring this back.

They’re like, we’re gonna bring crews back. And from an article which said that we can’t link to, ’cause it’s pay linked in Bloomberg I’m gonna quote this time around. The project would be focused on autonomous cars for personal use rather than a robotaxis service. The first step is development of hands-free, eyes free driving with a human in the vehicle with the ultimate goal being a [00:10:00] car that can drive with no one at the wheel.

I think this might be my Gaslight of the week ’cause this again is just absurd. And the person they have running the project is someone that GM recently hired, who 10 years ago worked on autopilot for Tesla. And we know autopilot is garbage. And recently he was at a self-driving trucking company called Aurora, which put, self-driving semis on the road that their only customer quickly said, we’re gonna put a human back in the car.

Yeah. I I guess if you’re not paying attention and you’re a corporation that has no problem setting tens of billions of dollars on fire, this is the guy you hire because

Fred: what could possibly go wrong?

Anthony: I think everything, I think, no. I think Harry Barrett will, within the next, I gave her 12 months before shareholders go, wait, you did what with our money?

Michael: And you did

Anthony: it

Michael: twice. But I’m looking at this a slightly different [00:11:00] way, okay. They’re not going back to a cruise Robo Taxii, running around the city like they were before, autonomously. They are starting at level three here, and they’re focusing on the, first of all, general Motors actually uses, mapping to determine whether the roads they’re on, are doing are appropriate for the vehicles that are on them.

Versus what Tesla did,

Anthony: right? They do that with their super Cruise, which is, dunno what they’re doing here, what this is,

Michael: see, they’re, this is what this is, they’re, what they’re saying here is the first step is development of this hands-free, ice free driving with a human in the vehicle.

That’s what they’re doing right now with Super Cruise Ultra Crew that’s had a number of different types of names as these things get rebranded, but they’re saying, ultimately we wanna reach a point where there’s nobody behind the wheel when that is, Lord only knows, we know right now that an autonomous vehicle is gonna cost way more than the consumer market can bear.

So most people are, [00:12:00] not gonna be able to afford a driverless car even if a safe one existed and could be operated in all the areas that humans drive in. But second, there’s I just see this as puffery saying, we’re back in the autonomy game. We had a bad run with Cruz.

We’re back in it just to help attract investment and that sort of thing. But at the same time, they’re being pretty clear that we’re not putting vehicles down the road without a driver there. There’s going to be a safety driver in the vehicle for the foreseeable future. So I guess it’s more of a it’s just one of these, we see a lot of companies doing this.

I think there’s, lift and all these companies around autonomy always seem like they want to keep their foot in the door. Whether or not they’re doing significant work in the area. My they

Fred: seem to think they, I’m sorry. They seem to think that there’s a growth path from level three operations to level four operations.

I don’t think there is because the requirements for level three in the requirements for [00:13:00] level four are quite different. And, if I were the in charge of engineering there, I would really look into that and lean into that. Very hard to say, are you building a foundation for eventual level four?

Are you setting up the requirements broadly enough so that we can grow from one to the other? Because if you’re only focusing on level three, you’re you’re pushing this development into a dead end,

Anthony: it’s gonna be interesting. Part of their push right now is to rehire some former cruise employees, which gives me pause because these former employees, directly responsible or not, were part of the problem.

You worked for an organization that was poorly run, did dangerous things and hey, looks like you might get your old job back. Keep quiet and keep marching. But that’s me. This is my long-winded gaslight. It’s just I have other options out in the world, but I think it’d be great if GM made a decent car.

Michael: Maybe do that [00:14:00] anytime Cruise or Kyle or GM comes into play on this podcast. I think your ears perk up a little.

Anthony: Yeah, it’s were you at to Gaslight now? Yeah. You can gaslight it up. Fred, you want to gaslight It

Fred: depends on who’s gonna win this week. Do we know that already or do we have to wait for the actual

Anthony: I feel competition respondent depends how much you guys suck.

If I win or not.

Waymo’s Liability Loophole

Fred: I’m going back to my old friends at Waymo. You got one, particularly the Waymo One application. The Waymo one app, which is what you download onto your phone if you want to. A ride on a Waymo seems like a privilege. So I downloaded it and I looked it over to see what was in there.

Didn’t complete the whole process because very few autonomous Waymo ones are available here in the hills of Western Massachusetts. But nevertheless I was curious to find how much of a warning they give to people about the liability they assume when they go [00:15:00] on their happily way with the Waymo.

So I went to the Waymo website, and when they’re talking about Waymo in Los Angeles, it’s very interesting because the quote somebody named Eva who says that she’s, she really loves using it because it is economical. It’s safe and private, and it’s sustainable. It says it provides convenience.

Prioritizes safety and is committed to sustainability. Makes it by far my favorite mode of transportation, says Eva. Now, Eva is is not credentialed in this particular publication. She looks like a typical human being, but who knows what avs are doing these days. And but the point of this is that when you look a little deeper into it, what you find is that the, there is no [00:16:00] notification on there that you are assuming liability or anything the Waymo does.

And if you look further at the Waymo websites, it talks about limitation liability, and states it to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law. Waymo and the other Waymo parties will not be liable to you under any theory of liability. Even if Waymo or the other Waymo parties have been advised of the possibility of such damages, the total liability of Waymo and the other Waymo parties for any claim arising out of or relating to these terms of our serv or our services, regardless of the form of the action, is limited to the amount paid, if any, by you to use our services.

So Michael, as I read that, basically it says if you are renting a Waymo anything that happens in that is on you. It’s not on Waymo. They’ve completely indemnify themselves, their officers, and, and shareholders. Assuming that is my [00:17:00] correct interpretation of what this plain English says, you would think that they would warn people who are using the services that, hey, this is, you are assuming.

Debt that could crush your life, you are assuming liability that is, that could ruin your life for the sake of taking that taxi down to the local train station. But there is no such warning on the Waymo one website and they blindly go on using, references like good old Eva to say it is really wonderful and that’s all you need to know.

So just sign up here. So that is that’s my Gaslight nominee for this week. The Waymo One application, which exposes you to unlimited liability or the Waymo going outta control and causing damages without giving you warning that is what you are assuming by using the service. That’s

Anthony: pretty good, Fred.

You’re gonna get points, but it’s not for what you think [00:18:00] you’re gonna get points for. Eva looks like a normal human. I mean was she does have that aspect in the picture. So Michael, before you jump into yours, can we follow up, is Fred’s interpretation of the law Correct. Do you assume full liability getting inside a Waymo?

Michael: I mean, whether or not that text makes them think that they’re, I don’t think they can do that. If something happens in that vehicle, it’s gonna be really hard for any court to hold you liable when you had absolutely no control over the vehicle’s operation. As much as Waymo would like to sign away, liability, I don’t think that’s gonna work.

Anthony: But I imagine you’re sign into, you sign up for forced arbitration.

Michael: Yeah. And that’s gonna be where the real issue is. Are you may not be liable for damages that occur in the crash but are you even gonna be able to get your case into court? If, even if you know you hit someone who is also signed up on the Waymo app and they’ve already signed the terms of service, did they somehow sign away their right to go to court?

We’re not sure that argument [00:19:00] could be made. And it probably would be made.

Anthony: So you should, before you get into a Waymo, I assume you should have you should only travel with an attorney and you should have assets at least in the eight figure range. Is that fair? Yeah.

Fred: Just for information to Section nine, indemnification, they say to the full system permitted by applicable law, you’ll indemnify defendant hold harmless way a witness, affiliates, officers, directors, agents, partners and employees individually and collectively.

And against any lost liability claim, demand damages, expenses or costs arising out of or related to your access to our use of our services.

Michael: Yep. I would say good luck to Waymo trying to get that to fly in an actual court, an arbitration, who knows? Yeah. Depends how much they’re paying the arbitrators.

Anthony: But let’s pretend the average consumer who gets this service manages to get into court. They’re gonna need really deep pockets to fight this. Or you’re gonna have to find some law firm that will be like, I’ll take [00:20:00] this on contingency, but they’re gonna be like, are there, class action firms are gonna be like, are there 800 other cases that I can bundle together?

Michael: I think in practice is where you probably, the language says one thing in practice. We know there have been incidents where I think there was an the dooring incident with the cyclist recently didn’t wamo cover the damages that were alleged. Even though a person in the vehicle opened the door, technically under California law, they would be liable.

So I don’t know, maybe, it might, the lawyers might have drafted that in the terms of service, but when it comes to the ultimate decisions, in cases where problems have occurred, Waymo has backed its vehicles and not gone after the consumer.

Anthony: It’s gonna be interesting.

Michael: Yeah, I, I don’t think that other men, Tesla is probably a good example of a company that would probably tend the other way.

We’ve seen how much they like to blame the human in, in, in any time it’s opportune [00:21:00] for them to do they will blame the human and try to shield themselves from liability. If, I don’t know, I guess I’m saying I would trust Waymo more than Tesla marginally in that area.

But it’s certainly interesting and it, this is one of those things that’s going to have to play out in the law and across all 50 states as autonomous vehicles make their way across the country. It’s one of those things that we just don’t know the answer to right now because the laws haven’t been written to account for computers driving vehicles.

Anthony: Hey, listeners, if you’ve got eight figures in your bank account, why don’t you go to auto safety.org and click donate. If you don’t have eight figures, all of us do, you just put, it matters where you put the decimal place, right? Yeah. Anyway. Auto safety.org, click on donate, do it once, do it, Bryce.

I don’t know why I’d do that anyway. Michael, you ready for your gaslight?

Michael: I am. I’m going back to that Zoox exemption Ooh. And the reason for that is there’s a, I’m gonna go to the provision that [00:22:00] the DOT and NHTSA are using for this. It’s called, it’s 49 US Code Section 31 1 4. Yeah, we knew that. And I’ll just read the provision, vehicles used for a particular purposes is the title of the provision.

And it says the Secretary of Transportation may exempt a motor vehicle or item of motor vehicle equipment from the certification section of the title. On terms the secretary decides are necessary for research, investigations, demonstrations, training, competitive racing events, show or display first of all and a major exemption.

I have. A major problem I have with this exemption is that this was written specifically for singular vehicles or items of equipment, right? It wasn’t written to cover fleets of autonomous vehicles like Zoox is [00:23:00] asked for an exemption for and been provided. It’s pretty clear. It says the secretary may exempt.

A motor vehicle or item of motor vehicle equipment. It doesn’t say anything about multiple vehicles fleets. And it’s and it’s restrictive in it in the way it says, things that are necessary for research investigation, demonstration. Typically the research and investigation. Part of that would be, NHTSA exempting, a safety vehicle that’s developed, which it did in the seventies and eighties for actual research investigations, not a publicly traded company testing these vehicles on the road.

So this provision was not written to apply to the situation that the DOT and NHTSA are applying it to here. And. Pretty simply, that’s why they get my Gaslight of the week because they are taking a provision that was written for, the Oscar Meyer Hotdog mobile for, special racing cars for [00:24:00] things that just clearly aren’t going to pass certification, but aren’t going to be used broadly, and they’re not going to impact motor vehicle safety.

’cause there aren’t that many of them on the road here. They’re giving an exemption to a fleet of autonomous vehicles. I think that clearly doesn’t qualify on as a special exemption. And for that reason, secretary Duffy and the folks at Nitza who backed this move, not all of them probably did, are gonna get my guess later of the week.

Fred: That’s a pretty good one. But okay. I must take issue because. I think that’s just a straight up example of corruption, because according to the Simply Psychology Today website, it says, gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse whereby a person or group manipulates one or more people into questioning their sanity and perception of reality.

Yeah, so I don’t know.

Michael: I don’t, my perception of sanity and reality is that the [00:25:00] secretary can only exempt one motor vehicle or piece of motor vehicle equipment for specific purposes. The secretary and the NHTSA are gaslighting me to believe that’s not true, and it’s causing me personal. It’s afflicting me.

So there we go.

Fred: Is it, are you questioning your sanity and perception of reality? Michael? This is more and more every day. All right. All right. I withdraw my objection.

Anthony: Okay. Look, before I get to scoring Fred, I think this is good for us because for our self-driving car business, I said we should make it the, we should make it, the car look like a giant hotdog, and now we can get an exemption for our fleet of self-driving hot dogs.

Excellent.

Fred: I’ve got that done. I’ve got some in my driveway right now, but I’m having trouble getting a permit. Hey, in Florida, everything’s free Texas. It’s because in the, in my version of the giant hot dog, people have to lie down. There are no seats and. That’s not getting passed. [00:26:00] I’ve self certified.

I’m self certified and I think that they’re ready to go, but still the problem exists.

Anthony: Okay. Ready for the winner of this week’s gaslight. Are we ready? Only if it’s me. No, it is Fred this week for saying, alright, God resembles a human. That’s it. That’s it. If you I like the leap you were taking, trying to interpret the law without that background, it seemed like it was pretty good.

And then you had to go to the dictionary and defined gaslight, which smelled of desperate, a little desperate. For that I’ll let you win this week. Thank you. Totally. Thank you. Thank you very much. He’s ridiculous. Okay.

Michael: Yeah, I’m still wavering on the, whether gaslighting is just lying under a different name or whether it’s really a different thing.

It’s, I dunno, when you really dive into it philosophically there’s not really a big difference.

Fred: Have you read on Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt?

Michael: I have to the extent that, especially because it’s [00:27:00] been covered a couple times in the towel of Fred.

Fred: It’s all explained. I’ll explain the net book.

Anthony: Yeah. Okay.

Lyft’s Autonomous Ambitions

Anthony: That’s your Piggly Wiggly speaking of gaslighting and bullshit lift is betting on Robotaxis to drive revenue growth. This is from the Wall Street Journal and basically it talks about how Lyft is like, Hey, let’s get autonomous vehicles. Let’s join that cool group like Waymo and like all these people.

The thing is, Lyft doesn’t own their own cars. They’re like Uber. Lyft has some, that they own, but but they’re like Uber where it’s just you’re an independent driver ’cause you’re not an employee because they’d have to pay a whole bunch of extra benefits and stuff and minimum wage.

And then you just you rent a service through an app. And then as you, as a customer, you go ahead, click and you wait for the Uber to the Lyft to show up. And then when it’s one block away, they cancel on you constantly. And anyway, I’m gonna quote from this wall Street Journal article because I think this really gets to the crux of their fantasy.

Quoting, ride sharing. Companies like Lyft will [00:28:00] gain bargaining power over drivers as they step up usage of autonomous vehicles, allowing them to push down wages, said an equity analyst at Morningstar that could help reduce costs for the companies, but they’re also paying more to operate an autonomous fleet.

They don’t have to deal with those goddamn people wanting, oh,

Fred: healthcare.

Anthony: Yeah. So that’s, that’s, I think what’s really the push here, but I think Lyft is, fantasizing about? Yeah, this is just, by the way,

Michael: opinion. Yeah. They’re fantasizing about how much they can make off of these operations as we’ve discussed ad nausea in the past, but also these announcements like this, we’re partnering with X, Y, and Z so we could pretend we’re keeping our foot in the autonomy race.

Lyft, I think, is really looking to be more of the platform that, that autonomous vehicle companies or people are using to ride autonomously versus building its own vehicle. In that respect, and Uber’s doing very similar things while they’re partnering with other folks.

They’re not [00:29:00] building the vehicles anymore. Or trying to, as they dip their toe into with Volvo when they, call us, what is. To this date, the only level four plus autonomous fatality in Arizona.

Anthony: Let’s move along and we’ll into that section of the show that makes people get a little nauseous, a little upset, some people a little flushed.

Tesla’s Robo Taxi Troubles

Anthony: It’s Tesla time. That’s right. We’ve talked about how Tesla has released their Robo Taxii in a very small section of Austin. And NHTSA sent some people down there to investigate these things because there’s lots of footage of them doing illegal things and making incorrect left turns, stopping in the middle of the street to let off passengers.

Just regular dumb stuff.

Tesla’s Confidentiality Tactics with NHTSA

Anthony: And I’m gonna quote from this article in Bloomberg NHTSA didn’t specify whether staff did in fact ride in Tesla’s robotaxis last month. The agency said in another filing dated August 6th. That it received [00:30:00] Tesla’s response to their July 1st emails last week, and that the information is subject to request for confidential treatment.

Basically, Nisa sends some requests to Tesla to Hey, give us this data about what your cars are doing. How many. One of the questions they ask us, how many cars are in this roboto, TAXII fleet? Tesla venture responds, but they’re like, this is confidential. We can’t share this with people. How can I do that with everything in my life?

Michael: Tesla’s been doing this for years with everything they’ve submitted to N NHTSA requesting blanket confidentiality, which is one big reason why we have trouble, the public is being super slow played by Tesla, right? As far as the stream of information, NHTSA is being slow, played by Tesla and has for some time now.

Last week we talked about how the data that they’ve submitted to and the responses they’ve submitted to NHTSA should be in question. When you see what happened in that, verdict in Florida over autopilot, the way that Tesla behaved there, if that’s indicative of how they’re behaving with, [00:31:00] NHTSA.

And we think there’s some truth to that. This, in this situation, you’ll, you see it right here. NHTSA NHTSA sends Tesla a, an information request May 8th asking, what the hell’s going on in Austin. Y’all are talking about it a lot on Twitter. We don’t have anything on it. What’s going on?

And you know it takes Tesla a month and a half. Plus just to give them some sort of response. But the response is so bad that then on July first Mitsa has to write an email to Tesla, basically asking all of the same things that they were asking in their initial request in May. Since nobody in the public can see any of this, because it’s all confidential, claimed confidential by Tesla.

We have no idea what’s really going on. But all outward appearances are that Tesla is dragging its feet and providing information to NHTSA about the safety of the robot. Taxis operating in Austin and NHTSA’s, trying their best to get information out of Tesla, writing [00:32:00] them letters, writing them emails, scheduling meetings with them, and they’re still not getting relevant information.

So that’s concerning. It’s really concerning given Tesla’s history and the fact that it just looks like Tesla wants it to bullshit its way through life and not actually cover all of its sa safety areas and make sure that these ve that the vehicles and the processes and everything that’s going on there ensures some sort of safety.

So that’s where we’re at. I would call again for NHTSA to start using its authority to penalize Tesla. When you give an incomplete response to the government when they’re requesting this stuff, it says right there in the letter they send to Tesla in May, you’re subject to civil penalties for delay, for not providing full responses.

It’s pretty clear Tesla’s not providing full responses based on just the different, just the email two months later in July asking the same questions that were in the first one. So this is [00:33:00] just an area where NHTSA needs to. Really clamp down on Tesla. And you know what? The civil penalties aren’t certainly gonna really hamper Tesla financially, but they will certainly send a signal and enough of them means you could probably call the DOJ and try to go after a more substantial penalty that’s not provided for in, in that area.

So it’s frustrating to read these types of things and to see how Tesla’s able to just stymie a gov government investigations.

Anthony: I think Michael’s trying to gaslight us thinking that we can go to the DOJ and have them investigate Tesla.

Michael: Occasionally what’ll happen if there’s a larger pattern of.

Bad behavior on the part of an auto company. That’s what’s, that’s what happens. And you think that

Anthony: would happen in this world?

Michael: Nexa goes to the no, not with this department. You go Department of Justice, but that’s why you’re gas technically how the process has played out in the past.

But yes, I’m gaslighting our listeners, making them think that the Department of Justice is a Department of Justice.

Anthony: So NHTSA [00:34:00] sends his requests, Tesla writes back and says, confidentiality. Is there any way for the public to be like, bullshit and file a request against that? Be like,

Michael: yeah, you could file a foyer request.

However, you might as well go ahead and call a lawyer and put them on retainer because first of all, you may or may not receive a response in the next year. NHTSA sometimes goes through these files. And comes up with they, they redact the portions that are actually confidential and they make public the rest, but that usually takes them longer than it takes for the investigations to complete.

Usually, it could be two, three years in the past. I’m not sure what the time lag is right now, but ultimately you’re gonna have to, go to court to get some of these documents made public. And that’s super expensive and it’s something not everyone can afford to do. I think that, major media companies are some of the few folks who can afford to take on that kind of process and access [00:35:00] these, this information.

But the at the federal level, the Freedom Information Act is functionally broken and it’s makes it very difficult and expensive to even think about acquiring confidential business information or information that’s been claimed to be confidential business information.

Tesla’s Permit for Ride-Hailing in Texas

Anthony: Moving on to the next Tesla bit of nonsense.

This is an article in CNBC and the title confuses me and the background of the article confuses me a little bit. It’s titled Tesla Robotaxis Scores Permit to Run Ride Hailing Service in Texas. Now, I personally thought that’s what they’ve been doing for the last month, but now they’ve been granted a permit to run a ride hailing business in Texas.

So now that they can compete against Uber and Lyft, oh, I guess previously they were just, it was invite only. It was, yeah,

Michael: if they, yeah, if they wanna open up to the public, they have to be certified as a transportation network company like Uber or Lyft would be

Anthony: right further from the article. This is hilarious.

The Austin fleet consists of model y vehicles equipped with ADA’s, Tesla’s latest, partially automated driving [00:36:00] systems. I like how they say it’s partially automated driving systems, but they’re selling it as fully automated driving systems. Oey. I am quoting Musk was characterized himself as pathologically optimistic, said on Tesla’s earning call last month that he believes Tesla could serve half of the US population by the end of 2025 with autonomous ride hailing services.

Oh my God. He left out the part where his goal with Doge is to kill off 90% of US populations. So he can make that statement true. What is is there anything else to even add into this nonsense?

Michael: Yeah, essentially Texas got, Tesla got a permit to operate as a taxi company. Which they’re doing since they have, they have a driver in the vehicle and a driver sitting behind a remote monitor for every one of these cars.

So you get two drivers for the price of one.

Anthony: And fun. Tesla News.

US Military Buys Tesla Cybertrucks

Anthony: The US military has bought two cyber trucks. [00:37:00] Not to drive around on, not to look for security failures, but to do what? Blow up. Use it as targets. Yeah. Use it as targets blow up. ’cause they’re saying the US military is hey it looks like some third world dictators might wanna have these as their own little armored vehicles and let’s just see how well we can blow them up.

I don’t know. What did our local third world dictator, did he get a cyber truck or does he go for a different one?

Fred: No, he is got a free airplane. He got a, oh man, that’s a better deal. That is a better deal indeed. He is a great deal maker as we know.

Tesla’s Joe Mode and Safety Concerns

Anthony: Alright, last Tesla story before we cry. There’s a, something called Joe Mode in a Tesla Joe mode.

I don’t get it, but Joe Mode. Essentially what it does is it makes all the alarms, alerts, bells, whistles inside your car quieter. So if you turn signal with that click click type thing, that’ll [00:38:00] become, and like beeps and boops and bops. ’cause somebody named Joe was like, ah, my car’s too loud while I’m falling asleep and letting it drive itself.

Michael, you you think this is not a legal thing.

Michael: It’s questionable. I would, they’re saying that it doesn’t impact the safety features, however, they go ahead then to say, that it reduces the volume for the sounds coming from turd signals, parking sensors, seatbelt reminders, importantly autopilot and other general notifications.

It doesn’t seem to impact some of the A DAS features. The lane departure, ae automatic emergency braking, that type of thing. There are certain. Sound threshold you have to reach for warnings under the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. And what you’re basically doing here is allowing people to put a kill switch on the volume to some of those things, which is, it’s, I would encourage NHTSA to take a look this, just to make sure [00:39:00] that, for instance, you’re not killing the seatbelt reminders, which are pretty effective in getting people to buckle up due to their annoyance.

And also if you’re, there I don’t, we don’t know what the full scope of this feature is. It’s not clear from the article. We should probably look and see if we can figure that out and see if that’s available on Tesla’s website. But it seems shady, it seems like there could be some issues with Federal motor vehicle safety standards, which require certain sound levels for some of these safety features.

Fred: If any of our listeners were in the meeting in which people discussed which of these legal standards are important to sustain and which of them we can ignore please give us a call or send us a note. We’d love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

Anthony: There’s also a hidden mode another one called Joe Mama Mode, where the car just yells at the other drivers around you that they’re driving poorly and to keep their baby safe.

Yeah. [00:40:00] Sounds good. It doesn’t sound too bad. Hey, Fred, you ready to talk some more? Sure. I love talking. I’m not

Fred: very good at it, I still try. He

Anthony: stumbles out of his face. Okay. Is this gonna be something that, that the layman can understand? Absolutely. Are you gonna keep it under 20 minutes?

Fred: I’m not sure about that, but we’ll give it a whirl.

Anthony: Alright.

Car Hacking Through Tire Pressure Sensors

Anthony: The TA of Fred.

Fred: Alright, so this week I wanted to talk about, a report that came out that people have found a new way of breaking into your car by going through the tire pressure sensors that every car now has. So the way these tire pressure sensors work is that as the car moves due to the vibration, a very small amount of electric energy is produced inside the tire, inside the mechanism that reports the tire pressure and that connects to through a wireless connection to the CAN bus that’s inside of your [00:41:00] car.

Now, the CAN bus is common access network, I think it stands for, and that’s how all of the different electronic control units in the car communicate with each other. So that sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo. So I wanted to explain that in more prosaic terms. So let’s consider the case of a pizza delivery.

If you want a pizza, you call up perhaps you’d call somebody and say, I’d like to get a pizza. And you order your pizza with specifications. And that pizza is like the data that’s carried in the message to the Can bus. So the can bus is like the network that you see in apartment buildings where you’ve got a bunch of the mailboxes and buzzers and if you want to get in and talk to somebody, you push a buzzer.

So what the, what the ECU does, the electronic control unit does is like the delivery person who gets to the apartment building [00:42:00] and they push a button and the person ideally on the other end will be the right person and they’ll say who is this? And they’ll say, pizza. And they hit the door buzzer and it comes in.

Okay, so that’s the way the CAN bus works. The data announces itself from one electronic control unit and the CAN bus electronically says, okay, I’m gonna transmit this information. Like the person who is pushing the buzzer to the CAN bus. And then if it’s accepted, like the person opening the door, then the can bus allows the message to get carried through and the data is delivered to the recipient.

So it’s the pizza delivery person goes up to the 10th floor, goes to build apartment 10 0 3, opens the door, delivers the pizza, everybody’s happy, went to the right place at the right [00:43:00] time. So what somebody has figured out is that the wireless. Length between your tires and the can bus in your car can be interrupted.

It’s like the pizza delivery person has been hijacked and somebody gives them the wrong pizza and that wrong pizza’s gonna be delivered to the address rather than the pizza that was being ordered.

Anthony: This is like what I do in my buildings, like Friday night. I just hang out by the front door, see delivery guys come by and be like, Hey, that’s for me.

Yeah that’s me. That’s right. Open the

Fred: door and take whatever they’ve got. Fix’s, gee. Yeah, because that works. Yeah. So it’s like that. So that’s how this all works. And the problem with of course is that it can break into the delivery service. And rather than you getting the pepperoni pizza you delivered, you end up getting a box full of let’s just say bullshit because that’s what we talked about in this show.

And that’s not what you want, but. The [00:44:00] person who is delivering it the person with a bad intent has succeeded in putting that malware or that bad content into your apartment. And that’s the whole point of this. Now, why is that important? A lot of information about your car is traveling on that can bus, so brakes information, light information.

If you have a steering that is controlled electronically the direction that you want to travel is carried on the can bus. So a lot of very critical information can be injected into the system and subvert the normal operation of the vehicle. Now this can, this is an intrinsic problem with a can bus.

It could be solved by encryption of the data or authentication. What does authentication mean? You call up the pizza delivery place and you give your [00:45:00] order and they tell you, okay, your order is number 47. So now when the pizza delivery person comes to your apartment and they click buttons at random, right?

And the right one answers, it opens the communication channel and says, who is this? The pizza delivery person says, pizza number 47. And you say, okay, and you open the door and let them in. You know that there’s, a relationship between that pizza and what you actually ordered. That’s the authentication.

Now, there’s a lot of sophistication that goes into this because you could have 10 pizza delivery people show up at the same time and start randomly pushing buttons. So unless you’ve got some authentication procedure there’s no way of these. Piece of delivery people de conflicting and, getting the right pieces to the right place.

But that’s a kind of second order problem. The real problem is that by injecting information into this wireless communication that [00:46:00] every car has got, you can control that car, critical aspects of that car’s operation live and in person as the car goes down the road. There are this is similar to people breaking into a headlight and just physically connecting to the can bus through the can bus connection to the smart headlight or some other part of your vehicle.

So that’s what this is all about. When we were, and when we talk about that, and I had thought we’d be talking about that by now, but I wanted to give that background to people as to how that works and why it’s important. And also point out that nobody and the car business that I know of. Is putting encryption into these links or authentication into these links to make sure that the right data is being delivered at the right time to the right address.

This is a vulnerability that everybody’s got and sounds like a great opportunity for [00:47:00] a spy movie to, to hijack your car in during a chase and make sure that the bad guy ends up in a bad situation. But this is real. This is an exposure that we’ve all got that has not been fixed. So is that’s concludes my rant.

That’s pretty good On the wireless. I think it was only seven minutes. So

Michael: Anthony should be doing cartwheels.

Anthony: So should you recommend that consumers go to their vehicles right now and remove their tire pressure monitoring system, prevent this, or should they just remove

Fred: their tires? No, I don’t. I, what I recommend is that the manufacturers recognize this risk among many other risks, particularly for self-driving vehicles, because any self-driving vehicle has that same exposure and has that same link.

And it would be very easy to, for example, set up a [00:48:00] wireless system that makes the self-driving vehicle stop in front of you, exposing the passengers to whatever threat you wish, because you then have control over the vehicle. You can open the doors, you can shut down the vehicle, you can change the address, is supposed to deliver the person tos.

It is a huge exposure that can only be covered by the manufacturers, and they’re not doing it today. Another thing folks don’t get warned about when they use their Waymo one application.

Anthony: So from the article you alluded to, I’m gonna quote from it it’s an MSN article. The current regulatory landscape for vehicle cybersecurity is still evolving with various initiatives underway to address the vulnerabilities associated with connected cars in the United States.

The NHTSA has issued guidelines for vehicle cybersecurity, encouraging manufacturers to adopt best practices to protect against better potential threats. So the, these [00:49:00] guidelines we know have no weight behind them has, and it doesn’t look like anybody has made any progress towards this.

Fred: And remember that these best practices are all being developed by engineers who work for the companies who have vested interest in making sure that these standards and best practices are as loose and inconsequential as possible.

Yeah. But,

Anthony: Encrypting the signal like that’s not. Complex. They don’t have to use some crazy super long key to do this. That would burden, I wouldn’t,

Fred: I don’t know what, what’s required to be safe these days, but a combination of encryption and authentication using something like the Mac address of the ECU would go a long way towards doing that.

But somebody’s got to do it

Anthony: right. And until then we just remove the tires from your car or nevermind. Just walk. Everywhere you go. Just walk. Before we go into [00:50:00] recalls hey, let’s go.

Most Stolen Vehicles in the US

Anthony: The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has a great article that we’re linking to about the most stolen vehicles.

And I was surprised ’cause I remember back in the day it always seemed to be like the Honda Accord or the Honda Civic was like always the top of this chart because I guess chop shots, they could get the parts turned around quickly.

Michael: There was, yeah, there were some key on, I think on some Japanese cars in the nineties.

Anthony: Yeah, that’s what it was.

Michael: And two thousands there were, it was really easy to fake the key. You could see a lot of filed down keys used at least in, in the police videos. I see. There always seems to be a guy in a stolen car with either a messed up steering column or a filed down key.

Anthony: But times have a changed and it’s no longer the Japanese of the top of this chart America, number one.

Number one. And people, the people are stealing a Chevy Camaro, ZL one. What? Why, I guess you’re doing the owner’s a [00:51:00] favor, but like why would you steal that car?

Michael: It could be that it’s just, like we saw, this IHS study looks at the 22 to 24 model year. So it’s not going back to all the problems we’ve seen with Hyundai, ikea.

And the stolen vehicles there. They’re newer vehicles that are covered here, performed great. I don’t see any of ’em the top 20, but there are a lot of pickup trucks. And the Camaro comes in first and third, right? I would just have to assume that there’s some type of either demand, specific demand for these vehicles on the street, or they’re just easy for whatever reason, easy to get into.

In fact, a, there’s a lot of GM vehicles, I think six or seven in the top 10 here, which just maybe they wanna take a look at their security. A lot of people love, Ford’s not in the top 20, it’s a, which is surprising.

Anthony: The F-150 is the number one selling car, right? Yeah.

Truck, a ridiculous amount of them,

Michael: but it’s dominated by GMs and a few Chrysler vehicles [00:52:00] scattered in too. But it could be

Anthony: the thiefs are like, I don’t wanna have to deal with the recalls after I steal this car. Yeah, that’s why we leave

Michael: Ford the loan. Also, the four out the top five least stolen vehicles are Teslas, which means even thieves don’t want ’em anymore.

Fred: Alright, Fred, if you steal a car, are you still able to get your car service and recalls?

Michael: I, I would assume if you walked it into a dealership and said, I need to have this recall fixed, they might do it even if you’re not the owner, I’m not, I guess it would depend on the dealership.

I don’t know if, I can’t recall, at the Volkswagen dealer, when I bring my car in for repairs or recall, I don’t recall them IDing me. So they have really no way to identify who I am. So I assume you could, I don’t know, as a thief a I don’t know. There’s two. I don’t know if you can fit that in the same person.

Someone who is both a car thief and concerned about recalls.

Fred: Oh, Anthony, that’s great news for you and your Maserati.

Anthony: Hey. Oh, it’s just my [00:53:00] neighbor’s Maserati. I’m just holding on the keys for ’em and yeah, it’s good. Hey listeners, if you’ve stolen a car and tried to get it recalled let us know about it.

Save your bail money, just hang out. You get three hots on a cot and donate auto safety.org. Click on donate. And with that, let’s go into the world of recalls.

Recent Vehicle Recalls

Anthony: First up, Nissan 13,719 vehicles, the 2025 Nissan Frontier. And the issue is some engine control ROM software. The what’s going?

The body control module signal, the, that, I can’t read this. Yeah.

Michael: It’s so much easier than how you’re making it here. So the daytime running lamps on these vehicles there’s like a disruption when the stop start system comes on and turns your vehicle, essentially turns your vehicle off for a second.

So not only does it interfere with your air conditioning, it might also make your daytime running lights blink immediately. Now, interestingly, [00:54:00] daytime running lamps are not. Mandated to be an operation on all vehicles, but, and they possibly should be. I think there is a safety argument for that, that they would make all vehicles on the road more visible.

And I believe that they’re mandated in Canada, but the United States has not followed that path. And perhaps they should, but if you do install them on your vehicle, then they have to work properly. You can’t get away with, you can’t get away with a problem like this by saying, oh, we didn’t have to have ’em anyway.

No. Once you’ve installed daytime running lamps on a vehicle, you have to have them work the way they’re supposed to being turned off when the stop starts system kicks in doesn’t fly. And so they’re gonna have to recall these. I think they’re, I’m guessing there’s going to be a software update here.

Yeah, they’re updating the software on the engine control module looks like a pretty. Quick trip to the dealership for this one, and owners should be hearing about it in about a [00:55:00] month.

Anthony: We will never follow Canada. How dare you suggest that Michael? We

Michael: need to follow Canada on some Canada things now.

Always

Anthony: on top of us. It’s

Michael: day for us. We still need to catch up with them on the theft standard and on the daytime running lamps and a number of things. Go back to the episode with George Inni from, what, three or four months ago? We got a lot to do to catch Canada. Their fatality rates have dropped in the last 10 years while Americas has have leapt.

Anthony: Yeah. Number one. Next recall. Bored. What, how are they on this list? 103,174 vehicles. The 2025 Ford F-150. 2020 Ford. 2023 F1 fifties. That’s it. The rear axle hub bolt may break due to fatigue and will no longer prevent micro movement between the hub spines and the actual shafts. SP spines over time in an corrosive environment, like a road corrosion, and the micro mi micro movement may result in wearing of the hub splines, which gle the loss of torque transfer to the wheel end.

Michael: That [00:56:00]

Anthony: And what does that mean? Doesn’t sound good at all. I just said words. I don’t even know what any of them mean. What does that

Michael: ultimately, the concern here is that if you’re if your rear axle hubs lines are stripped, you can have problems with the vehicle rolling away while it’s in part because the transmission can’t hold it in park.

But it also looks like it can cause a loss of motive power. So you’re gonna stop moving when you’re not in four wheel drive which you’re gonna, we’re gonna,

Fred: they’re gonna be in a world of hurt. This is called fretting corrosion. And as you aimed after you.

Anthony: Spreading from corrosion.

Fred: I wish, but no, it’s just called, and it’s caused by small vibrations.

If you may have seen this on a door hinge. Little black powder on the other side of the door hinge from the moving back and forth. That’s called spreading corrosion.

Anthony: Anyway last recall coming up Tesla five vehicles, what, five vehicles? Yeah, we had a slow, we had a slow week this week, so I picked out one.

This is weird. This is the 2026 Tesla model [00:57:00] Y. Oh, I understand. It was because only five of them have been sold because no one wants to buy a Nazi mobile. There we go. An inoperable horn may increase the risk of collision. That sucks. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. It’s, and then it looks like there’s, they’re blaming you on the supplier here.

They didn’t secure the ring terminal. Of the horn ground wire. And that results in a loss of continuity in the horn circuit. But basically you won’t have a horn if there’s a problem here. And the crazy thing about this, recall to me was that owners, you’re gonna hear about it and later in September, it’s not gonna be an over the air recall, either it’s a physical part.

That’s a problem. But, you would think they would go in and ground the horn wire. That’s the problem here, the horn ground wire. But what they’re doing is just replacing the entire steering wheel so you get a new steering wheel.

Anthony: That’s great. And when you come in, they’ll finish your swastika tattoo.

Michael: Excellent.

Anthony: Great. Ah, and with that, folks, that’s another episode of your life. [00:58:00] I hope you feel educated, improved, relaxed, serene. Thanks for listening folks.

Fred: I don’t have those same aspirations, but thank you very much for listening.

Anthony: All right. That’s Fred and Corrosion saying goodbye.

Fred: For more information, visit www.auto safety.org.