A Dive into Automotive Safety with Dr. Jonathan Gitlin

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

Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Fred saying good morning to everybody. Good morning, everybody. Oh, my God. It’s so loud in my head.

[00:00:38] Meet Dr. Jonathan Gitlin

[00:00:38] Anthony: Anyway, today we’re joined by Dr. Jonathan Gitlin. He is the senior automotive writer for Ars Technica. Is that right? That’s right.

Good morning, everyone. Great. Thanks for joining us.

[00:00:50] Journey from Pharmacology to Automotive Writing

[00:00:50] Anthony: And before we start, I want to find out how do you go from being a doctor to being like, hey, let me write about cars. Thanks.

[00:00:58] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: So a long time ago, I did a [00:01:00] PhD in pharmacology, which is how I ended up in America. I came out here originally to do a postdoc for a year, and that was in cardiovascular disease.

And I had been interested, I’ve been interested in cars since I was about 16, and also liked science. And it turned out the one thing I really liked from my PhD, was the writing and not the experiments. But anyway, so I’m in California for a couple of years. And I had a Mazda Miata as the car and I realized my second year where I was living, my drive to work in Torrey Pines could either be 45 minutes on the freeway, like the 101 or the 5 or I could take the back roads which added maybe 10 minutes to the drive and I got there with a smile on my face.

And I realized after a while, like the high point of my day was driving to and from work. And not really anything I was doing in between and we were also postdocs. Generally, then we’re doing a lot of organizing, trying to work out, Hey, what are we going to do for careers? Cause there’s no faculty jobs for anyone to go to.

So Oh, you need to work out like what else you can do with your life. And so at that point I figured, something to do with writing and cars would probably be a good idea. And it took about another 11 years before that happened. [00:02:00] So I then. I did another postdoc for a bit and then got my green card and moved to go work for the government doing science policy which is how I ended up here in D.

C. And so that was fun for a while and then got quite not fun and I was thinking of something else to do. And a very long time ago when I, also when I had come to the States originally in the early 2000s, I had started the science section for Ars Technica and hadn’t really been writing that much whilst I was at NIH, but Hey, you guys should have a car section.

You should let me come write about it. Cause cars getting super computerized right now and fits in with the tech thing. And after just, bugging them for a while, they eventually just said, yes, to make me be quiet. And that was, we launched the cost, the car vertical in 2014. It’ll be 10 years, I think in September.

[00:02:41] Anthony: Wow. That’s amazing.

[00:02:42] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I know that’s how I did it. Yeah. I just basically had to make myself a job, I think.

[00:02:48] Anthony: That’s great.

[00:02:48] Life as an Automotive Writer

[00:02:48] Anthony: So I know all of us have read probably most of your articles as they come out. And so you’re trying out a new car like once a week or something like that?

[00:02:57] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Maybe a little less often than that, but yeah, certainly I would say [00:03:00] at least a couple of months.

[00:03:01] Anthony: Okay. And so do your neighbors think you’re a drug dealer because you’re always showing up with a new car?

[00:03:06] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: It has been quite funny, but where we live currently, we have there’s like a, we’re in a co op that has an off street parking lot. And I did have one very irate older lady come up to me about three years ago.

And she might have been even before the pandemic and she was really angry. And she shouted at me, Why can’t you just pick one car and stick with it? Why do you have to change them every week? I explained to her what the job was. In my previous, where we lived before, where we had street parking there were a lot of young kids that lived on the street and they were very excited when they worked out what happened, what I was doing.

Cause they, they would get rides in like when we got exotic cars, they would go for a ride.

[00:03:41] Anthony: Oh my God, that sounds amazing. Then

[00:03:43] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Crestfall, when we got the first Ferrari to test because, I told them a few weeks in advance and they were super excited about it. And when it showed up and it was grey, they were heartbroken.

Because they would say it would be like red or yellow. It’s oh I guess you don’t want to go for a ride. No, we will. [00:04:00] Yeah, that’s great.

[00:04:01] Experiences with Test Cars

[00:04:01] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Actually, speaking of something I suppose is relevant for the topic of this podcast is the best thing with them was showing the kids that even on a front engine supercar that has a frunk that’s maybe big enough for, carry on suitcase still legally has to have a day glow or an illuminated trunk release button in the inside in case someone stuffs you in there so you can escape.

And this one kid, James, who was about five, very, was like, can I try it out? I was like, If your parents come to me and tell me that’s okay to my face, yes. , the optics of me stuffing a little five-year-old kid in the trunk of a, of an Audi R eight. Be very bad if someone saw me, so

[00:04:39] Anthony: that would be amazing.

Did James ever pull the release?

[00:04:43] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: He did. He got in and he popped up and then anytime any other front engine cars turned up, he wanted to climb in the front .

[00:04:49] Anthony: That’s great.

[00:04:50] Discussion on ADAS Features

[00:04:50] Anthony: I think right before we started, I mentioned that, you have a lot more exposure to new cars than we do. You’re trying them out all the time, and I’ve mentioned on this show a bunch of times how my [00:05:00] car is, it’s a 2020 car, and it’s got all sorts of ADAS features, And what have you and I’m slowly it took me three years to learn like what one icon on my steering wheel did.

I thought it was honestly I thought it was turning off automatic emergency braking. It’s an icon of a car with three little radiating waves out of it and I’m like this why would I ever want to turn that off that’s stupid.

[00:05:19] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: That’s the distance control for your adaptive cruise control.

[00:05:22] Anthony: I know that now.

Also, a really dangerous feature. Why would I want to do that? I’m going down the highway at the legally regulated speed limit. Why do I want to make it so now I’m one car distance away?

[00:05:34] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: So I guess I suppose that would be useful in traffic if you’re like in dense traffic and you’ve been using adaptive cruise control and you want to maybe reduce the distance so you’re not leaving a huge gap and then some lots of people cut in front of you.

That’s probably the only time you want to set it to that lower distance.

[00:05:49] Anthony: In city driving, like it should prevent you from doing that. Maybe not city

[00:05:51] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: driving because people shouldn’t be using adaptive cruise control on surface streets.

[00:05:55] Anthony: Oh wait, oh, is that true?

[00:05:57] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I think increasingly they do.

I know the system [00:06:00] is really designed for, um, for highways, for like closed access divided lane highways, but Lots of us have been known to do it. It’s a good way. You can set it to 20 miles an hour and then you’re not breaking any urban speed limits.

[00:06:12] Anthony: Yeah. Cause mine, I actually read the manual and all, and it has separate settings for city versus highway.

Oh, it does. Okay. Which is neat. And it’s not a fancy car. It’s a little Toyota Corolla.

[00:06:21] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Yeah, Toyota said it’s okay. They have their, I can’t remember the name of it. Like they have an active safety net that they basically, their ADAS is it’s very much meant to, to cost it and protect the driver from the things around them.

Um, I can’t remember the name of it right now. Anyway,

[00:06:35] Anthony: I think it’s Toyota Safety Sense. Yeah, that’s it. There you go. So what I want to know is you’re trying out all these cars all the time, and I’m sure the manufacturers Oh, actually you can tell us, are the manufacturers saying, hey, here are all these cool safety features involved.

Here’s how you use all these 800 buttons that we’ve stuck on the driver’s side door. Or do they just say, get in, go, hey, go really fast, man.

[00:06:57] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: So they, there’s very, the, Briefings [00:07:00] beforehand are usually more of a technical briefing on the car specs itself. So no, there’s not really a lot of guidance into how, here’s like the UI and how you should do it.

In fact, one of the last, one of the last ones or last drives I remember going on where anything like that happened was, it was a Mazda drive. And this would have been three or four years ago, maybe longer, where they took the time to explain the fact that in that car, it was the CX 30 and it didn’t have a touch screen because they’d moved the screen back further on the dash.

And they said here, like there’s physical controls here and we spend five minutes just talking about them. So you know how to use them. So when you write about it, you can explain to your audience, Hey, there’s physical controls here. There’s some shortcuts. Here’s how you use them. And you don’t have to take your eyes off the road because there’s no touch screen.

That is definitely the exception. I think. So pretty much you just have to like, yeah, the same way you’ve been trying to work out what the different icons do, we do that. And then after the drive, we compare notes with like friends and so what did that button do for you? I think. Oh my God.

So yeah, they [00:08:00] do. However, I will add that they usually tell us not to speed and, we’ll say any traffic tickets you get are yours.

[00:08:05] Anthony: I saw, how many traffic tickets

[00:08:06] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: have you gotten? Oh, the last one I had was in 2017 in New York state and it was very expensive and I’ve been very careful not to get any since then.

Yeah, I’ve got It was on Taconic Parkway and I think I had assumed that it was a 70 mile an hour road and it’s not, it was a 50 mile an hour limit there.

[00:08:25] Fred: There’s a dead deer by the side of the road that had my initials on it, so be careful on Taconic State Parkway.

[00:08:30] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Alright. I have been very careful ever since everywhere driving New York.

[00:08:34] Fred: Hey, so I have a question for you. I’ve read a lot of reviews of cars, of course, and all the reviews tend to separate out. The safety features from the performance features, particularly with with electric vehicles, they’re quite heavy and they also accelerate quite fast and I think that, if you were to take all the power available on something like the Polestar, put it through the rear wheels, you’re [00:09:00] going to be spinning the tires and you’re going to be scaring the hell out of the driver as well as everybody else around you.

You also have a momentum in the car and kinetic energy that probably Is probably exceeds what these barriers along the side of the road and can withstand. Is it fair to treat these as separate issues? Or is it really important to see the coupling between performance features and the safety degradation that might cause?

[00:09:30] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: So I think weight is definitely something the industry has to really seriously grapple with. And I think the trouble is right now, when the view from consumers, particularly those who haven’t had EVs before, and whilst public fast charging infrastructure isn’t very good, is that you don’t People do think they need long range, and that means massive batteries, and that means really heavy cars and most of the stuff I’ve driven recently has been over 5, 000 pounds, which is massive and you’re right, that, travelling at 70 [00:10:00] miles an hour, hitting a guardrail is not going to be great The other issue actually also is that even, EVs being, let’s say, 10 15 percent heavier than a normal gasoline car, also means much more tar particulates, which it turns out are a huge source of microplastics in the environment.

So that’s also quite bad. I think on the performance side of things actually in practice, once people start driving the cars regularly, I think most people End up defaulting to like whatever the eco mode is which usually so that, there’ll be several different modes with different throttle mappings and you won’t get so sport will usually be the most linear throttle and the most power.

There’s a comfort setting somewhere between eco will be will have the least linear throttle response. So you get not very much for the first. Two inches of travel, as it were and often if it’s an all wheel drive EV, those will default to just one motor, which is usually rear wheel drive, because it’s more efficient that tends to avoid, because I’ve noticed with the EVs that are super powerful, for example, if you have a passenger in the car and, the [00:11:00] initial acceleration is often so violent that they smack their heads against the back of their headrest all the time.

And that’s not, you can’t, if I’m driving my wife somewhere in a car, I can’t do that. I think in some way it becomes. I suppose for some people it becomes self correcting because you just put the car in the lower power mode and you get better efficiency. And one of the things I find about EVs is actually they’re quite good at encouraging you to drive slowly compared to gasoline cars.

It’s very easy to drive at sort of 15, 20 miles an hour around town in an EV compared to drive a Porsche Taycan slowly around DC in a way that you couldn’t drive, I think a Porsche Boxster drive around DC, if that makes sense. But High horsepower is much easier to do with EVs and gasoline cars, you know There’s not really much of an impediment for just putting a larger motor and it’s not like The OEMs would save money by offering less powerful motors So I think it’s a trend that’s probably not going to go anywhere for the time being and I don’t know if that entirely answers your question.

It was a stab at it

[00:11:54] Fred: I don’t think there’s a simple answer, but I we are continually concerned about [00:12:00] the huge amounts of kinetic energy in these vehicles. And I did a quick calculation and a typical EV at 70 miles an hour has about the same kinetic energy as the chemical energy in a hand grenade.

So there’s a lot of energy floating around out there and people are not trained in in any sense to have comparable awareness of the energy as they would if they were trained to throw a hand grenade. So if you

[00:12:23] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: want me to get on my soapbox about the fact that this country needs to just please box, so we yeah.

[00:12:31] Public Transportation vs. Car Dependency

[00:12:31] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: In our comment section, we often get people who don’t like cars and think we should have fewer cars who just, who show up and post videos from a couple of YouTube channels and get all ranty about getting rid of cars, and that’s fine I don’t personally own a car anymore, I live a block from Metro and I walk everywhere, so I understand the desire to have more kind of urbanist 15 minute cities and the rest of it I think that’s great But I also think the solution has to be much more multi pronged than that.

The, yes, this country is hugely auto dependent. But I don’t [00:13:00] think you could ban all cars unless you then had some mechanism for everyone who then wouldn’t be driving to get around the place. We need much more public transport, but we also need much better driver licensing. You know what I mean?

Having done. driving tests in the UK and then driving tests in America when they’re not even in the same league. It’s, they basically give you a license here in a cornflake packet. And which in one way I can understand because it’s a de facto national ID and everyone basically needs a driver’s license.

If you don’t have a driver’s license, it’s very difficult to live in America in the 21st century. But we’re really not preparing a lot of people to get in control of, three, four, 5, 000 pound machines that can, cause a lot of damage if they don’t know what they’re doing. And driving standards since the pandemic, particularly around in this area, are shockingly bad.

It’s, it terrifies me. So yes, I think we absolutely need to make it harder to get a driver’s license. But the trouble is if you then, if you do that without giving people some other way of getting to work and getting to school and getting to the shops, then it becomes inherently discriminatory.

So [00:14:00] it’s.

[00:14:01] Fred: Oh, yeah, I agree. Particularly, and even in Washington where you are, you have a superlative public transportation compared to almost any other part of the country.

[00:14:11] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: But only in certain parts of the city. There’s still other bits where, there’s some bits where you live.

I’m lucky enough to now live in a bit where I’m quite close to the metro. Before this, we were about three quarters of a mile from the subway. And it was, when it’s 100 degrees outside in the summer, it’s, that’s a much less you feel much less good about walking to the metro rather than taking a car on days like those.

[00:14:31] Anthony: Yeah. Oh, sorry, Michael. Go ahead.

[00:14:34] Driving Tests and Licensing Standards

[00:14:34] Michael: I was just gonna say there’s a real big problem that I’ve noticed, I’m from a fairly rural area in Mississippi and when I read some of the columns from people in the urbanism movement, I get the feeling that they’re not really thinking about everyone else living in America out in the country and it’s going to be really difficult to.

To get mass transportation to get transportation [00:15:00] options out to areas where there’s really no economic incentive to do and a lot of the and also back to your point, I watch a lot of comedy coming out of the UK panel show type things. And I’ve noticed on those that there are routinely people who do not have licenses because they could not pass the UK’s driving tests and we don’t hear about that.

In the United States, simply put. And I think the U. K. tests are

[00:15:26] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: probably actually easier than quite a few of the ones in Europe. The thing that always got me was one of the things they teach you have to be able to reverse around a corner. And there’s actually two different kinds, there’s like a corner with a round curve and a corner with a square curve.

And I remember that took me quite a long time to try and get the hang of. And I can’t tell you, I’m not sure when the last time I reversed around a corner now was, but. That skill is in there somewhere.

[00:15:50] Anthony: When I lived in D. C. My license had expired and I had to take a road test again. And I swear to God it was literally just drive around the block and come back in.

And it expired for five years. [00:16:00]

[00:16:00] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I’m pretty, my test, when I moved from California to Kentucky, I had to do another test and yeah, the test there was the same thing. It’s literally drive around the block.

[00:16:07] Anthony: Yeah. I was so nervous. I felt like a teenager again, pulling out of the parking lot there. I actually ran over the curb and normal person would be like, just come back another time.

This guy’s I don’t care. Let’s jump into an article that you I think it came out a couple of days ago maybe it was today, a couple of days ago. It’s the partially automated driving systems don’t make driving safer, study finds. This is in the IIHS study talking about ADAS systems.

And there’s a great little quote from the IIHS article saying, everything we’re seeing tells us that partial automation is a convenience feature, like power windows or heated seats rather than a safety technology. That was shocking to me, and I don’t know about Michael or Fred if that was surprising that these ADAS systems that aren’t really doing much.

[00:16:52] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I think it’s specifically, actually I had notes to write to talk about this, because one of the questions you asked was what seems great and what seems suspicious. [00:17:00] And I think definitely, and I think that study confirmed it, is that not all, is that a whole, lane keep assist has been bundled under ADAS.

Which is most ADAS systems are safety systems and things like automatic emergency braking and I think it’s brilliant Lots of cars now have rear cross traffic assist, which yeah, I think is a life It is really I honestly think that’s a really good safety system because so many people pull drives headfirst into parking bays in parking Lots and you know if you have rear visibility is not great Even on sedans, and most people drive big SUVs, they have terrible rear visibility.

And it warns you that if you’re backing out and there’s another car, it stops you getting hit from the side. So I think stuff like that is really quite good. I’ll even go to that for adaptive cruise control, which I think is, on long drives is very useful. Because if you can set it to the speed limit and then, or maybe five over if that’s the flow of traffic but then every time someone slows down in front of you, you’re not constantly braking.

The lane keep assist, on the other hand, I think is Definitely [00:18:00] a convenience feature, not a safety feature. I think it, I think there’s a lot of evidence now that shows that it disengages people from the act of driving. It’s worth much worse with Tesla system because it gives you much longer prompts between, Hey, put your hands back on the wheel, whereas the rest of the industry is like the standard is 15 seconds.

But I think the perception of this came from In the late 20 teens when Tesla were making statements about how they added auto steer to autopilot and it’s made the whole system 40 percent safer. And they used this claim for quite a long time and eventually people started looking at it and then in, then I think in 2018 it’s a said, hey, you’ve got to stop saying that.

And in 2019 they, Third party looked at the data and it seems oh actually the 40 percent reduction was because when you introduced autosteer You also introduced automatically emergency braking and we know that AEB is actually a really quite good tool that was one where the auto industry got ahead of a NHTSA mandate and said, you know We’re gonna put make this standard on all our cars before the government requires it, which I think is relatively rare [00:19:00] But yeah, I think that contributed to the idea that, oh, cars will be able to drive for you, and humans are bad, lots of stats, about 99.

7 percent of accidents are human error, and if we give this over to the computers, it will eliminate road crashes, and I think that’s been very wrong headed. Certainly I know now, I, if I have a long drive, I will tend not to engage lane keeping, because I, because I think, If you are steering, that keeps you engaged with the job of actually driving the car.

And that’s so that’s for level two assists. There are slightly more advanced ones that have driver monitoring cameras that do gaze tracking. So they make sure that you’re actually looking at the road, which is a marginal improvement. But really in practice, I think they mostly allow like very tired drivers to continue.

their journeys. And I don’t think that’s such a great idea. I think if you’re so tired that you need the car to help you drive it in a straight line or stick between the lines, you should probably pull over and take a 20 minute nap.

[00:19:52] Challenges of Lane Keeping Assist

[00:19:52] Fred: I found out that’s actually quite dangerous because in my car, which is a 2020 Subaru Outback, it [00:20:00] has lane keeping assist and it has automatic steering.

So I figured I’d try out the automatic steering, and I ended up heading straight for guardrail at about 30 miles an hour when it blinked off and said, Oh, you got to take over now. So that wasn’t great. I also find that when I’m passing vehicles on the highway, particularly heavy trucks, the it’s too close to the heavy trucks.

It makes me really nervous. And so I, put my hands on a wheel to make sure I stay far enough away from the truck. And then when I release my hands after passing the truck, the damn car lurches to the right in front of the truck. And so I think it’s a really hazardous feature. So I agree with you completely.

[00:20:42] Debate on Automation and Safety

[00:20:42] Fred: I’m going to, I’m going to ask you a related question now that came up in your conversation. You talked about the possibility of reducing. Accidents by automation of the vehicle and how that’s, people talk about that, and we looked at that, too. And I think this whole [00:21:00] idea that You can get a potential 94 percent reduction in automobile crashes if you just get rid of the people.

It’s actually just an urban myth, has no basis in fact, has no basis in experience, and people are just saying it over and over again, and they start to believe it. But I, I’d like to get your thoughts on that. Oh, I

[00:21:20] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: agree, I agree entirely. I think actually wrote this down as a note.

I’m skeptical how much of the push for automation is coming from chip makers who need to sell more graphics cards because it’s an extra market for NVIDIA, to sell lots more processors. They seem to be the only company that’s really doing well out of the AV boom, maybe Qualcomm, that might be a very cynical view.

And maybe they’re going to shout at the PR. Maybe the PR people, when they listen to this, will shout at me. But it’s, yeah, I the whole thing seems to be a giant boondoggle to me.

[00:21:49] Anthony: So you’re not going to be covering the the robo taxi launch, which has been pushed back to Lockheed Martin?

[00:21:53] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I will have to write that.

I guess that, that Tesla traffic, Tesla content seems to certainly drive The [00:22:00] most reliable traffic, whether or not I always want to cover the latest weird thing they’ve done. Sometimes you have to for the job. That’s the downside to it. Yes, I do get to drive really cool cars quite a lot, and I get to drive lots of interesting EVs.

But yes, also the flip side is the stuff that people really want to write about is the latest drama with Tesla.

[00:22:18] Anthony: Michael, do you have automated lane keeping?

[00:22:21] Michael: I do not. I’ve used it somewhat. My daughter has it in her vehicle. I’ve tried it out, but it’s not something that has ever really interested me.

From a safety perspective, I, I feel a lot like the way Fred does that. It’s. It I want to be engaged in driving. I’m a little, I guess I’m a little nervous and we’re a worried type driver. My blood pressure goes up when I’m driving, that’s for sure. And that adds another level of.

Monitoring control to the task that I think could be distracting or could lull me into a false sense of security or Humans are really [00:23:00] bad

[00:23:00] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: at overseeing automated tasks. They’re quite good at being engaged if you’re actually doing the job yourself, but watching a robot do it is not a good way.

That’s the one thing that really I thought was really interesting in that paper that I covered earlier this week about why lane keeping is not as good as other ADAS systems was actually the only 6 percent of police reported crashes in the US were run off road or same direction sideswipes resulting from unintentional lane departures.

So it’s not even, it’s it’s a very small problem that it’s curing in terms of safety, where it’s, Hey, you don’t have to put your hands on the wheel and you can check your iPhone whilst you’re driving, which you’re not, is,

[00:23:37] Anthony: please don’t do that.

[00:23:38] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Please don’t do that. But that’s the kind of unwritten message.

I think that, that lane keeping systems.

[00:23:45] Fred: I agree with you that the safety features that run in the background, like the automatic emergency braking, the anti swerve, the anti lock brakes and all those sort of, those are wonderful. Those are wonderful. But the things that don’t operate in the [00:24:00] background.

Really, in my mind, increase the load on the driver, increase the workload on the driver because not only do you have to be aware of everything the car is doing, you have to be aware of everything the car is trying to do to you or the, supervising the control system. So I don’t see them as having any real benefit in terms of either safety or in terms of reducing the workload on the driver.

If you assume that the driver’s responsibility is to operate safely, if you think that it’s okay for the operator to go to sleep and, have a few drinks, it’s a different matter, but I don’t think that anybody here supports that. What is anti swerve? I haven’t heard of that one. What, anti swerve?

I’m sorry. Yeah, what’s

[00:24:44] Anthony: that? Yeah.

[00:24:45] Fred: Oh, that is a system that’s built, probably built into your car. It’s got wavy lines on your instrument panel somewhere. Oh, yes,

[00:24:51] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: traction stability control. Oh,

[00:24:52] Fred: traction

[00:24:54] Anthony: control. Okay.

[00:24:54] Michael: Stability.

[00:24:55] Fred: Traction control is related to it, but anti swerve really regulates [00:25:00] how it keeps your car from tipping over.

Keeps your car from tipping over. Okay.

[00:25:04] Anthony: My car’s so small, I couldn’t tip over. People can come over Oh, with that attitude. Yeah, I know, exactly. I can I was once driving very curvy country lanes getting to a brother in law’s place, and my wife’s get there quicker, I need to go to the bathroom.

And I knew how fast I could take that 90 degree turn, because the wheels went, I was like, oh, I’m going to go a little slower. Next thing I know there’s a cop behind me and I’m like, Oh no, but he didn’t care. He just drove on.

[00:25:29] Michael: The electric stability troll is a success story. It was introduced after a lot of rollovers that took place in the early 2000s.

And, based on the data between that and some roof crush upgrades for roof, roof crush strength by NHTSA, the rollover problem and crashes and injuries related to it have been significantly reduced.

[00:25:50] Anthony: Okay, Michael, are there any, I already know the answer to this, are there any regulations around lane keeping assist or, because I know they work on AEB, like [00:26:00] automatic emergency braking, it’s his proposing rules, but everything else, so lane keeping assist, auto steering, if that’s just

[00:26:06] Michael: There’s nothing around that there are, Congress and the Infrastructure Act in 2021 directed NHTSA to study those technologies with the thought of possibly putting a regulation in place someday, but lane keeping assists, until it shows a lot more safety benefits or, somehow.

Driver monitoring and these other technologies catch up to the point where lane keeping assist could be, truly deemed safe and something that’s actually helping on the roads. I don’t know that it’s going, there’s, I don’t know that we’ll see a mandate like we have with automatic emergency braking anytime soon.

Automatic emergency braking also is, a lower level automation. I think under the SE levels, it’s a level 1 automation lane keeping assist. Is, level two and level

[00:26:55] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: two is the combo of adaptive cruise control.

[00:26:58] Michael: And like keeping, and [00:27:00] so those are the concerns that the IHS pointed out in its article, there’s, there really haven’t been any proven safety benefits for lane keeping.

And, until there are, I don’t see any path towards mandating it in all vehicles.

[00:27:12] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: So a couple of years ago, IHS said that they were going to start reviewing and grading drive rate like adaptive cruise control, lane and lane keep system, partially automated systems, and I think that’s going to be That will be what gets the industry to improve before because I don’t yeah, it’ll be a long time I think before NITSA acts.

I know NITSA right now there they pump they finally published specs for matrix beam adaptive headlights, which I think have the potential to actually be very good you have high beams that don’t blind oncoming traffic and But I don’t think anyone knows how to satisfy like the list of testing requirements that NHTSA came out with, which seemed to be, and it was hundreds of pages and it’s basically, now you have to go away and design all the tests to, and then do the tests and then prove to NHTSA that you passed the tests.

And

[00:27:57] Anthony: you just got to say you passed the test and then hope they don’t catch you.

[00:27:59] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: [00:28:00] Self satisfication

[00:28:00] Anthony: is

[00:28:02] Michael: great.

[00:28:04] Voice Control and Touchscreen Interfaces in Cars

[00:28:04] Michael: I had a kind of a general question to something we talked about a lot and something consumers seem to complain about a lot or are as cars, become computers on wheels.

We’re seeing a lot of manufacturers move features to the touch screen away from buttons. We see consumers struggling to catch up with that, and we see consumers buying new cars, struggling to adapt and learn how to operate their new vehicles. So when you’re sitting down in a new vehicle, every couple of weeks, what’s your process like for learning the vehicles, or some cars a lot harder to wrap your head around than others touch screen menus.

Are they frustrating that kind of thing?

[00:28:44] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Yeah, I, so I. Don’t love touchscreens in cars. I hurt my shoulder a few years ago and I find reaching to the far end of the screen is still quite difficult with that range of motion. Also you’re taking your hands off the wheel. So again, I think cars that have [00:29:00] physical controls for touchscreens, like a jog wheel or track pads, those that are better because, you can develop muscle memory and at least work out what the tasks are.

Really, I think the, Where we need to go is to voice control and there are some cars on the market right now Particularly ones that use that buy in Or the partner with a company called Sirens to do voice recognition. And so some cars, they tend to be higher end cars at the moment like BMW, Mercedes Porsche and Audi are using them.

I think some Stellantis brands are using them. And I know, I think Renault in the UK, in Europe. And the, so what they do is because they run the Voice processing and the natural language recognition in the car. And then if it’s on the cloud, it’s in their private cloud. They tend to be more powerful than if you just use Google automated services, which relies on Google’s cloud.

And then with those, you can only really interact with the windows or the infotainment and the heating. The more powerful systems will do more stuff. Like you can actually, they can change the, drive mode. [00:30:00] And and I find with those, I’ll get to the point here, the natural language processing is getting good enough that.

You can just ask instead of trying to work out how do I lower the rear sunshades that have come up in this Mercedes. And in the old days you would have to dig through the manual book and work it out and there’d be like an individual button somewhere that you’d have to try and find that would push it.

And I suppose more recently with the move to infotainment screens with lots of menus, maybe you’re digging something. What you can really do is say, hey Mercedes, which is the keyword, and then lower the rear sunshades. And it maybe took a couple of goes to get exactly the right term. But it just did it.

And so if I’m, driving one of those cars now, instead of poking at the screen, I just say, Hey, whatever the car prompt is, and then ask it to do it. And most of the time these days it will be able to, you can find navigation destinations, you can get it to tell it you’re hot or change the temperature and even get them to tell you a joke, which they tell you bad dad jokes, which I find quite funny.

And I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about how. Voice recognition in [00:31:00] some cars is actually getting good enough to rely on. I think one problem is like most people are used to Siri, which is not very good, or like their Android phone and The NLP in cars is in some cars now is good enough, I think, to rely on.

And I got a lot of negative feedback from the audience when I wrote that post and discussing it with, other friends in this industry, most of them also think I’m dumb because I will talk to the cars. But I was thinking to about a month ago, we were testing the new Audi Q8 or Q6. And the way launches often work is they pay you with another journalist.

And I was sharing with Antoine from CNET is also, from a tech site and he’s probably, I would say he’s even more of a techie than I am.

[00:31:36] Voice Recognition in Audi: A Game Changer?

[00:31:36] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: But I think over the course of four hours, I convinced him that actually the voice recognition in this Audi is good enough that you can rely on it.

And I think it does be safely because you’re not dealing at all. You’re not really ever interacting with the screen. You just tell it. And then the information shows up there. I think that’s, but at the same time, even that needs a better learning curve. For new drivers there needs to be some kind of onboarding, you know Here’s like a 10 minute way that you [00:32:00] set up your car and here the different prompts and these are things you can do with it And I don’t know that really anyone does that and I think they should

[00:32:07] Fred: There’s a sleeper issue associated with that, which is that none of the cars that I’m aware of provide sleep Worry about authentication of the voice.

Particularly as the controls migrate towards things that are more and more consequential for the car operation, there should be a mechanism in there that says the voice command that’s being presented is being presented by a person who can’t speak. has authority to control the car, not just anybody who’s sitting in the seat.

[00:32:35] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: So that Audi actually can do that. It could tell the difference between who was sitting in the front seat, in the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. And there were some commands that it wouldn’t let the passenger do. So if I was in the passenger seat and I said, Hey Audi, switch to eco mode, it would say, I’m sorry, only the driver could do that.

[00:32:50] Anthony: And that’s what you just lean your head over?

[00:32:52] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I don’t know if we tried that. I don’t think we tried that. That might work, because I assume it’s positional. But I [00:33:00] don’t know if they’re also using the infrared driver monitor to see who’s speaking. But so yes, so that absolutely is a good idea.

And the good news is that at least one car that I’ve driven recently will, has that implementation.

[00:33:11] Anthony: Oh, that’s good to know. That is great to know.

[00:33:13] Tesla’s Self-Driving Claims Under Scrutiny

[00:33:13] Anthony: Speaking of car companies that have really great features there’s an article in the Washington Post titled Tesla sells self driving cars. Is it fraud? I don’t know.

Is it fraud? A growing number of investigations and legal complaints are targeting Tesla’s claims that its cars are full self driving, scrutinizing the company’s decisions to brand and market its of driver assistance technologies for evidence of potential fraud. I know what I think it is. Amazing. Oh my God.

Elon is so good looking. Who does his hair?

[00:33:44] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: So I don’t know that I’m pretty sure if I said it’s fraud, my deputy editor would shout it because he says you’re not allowed. So I’m not going to say it’s fraud. I will say that I know that in California, they’ve been investigating the fact that they called it autopilot for [00:34:00] quite a few years.

I believe the department of justice believe that’s a focus of their, one of their ongoing investigations since Tesla. And I’m. positive that in Germany a few years ago they got shouted out for calling autopilot and the German regulators were like, yeah, no, not doing this. Yes, regulators all over the world.

I quite rightly think that’s a misleading name.

[00:34:21] Debating Tesla’s Autopilot: Fraud or Innovation?

[00:34:21] Anthony: So Michael, you’re a lawyer. Can you use the fraud word?

[00:34:24] Michael: I’ll use the fraud word happily. It’s a fraud on consumers and investors to an extent. There’s, they’re calling things, something that they’re not.

They are essentially conflating. The the capabilities of the vehicle in a way that suggests that they have stronger capabilities and are safer than they are. So I don’t think there’s really any question from a base level that a lot of what Tesla’s doing is and is fraudulent. But fraud is also a legal Term and a legal charge.

And that’s something that the Department of Justice, [00:35:00] the SEC, the FTC should all be involved in. We think they should have been involved, in 2016 or earlier we started telling, the FTC, they need to get on top of this autopilot thing. This was, I think, before full self driving was even, Out or even used by Tesla, but the the idea that autopilot itself, which is something we’ve always, associated with airplanes, but that conveys a sense that the vehicle can safely drive itself, which is something Tesla’s can’t do.

They have to, and they require supervision at all times. So that’s fraud. Quite simply. I think, I don’t know why. It’s taken almost a decade and multiple government agencies and, a lot of tragedies to take place before people are willing to call a spade.

[00:35:49] Anthony: Fred, I want to ask Fred, let’s pretend you invent something, you call it full self driving and it’s obviously not true. Would you spend, I don’t know, 45 million dollars a month for the next few months to [00:36:00] make sure that this fraud goes away with it? That’s somebody new and in the

[00:36:04] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: that might actually be a misquote it might be four to five million dollars No one’s entirely sure.

[00:36:09] Anthony: Ah Okay, he might have said

[00:36:11] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: four to five As opposed to about 45, which seems less, everyone has a weird way of speaking, but he also doesn’t really pay his bills, so maybe it’ll just be like free blue ticks for the online bot army, I don’t know.

[00:36:25] Anthony: Oh, I’m looking forward to the comments section of your next article.

It’s gonna be amazing.

[00:36:30] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I’ve actually these days, the last month or so, I’ve now decided, I it was, arguing with readers is a bad look. And I’ve now finally decided I’m stepping back from the comments to just not engage.

[00:36:41] Anthony: And that’s surprising because actually Ars Technica has probably the best comments section anywhere on the internet.

[00:36:46] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: And that’s where I came from originally. I was a commenter before I started writing in the early 2000s.

[00:36:51] Anthony: Yes, for anyone who’s not It’s not Reddit. Go into the comments, because there’s a lot of really intelligent discussions, and a lot of times the authors will say, Oh, no, this is what was [00:37:00] there, or, Oh, you’re right, this was the wrong word used, and it’s really good.

But then it always blows down into the lowest common denominator eventually. It

[00:37:07] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: generally takes a while. I always would get frustrated at people who are, like, if I’ve written something, if you ask a question and it’s already been answered in the article, that frustrates me. It’s I wrote the answer and you should have read it, as opposed to just reading the headline and

[00:37:21] Anthony: Hey look, I read the headline, I want to write some nasty things.

Yep. I always get upset when I get downvoted because I realize I’m using too obscure a reference like I did made one or is like some software thing. I was like, Oh, it’s like Mac OS Copeland. And I realized, Oh, no one here knew that was a fake demo from the late 90s. They should do. They should, but they didn’t.

I have a Copeland

[00:37:40] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: demo. Speaking of misleading headlines. I never got it to run.

[00:37:43] Fred: Speaking of misleading headlines.

[00:37:45] The Ethics of EV Grid Integration

[00:37:45] Fred: Okay, we normally do a section called Gaslight Illumination, which we’re not doing it in a normal way this week. But I have a observation for you. That bleeds over into journalistic ethics and starts with electric vehicles.

So there was an article in the [00:38:00] Guardian on the headlines. A skeptic say EVs will overwhelm the grid. In fact, they could be part of the solution. So there’s a lot of stuff in there, but it goes on to say that basically. What you can do with an EV is you can arbitrage, or I’m not sure what the verb is, arbitrage, you can use the time of day charging rates for cars to charge up the car batteries when it’s cheap and put it back in, put the energy back into the grid when it’s expensive, like peak loads, and so the owners could make money doing this.

And so they, the guy who wrote it is named Jasper Jolly, and he apparently got his information from a company called Ener, MyEnergy, which is in the rechargeable EV business, so it seems a bit biased, but he goes on to say, that means there is ample flexibility to sell small amounts to the grid at [00:39:00] expensive times before buying power back overnight when things are cheaper.

It doesn’t address, the random power availability to satisfy requirements for guaranteed power and things like that. But, there’s a real question of whether the utilities, if they’re able to control when your car is charging, would allow you to charge at low rates and sell back to them at high rates.

It just seems like a, a thing that they would never do. But, so here’s where I’m headed. Excuse me. So they say that it could be something, but then they go in the caption to say they transitioned to allows drivers to make money. So it’s conclusive without a foundation, aspirational, and it’s not identified as such in the article.

So it seems to me that this would be a fair topic for an op ed, but not a fair topic for an article in The Guardian that doesn’t disclaim itself as being purely speculative and opinion. So your observations.

[00:39:59] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: [00:40:00] So I haven’t read that Guardian article, so I don’t know that I have a very well formed opinion on the specific claims in there.

I think the, with regards to vehicle to load and using EVs to do load balancing, I think for, Private EVs, privately owned individual like light vehicles. I think it’s going to be some time before that happens. I think part of it is not sure the grid here in the US and the way the kind of grid breaks down all the way to like house structures is designed to then be able to easily send that electricity back.

It’s mostly one way transmission, I think, from the substation. So there would be a bunch of infrastructure work, I think, on the back end that’s necessary. Plus you need the cars that can do it. And you need a fancy EVSC that can that take DC power from the car and then turn that into AC and send that into your house.

Where I think it’s happening first is going to be fleets. I know there’s a couple of school bus pilots near here. There’s one in Virginia, certainly. Where the idea is that you because school buses are pretty massive batteries and they’re also not driving for quite a substantial portion of the day and [00:41:00] night is that the middle of the day you can leave them plugged in and they can act as like load balancing reserve for the grid and then you charge them at night.

So I could see that happening with fleets and school buses in the next 10 years. I think it’d be. I think it’s going to be longer before that’s even capable for really for home users. So yes, that does sound, so I think that sort of answers your question that it’s not really a thing you can do right now.

I also think we’re quite far away from EVs overwhelming the grid when they charge, because I just think adoptionists are not nearly smart enough for that to happen yet either.

[00:41:37] Fred: Yep, there’s a related question, though, is that, or an observation, is that whether or not it’s ethical for the cost of upgrading the grid for EVs to be spread out over the entire population, many of whom are not going to have EVs.

To me, it seems like you’re really forcing the public to subsidize EVs for little good purpose.

[00:41:58] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I suppose you could argue that the [00:42:00] public benefit comes from a reduction in local air pollution as well as kind of overall climate change, slight amelioration in that regards. I do know that the, I suppose it’s a similar argument to, to rooftop solar versus big solar farms.

And I think we’re starting to see in California with net metering and solar that once individuals have. Individuals that have rooftop solar and net metering then obviously are paying much less into the grid. And so everyone else who’s getting electricity doesn’t have rooftop solar, their bills go up to compensate.

So yeah, I think it’s you have identified a problem with an uneven uneven green adaptations, let’s say. Or an uneven switch to green technologies. Yeah, thorny issues. Unequally distributed rather, I think is the phrase I was looking for,

[00:42:47] Anthony: right? And this article just seems like it’s slightly bit of an advertisement.

Part of it was saying the, this is my energy company saying, Hey if we’ve calculated, if balancing services were enabled on every one of its compatible installed chargers, we could [00:43:00] offer the grid more than one gigawatts of demand shift flexibility, larger than 98 percent of the UK’s major fossil fuel generators.

And everything will be great. And people have unicorns in their backyard. It may well have been a very

[00:43:11] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: slow news day and that person needed to write something and there was a feel good EV story that came into their mailbox from a PR company as opposed to a feel bad EV story and decided, hey, we’ll write this up.

That can be a motivation. Sometimes it’s a slow news day. You need to write something and it’s you can write good news or bad news. No, I understand. In those cases, I try and find some sort of good news, but it doesn’t always work.

[00:43:33] Fred: Would you call that gaslight or would you just call that a slow news day?

[00:43:37] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I would say it’s, I would say it’s probably a smoke news day and like a PR puff piece. All right.

[00:43:43] Anthony: It’s, yeah, I don’t know. Does that make your gas light, Fred? That’s the best I got this week. Yeah. I don’t know. My answer is GM cruise. I got nothing specific. It’s always GM cruise, everything they do.

Actually, no, it would be

[00:43:56] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: self driving is gaslighting. I think we could do

[00:43:58] Fred: you have a favorite gas light that you’ve [00:44:00] seen over and over again?

[00:44:01] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Favorite, but yes, most of Tesla’s games, I think I have to think about, there’s probably some others,

[00:44:07] Anthony: Briefly mentioned that the the Tesla RoboTaxi, and this is a very confusing thing to me, because back in 2016, he said, hey, every single one of the cars we’re selling, they’re gonna be ready for this, we just have to, they have all the hardware.

We’re just gonna put some software on it, and it’s coming next year, and next year, and was mostly

[00:44:24] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: because he got upset that Uber had got more attention for its IPO, and was working Robotaxis. And it was like, I think it was a way to take the to bring the focus back to Tesla.

[00:44:35] Anthony: You’re right, and I’m

[00:44:37] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: pretty cynical, but that’s pretty much, that, that’s, I’ve followed the company for a decade, I see that quite often.

[00:44:43] Anthony: Huh, do you think they’re actually planning to go to Mars too? Alright, different question. So yeah, how did Uber’s self driving taxis work out? Not great.

No. No. He said at first it was gonna come out on August 8th, and they delayed it to October, I hope, because they realized, hey, 8 8, not really a good [00:45:00] look for us, as a date. I hope. But also saying, hey, we need to do some more things. But now it’s, so this is gonna be a separate vehicle. It’s not gonna be your Model 3 that people went out and bought.

So it’s not what’s coming. I don’t,

[00:45:12] Michael: I, I wonder if it’s ever going to even see the light of day.

[00:45:15] Anthony: It will be a guy just dressed as a robot taxi on stage doing dance moves. We know that.

[00:45:22] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I’m very reticent to, so I didn’t write that up yesterday. My managing editor sent me the link and I, random pronouncements by Elon in tweet with no further information behind them.

The guy’s track record is such that I don’t really think that it’s worth giving that. More oxygen to cover it when they finally unveil something that they call a Robotaxi and they give any details about it, sure, I’ll write about it then, but yeah, he, him saying that, oh, we’re, I think he said what, they’re redesigning the front end or something.

[00:45:50] Anthony: Yeah, who knows, we have a front end. That’s a lie. Yeah, it is a lie.

[00:45:57] Fred: Jonathan, have you ever ridden in one of the Robotaxis that are currently [00:46:00] available?

[00:46:01] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I think the last level four car I rode in was at CES maybe five years ago. It was one of Aptiv’s demo cars. And the experience was really, it was very unremarkable with one exception, which was when, going back to something you said earlier, when we passed a bus, actually, on the Las Vegas Strip.

And it left much less room between us and the bus on the side than I would have. It passed by that psst. four inches maybe. And there was a, they had a PR handler and engineer who was sitting in the front seats and they were turning around, look the PR person was facing me and another journalist in the back.

And as we went past this bus, like the journalist and I were both facing forward, a pair of us both just flinched like that because the car, the bus was too close. Or at least we thought it was. So that was, but other than that, it was very unremarkable. But no, I don’t think I’ve been in anything since then.

I know Waymo is now operating in DC, so I should probably talk to them and see about having a ride. Wait, Waymo’s not in DC? No, just not coverage. [00:47:00] I’m, as I said earlier I’m, I still think AV is a bit of a sidetrack so I tend not to cover it that much when there are other stories that I would rather write about, if that makes sense.

[00:47:10] Anthony: I don’t understand how Waymo will navigate DC because it’s designed not even for humans to navigate those streets. I’ve pointed out that I lived on a street that was parallel to itself. It was D Street, and then, hey, a block over, it was D Street again, and it wasn’t like one went one way, one went the other way, and I’m like, what is hap like, how, if Waymo can solve the DC problem, I’m 100 percent in.

I’m on board.

[00:47:36] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: But I think as we’ve learned, they can solve the DC problem, and it’s not gonna be that useful. Solving problems in any other cities. And that’s like AV development doesn’t scale because I don’t think you can just copy and paste the lessons you learned from San Francisco to LA people drive badly differently in every city and you have to relocalize and that’s super expensive.

[00:47:55] Anthony: If you’ve got Google kind of money, you can set [00:48:00] dumpsters full of cash on fire every few minutes.

[00:48:02] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Yeah, but they can’t keep Google Reader alive. How’s that

[00:48:04] Anthony: fair? And their podcast apps. I was a big fan of Google Podcasts. Oh, but here might be a kind of feel good story, or maybe we’re being gaslit.

This is from CNN. This electric car battery takes less than five minutes to charge. There’s a company called Ninevolt based in Cambridge, England, and they’ve developed a 35 kilowatt lithium ion battery that was charged from 10 percent to 80 percent in just over four and a half minutes. That’s a very small battery.

For normally what we’re used to in, in cars, but it’s, that will have a range of what was it a little under a hundred miles, I think it was, yeah, and it was in

[00:48:36] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: a, it was in a modified Lotus Elise. I saw that last year in the UK. And I guess they took it to Goodwood again, but it’s, it seems like really interesting tech.

And I know they’re focused on cell phones and laptops as well as just cars. So the battery chemistry is not just for automotive but I think they, they decided to go with the car as a kind of super flashy way of getting a lot of attention. And the tech did seem quite interesting when I spoke to them last year.

I don’t know how [00:49:00] much has changed between then and now, because I wasn’t a Goodwood, but I suppose that would be something I should follow up if I were a decent journalist.

[00:49:06] Fred: I did a quick calculation and the quick calculation that I did, assuming that you’re charging it at 400 volts is that the current.

That would be required for this small battery and 70 percent recharge in four minutes. Would require current that’s about four times as much as a heavy duty industrial electric arc welder. So this is a hell of a lot of current. And it’s very dangerous and hazardous and, there’s a lot of training and regulations involved in the use of that kind of current in the industrial environment.

And it’s great if you want to weld a six inch armor onto the side of a battleship, but it’s probably not something that a consumer is ever going to get their safety mind wrapped around. I don’t know how you would do this, and I think that’s a real sleeper issue associated with the push [00:50:00] to recharge batteries faster and have ever more capability in the batteries.

This, this is just plain old physics, and that’s a hell of a lot of current, and I think a real safety hazard. Your thoughts?

[00:50:12] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Yeah, Nidegold says that they charge at 500 amps. So I’m not sure quite how that compares to other people. I’m not sure what that compares to. Yeah,

[00:50:20] Fred: that’s a lot.

That’s a lot of amperage.

[00:50:23] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Particularly when it’s 350 yeah. It’s particularly when it’s 800 volts as well. I think they’re 800 volts. Yes.

[00:50:31] Anthony: Do I have to buy a Lotus to use their stuff? It’s not even

[00:50:33] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: a Lotus, actually. They took a Lotus Elise and then got Julian Thompson, who was the original designer, to do a slight restyle job on it.

Let me just check my story from them. I think the actual car is slightly bigger.

[00:50:48] Anthony: It’s a cool looking car. It reminds me of the He said he took the

[00:50:50] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: time to fix a couple of things he didn’t like about the original. But I certainly I, when I spoke to them last year, they said like they had, they told me they had no interest in building cars.

[00:51:00] They just, they want to be a battery technology company. So I think it’s up to other OEMs to test the tech and then Deploy it if they like it,

[00:51:08] Fred: okay, if you have any dirt or any misalignment between the charging and the Port and the receptacle on the car you got an instant explosion This is you know, that’s just a hell of a lot of current

[00:51:25] Hydrogen vs. Electric: The Future of Fuel

[00:51:25] Anthony: So with with different cars you try out and obviously it looks like everything’s moving towards EV as the fuel of the future.

Do you see any chance for hydrogen or what was, there was one we came across a couple months ago where it was like some sort of liquid electrolyte refilling batteries that seemed really promising. Is it seems like hydrogen is just dead on arrival. Any chance of anyone resurrecting it? Is it only Toyota really looking at it still?

[00:51:51] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: So the Japanese OEMs are still pretty gung-ho on hydrogen because they don’t have great renewable resources in Japan. And I think, so the, there are a lot of [00:52:00] methane class rates off the coast that, so the Japanese government I dunno whether it still thinks it can do that, but thought that they could mind me think cloth rates and use that to make fuel.

Here in the, so I. I think there’s probably a future for hydrogen or like heavy duty trucks doing long routes. I think that makes much more sense than BEVs because because of the weight of A third of the weight of a, Class 8 truck would be battery, and that’s obviously, when it’s depleted, you’re still dragging that weight around.

And the other, I think, advantage of doing heavy trucks, so either at ports like Long Beach where they’re doing drayage, or just for fixed routes, is that if you have a fixed route, it’s very easy to build out the infrastructure either end of that route, and you don’t have to worry about anything else.

I think for passenger cars, I think as California showed us, What didn’t really work very well. It was the hydrogen super expensive. So it’s not economical. Even if you’re making hydrogen with electrolysis using sunlight, you’re still throwing away what, like 60 percent of the energy, probably by the time you’ve got a [00:53:00] tank full of hydrogen and then the cars themselves don’t, and not nearly as efficient as an EV.

But just if you have a limited amount of energy of electricity, It just seems to make a lot more sense to put it straight in the battery of an EV that gets it’s 97 percent efficient than to throw away a huge chunk of it. And then you’ve got hydrogen gas, which is these tiny little molecules that, you can store it in a tank for four days and it all leaks out because the molecules are so tiny.

You really have to be Manufacturing on demand and I remember seeing about 15, 16 years ago, a really cool talk at AAAS from an MIT academic called Dan Nassera, I think. And he was, his group was working on these developing like artificial leaves. And the idea was it’d be like a photovoltaic attached to an artificial oxygen evolving complex and some water and you get sunlight and it splits, you split five liters of water and here you go, here’s a whole lot of hydrogen and use that to power the fuel cell in your house all day.

Or you could do eight liters and you can drive your car too. Sounds like a great idea. It was the G sounds genius, but I’m not sure, even if the technology is getting there, I just, I think it seems like that’s a 50 year [00:54:00] away from being implemented thing, which would be cool if we get there, but.

I think hydrogen doesn’t make sense until energy really is basically free. Because there’s just stuff everywhere.

[00:54:09] Fred: As one aspect of that, one aspect of that has come to the fore recently, which is that people always assumed that there were no hydrogen natural resources around because of, evaporation goes into space, but recently they found, particularly in France, that there are enormous reserves Of hydrogen that can be mined, and as people have started to look for it, they’re finding that it’s also available in gas wells around the world.

And so it’s becoming much more available and potentially much less expensive than the California experience. So I’m high in it. I think it’s good stuff. I’d like to see it look forward, but

[00:54:47] Anthony: I’m like any new

[00:54:48] Fred: fuel. It’s got distribution problems.

[00:54:52] Concluding Thoughts and Farewell

[00:54:52] Anthony: Hey, so we’ve taken about, and we’ve taken roughly an hour or so.

I’m going to skip recalls this week. Cause listeners you’re driving somewhere and you’re [00:55:00] having too much fun and you’re crashing into the guardrail. Before we go, I want to ask you one question. Zero to 60 miles per hour. Why? Why is every car review mention that? Is it just because I don’t, I’ve never bought a fast enough car and it doesn’t mean anything to me?

I

[00:55:15] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: think it’s just become something default that most people expect to see in a car review.

[00:55:19] Anthony: Okay. I

[00:55:20] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: think the day to day like nought to 60, the only time it ever makes sense, ever matters is if you’re leaving a highway toll booth. Really? That’s the only time you’re ever just miles an hour with flooring it.

Like otherwise like nought to 20 or nought to 30 is a much more useful figure. I think it’s just, it’s a, I think it’s just a legacy of the fact that for 50 or 60 years, that’s how the auto industry has defined performance. And so we’re just still stuck there. A lazy shorthand we use.

[00:55:49] Anthony: Okay, I lied. I have one more question. This weekend, who do you think is going to win F1?

[00:55:53] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Oh I have no idea. That’s what I would, what I can, I now like about the series again. I’ve been watching the sport since [00:56:00] 93 and I would never bet on it. There’s some years you would, but they’re really depressing years where one driver wins everything.

I think now we’ve got to the point where there’s three, probably four cars that could win it. And if Red Bull have another bad day McLaren probably will snatch up the pieces, but McLaren seemed to have a very fast car, but they’d been out of the. out of winning for such a long time, they make lots of mistakes still.

[00:56:22] Anthony: So that’s one vote for Logan Sargent. Yep. Great. Michael, do you have any more questions? I do not. Excellent. Fred? I do not.

[00:56:32] Fred: Jonathan,

[00:56:33] Anthony: thank you so much.

[00:56:34] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: Thank you, Jonathan. so much for having me. I

[00:56:36] Anthony: really enjoyed it. Yeah, this was great. It’s awesome to get that perspective of someone who’s trying out new cars all the time.

The next time you have a Ferrari please let us know. I will gladly come to your neighborhood.

[00:56:45] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: I will too. Although actually these days, it’s quite rare. They don’t invite me to drive many things. And these days they, it’ll usually be, they’ll invite me to drive it somewhere else rather than sending me one here, but I will try and rectify that.

And if I do, I will let you know. [00:57:00] But actually the last time I had a Ferrari to test here in DC one of my neighbors actually met some neighbor friends of mine cause he was like, Oh, that’s right. It’s really cool. So I was like, sure. Yeah, I’m happy to give you a ride. I was on a Sunday afternoon and we were just coming, my wife and I were just coming back from Georgetown and going down a hill at five miles an hour, a sensor in the back failed and the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree and it went into limp mode.

And so it wouldn’t go above 30 miles an hour, but it didn’t stop. On the ball, which was good because I was worried that we’re going to break down on Ohio Drive, and that’d be bad. Yep, and then I was like I would love to take you for a ride, but this car’s not going anywhere until they pick it up tomorrow on a trailer, so you can sit in it if you like.

[00:57:36] Anthony: I think we covered

[00:57:37] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: that. The art man was very unconcerned when I climbed up to tell him this car is having a total fit. He was just like, yeah, I guess it does it. I guess it did it alone.

[00:57:46] Anthony: Hey listeners, thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. Until next week, and go to autosafety. org, click on donate, and do it a thousand times.

Bye. Goodbye listeners,

[00:57:58] Michael: Thanks everyone. For more [00:58:00] information,

[00:58:00] Dr. Jonathan Gitlin: visit www. autosafety. org.