How do I drive this rental car? Plus FSD fail and how hybrid’s work.

Anthony: You’re listening to their 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 guys, do we remember how to do this?

Michael: I think we’re going to have a few, humps and bumps on the way to figuring it out again, but okay. Okay.

Anthony: All right listeners This is our first time back together in two weeks our last two episodes. We pre recorded but there were great ones With Phil and I can’t remember the other guy’s name.

William White. There we go.

Michael: Come on Anthony. You’re already stumbling.

Anthony: I know coffee. I haven’t finished it but hey, guys, I was thinking about you a lot the last couple weeks because I had to use rental cars. And boy oh boy, so the first one was like a relatively new Jeep Wrangler thing. Fine. It was fun to drive because I was driving over lava fields which is a whole different story.

Michael: Your excuse for driving a Jeep. Okay.

Anthony: The next one though, this is the one I was like, as soon as I got in the car, I was like, Oh my God, Michael and Fred are just going to be cracking up. It was a Kia K5 and I was like, it’s going to get stolen. It’s, they’re just gonna, and I was leaving a USB cable plugged in cause I could hook my phone into it.

It thankfully it was not stolen, but listeners,

Fred: I want our listeners to know that Anthony was just spent two weeks in Hawaii and he’s back. He looks tanned, rested, ready to go. He’s got a lay on, he’s got a whole stockpile of passion fruit and a whole crate of it behind him. And he’s moving and grooving to the music.

The, it’s got a little bit of hula music going in the background. Wonderful time to be Anthony.

Michael: Yeah, we’re just gonna let him handle the rest of the episode. Oh my God. He’s so well rested.

Anthony: No.

Michael: No. So the Kia, what model year was that Kia? Because I think 2022 is when they fixed the problem in quotes where they actually started putting immobilizers in.

So you may have been okay.

Anthony: Yeah, I think this was a 2024 Yeah, you were definitely injured. Yeah, what I took away from both of these vehicles is these are not cars I normally drive. Every other driver on the road, there’s tons of rental cars out there. One, no one knows how to adjust their lights. I would get blinded regularly by people just leaving high beams on, and I’d be cursing at them, then I realized, oh, they’re in a rental car, they don’t know how to do this.

And the other thing is there’s so many features in these cars, how, they shouldn’t allow people to rent cars. It’s so different from what we’re used to.

Michael: There’s something to that, beyond not allowing people to rent cars, the cars are getting more complicated from an electronics and functionality standpoint, I’ve seen, what was it, Anthony, I think I was telling you about, I saw a war correspondent in Israel who was covering the ongoing war there, who was coming, was targeted by a missile and coming under fire somewhat and had to get out of the area they were in.

And couldn’t drive for a couple of minutes cause they couldn’t figure out how to turn on the defroster in their Tesla clicking around the screen, all that stuff. Whereas, in most normal cars or older cars, you’ve got a, a button there that’s pretty easy to figure out, but these menus and interfaces and all that mixed in with all the crazy.

Different types of software that are on vehicles now for entertainment and for other features, you know It makes it difficult scrolling into that menu to get to these things and it’s definitely slower I would think until you really learn the system. So I would say, people really need to familiarize themselves With rental cars that are getting not only looking to see if there’s a recall on it and that type of thing, but really sit down before you leave the airport and make sure you know where your brights are, beyond just adjusting the mirrors, which I hope everyone’s doing nowhere, the brights are turned signals where the windshield washers and wipers and all that are because the newer vehicles are.

Not this, not putting these features in the same place as you might be used to.

Fred: Yeah. It was, I think most of the cars now have a option where you can opt out of having them track your private data. And I recommend that as a good way of trying to figure out how the interfaces work, because you have to dive right in and go down about six levels to find these switches are always in there.

Anthony: That’s what you want to do on your own vacation. Hey, honey, let’s wait a few minutes. I gotta read the manual. You gotta set priorities Staying married is my priority I’m gonna stick with that But one of the cool features of the Hyundai that I discovered that we’re gonna talk about Is I’m going to back up out of a parking lot, and bing, and I’m like, What?

What is happening? And the car just stops. Completely. And I’m like, Huh? Because it detected another vehicle coming. Which I thought was great. Side note this car, when you put it in reverse, the rever rear view camera comes on. But then you put it in drive again, the rear view camera stays on. And I’m like, Wha?

This is disconcerting. And then I press the screen, and now I’m looking at the front camera. Which is so weird.

Michael: That sounds buggy. Did it seem buggy?

Anthony: It was definitely a little buggy. But the backup camera, the warning stuff was fascinating. And this we have from AAA. There’s an article we’re linking to.

They’re talking about the reverse AEB, the automatic emergency braking system. And they talk about, hey, this is a good thing. This is It, they tested it out on a few systems and it applied the brakes and 65 percent of their test runs and prevented collisions and only two and a half percent of test runs, which was, which is because it would stop me constantly.

And it would, it was a little too aggressive. But the great thing from this article, which I really like is their tips. It says one driver should not rely on reverse AB systems to prevent collisions when backing up, but utilize backup cameras. and other sensors to enhance their awareness.

Michael: Yeah, they should.

And the stats in the article bear that out. You’re seeing that, they tested it with a vehicle and with a pedestrian behind the vehicle. And, it is preventing some collisions. It didn’t do very well in preventing the vehicle collisions. It looked like, only 2.

5 percent of the time did it Figure out that the vehicle was there and stop the vehicle in time. So it’s a it’s a technology. Look, that advice, that broad advice that you need to be using all of the, all of your normal senses and your mirrors and everything to do these types of maneuvers is 100 percent spot on.

They’re going to work some of the time to prevent crashes, but they’re not a panacea. You can’t have. You can’t trust that when you’re backing out of your driveway that your rear cross traffic alert is going to detect a vehicle and your rear emergency braking is going to stop the vehicle.

And that goes for moving forward too. It goes for all of these advanced safety systems and crash avoidance features on your car. They’re just there to supplement the driver and any drivers that are relying on them. As a active safety technology to prevent them from getting in crashes and think they can relax or are incorrect and people really need to pay just as much as attention as usual.

Anthony: Yeah, it was amazing. I was so blown away by how even my car is only four years old and how much things have advanced in that short period of time with. With these rear view backup systems with the, when you go back up, it would draw curved lines based on how you’re turning the wheel. It’s really become like the upgrade leap, like that didn’t happen, 10 years ago, you wouldn’t get that big of a change.

Michael: Yeah, I think so. There’s a lot of reasons that we’re starting to see that one. Is that NHTSA has indicated that it’s going to start testing some of this stuff, but the Insurance Institute has gone ahead and started testing vehicles on automatic emergency braking and a lot of these other new tech things that NHTSA is a little too slow to get to.

And that pushes manufacturers. That’s why we support NCAP and want it to Be a lot sharper on these issues because it really does make manufacturers get working technology into vehicles more quickly. And that’s going to ultimately save more lives.

Anthony: And speaking of our friends at IIHS, the insurance Institute for highway safety, they have a new article.

They’ve made their top safety pick awards harder to get, which is great. Unlike NHTSA. IIHS says, alright you guys, hit this hurdle last year, now you gotta step up your game a bit. And so, it’s not just for front cat crashing. It’s they’ve increased the weight of the barriers. They’ve increased the speed that these crash tests take place at.

And so it’s become harder to come through, but the quick takeaway is surprising. Hyundai motor group, which includes Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia brands has the most 2024 over awards overall, six top safety picks and. And 10 top safety pick awards, wait, a six top safety pick plus, Oh my God. They’re doing that stuff too.

Yeah, but

Michael: one thing that shows me is that IHS is not testing these vehicles for engine problems or theft protection, Hyundai and Kia both have. Tested fairly well on a lot of these initial tests, both with NHTSA and with IHS and even on some of the consumer reports testing.

And, even in the car book that we used to publish we had fairly high marks for some of the Hyundai’s and Kia’s before a lot of these engine problems and some of the other issues started to appear. They. They apparently do very well at initial quality, but over time, there’s some things that are lacking that customers have experienced in the last decade or so.

Anthony: But so the IHS the this year, their driver side and passenger side evaluations have been combined into a single rating. The test that provide performing now on both driver and passenger sides. Which is amazing. The level of testing they do is, because what does NHTSA do? They just run it into a static barrier head on.

They don’t even do an offset, do they?

Michael: They, they have, I think they’re planning to do offsets. I’m not 100 percent on that. One thing that IHS is doing that’s I think really important that the article points out is putting dummies in second row seats. They’re really focusing on rear seat safety, which is obviously something we’ve.

Been harping about for a long time, and I’m sure we’ve mentioned on the podcast a number of times. The rear seat safety is something that just simply hasn’t improved much in cars over the years, mainly because, the rear seats are typically a safer spot to be than the front seats. But as the front seats have become more protected, had better airbag systems and other things put in place.

Seat belt pretensioners for one thing. The rear seats have fallen behind and they’re not people in the rear seats are probably not nearly as well protected or certainly haven’t had the technological investment in their protection as the folks in the front seat. So that’s really good that IHS is focusing on that.

Um, they were also Focusing on pedestrian crash avoidance systems as well, and rating those, because as we saw both through the recent NHTSA rulemakings and a lot of other articles we’ve talked about with driving at night and other things, a lot of the vehicle systems on the market right now for automatic emergency braking are struggling to pick up and respond to pedestrians and this is going to mandate pedestrian protection and automatic emergency braking.

The final rule for that should be coming out in the next couple of months, three months, hopefully as quick as possible. And that’s going to be a regulation that manufacturers are going to have to comply with starting in just a few years. So that’s, it’s important that they get. That they get that right and that we start figuring out, which technologies are best, which systems are the best and giving those folks the high scores that sell their cars and incentivizing the manufacturers that aren’t doing as well to improve their systems.

Anthony: Yeah, so this is a great article to check out and it’s always fun just to watch IIHS’s crash test videos. It’s a great way to lose hours of your life watching expensive cars get destroyed. A surprising takeaway from their safety picks though is only one U. S. car made, U. S. made car, made their top safety pick plus, which was a Ford Explorer.

And I remember Ford Explorers just being the Ford rollover vehicles. So I guess they’re not doing that anymore, thankfully.

Michael: Hopefully they’ve You know, a lot has improved on rollovers over the years with electronic stability control and manufacturers have become very aware of the risk there and have, designed vehicles that are slightly less prone to rollover over time.

I, I wouldn’t expect that a Ford Explorer would be the only American model on that list. Because, I actually had two back in the day and they never struck me as a particularly protective vehicle in any way, everybody can get better over time and maybe the Ford Explorers have.

The IHS testing certainly seems to bear that

Anthony: out.

Hey, and because of an organization like the Center for Auto Safety, the Ford Explorer’s rollover issue was highlighted dramatically. That’s right. So hey, if you make a donation at autosafety. org, we can help work on other safety issues and other manufacturers can get on this list and not be dangerous or as dangerous.

Some sort of danger. Speaking of danger, Washington Post had a very long article, a very sad article, titled Tesla Worker Killed in Fiery Crash, maybe first. Full self driving fatality. We’ve got a link to it, it’s really well done, but the the takeaway from the article is there was a Tesla engineer who was a huge fan of Tesla, huge fan of Elon Musk, and he would always have full self driving running in his car.

He would tell everybody about it, he’d brag to his friends, to his wife, everything, everyone possible, how much he loved this stuff. Him and a buddy go out golfing. I guess they have a few beers, drink some. I think legally his blood alcohol level was,

Michael: It was three times the legal limit.

Anthony: Oh, it was three times the legal limit.

And he they were

Michael: in California. I think in California the legal limit’s a little higher. But it was 24, I believe. Which is three times the legal limit in, in most states.

Anthony: No, they were in Colorado.

Michael: Colorado, okay. Yeah. Good. I could, but yeah that’s a really high that’s a really high. You’ve had a lot of alcohol when you’re at 0.

24,

Anthony: right?

And so unfortunately, the car crashes, the driver dies, the passengers survives. And his recollection is that, hey, he had full self driving on. Of course, Tesla says, no, he didn’t. It’s impossible. But if he did, he would have survived, which is possibly the most tone deaf response possible for this.

Poor guy’s family. Hey, if he had just downloaded this software, he’d be alive, but clearly he didn’t, the dummy. Blaming the victim is,

Michael: Yeah, and they would have done that even if the guy hadn’t been drinking, I’m sure. But in this case, he was. And that presents a very, it’s a, I believe his surviving spouse pointed out that she hasn’t been able to find an attorney willing to take the case.

That’s simply how much, when you are at alcohol levels that are that high and you crash and. You die in a car crash, the odds of a recovery are going to be very low simply because of the stigma around that. And it’s the deserved stigma around drunk driving here. It looks like he was over reliant on full self driving and he was a, a Homer.

He believed in the technology and he was fascinated with it and he would, use it with his child in the car. Essentially, he fell into the same trap that a lot of Tesla’s are driving into, whether they’re using full self driving or autopilot, relaxing and tending to believe that they don’t have to maintain full control of the vehicle and that the vehicle is going to take over a lot of those functions.

That a normal driver would use and then find themselves in a situation where they’re unable to correct it and prevent a crash. We don’t really know the circumstances here. We don’t know if the guy had passed out, there were no signs of breaking for the collision.

We know that he was alive after the crash and that his. Passenger was unable to get him out of the vehicle. That again leads to, some of our worries about the battery fires and such that are, a problem. And that we think in the future is going to be addressed by better battery materials.

But. This case, once again, it’s just yet another person card falling into the trap set by Tesla, where they, market this great system that’s going to make you, relax and have a good time while driving, the car is going to take over. And then as soon as the car doesn’t do something right, and you crash, you’re on the hook, the car and Tesla aren’t going to be taking any responsibility in court.

Anthony: Yeah, this is one of these things where a lot of the fanboys come out and they say, Hey, oh, look, the car warned you every all the time. You have to do this. It says this in the manual. If you read the manual, which I think we’ve pointed out on the show, the only people who have ever read a car manual are Possibly just the three of us.

No one ever reads the car manual.

Michael: I typically read my manual when I want to find out what my inflation pressure needs to be. Those are when I need to figure out how to turn off the theft protection on your radio or something after you’ve had your battery go out.

They’re very specific situations. In which I think most folks read their manuals and they’re usually involved. I think probably the one people use it the most for these days is figuring out their electronic systems, how to turn off lane keeping assist, that sort of thing. So people aren’t kicking back with a glass of wine and their owner’s manual and reading the whole thing cover to cover.

I

Anthony: don’t think

Michael: that’s not normal. I don’t know if it is for you but I just can’t see anyone doing that. However, I think there’s a giant need for something along those lines, not a full owner’s manual, but at least acquainting people with the control systems in the vehicle and the safety related systems, the crash avoidance systems and any systems that assist the driver.

People really need to be, they need black and white language. So that they understand that these systems aren’t doing aren’t doing any autonomy. They’re not driving for you. They may assist you, but you’ve got to, you’ve got to remain in control of the vehicle and you’ve got to remain aware.

You can’t really relax.

Fred: The other thing that the car should do is warn you when you are approaching a safety boundary. In this particular case in Colorado, on the way up to the golf course which is an elevation, the surviving passenger said that the car was on full self driving, but in many instances it had to switch off because it wasn’t able to handle the curves the geography of the road.

Seems to me that it would be easy and reasonable for the manufacturer to have an alert. Or spoken message that says, Hey, this is not a great place to use your full self driving. Anthony, you were talking about that experience in Hawaii with the backup camera and the forward camera. It would be trivially easy for a manufacturer to just have an alert, speaks words to you or has a signal that says, Only use it in these circumstances.

Don’t use it in these circumstances. This will or will not protect you in a crash. I don’t understand why. People aren’t using the capability in the cars to provide adequate warnings to the people who are using the cars. It seems like a very straightforward thing to do.

Anthony: We’ve talked about that. The operating design domain, whereas Ford and Mercedes and GM they have it, so you can only use these features on pre mapped highways and they will not work once you’re off these roads, whereas Tesla is a very different, more cavalier approach.

Michael: Yeah. And in this case, there was. If they experience issues on the same road on the way to the golf course, what, no reasonable, manufacturer put in safeguards and said, Oh, wait, we, we’ve been here before. Let’s not do this on the way back home. It, it just seems these incredibly brilliant, awesome computers powered by AI should be able to figure something like that out.

Fred: And A very straightforward example is that if the Tesla full self driving is only designed to be used on limited access highways, why isn’t it alerting people when they turn it on roads for which it’s not designed? Yeah, you could say people have to understand and use the owner’s manual and it’s right there on page 433.

It says this is a bad idea. But if you rent a car You’re unlikely to read up to page 423 before you pull the car out of the parking lot. Why aren’t they using the warnings that are available? Is it just aesthetics or is there something deeper at risk here? I

Anthony: think given the names Tesla uses for these things, it’s, um, it’s BS.

It’s plain and simple. That’s their method. There’s another article we have a link to from Futurism. com. What a great name for a publication. And to start off with, it says, A 42 year old Tesla driver, who at first denied having killed a woman with his Tesla in a hit and run, is now claiming that he can’t remember if he ran her down or not.

If he did, he says he must have been on autopilot and checking work emails while doing so. Oh my God! And, I struggle with this one, because , I do. Do you

Michael: think he should be under the jail like I do? Yes.

Anthony: So yes, he should. Absolutely. But it’s, I think a lot of the blame has to go to Tesla, strictly to their marketing department, strictly for calling things autopilot, for calling things full self driving, because people think, hey, this is a car.

If it came out on the road, it must’ve been tested. All this stuff must have been checked, it must be good, it’s called Autopilot, it must be perfect, it must be okay, and so that’s, I think, where the complacency comes in. This person is a giant asshole.

Michael: Yeah, this is, this goes beyond complacency in a way, though.

It’s, he says, Oh, I didn’t know I hit someone. I must’ve been checking work emails. I that is that’s beyond a reckless. That’s complete indifference to human life at that point. Who knows where this guy works? I don’t think he, I don’t know if he’s an emergency room doctor and he was trying to save a life over email, if he’s working, if he’s working, there’s just no excuse.

There is absolutely. No excuse in this scenario. I don’t believe that autopilot look autopilots been on the road now for years and it doesn’t take a whole lot of Googling to figure out that it is not an autonomous vehicle, it’s being sold that way and it’s certainly setting up a trap for people to fall into, this guy fell, he did more than just fall into a trap.

He was Basic I just don’t see how you can check a work email while you’re driving that doesn’t compute with me. Is it that’s not I don’t know this article is it’s frustrating that someone’s even trying to use this as a criminal defense to me in such a situation.

Anthony: Yeah, this is just another reason to avoid Tesla drivers if you’re on the road.

And we still stand by avoiding BMW drivers, but for different reasons. Okay good article, check it out. I’m curious to see what will happen and how much jail time this guy will serve. Willie? Who knows? We got an article in Ars Technica tangentially related, called, New Data Shows Which States Were More Deadly for Pedestrians in 2023.

We’ve talked about this a lot, about how road safety for pedestrians has gone poorly since the pandemic, but some states are getting a lot better. California had the biggest decrease New York, Pennsylvania had decreases, but then Texas had a big old spike, and Colorado as well. The largest overall reduction in pedestrian deaths in absolute numbers occurred in California, which saw 66 fewer pedestrians die between January and June 2023, compared to the same six months in 2022.

Colorado saw the greatest increase in real numbers. With 19 additional pedestrian deaths dying versus the first half of 2022.

Michael: Yeah, this, the numbers came down slightly, but, they’re still higher than they’ve been any other year other than last year over the past decade. I don’t know that there’s even really any statistical significance to the slight drop in fatalities that we’ve seen.

We know that the pedestrian. Metallities and injuries appear to be going up significantly. And we know there’s technology that can prevent that. Which we just talked about with the pedestrian automatic emergency breaking, which isn’t. Even remotely perfect yet, but hopefully one day it will be and will prevent a significant number of these types of injuries and fatalities.

So while, while it’s coming down a little, I don’t know that it’s coming down enough to think that this might be the first step in a larger drop. But, who knows? I’m certainly not a prognosticator. One of the interesting things that I’ve found in this article and some other ones is that the state of New Mexico has, is a really bad state to be a pedestrian and they’ve actually, you’ll see some years, some fluctuation between states and New Mexico consistently has been the worst state in America for the past five years.

I’m not sure why. I don’t know if they have, a lot of unlit open highways and foot traffic on them. I’m assuming there’s some type of specific condition that is unique to New Mexico that causes this issue, but I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what it is.

Anthony: Hey, if you’re in New Mexico and you walk on the streets, let us know.

I’ve got some theories that are not helpful, but that’s just because I watched too much Breaking Bad. Hey, let’s jump to dummies. You guys want to talk about dummies? We’ve we had we’ve had guests talk about this, and this is about the future of female crash dummies. This is an article in Forbes, and the article is titled, Will female crash dummies improve road safety for women?

The answer is complicated. I’m not really sure the ambers got complicated, it just seems like there are some excuses made here. I don’t want to test with a female dummy, but maybe I’m cynical. The male dummy currently used in the driver’s seat and frontal crash test for the five star review was based on the average man in the 1970s at 5’9 and 171 pounds.

Since body types have changed in the last half century, this, quote unquote, male dummy, now more closely aligns with the weight of the average female. Currently, the average woman’s weight is 171 pounds and is 5 foot 3 and a half inches and men weighing in 200 pounds and stand 5 foot 9 on average. Holy cow.

There’s I know this is not related to crash testing, but what happened? This is insane. But, going back to this crash testing we we’ve had people talk about this before, whereas the, since the crash test dummies is really just checking men and physiology is different in men, that women aren’t really tested in this and they are put in the front passenger seat and then we see more injuries with women in, in cars.

And so simple argument is, hey, why don’t we just have other dummies? And there are other models in there so we can see more what goes on. There’s a couple guys in this article who are engineers saying, No, that’s going to give us wrong data. Which, feels a little weird to me. But one thing they point out is that women They have more ankle injuries in crashes, and so what they’re doing is neat, is they’re putting cameras in the footwells to see what’s going on, because we don’t know why this is happening, is it, do women break at a different pressure than something else, than a man or something happened there, the angle but guys, I, am I wrong just to think, hey, just, Throw a female dummy in there and we can get some more data?

Like, why would that be wrong?

Fred: It’s never wrong to get more data, but it’s a question of how you interpret the data. Okay. There’s a lot of, based on my observations, a lot of variability in women’s physiology. And it’s hard to know which It’s getting back to the simulation problem. The simulations are always doomed to succeed because you’ve got to abstract all of the information that’s available into some particular model that you say then represents reality.

And with women, there’s a lot of variability in the physiology and how they look and, their proportions. So how do you reduce that to a single representation that you can put into a car and say this represents women? That’s part of the problem. There’s just a lot of variability in how that happens.

But there are so many gaps in the data that are available. In the front seat, in the back seat, and the types of restraints being used for the people. That it can only benefit everybody to look at any representation of women in the various positions in the car and look at what can happen to them. A lot of the people in the world are women and they have unique characteristics and certainly if they can identify if there’s more ankle injuries, it’s worth a little bit of study.

Try to figure out why. But I think the bigger point is that there are so many positions in the car that are underrepresented in crashes and types of crashes that take anyone, take any dummy, put it in any of those positions, you’re going to learn a lot more information. And the more you learn about the different kinds of people and the different physiology that they might exhibit in various positions in the car you’re going to get a lot more data.

Then, of course, you have to reduce the data, so there are some downstream activities that are associated with the data that need to happen in order for you to fully understand what’s happening. The point is, just putting a women’s representative, 5 percent female dummy, like they use now, In the test into a position in the car is going to tell you something, but it’s not going to tell you everything.

So I think that more grounded research has got to happen to figure out which dummies represent the women, the female population writ large, and which are useful in these studies. But as we’ve always said, Fill up the damn cars that you’re working in these studies and, get the data. Even if you don’t use all the data, you’ve got it in a store somewhere and it’ll be useful for people in the future to understand trends, understand the impact, the different design features that could be put into the cars.

Michael: Yeah, and I think we need more representative dummies here. Anthony, you put your thumb on that, maybe the average female is more like what the male dummy that is used now. Maybe females are closer to that, but that’s still a male dummy and it doesn’t have, the dummy characteristics that correspond to a female body.

This article points out we need bigger dummies. We need a big guy dummy as the driver and as the passenger in the backseat. We need, little women, big women, little kids, big kids. We need a lot of different variables there to get as much data as possible.

Fred: We need a tall male elderly dummy in particular.

Michael: The two

Anthony: of you just advocating for yourselves, look, I’m all for the female sized dummy.

Michael: Who,

Fred: if I’m not going to advocate for myself, who will? Come on.

Anthony: It’s one of the things, so they’re talking about the lower extremity injuries that women have more in this, and talking about putting cameras in the footwell, but with a dummy, you’re not the dummy’s passive it’s limp, it’s not going to React like a human does in a crash.

I don’t understand how they would get that data. And it’s

Michael: all about positioning, I think, it’s all about where they put the leg of that dummy. Is it on the brake pedal anticipating a crash? I think that’s where we’ve seen a lot of these injuries is that we’ve seen brake pedals and crashes and get pushed back into the vehicle by the force of a frontal crash, for instance, the structures being pushed into the person maybe, maybe women have Legs that are more subject to that type of injury, maybe women, because they’re sitting closer to the steering wheel experience more of these injuries, there’s, it was interesting in the article talking about, are men and women generally doing something different with their feet at the time of the crash?

I don’t know. But that’s something they’re studying, which is great. And we know for a fact that women are receiving a larger portion of the lower leg and pelvic injuries than we see in men. Anything they can throw at it to try to figure it out would be great.

Anthony: All right. Hey, let’s jump over to one of Fred’s favorite topics, his favorite things he wants to rally about.

Hey, Fred, what’s the greenest car you can buy today? It’s an electric vehicle, right?

Fred: The greenest car? Oh, you heard it here first, several weeks ago, that it is apparently a plug in hybrid. And we know a confirmation of that from a story published in the Washington Post.

Anthony: And please go ahead and elaborate.

Yeah, if you believe that left wing woke media. Yeah, the Washington Post has an article titled, The Greenest Car in America Might Surprise You Unless Your Name is Fred Perkins. And it goes into all sorts of reasons, but basically it’s saying hey, the Toyota Prius Prime SE, a plug in hybrid that can go 44 miles on electricity before switching to hybrid is the one that is the highest rated.

This is a report from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. It’s the shape of the body, the technology with it, and the overall weight. And I love the fact that they mentioned weight of the vehicle. Other The second one on the list though, they say, is the Lexus RZ300E, which is an electric vehicle.

And it scored 67, but it’s also, 20, 000 more. But it’s pretty interesting. Obviously, cars like the Hummer EV, our favorite electric vehicle, weighing in over 9, 000 pounds. Made the bottom of the list. Shock of all shocks. So with that, let’s jump into this week’s Tao of Fred.

Fred, what was this hybrid powertrain stuff? You’ve now

Michael: entered

Fred: the Tao of Fred. Hybrid powertrain stuff. I’m not sure about that. I’ve done a little bit of homework here to try to explain why hybrid cars are Basically better than a lot of the other cars that are out there. One source looked at all electric vehicles, and this actually harkens back to some other discussions we’ve had, but the average power of electric vehicles is an interesting parameter.

So if you look at the Tesla Model three. It requires on average about 13. 9 kilowatts, which is 19 horsepower overall to go up and down hills and back and forth to the Piggly Wiggly. The median on that list is an Audi Q4 Sportsback, which is about 19 kilowatts, or 25 horsepower. And at the high end, for the average power, you look at Mercedes Benz EQV 300 Long, which is 29 kilowatts, or 39 horsepower.

The Tesla, or excuse me, some of the trucks, electric trucks, were not included in the study, and they would be a lot worse. But what in this is a clear trend that the heavier the vehicle, the more power it requires to just go back and forth on the street. And just as a way of qualifying this, 19 horsepower, what’s the what’s the equivalent in terms of electric space heaters that you might have in your house?

Anthony: Of 19 horsepower. I’m going to say 190.

Fred: Oh, good. Good answer.

Michael: Michael. They see their horsepower. Man, I don’t know.

Fred: This is why I love life because I can explain these things. The average home room heater that you plug into the wall is 1500 watts, which is basically 2 horsepower. Oh So if you look at these cars at the low end Tesla Model 3 is 19 horsepower.

So you have to have enough batteries in this thing To essentially have 10 electric space heaters running all the time just to get you back and forth to wherever you’re going to go. That’s a lot

Michael: of power. That’s a lot, especially because space heaters seem to be one thing that always trips my fuses on my home electrics.

Fred: Yeah, it’s a lot of power. And so another way of thinking of this is that you have enough current going through your car basically to run a welding station all the time. So it’s like having a continuous welding station going on as you’re driving down the road. So just to point out that this is a lot of power.

But the key point here is that as the weight increases, the required power also increases. The amount of power that we’re talking about here is like the order of 20 to horsepower. So let’s look at a motorcycle engine. If you had a motorcycle engine in your car producing that same amount of power, the weight of that engine is what?

A lot. A lot. No, actually not so much. A little. Motorcycle engine. It’s in the range of 40 to 50 pounds to produce that 25 to 30 horsepower. As you look at it, even if you look at a 600 cc, which you would need for that big Mercedes Benz, you’re still talking about an engine weight of about 90 pounds. If you look at the engine in the Mercedes, you’re going to be talking about Probably a thousand pounds.

So I get to try to pull this apart a little bit. The V8 engine weight is about somewhere between 400 and 700 pounds, depending on the model. Let’s say 500 pounds or so. The rear end assembly is 250 pounds. The transmission weight is about 125 pounds. If you look at the Prius, for example, you look at the engine weight of about 200 pounds instead of 500 or 600 pounds, and the included battery, it’s around 150 pounds the engine only needs to produce 71 horsepower.

So you got an electric motor and you got a generator. So how does this all work? The best analogy I can think of is. And you’ve probably done this taking a shower using a hot water heater. Yes. Have you ever had the experience of taking a shower too long and all of a sudden cold water starts running out?

Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve all had that. That’s like a battery running down, right? So there’s two different kinds of hot water heaters that you can get. One is called a tankless hot water heater, which just absorbs an enormous amount of power. And it heats the water on the way through, but it doesn’t store any hot water.

Another more conventional way of doing things is to have a big cylinder in your basement, and it heats it a little bit at a time, but eventually it heats up the entire hot water tank with hot water. And as long as you don’t take a shower that’s too long, and I don’t even want to know what you’re doing in that shower if you’re in there for too long, then it’s perfectly fine, right?

You take the hot water out. Over time, it adds some more hot water it heats up some more hot water, and then if you use it again, it’s all fine. That’s like the approach for the hybrid car. So the hybrid car has a battery. That it uses to augment the power. So you can have a small engine, right?

It only weighs, it only puts out 71 horsepower. And it only weighs about 200 pounds. And it’s perfectly fine for driving the car down the road. Because that only takes 25 horsepower, right? 20, 25 horsepower. So you’ve got an extra 50 horsepower it can use to generate extra power and charge up a battery.

When you go up a hill, which is really the reason you’ve got this big V eight in your car anyway, to accelerate and to go up hills. But in the hybrid car, what happens is it takes the power that’s in the battery, which is producing, we’ll say, 20 horsepower or so, 25 horsepower when you’re going up the hill.

And then it gives a boost from the engine to say, okay, I only need this engine boost to add to the 25 horsepower. Every now and again, so I can go ahead and suck energy out of the battery, and I’ll use the motor. We’ll get up the hill, and when we go back down the hill I’ll start to recover some of that energy, I’ll regenerate, I’ll use the regenerative braking system, I’ll run the engine.

So basically what you’re seeing is that you’ve got a weight savings for propulsion of around 650 pounds or so in comparison between the conventionally powered car with a big engine and the Prius with a much smaller engine. Because the propulsion weight is reduced, then other things can happen, like the structural support is reduced, the brakes can be smaller, the tires are smaller and lighter, all of those things help save weight.

But again, weight is the principal parameter that determines your overall mileage. Less weight, better mileage. Does that make sense so far, or have I lost you somewhere?

Anthony: No, I’m on board. I have a question, but I don’t know if you’re going to get to it in a second. But I’m going to ask it anyway. Okay I get the concept of hybrid cars, all that.

What always confuses me is plug in hybrid versus non plug in. So I have to plug in my car. Even why would I choose a plug in version versus a non plug in version? What’s the

Fred: great question. So the difference between a plug in and a regular is simply the size of the battery. One of the features of the hybrid car is that when the engine runs, It typically runs at a very efficient point, because it’s not directly driving the car, it’s also charging the battery.

The performance point for the car engine is better, because it can be tuned for that much narrower application than the broad range that a regular car is going to have to support with this engine. Does that make sense? You’re just tuning it for a much finer performance point. With a plug in hybrid.

You’re able to go for longer without starting up the engine. Now the engine is very inefficient when starting up. Because it’s got to warm up. It’s got to it’s got to do all those things. It’s got to get the oil flowing. There are a lot of parasitic losses associated with any engine running. If you think of it in a conventional car, the engine’s always running.

So you’re always circulating the oil. You’re always running the coolant pump. You’re always doing these things. You’re turning crankshafts. You’re turning camshafts. You’re doing all these things that are Parasitic losses. They all require energy to do that, and so they’re all absorbing power as the car is running.

So the less you can use the engine, the better off, the higher the efficiency is going to be. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. So with a plug in hybrid, you’re not using the engine very much because it’s designed so that you can go back and forth to the grocery store or school or whatever, basically running strictly on battery power.

And the battery power, in small amounts, can be much more efficient than the than the gasoline power. We’ve talked about this before, there’s some potential efficiencies there. Maybe some of it’s illusory, but as far as the owner of the plugin hybrid is concerned, you’ve only been trickling in this power overnight to charge up the battery because it doesn’t, it’s not a huge battery.

It doesn’t need to get all that much energy into it. You’re going back and forth to the store. You’re not running engines, so you don’t have those parasitic losses. You’re recovering energy when you brake because it’s got regenerative braking. All of these come into play to reduce the overall carbon footprint associated with that car.

Anthony: Okay, so I can just plug it in using a standard 110 outlet. I don’t need some Electrician to install a 220 line or even something more advanced like with an electric car

Michael: Certainly don’t

Fred: need to have the higher voltage because you don’t if the battery runs down you’re gonna have this gasoline engine kick in and go ahead and charge the battery up.

So you don’t need to have that. I don’t know whether or not they’re equipped with a higher voltage charging, because maybe people get impatient, but Yeah, I, you don’t clearly need it. You can get it the way you need it for hire, remember, so right with a conventional electric car, you’ve got this trail of 20.

Room heaters that you have to heat up and burn every time you’re going down the highway, because that’s just what it takes. And that’s just a lot of power. So if you got a lot of power out, you got to put a lot of power in order to make the system work. But with the hybrids and the plug in hybrids, you don’t have that much power coming out and.

It’s because they’re lighter and you’ve got the engine that’s available to supplement whatever energy you’ve pulled in from the electrical system.

Anthony: So with a conventional car, I’ve got to worry about oil changes, transmission issues, conventional engine issues and whatnot. With an electric vehicle, I don’t, there’s no more oil in the system.

There’s not a transmission in a There’s not a transmission. I don’t have to, there’s a whole bunch of things I don’t have to worry about. Now, but with the hybrid system, I have to deal with whatever issues come with electric vehicles and the issues that come with conventional vehicles. Don’t, isn’t this a bad situation where I have two I’ve doubled my point of failure or no?

Michael: I

Fred: don’t know if you double it or not, but the fact is that the electric vehicles are higher maintenance than the conventional vehicles, at least up to this point, probably because of the maturity of the designs. The electric the hybrid electric. Yes, it has more, more moving parts than you might want to have, but these small gasoline powered motors are very mature technology and they don’t require lots of maintenance.

Yes, they do require some maintenance, but it’s more about the hours of operating the engine than it is about the miles that the car has actually been used. With a conventional car. Every mile is associated with a certain amount of engine wear. With a hybrid, plug in hybrid, every mile that you drive the car is not necessarily associated with engine wear.

Because the engine’s just sitting there a lot of the time because you’re running on the battery. So it’s A different approach to maintenance. And yes, you do need to maintain it, but it doesn’t require that much because you’re not using it all the time. And because when you do run it, it’s operating at a pretty efficient operating point.

Anthony: Okay. And one thing you just said in there is that the cost of maintenance for an electric vehicle is higher than for conventional

Fred: cars. That’s what people have been, that’s what people have seen so far in the industry.

Anthony: Really, because I’ve seen the repair bills being much higher because they’re like, Tesla, there’s, they just don’t have third party suppliers and parts and things like that.

But wait, the cost of maintaining these vehicles, I didn’t know

Fred: this. Tesla’s got problems like the front end falling off, right?

Anthony: Yeah, but like the conventional like every, I’m going to totally get this wrong, but however often you’re supposed to change your oil like you have to do those types of maintenance.

I guess tire wear can be more depending on how heavy my EV is. I thought with, basically just eliminating fluids. Eliminating oil changes. I assume that would just drop my EV costs. My maintenance cost right there. What?

Fred: What’s the cost or my two off top? I’m only reflecting what I’ve been reading in the literature that’s coming through that.

And again, it may be just due to the immaturity of the industry. I don’t know. But if you look at, a lucid car that’s on the road right now, there’s been a lot of recalls associated with those, and they simply haven’t accumulated enough miles yet. So the Lucent has an imperative to minimize the maintenance on those cars.

There, new stuff always has to be brought in. It’s, in engineering it’s called something called a bathtub curve, where you look at introducing a new system with a lot of moving parts, and you have high maintenance at the beginning. Then as you learn to use it, you go down to a low maintenance regime, which hopefully will last a long time.

Then as the vehicle wears out, you go back up into a high maintenance regime. So that’s why people replace the cars eventually. Because they get to be, when your maintenance bill exceeds your Monthly payment for the car, then that’s time to think about getting a new car, right? So I think that for a lot of the electric vehicles, simply because they are new, they’re not mature yet.

They’re still learning what parts are going to be needing maintenance and what parts are not going to be needing maintenance. The potential in the future, who knows, with the fewer parts maybe it’ll be better, but at the moment, it seems that the electric vehicles are suffering more maintenance costs, certainly than they want to, but higher than comparably mature or comparable conventional cars, simply because the conventional cars are more mature.

Anthony: Probably. And you have a bunch of startups like Lucid, who’s probably ruining the curve for everybody else. Hey, with that So

Fred: does that clarify things, guys? Why the plug in hybrid can have such high efficiency or something that I’ve missed here?

Anthony: No I understand it now. I get, I didn’t the whole plug in part, I just, what, why would I do that?

Fred: Because you’re still looking confused, but you haven’t just come back from Hawaii, so I don’t know if I’m missing something

Michael: here. I’m not sure what the answer is to the maintenance cost question. A lot of studies have come out tending to show a, somewhat less maintenance costs involved.

I know Consumer Reports had one and some, I believe AAA put one out showing less maintenance costs involved in electric vehicles due to the fact that they have less moving parts. And the studies tended to bear that out on a numbers. Basis, but it’s a few hundred dollars a year, but I don’t know if I, I’m not sure that we’re early enough or that we’ve got enough electric vehicles on the road of, especially the large variety to, to really come down on that point right now, it’s premature.

Fred: They’re new and, um, nobody’s really got a lot of experience with these electric motors or, wherever they are, they’re experiencing salt spray and dirt and grime over a period of 10 years. Is that good for them or not? Do you have to excessively filter the air that’s being used to cool them or not?

We just don’t know. The industry doesn’t know. Hopefully in the future that electric vehicles will be very maintenance free for a very long time, but. I think the jury’s still out on that.

Anthony: Alright, good to know. Thank you for this week’s Tao. Let’s jump into Recall Roundup. There’s a billion stories we haven’t gotten to, but we’re gonna jump right into Recall Roundup.

And we’re gonna start off with fan favorite, Lucid. Lucid under investigation for potentially dodging recall responsibilities. Lucid’s defroster failed, and they just warned the driver instead of replacing it. Wait,

Michael: is that right? Yeah, we, we talked about this recall, I think it was about a month ago, when Lucid came out with it, and I think I had some pretty strong words for Lucid on this, because basically what they’re instructing owners to do is wait for the safety defect to occur before they can report it to the dealer and get it fixed, which is just backwards.

It’s not how recalls work. It’s never been how recalls work. I know Lucid’s very new to the industry and they’ve modeled themselves off some of Elon’s behaviors, which include denying the existence of recalls in certain situations. So that’s what happened was, less than a month or about a month after that recall, NHTSA is now saying, Whoa, what are you doing here?

We need to open investigation into this. Because you’re making people have the defect and have the failure before you repair it. Apparently NHTSA caught this. They had an opportunity to catch this when Lucid submitted their Part 573 defect notification. NHTSA reviewed that and approved it.

At the time, they didn’t seem to have a problem. But then they came out pretty quickly with this investigation, which I Assume is going to result in lucid doing an actual recall that would have people come get a fix for this problem before they experience it and before they potentially have an unsafe condition arise.

Anthony: Next one to jump to is Ford and some airbag issues. Now this is. Again, this is related to the whole Takata thing. This is Ford is working to re inspect more than a quarter million vehicles after they discovered that flawed work and false billing by dealership technicians during the required replacement of Takata airbags.

Wait, so I bring in my Ford and they’re like, Hey, got to fix my deadly airbag. And they’re like, yeah, done.

Michael: Yeah, that’s, there were apparently a number of dealerships. We’re not sure how many, it could be a lot who were either incorrectly repairing some of the Takata inflators, the Takata airbag modules.

Or not doing anything and charging forward for the repair without even replacing the airbag. So this is something we worry about a lot in the context of recalls, but there’s very little that we can do to really. Catch this behavior. It’s if a manufacturer order, it says, Hey, we’re going to do this recall all their dealers are going to be the ones responsible for performing the actual repairs.

And if a dealer says, Oh, yeah, Nancy brought in her 2015 Ford focus and we did the recall and shipped it out the door. We need x amount of money from you ford for our labor or whatever they get for each recall They do get paid to perform recalls What’s what apparently was happening was these dealers were either doing a quick cheap or non functioning repair or not doing a repair at all And I believe ford came back and said, we’re going to look into this.

They basically did a survey that found that you know A certain percentage of these vehicles probably aren’t repaired, but they don’t appear to be conducting another recall to go back and, basically audit the entire population of vehicles out there and figure out who’s gotten these fake repairs or bad repairs which is something.

We really think they need to do. We think they need to go car by car here and make sure that owners have gotten this repair properly done. Because as these airbag inflators and as the ammonium nitrate in these airbag inflators ages, that’s where the problem starts to happen. Starts to exist.

You know that the and ultimately what Ford needs to do here is make sure that it’s tracking down all the vehicles that did not get a repair because if they’re not repaired, the rate of potential inflator rupture is goes through the roof at some point about 20 years after those vehicles are built. As we’re seeing with the do not drive advisory that GM put out.

In the past week for the 2003, 2004 Pontiac Vibes they say do not drive them. If you still own one and you haven’t got this recall, do not drive it until you do. That’s just how dangerous this issue gets after that many years. And it’s something that owners need to be keenly aware of and on top of.

Anthony: So if I’m a Ford customer, how do I find out if my repair is actually made or if my dealership was one of these bad actors?

Michael: You have to go, you have to go, if you don’t trust that dealership, go to another dealership, but you’re going to have to get it checked out by a Ford dealer. And potentially an independent repair shop could tell you the same thing.

If they’re knowledgeable about what the newer airbag modules replacement airbag modules look like and you know how to determine whether you have an old or a new that’s the only way that it’s going to happen it’s you know, I don’t really want to advise consumers to break open their Take a look at their airbag But definitely if you have an a Ford vehicle that falls into this, these are going to be, and I think we’ll post that story to our site, but these are going to be a lot of the older Takata models, like the 2005 Ford Ranger, these are mostly older, the older Ford Rangers that are in that really dangerous population of airbags that have been around so long.

Wow.

Anthony: Okay. I’m just going to get to one more recall before I do listener mail. Hey guys what recall of our patch of recalls do you think I’m gonna choose out of all of them? Come on, take a guess. Anybody? Anybody? Yeah, Waymo. That’s right. Waymo is recalling potentially 444 vehicles. I

Michael: don’t know how many vehicles they have in total, but I don’t think it’s much more than that.

I think that’s gonna be all of them.

Anthony: Yeah, okay. So the description of the safety risk is incorrect prediction of the future motion of another vehicle may result in an increased risk of collision. Now, this was a Waymo ran into a car being towed. Is that what the story was, this was?

Michael: Yes, they

Fred: ran into one car being towed and they did it twice.

Michael: Have you ever seen one of those have you ever seen a truck being towed backwards on the interstate? Yeah. That’s that thing where the you start screaming and then you nudge the person sleeping next to you and they wake up and see a truck right in front of you? That’s the trickiest way.

Anthony: I am not getting in a car with you, I’m falling asleep.

Michael: This pickup truck was being towed by another vehicle facing back at the weighing vehicle, basically. And apparently the Waymo’s were having trouble picking that up. It’s apparently an improper way to tow a vehicle. I don’t know if they’re trying to cast aspersions on the tower of the vehicle, but in this case, they had a problem.

The first Waymo vehicle hit the truck and nobody stopped. The truck didn’t stop. And then another Waymo vehicle came by and did the same thing. So there’s clearly a programming issue going on there. And Waymo put out a test, validated the fix, and started deploying the software, I think, in December.

So this is an older recall that’s being noticed, NHTSA is being noticed about it now, or being given notice of it, but it’s something that WAMO has already performed.

Fred: So I’m going to issue a rant warning here, because their press release that associated with this said quote, to date, we have driven over 10 million fully autonomous miles and served over 1 million ride hail trips.

Always putting safety first, close quote. That’s fine, 10 million, so only another 90 million to go before you can make any kind of qualif any kind of supported claim about safety. But I also want to point out that they’re clearly not putting safety first. They’re putting operations first. If they wanted to put safety first, they would just stop operating the cars.

So clearly safety is a subordinate goal for them, if it at best. And I just, it just is irksome that they keep throwing out this bullshit saying that, safety is first, safety is always going to be first. We’re the safest in the world where the world needs us for safety. And yet safety is not even their top priority.

And we don’t know what the priority is for safety. Clearly not number one. End of rant. Thank you.

Anthony: Excellent rant. Let’s jump into listeners questions, because we can get into safety with GM Cruise, but that would take another hour of the show of me just maniacally laughing.

Michael: Yeah, and we’ve had two straight weeks of that, so give him a break.

Anthony: Okay. Listener mail. I inherited a 2013 Hyundai Elantra from my wife. While I don’t believe Hyundai’s engine recall applies, I am at 145, 000 miles with it, and there are no symptoms or defects with this 1. 8 liter engine yet. However, I’m a slow driver and change the oil every 3, 000 miles. Wow. Using synthetic and Hyundai oil filters.

I’m wondering though, will the defect inevitably show up? I performed a compression test and cylinders one through four read between 155 and 160. Our listeners are very detailed. My wife’s 2016 Sonata, however, is using oil at 60, 000 miles. We noted this with Hyundai last year. The intake person recommend when changing the oil that half quart be added additionally, then keep an eye on it.

A knock sensor has been installed. So this Sonata doesn’t, does have this engine recall. Are there any advisories for us in this regard? Thanks in advance.

Michael: Let’s see, so on the, I don’t believe the 2013 Elantra has the engine, the Theta 2 engine I could be wrong there that’s really been the biggest problem here the 2016 Sonata may be a problem, but the Elantra sounds, I mean Look that sounds like a good car.

He’s got a lot of miles on it. It’s over 10 years old now no defects Taking care of the changing the oil driving slow And babying it. I don’t know. I don’t think that deep, it’s looking like he’s doing really well there. There may not be a defect that shows up on that one. And the compression test looks good.

That’s not enough to tell you really everything about your engine condition, but it will give you some indications at least how well the cylinders are sealed. On the Sonata, I would say that’s something, the additional oil uses is something that, that we’ve heard from a lot of consumers.

That’s probably the engine you really want to be babying. And also if you listen back to our previous episodes, when we had Joanna Johnson on to talk about the oil pan drain plug episode

Anthony: title, don’t crack the paint.

Michael: Yes, never crack the paint. That should, that’s something to certainly keep an eye on very closely.

Make sure that, your drain plug isn’t falling out and letting all of the oil out, but also burning, having to add an extra half quart of oil. Because the engines burning too much oil is never a great sign.

Fred: There’s a lot of variables at play here. So it’s hard to know. I, it’s, this is neither death nor taxes, so it’s not inevitable.

I think that, one of the things that the listener could do is to see if there’s any oil dripping from the engine. And that would determine whether or not there’s something internal versus external that. Is causing the excess oil use. In the in the 2016 Sonata. Another thing to think about though, is that there are other things besides leaks that can consume the oil.

There could be scratches on the cylinder wall. There could be a head gasket that’s wearing out. Just there’s just a lot of things that could be happening. And you did mention the compression test on the Sonata, the 2016 Sonata. If you’re in a position to do that, go ahead and check the compression.

If you find one of the cylinders is off, then that would be an indication that there’s either some damage to the cylinder walls or that there is perhaps a a leaky valve or a leaky head gasket. So a lot of things to think about, but congratulations on the maintenance that you’ve maintained so far.

It sounds like it’s a good car.

Anthony: Our other listener question is I have a 2016 Nissan Rogue. Are there any recalls on that model concerning the CVT or continuous variable transmission? And I suggest that this listener and all listeners go to autosafety. org and you can put all this information in and you’ll get all the recalls.

And I’m doing it right now and I’m searching for CVT and I don’t see anything come up with CVT,

Michael: that’s correct. There are seven recalls on that model year Nissan Rogue 2016. None of them involve the CVT. But, with that said, there are a lot of complaints about that transmission on NHTSA’s site, and, the NHTSA site is geared towards safety complaints, and you’re not going to get, complaints of general transmission failures, or you might get them at a far lower rate than you would on the NHTSA site, but they’re If you over 100 on that model year on the CVTs failing on some bad shifting issues, that’s functionally look like a loss of power.

There was also a class action on the CVT train, the CV transmission, I guess it would be continuously variable transmission. There was a class action and they extended the warranty to 7 years and 84, 000 miles which While that was great up until 2023 for the listener It’s probably expired now And so the extended warranty would no longer cover the cbt.

So if you’re having problems, I would suggest You know, taking a copy of that bulletin and any other research you can find, there are a number of bulletins, service bulletins available on this issue, and you can also, while you’re looking at our website about the CBT recalls, you can look up manufactured communications.

Involving the CVTs and that might give you a good idea of what you can talk about when you go into the dealer with, when you go to the dealer, make sure you have this warranty extension with you and saying, look, guys, you don’t have in this problem. I’m just past this extension date. I know you guys have seen a lot of problems with these vehicles.

Can you help me out here? You have to throw yourself at their mercy because you’re past the final date of the warranty extension. Yeah,

Anthony: on our side as well very helpful for us. You can submit a complaint about your 2016 Nissan Rogue or anything else when you’re on the vehicle safety check pages looking at the stuff and we see there’s at least, we’ve got three complaints about the CVT of people coming in and the manufacturer communications.

I just did a quick check on that. There’s a lot of stuff. Information about CVT, about the class action notification, about fluid level check gauge. There’s a lot about fluid level check gauge. Oh man oil leak diagnosis. So there’s a lot of valuable information on autosafety. org! And while you’re there checking all this stuff out, think, Hey, I got this great information.

I should really give them some money. I was going to buy a lucid air, but now I’m going to donate all that money to the center for auto safety instead. Or just donate it to me directly. Sound good? No,

Fred: one final thought on the Nissan Rogue. Now that we’ve covered our financial issues, be nice when you go in to ask about, recalls, because every dealer I believe has a certain amount of discretionary money set aside for customers who.

Are in what the dealer thinks is an unreasonable situation. You may be able to tap into that, but the key to tapping into that is just be nice and be respectful and, she has to be affirmative, but hopefully it’ll be on your side and it’ll work out to your advantage.

Michael: Yeah, I would say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease if it’s using honey instead of vinegar.

Anthony: That’s too many mixed metaphors there.

Michael: Maybe it is. I think you understand what

Anthony: it means. That it’s time for your lunch. That’s what I think it means. Alright, hey, thanks listeners for sticking with us. This is a longer than normal episode, but hopefully worth it. I will be back next week. Bye bye. Oh, it’s leap

Michael: day.

For more information, visit www. autosafety. org.