Liberate you from safety!

Introduction to the Podcast

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

Liberation Day and Its Impact on Auto Prices

Anthony: Welcome everybody to work Tariff Day. Is it, what is it called?

Michael: Liberation Day. Oh, I think is what they’re calling it, right?

Anthony: Welcome to Liberation Day, where everything costs 25% more. Today is apparently liberation day. And we’re starting off with what this means for you, the auto buyer from an article in the New York Times, I’m gonna quote, but whatever car makers decide, car buyers can expect to pay more for new and used vehicles estimates very [00:01:00] widely and depend on the model.

But the increase could range from around $3,000 for a car made in the US to well over $10,000 for imported models. How would used vehicles price go up?

Michael: I think ultimately you’re gonna see exactly what we saw during Covid where the price of used vehicles went sky high through the roof.

I. I I if a lot of the people who are in a rush now to get out and buy cars may be doing the right thing. We keep seeing articles about a rush to buy new cars from dealerships. I think you could make the argument that it you should be rushing to buy a used car too.

If you have a car that’s in a bad state and isn’t gonna make it. For another three or four years, then you might want to consider changing. Now, while the prices are still somewhat reasonable, because all indications are that tariffs are going to go into effect they, the Trump administration doesn’t really seem to grasp the interconnectedness of the auto market and just how.

Anthony: How dare you.

The Complexity of the Auto Supply Chain

Michael: There is no [00:02:00] 100% American made vehicle. I think that’s one of the articles we are, we’re looking at this week, where you’ve got vehicles that are made from a combination of parts. Even American vehicles that are made by GM and Ford. True Blue American manufacturers are going to be comprised of parts that are being made in Canada, made in Mexico, the computers that are going to these cars inevitably are gonna have chips that are coming in from Taiwan or somewhere else, and there are 40,000 parts on average in a car, right? And so all these parts have to be sourced from various places, and we’re not making all of them in America and. The kind of the idea that these tariffs are gonna drive all this production to America so that we’re gonna have truly a hundred percent American made cars is almost it’s borderline absurd and it’s definitely silly.

It’s just a bad plan and ultimately. I don’t think tariffs are gonna drive anything but the cost of cars [00:03:00] up bad for consumers, it’s bad for everyone. It’s bad for the industry as well. Even the automotive alliance who were often at odds with on safety issues, they have come out and criticized the tariffs and suggested that, it’s gonna, it’s gonna hurt the auto industry because, fewer people are going to be willing to.

Fork out a lot of money on their newer cars. We saw what happened during Covid where new car sales suffered, used car sales begin to dominate. I think we’re gonna see that again. But this time, we’re looking at a market where the average car on the road is older than it’s ever been.

I think we’re approaching 13 years for the average age of a vehicle. And so I, I think this is just going to be a pocketbook nightmare for consumers. The safety impacts, it’s hard to be sure of. But anytime you see supply chain issues, which I’m sure this tariff structure is going to create, there’s a chance of poor quality, bad parts, all these things that could ultimately impact [00:04:00] vehicle safety as well.

But that’s not something, that’s not something that’s as easily predictable as the fact that your car is about to go up in price by, three to. $12,000 according to some of the estimates we’ve seen.

Anthony: But my used vehicle will be worth more sweet so I can sell. It will

Michael: be like, yeah, it will be like that.

I think like just like what we saw in Covid, where used vehicle prices are going to skyrocket because people won’t be able to afford new cars and I think the average vehicle in the United States is now around. 48, 40 9,000, approaching $50,000. Oh my God. Which is out of my price range and out of, the price range for the majority of Americans.

So used cars are what we’re gonna have to turn to and it’s. That’s bad. That’s, that is bad for safety long term because, when all these new technologies are coming out that do add safety to vehicles better, automatic emergency braking, cars with better [00:05:00] airbag systems there’s all sorts of things coming out on the market every year that make your vehicle safer when we’re all buying used cars.

None of that safety tech is making it out onto the roads. And so it’s a step backwards for safety as well.

Anthony: Liberation day from the article in MSN, this is what Michael, you just alluded to. I’m gonna quote from it. Even US assembled automobiles by major American brands rely heavily on complex global supply chains for the roughly 30,000 parts, not 40,000, 30,000 parts that make up the average car.

Overall, the percentage of auto parts that are sourced abroad hovers around 40%. Said Dan Ives, the global head of technology research at Webo Securities financial services firm. US made cars with all US parts is a. Fictional tale I’ve said, but the, you mentioned GM and Ford and I think, we know that tho they don’t matter in this administration.

Tesla’s Controversial Practices

Anthony: How does this affect the price of a Tesla?

Michael: Are people still [00:06:00] buying Teslas? What, how is their market going? There’s so much going on there that I just don’t know. I know that, in Canada a couple of weeks ago, they found out that, someone sold what?

Thousands of Teslas in a weekend or something. Apparently the apparently Tesla is trying to suck up all the money that Canada has put aside for electric vehicle rebates. And these dealerships somehow colluded to empty the pot of the kinetic the Canadian. The Canadian rebate system.

So yeah, they did it. And it was so egregious that the minister in Canada said, Tesla’s going to be excluded from the next round of whatever rebates we give an electric vehicles, which is, that’s a threat to electric vehicle adoption and all the, environmental.

Loveliness that electric vehicles are supposedly providing the country. But, I haven’t seen any indication that the same thing is taking place in America where we also have some ev rebate structures. Unless [00:07:00] I, I can’t remember. Has the administration eliminated all those yet as well?

Anthony: I don’t know if they have. I think Tesla gets a pass on everything. What do you think, Fred?

Fred: I think that. The Tesla dealerships in Canada apparently sold one Tesla every 30 seconds over a weekend so that they could exhaust the fund Michael was talking about, and the stopped happened to be coincidental with the exhaustion of the funds that were in that.

Something pretty fishy. I thanked since you asked. Yeah.

Rant on Tariffs and Economic Chaos

Fred: And this is a bit of a rant that we’re engaged in an effort by Trump to reinstate the hereditary aristocracy that we abandoned when the British left and when the slaves were freed. I think he’s really trying to do that by substituting tariff income for the current tax [00:08:00] system.

Remember in a tariff based economy, money flows up, flows from the poor to the rich. It doesn’t flow down from the rich to the poor. So the more we head in the Russian of tariffs the less progressive the tax system comes, becomes. So that’s thing is going on here ultimately and. In the process, I believe that they’re trying to create as much chaos as possible, because that’s an old sales technique, right?

You have to convince somebody that there’s a reason to take action in order for somebody to buy something, right? And if you create chaos, widespread chaos, then you can say I’m the only one who can see light out of this chaos. I’m the only one who can help you. Ultimately, I think that’s what’s going on.

Creation of chaos that is irrelevant to any kind of economic incentive in order to allow Trump and his minions to restore hereditary a [00:09:00] aristocracy in America. How else can you interpret Musk being allowed to accumulate 200 some odd billion dollars, essentially tax free? End of rant.

Sorry,

Anthony: end of rant, but possible beginning of your prison sentence. So if you would like to contribute to Fred’s commissary account, go to auto safety.org. Click on the donate button and we’ll make sure that Fred gets all the. Pop darts he could possibly need.

Fred: That’s a great segue. Thank you.

Anthony: As a current amount of zero.

Canadian Tesla Sales Scandal

Anthony: So yeah, so we were talking about this Canadian import thing last week. Friend of the show and guest, George Einy mentioned this and brought this up and and apparently the New York Times reporters listened to our show ’cause they wrote an article about it this week. I was talking about how according to Tesla, what they did is four Tesla owned dealerships reported to the Canadian government that they sold an astonishing 8,653 cars during a single weekend in January.[00:10:00]

I. Enough to qualify for 43 million Canadian dollars, about $30 million in real money worth of government subsidies under our program just before it expires. Now the Canadian government wants to know exactly how the hell they pulled this scam, because all four of those dealers, as Fred said, would’ve to sell a car every 30 seconds and the dealerships would’ve to be open for 24 hours a day from January 10th to January 12th.

The new Canadian Prime Minister is froze those payments and he said, I also don’t wanna be part of the United States Go Leafs. So yeah, this is gonna be an interesting little investigation and as just a scam and that just more of Tesla’s built on the backs of the taxpayers and apparently everywhere.

Fred: I excuse me. I was gonna say that but I lost the thought for a second.

Safety Implications of Older Vehicles

Fred: That this 12 year limit and the concentration on used cars has got real safety issues attached to it. Don’t forget, if the average age is 12 years, that means half of the [00:11:00] cars are older than 12 years, and cars that are older than 12 years don’t have automatic emergency braking.

They don’t have in many cases rear view cameras. They don’t have the many features that are built into cars that are more recent. So there’s a real safety implication of these tariffs. And by the way, it takes about, 10 to 15 years to build a new factory for some of these components and then establish all the supply chain that’s associated with getting them up and running.

It’s not a simple thing. It doesn’t happen overnight. So 10 years from now. There may be more manufacturers in the United States if this if this holds, but many people have their fingers crossed, hoping for a change of administration and all of these economic, decisions that are being made can be reversed by the next executive.

Order from the president. Remember, these [00:12:00] are not legislated. These rates are not legislated. These tariffs are not legislated. It’s all the personal whim of the current president. Stand by. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

Anthony: Unfortunately, I just heard that. Donations to the Fred Perkins Freedom Fund are now considered treason.

I would go to auto safety.org and click on donate. Anyway. Speaking of why we can’t criticize Tesla Elon Musk is wanting to use the power of the US government to stifle anyone who criticizes him and his fake chin and his hair plugs quoting from him on a Fox News interview. This is Elon’s words and the presidents made it clear we’re going to go after them.

The ones providing the money, the ones pushing the lies and propaganda, we’re going after them. If anyone would like to con contribute to my Con commissary account? Here’s the thing with that.

Michael: This is a good one and something, I’m considering maybe may, maybe I’ll make this my Gaslight of the Week, right?

Oh, who is the one human being on earth who has lied about Tesla more than anyone else? Elon. [00:13:00] Oh, okay. He’s been lying for years about Tesla’s capabilities in autonomy, full self-driving autopilot. He’s lying through his teeth about the robo, the future Tesla, robo Taxii, and its ability to robo cab, what do they call it?

Its ability to actually function based on the neural net and cameras that he has. In, in, in the Tesla Fe fleet right now. And I don’t think it would be very difficult, although I’m not gonna bore listeners with it, tracking every lie Elon is told about, about Tesla, the list goes on and on forever.

He repeats these lies about when full autonomy is coming virtually. At every earnings call Tesla has. If we’re gonna start going after people who lie about Tesla, he should be number one on the list.

Anthony: That is an excellent gaslight. Michael I’m impressed. With that in mind, I would like to reach out to George Soros, ’cause you’re obviously gonna be accused of funding the words coming out of Michael’s mouth.

And it’d be great if you [00:14:00] actually did fund those words. So this is just for George Soros, since you’re gonna get tainted with his. Propaganda, just pay for it. Fred, are you ready for your gaslight?

Fred: Oh, sure. Okay. Fire up.

Critique of Autonomous Vehicle Safety

Fred: I have a perennial favorite here. Waymo. Yay. Yeah. There was an article published, apparently funded by Waymo and written by Swiss Re, which is a reinsurance company in Switzerland.

The title of it is Do Autonomous Vehicles outperform Latest Generation Human Driven Vehicles? A Comparison to Waymo’s Auto Liability Insurance Claims at 25 million miles. Undated Study, by the way and quoting from it results demonstrate that the Waymo a DS significantly outperformed both the overall driving population, 88% reduction in property damage claims, 92% in injury claims.

Outperform the more stringent, latest [00:15:00] generation human-driven vehicle benchmark. 86% reduction in property damage claims, and 90% in bodily injury claims. Man, that sounds really good, doesn’t it? It does. So I decided to dive into it a little bit to find out what was behind that. And essentially what I found is that Santa Claus isn’t real.

They said that as the property damage thresholds are different in the standard general order standing, general order and insurance data, they’re not suitable to comparisons. So what this means is they threw out the 241 collisions that have been reported to Nisa under the standing general order, during the extent of the study, and instead they put in their own number, which was nine collisions.

Anthony: Why even put nine? Why? Come on. If you’re gonna bullshit, just go all out.

Fred: So I thought that was pretty good. Just take away [00:16:00] all the negative information and then discover that you’re doing really good. So I’m not a actuary, but I think someone’s got some spleen to do.

Of course, they can go into the details of the comparisons and they basically made up a mythical database based on a lot of really challenging assumptions. And basically, if, a good comparison might be the safety statistics of chauffeur-driven Bentleys in the same favorable circumstances rather than the overall population that they made up.

Surprisingly, Waymo published the 90% Improvement in Safety, and they didn’t talk about any of the qualifying assumptions that went into this. So I’m giving Waymo my congratulations for this week’s Gaslight of the Week nomination.

Anthony: That is excellent. And Fred, you’re the winner this week because the correct answer is Waymo.

I also [00:17:00] am not an act. I also am not an actuary, but I can do basic math as I’ve done numerous times in this show. It will take forever for Waymo to break even. Not gonna happen, folks, just like GM Cruise didn’t break even, wouldn’t break even. And the people at GM eventually did the math and realized, holy shit, we’ve burnt how much money.

So this is to the executives at Alphabet. How much money have you burnt? Now look at how much revenue that Uber makes globally, and they don’t have to deal with restrictions on avs. They don’t have to do any of that at all. Look how much revenue they make globally. Look how much money you’ve spent and realize that you would have to take over every city where Uber operates and dominate it before you start breaking even.

Do you think that’s possible? I didn’t think so either. How do you say pump and dump?

Fred: In

Anthony: Spanish. Oh, El I wasn’t very good at the [00:18:00] Spanish. But talking to talking more about the automated vehicles, here’s a great article titled Traffic Deaths Show No Signs of Abating Despite Years of Tech Advances.

I’m gonna quote from the opening of this ’cause it’s amazing. Traffic crashes killed tens of thousands of Americans, and wrought a suicidal mess through city neighborhoods and across fledgling highways. Norman Bel Gettys wrote in 1939. Wow. His antidote. Antidote. Automated driving technology. Hey, what.

Back in 1939, this guy was working for gm and he is Hey, we can put sensors in highways that will guide self-driving cars. It was a big hit at the 1939 World’s Fair. And we’re almost, what, 90 years later and people are still trying to sell nonsense. But I liked his approach where you’re actually doing kind of a V two X thing and the vehicles are talking to the infrastructure as opposed to today’s, where it’s just eh, let’s just go, let’s just, see what happens [00:19:00] here. Michael, I know you have some thoughts about this

Fred: well before Michael. Oh, sorry. Let me just ask you, was this written before or after the FCC took away all of the bandwidth that was associated with vehicle to vehicle communications?

Anthony: This will be after the date on, this is March 24th, 2025.

This is what is the publication This is in? ’cause I’m talking, it’s automotive

Michael: news. This is part of their hundredth anniversary celebration. Yeah. This and they’re looking at this issue. And it’s. It’s what we’ve, yes. In 1939, they were talking about automated vehicle technology.

I obviously, back then, the systems they were talking about probably aren’t nearly as advanced as what we talk about when we look at Waymo. But the real issue here and what the article is pointing out is that. There’s so much focus on all this added tech in these, AI and the ability for vehicles to use that tech to save lives, but they’re not looking at the simple tech [00:20:00] that we already have available that can do that now.

People keep looking, oh autonomous vehicles are gonna save, or eliminate traffic deaths in, I don’t know, 30, 50 years. We could kill. A third of all traffic deaths today by putting speed governing technology into vehicles that eliminate speeding. The technology is there, it’s available, it’s cheap.

It can go into every car in America. We just don’t want it, and manufacturers don’t want to put it in their cars because, if you’re the first manufacturer who puts it in your cars, the sales of that vehicle are gonna drop because people who wanna speed aren’t gonna buy ’em. So they need to be, it needs to be rolled out into every vehicle at once.

Similarly, automatic emergency braking, which we’ve talked about endlessly for the past couple of years. It’s not going to be it’s not being, even the industry is fighting, having good automatic emergency braking put into vehicles right now. But it’s something that could save a ton of lies.

Alcohol detection [00:21:00] technology that could eliminate. While it’s, the technology probably isn’t there to be able to, get everyone off the road who is at 0.08 or above and driving, it’s certainly there to get, 0.15 or higher and some of the worst drunk drivers off the road immediately.

So we have a ton of technology that is available. That is not being put into cars, that could dramatically reduce the fatality and injury rate on our roads. And instead the industry is focused on driver assistance, convenience systems that don’t offer any safety benefits. Autonomous vehicles that. The jury is still very much out on as far as this, any safety benefits they confer.

And not focused on, doing the actual work that could be done today to save lives on the road. And a lot of those re a lot of the reason for that is the, there’s. Political problems. [00:22:00] People want to speed apparently, and people want to be able to drive drunk, apparently. And those people’s feelings, for some reason matter a lot to automakers who’s, who ultimately are only concerned about how much money they’re gonna make at the end of the year.

And, less concerned about what they could be doing with their vehicles to make them safer. And it’s, I don’t see that situation getting any better in the next few years since, even the safety regulations, like automatic emergency braking that were on the way to get some of this stuff in place.

Alcohol detection, I. In intelligence, speed assistance, all these things were on the move at nitsa or even finalized in the case of automatic emergency braking. And the first thing the Trump administration has done is come in and indicate that they’re going to get rid of the automatic emergency braking rule.

And I can assure you, they’re not going to be pursuing regulations for intelligence, speed assistance, or alcohol detection technology. We have the ability to do it right now and to drastically [00:23:00] reduce the. Problems we’re seeing on our roads, but, it’s just not happening.

And it’s somewhat inexplicable from a safety perspective, when we’ve got 40 some odd thousand people dying on the roads every year that we’re not willing to take those steps. Michael, automatic,

Anthony: sorry I, this is a very important question, Fred. Does automatic emergency braking cause autism?

Is that the issue here?

Fred: It could very well. Okay. But I think the real issue is that all the cars have speedometers. Even my humble Subaru have speedometers that go up to 160 miles an hour. And if they put in speed limiters, what are we gonna possibly do with all those speedometers that go up 60 miles an hour?

Especially now with the import restrictions and tariffs, it’s, reducing the speed the cars can drive is gonna have an overwhelming impact on. The cost of cars because of import restrictions, which I’m sure the Alliance for Automotive Innovation will come out with a press release supporting that [00:24:00] view in days.

Anthony: Okay, so we’re gonna have smaller speedometers and we can get rid of that whole RPM thing ’cause I don’t know what the hell that’s about. And then we can use that space for advertising. What do you think guys?

Fred: It’s a good plan.

Anthony: Yeah. Alright. Good. All right. That was stupid. I’m sorry for wasting your time.

But we all know that autonomous vehicles are gonna save lives, right? Fred? This,

Fred: In the future, everything will be better. Absolutely. Great.

Anthony: Welcome to the future.

China’s Approach to Autonomous Vehicle Safety

Anthony: There’s a company out in China called Xiaomi. I think they used to sell cell phones, but now they also make autonomous vehicles.

This is an article we’re linking to from Yahoo News. A disclosure from the company earlier on Tuesday said, initial information showed the car was in the navigate on autopilot, intelligent assisted driving mode. Holy crap. That’s what they named it before the accident. That’s auto,

Michael: that’s autopilot basically.

Anthony: Yeah. Before the accident was moving at 72 miles per hour. A rundown of the data submitted to local police [00:25:00] posted on company Wabo account which is I guess their version of Twitter. Xiaomi said the autopilot system had issued a risk warning of obstacles ahead. A driver inside of the car took over and tried to slow it down, but then collided with a cement pole at a speed.

97 kilometers per hour. Unfortunately three people were killed in this. It’s an SUV type vehicle. This is the first confirmed autonomous vehicle.

Michael: No it’s not an, it’s not an autonomous vehicle. So it’s a. Their version of autopilot. It’s basically, this has already happened in the United States many times with Teslas and autopilot.

It looks China is probably going, and we talked about this a few weeks ago how China’s safety regulations. Our, it, it seems crazy to even think about this, but that China safety regulations may be more stringent and their, even, their recall and those systems might be more stringent than what we have in the United States because we [00:26:00] simply.

Fallen so far behind here of the world when it comes to getting safety, not only into vehicles, but ensuring that vehicles that are on the road are safe and not subject to problems like this, where you have a situation very similar to what we’ve seen in Teslas, where they’ve gone off the side of the road and hit.

Hit concrete structures or, go off the side of the road and hit fire trucks. There’s really not a lot of difference here, but I, it’s interesting to watch this and how it. Proceeds in China because the United States regulators and had essentially been sitting on their hands for seven or eight years now since some of these Tesla crashes started happening.

There was a autopilot recall that did very little to eliminate this problem. And even worse, Tesla’s putting. Full self-driving, which they’ve changed the name up to supervise full self-driving now out, and that’s growing as well. And there don’t seem to really [00:27:00] be any efforts to ensure that it’s safe.

And so people are continuing to die and to be injured in crashes because they’re relying on this. So now we get to see how China addresses the issue and if they do a better job than the United States has.

Anthony: And the first big difference is the company admits responsibility. Off the bat. Yeah, look at that.

But that’s, that is very anti maga right there. Don’t accept responsibility for your actions.

Fred: I’ve gotta submit here that they probably have a shortage of Gian Splatting.

Anthony: Oh, boy. Someone wants to jump into the towel of Fred, don’t they? Gian?

Introduction to Gaussian Splatting

Anthony: This is a Gian or Gian. Gaussian

Fred: Gauss was a mathematician in in Germany a long time ago, who’s done a lot of great things. Anyway, I’m gonna jump right into this. What does Gaussian splatting mean? It’s what it means is the method represents scenes with 3D Gaussians that retain properties of continuous [00:28:00] volumetric radiance fields, integrating sparse points produced in camera calibration.

It introduces the anisotropic representation using 3D Gaussians to model Radiance Fields along with an interleaved optimization and density control of the gaussians. Okay. You got that?

Anthony: Did we do something to hurt you?

Michael: Yeah. My, my brain stopped in your first couple of words there.

Anthony: I thought Gaussian splatting was like one, you see a squirrel lay down on their belly.

Isn’t that it? No, I

Michael: thought it was, I thought it was an ancient sport involving geese.

Fred: I like that. That’s good.

Understanding Point Clouds and Image Representation

Fred: All right, so I gotta get a little techy here. When you take a camera photograph, or you use your eyeballs to look at something, there are point images or there are points that the focal plane resolves, right?

And it’s your brain that turns that into a representation of something. That’s real and organic, right? So when you look at a digital camera, you’re actually looking at a bunch of little [00:29:00] dots. You’re not looking at an image, but your brain tur that, oh, that’s Susie. And it automatically does. So a very sophisticated perception mechanism.

So when you use digital cameras or you use lidars or something like that to take a picture of any object. What you actually get is a bunch of points, and then you have to somehow in your brain, automatically turn that into an image that you know is Susie again, and that’s good. But if you’re trying to drive a car and all you got is a bunch of points, which points are important for the car?

So what happens is the computer takes this what’s called a point cloud, which is just this bunch of data, and it turns it into a representation of a solid object. So it basically pastes little triangles, generally speaking between the points and says, beyond this, there’ll be demons. You cannot go past this little triangle I just created from these several [00:30:00] points.

Sometimes they use something called a tetrahedron to represent a solid object. Thank you. You’re welcome. Anyway, What happens with the Gian Splatting is that instead of looking at the different points. It says each point has a probability of being in this area. So they get, it is a bell-shaped curve and two dimensions around it that represents what that point does.

And then they combine that with another bell-shaped curve around another point, and they mesh it all together with mathematics and say, okay, this is what the surface is now. It’s not that little triangle. It’s a fuzzy little object. Then they spread that over the whole object that’s been perceived by the camera.

And they say, okay, now this is what the surface looks like. That gives a surface or a barrier for the vehicle. So the vehicle can’t drive past that fuzzy point cloud and it works pretty well. What the splatting refers to is being able to take several of those different [00:31:00] images taken from different angles, perhaps taken to different times.

And combine them all into a representation, an approved representation of what that object surface really looks like. So the splatting part just says that you’re taking several of these images and you’re squishing them together and using that to represent the object as it’s average among all that sophisticated mathematics.

So this is,

Anthony: I’m gonna jump in so I can make sure I understand.

Applications in Self-Driving Cars

Anthony: So this is, I’m in my automated Bentley and I’ve put my chauffeur on vacation and there’s multiple cameras on my Bentley. Looking forward, backwards. Sideways. And maybe it has lidar and radar. I. And I’ve got and every, we’ll say every millisecond it, they’re all taking photographs and taking range estimates and whatnot.

And the Gian Splatting is combining all of that together as quick as possible. Hey, there’s a road, there’s a tree, there’s a duck. [00:32:00] Roughly.

Fred: Yes, except it’s not happening in your Finley. It’s happening in a computer somewhere else running. Lots and lots of of processes. So the mathematical requirements for doing this are too extensive to be put into any individual automobile.

Now, Nvidia is trying to put in super computers into the cars, and they’re all over this because it requires extensive mathematics. But where we’ve seen it right now is its use in simulations. So when Volvo is, for example, looking at. Simulating a self-driving car going down the road, it’ll take one of these Gaussian Splatted representations and it’ll put it in the middle of the road to say, okay, this is my Gaussian spl splatted representation of a house over a fire hydrant or whatever.

And it becomes a solid object they can manipulate in the computer to look at it from different angles as though the [00:33:00] vehicle’s approaching it from different angles and, getting them improved ability in their minds to simulate the behavior of the vehicle in the real world.

Challenges and Criticisms of Simulations

Fred: Now, the, you’ve heard me say this many times, that simulations are doomed to succeed, and in the sense that you keep twiddling with this thing until it gives you the answer that you want, and go ahead and do it.

But what they’re trying to say is that. Because we have these images now and they’re coming fast and furious and we can do this in a computer. We no longer need to have real live vehicles and real live objects to qualify the safety systems of these self-driving vehicles. No, I think that’s nonsense and it’s very hazardous, but so this is being offered as another way of streamlining the qualification and validation process for the self-driving vehicles.

And it’s in Sweden, [00:34:00] so it must be good, right? That’s, oh, that’s where they’re doing this. But anyway, that’s what the Gaussian Flatting is all about. It’s just a way of making an improved representation of phy a physical object using point clouds generated by either cameras or lidars. Is that confusing enough or shall I dive in further?

Michael: No, I, no, that, that makes sense. Essentially, Volvo and Nvidia have joined together on, on this project and they’re essentially saying that, we can turn using gasoline and splatting, we can take all of the data points we have and use that in simulation and discover edge cases that are gonna ultimately make our cars safer.

Now, who knows? So many people are saying so many different things about the future of safety and autonomy, that it’s hard to know who’s real and who’s not. Volvo is long respected as a leader in safety in [00:35:00] automobile. So maybe they’ve got something here or maybe they’ve.

They’re just jumping into the world of autonomy feet first and, making claims that are somewhat unprovable at this point to a, attract the attention of buyers and other people who knows really

Fred: well. Then it’s important for people to remember that all AI is in a sense, bullshit in terms of Harry Frankfurt.

Okay? It’s, it is irrelevant to truth. It’s just a representation that looks truthy and yeah, and the truthiness. So you could

Michael: say that, yeah. The edge cases they’re creating here may be edge cases that exist in the simulation, but may not even exist in reality or something like that. That’s.

Certainly.

Fred: That’s right. And the fact that they can generate these things doesn’t mean that they can generate images comprehensive enough to represent real life driving safety and real life driving circumstances, even when they’re trying to limit it to just certain edge [00:36:00] cases. So it’s. It’s very hazy.

It sounds convincing. It can generate really lovely images that you can put on a computer. It really looks convincing. It’s truthiness at its best.

Anthony: That’s pretty good. It sounds like my old dating profile. It’s speaking of truthiness, at its best, let’s talk Aurora.

Aurora’s Self-Driving Trucks

Anthony: If you guys remember Aurora, it’s a self-driving truck company.

By truck, 18 wheelers hauling the big rigs. They’ve been testing out in Texas, I believe for the last couple years, but they’ve had safety drivers on board, right? Yep. And now from govtech.com. Quoting Amy Wither right founder of the Wither Right Law Group, and a traffic safety expert in Texas said that although she applauds Aurora’s efforts, she’s still concerned about the report’s.

Lack of specific details about how often or under what circumstances the company’s automation had failed or required human intervention with literally billions of dollars at stake. It is fair [00:37:00] to ask whether companies who will potentially profit from this technology should be the ones who decide whether it is safe to put on our highways.

So is this another case of these companies saying, Hey, I invented something, I’ll regulate myself. Thank you very much. Bye.

Fred: Oh, it’s another freedom Hater.

Anthony: Oh yeah, boy, boy. So Aurora, it’s, so are they Michael, are they trying to get rid of their safety drivers?

Michael: Yeah, apparently they’re gonna do that this month.

They haven’t been clear about the exact date, but they’re going to have operations between Dallas and Houston. In April, and they’ve been saying April for many months now. So apparently that’s in their plan. They apparently, they haven’t finished their safety case, which is essentially what something that, I think we advocate for.

We’re not sure exactly what Aurora’s safety case framework looks like and how they’re making it, because they’re not giving the public full access to that. They are publishing, a. [00:38:00] Essentially some sort of safety report that kind of at a high level describes their activities. None of us will ever get to see what’s what’s really underneath that, because that’s protected as a trade secret, I’m sure.

And so ultimately, like every other driverless company we’re simply going to have to trust them when driving between Houston and Dallas. Starting at some point this month in these massive, highways yes, are safer per mile than, city roads and connecting roads and all sorts of other areas.

But, these are also. Trucks that weigh many thousands of pounds. And when something goes wrong, it goes very badly wrong in moments. And so we’re nervous about, about the possibility of a completely driverless. 18 wheelers and I, if I was driving on the highway between Dallas and Houston in the next few months I’d probably be nervous as well, but I’d also be [00:39:00] intrigued to see one of these things drive past.

Anthony: Yeah. I’m more concerned about how this will affect country music because a lot of songs are written about, I was hollering something all night. Now it’s, now it’s gonna be bleep bloop, blo bloop, bloop. Is that it? Am I being a little too flippant today?

Michael: Maybe I was thinking more smokey in the Bandit reference.

Might be better off there, but who knows?

Anthony: Yeah,

Fred: all green beans. Just a grim reminder to folks that a heavy truck going into 70 miles an hour has the same destructive potential as a hell Fire missile fired from 20,000 feet into a building. You’ve seen a lot of that results in that in Gaza and similar places.

This is, it’s not a truck folks, it’s a safety hazard.

Anthony: Oh my God. If you’re if you live in the Dallas Houston area and you wanna tell us how often you have to change your underwear write in at [email protected]. I, yeah, I’m fascinated to see how this goes. I still don’t understand how [00:40:00] it saves money necessarily in terms of getting things on and off the highway to depots.

I don’t, I think it’s wishful economic thinking again, but, hey, I’m a cynic and not an actuary.

Female Crash Test Dummies Initiative

Anthony: Hey, there’s a female Crash Dummies to be used in car safety tests under Katie Britt bill, US Senator Republican from Alabama is the co-signer of the, she develops regulations and Vehicle Equality and Safety Act.

Adorable. The She Drives act. I’m saying it’s adorable. ’cause the way they name things is just, she should work for an auto company. This is put forth in saying, Hey, it’s, let’s update our crash testing dummies, as we’ve talked about before. So they cover a larger range of people instead of right now, where it only covers a range of what, a five 10 male who weighs 170 pounds.

Did I get that right? Pretty close, ballpark. Yep. Yeah, ballpark. And as we’ve pointed out, I don’t qualify for that and nor does Mr. [00:41:00] Perkins.

Fred: I may have met somebody like that once, but I, I can’t identify anybody like that. Right now.

Anthony: So this is a very good thing. I dunno how the other members of her political party will take to this.

But this is good. ’cause according to Nitsa data 1300 women die every year who would’ve otherwise lived if female death and injury rates were comparable to that of males. Cars are not designed unfortunately, to protect. People who are not five, ten, a hundred and seventy pounds. It’s surprising, but it’s true.

Michael.

Michael: It just makes complete sense to include dummies that correspond to the different sizes and types of humans that are out there and crashes rather than using a 5, 1070 pound van. It’s common sense. This supposedly a bipartisan bill that, that it’s made it through the Commerce committee in the Senate and who knows what would happen to in the house.

But, I think. It, this may be one bill that has a chance. We see a [00:42:00] lot of safety bills come and go and never get a vote on the Senate or the house floor. Some of those get wrapped into the infrastructure. I. Every, every infrastructure bill or every four years this one may have a shot.

Who knows? And it’s something that we would certainly support. I haven’t done a deep dive on the bill and reviewed every part of it, but, we’ve continually advocated for getting new dummies. Into cars and new dump in the, into different seats in the cars and new dummies that are more representative of the human beings around us into cars, because the data you get from those is going to be invaluable in understanding how to make crashes safer.

Anthony: That’s good. More data the better.

Fred: I’m really hoping for a tall senior dummy because it would represent me physically as well as intellectually. Wa, wa It’s, this is why engineers don’t do [00:43:00] standup on it.

Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. And you’re too tall to do standup.

Fred: Yeah, that’s true. The microphone

Anthony: stand doesn’t go that high.

That wasn’t remotely funny, but I, they’re not all winners, folks. It

Michael: was bad. I,

Anthony: yeah,

Michael: I’ll put credit for that. I’m, wait, I’m hoping for a dummy that’s shaped like a meatball so it can help me out.

Anthony: I that’s a spicy meatball. There you go. There you go.

Recall Roundup: Lucid, Volvo, and Nissan

Anthony: Okay, let’s do let’s do some recalls.

Let’s start off with a rare, because they don’t sell a lot of cars lucid. 4,294 vehicles. This is their all weather floor mats without anchor. It doesn’t even say mo, it’s no, the model is actually the floor mats.

Michael: Yeah. This is an equip equipment recall, so it’s not the actual cars that we recalled.

It’s. They basically have these all-weather floor mats that they’re selling as basically replacement equipment would be the technical term. But, you walk into your dealer and or online, it’s lucid, I’m not sure if how many actual dealerships they have. And you buy, a cooler looking format.

These don’t have [00:44:00] anchors on them, and so they can slide up and interfere with your operation of your accelerator pedal. And I’m not sure if they have had any crashes related to this, but they had a lucid sales associate driving a lucid vehicle with these floor mats in it. And he determined, or he suspected that the accelerator pedal was stuck.

Even though they weren’t able to reproduce that they, they took a look at it, put their product safety working group in it and they found that this could happen. So this is very similar to what, we’ve seen a number of recalls over the years with bad formats and I think Toyota sudden acceleration.

There were some recalls around the floor mats in those vehicles and it’s something that comes up occasionally. I recommend to everyone. When you’re buying floor mats, make sure that they’re anchored because if your floor mat can move around, there’s always a potential for a problem and interference with your accelerator.

So it’s a good thing [00:45:00] from Lucid. Lucid hasn’t always been on our, our good list over here, but for some of the things that they’ve done. But, this looks like a recall that that they moved on pretty quickly and got done, and it hopefully will be, hopefully they’ll be able to track down everyone who’s.

Purchase these floor mats. That’s always a problem when you don’t have a consumer that’s attached to a car in, in, in registration records. It’s, it becomes a little more difficult to administer a recall when you’re having to go after aftermarket parts where you don’t necessarily have the same paper trail between the purchaser that you would in a car purchase.

Anthony: What are, anchors. ’cause I’m just thinking my floor mats, they just got, on the underside, they’ve got like little spiky things that kind of dig into the carpeting. Yeah. That could be one way

Michael: of anchoring it. But in my Volkswagen each of the four corners or so of the floor mat have a.

What looks like a snap or a button. Oh. Where you physically attach the floor mat to the floor of your vehicle. And [00:46:00] I, I have a floor mat that, that I. I’ve had cars with floor mats that continually slide up under the accelerator pedal. That gets, I, that seems very concerning and it’s something that everyone should check when they’re getting into their cars.

Yeah, it’s floor mat position,

Anthony: and we know this is a big trend on TikTok. Stop buttering the underside of your floor mats. It’s. The trend has gone out. It’s it was fun for a little bit, not anymore. Next up Volvo, 7,483 vehicles. Wait a minute. You thought my joke was

Fred: bad? Yours is a far worse.

Anthony: Yeah, but Michael laughed at my joke.

Okay. Yeah. Huh? What? Okay, so Volvo 7,483 vehicles, the 2020 to 2022 Volvo S 60, the V 60, the V 90, the S 90, the xc, a whole bunch of them. They’re all their. Are they all hybrid electrics? Is that the issue here? Yeah, they’re all hybrid. Ah, there is a short circuit in the high voltage [00:47:00] battery module, which increase the risk of fire.

We see this happen quite often where there’s all these little things where it’s like, ah, there’s a mismatch, there’s a voltage issue. What’s what’s going on here?

Michael: The root cause analysis that they conducted apparently identified a problem with their supplier that leads to the risk of an internal short circuit in certain battery cells within the battery module.

That could be almost anything. But that’s all, they’re all we’re really getting. But apparently it leads to overheating the battery cells when the battery is. Fully charged and the vehicle is parked, which is critical to what the warning that’s been issued along with this call is a do not charge warning.

So apparently what you don’t want is a, apparently you cannot you’re, they’re telling you not to charge your hybrid electric vehicle. We’ve seen this in a couple of other recalls where essentially you’ve purchased a hybrid. But you’ve got an internal combustion engine until you can get this recall performed [00:48:00] because you’re not allowed to charge your car.

So it looks like owners are gonna be notified in mid-May. I don’t know that the remedy is going to be available yet. Then it’s we’ve seen these battery recalls tend to take a little longer to figure out repairs for and to get those repairs out to consumers. I think we saw a Chrysler, was it Pacifica minivans that customers had to wait about a year and not charge their, basically not use the plugin charging part of their hybrid vehicle for a year while they waited on those recall repairs to come out. So hopefully the Volvo folks will get theirs a little quicker.

Anthony: Okay. This one is not a recall, but it is a fix. Ooh, come on Nissan. Yeah. Come on. I know Michael’s very excited about this one.

Do it.

Michael: Speaking of delayed fixes, this is one that just is mind boggling. Nissan Re did a recall in [00:49:00] 2022 because they had hoods that were popping open while the vehicle was in motion, and it has taken them three years to roll out a fix for that problem. It’s. I don’t know that anyone can explain what has taken them so long.

In fact, I think that this is an an area that Nitsa should have cracked down on Nissan a long time ago and given them significant fines for the recall delay here. I don’t know why Nitsa hasn’t opened up a recall query into this and. Push Nissan or even, use civil penalties to incentivize Nissan to get its act together on this recall.

But a hood latch fix is not something that should take any auto company three years to to put onto the market

Anthony: crazy. And by vehicle in motion, you mean you’re driving down the road and then Oh my god. And your hood

Michael: pops up? Yeah. Yeah.

Anthony: Okay. Just checking.

General Motors’ Manual Mishap

Anthony: Final recall from General Motors? A frequent participant of the recall roundup section [00:50:00] 10,643 vehicles.

The 2025 Cadillac Lyric. This one is this is interesting. Ooh apparently their MA model their ma their manual has typos. What it is. Yeah.

Michael: If you’re driving one of these vehicles, you know your car, there’s nothing wrong with your car.

Anthony: Wow. The problem

Michael: is not, the problem is the owner’s manual, where they have included what appears to be a, the image they included of the head restraint in your vehicle is incorrect.

So they, they basically put the wrong picture in of the rear outboard head restraint, and because of that, they violated. F-M-D-S-S 2 0 2 A, which covers head restraints. You have to have an accurate description of your head restraints in the owner’s manual, or you are gonna not be in in compliance with federal regulations.

And so these on your manuals will not be getting a repair for their car. They’ll be getting a owner’s manual [00:51:00] insert that they can pop into their owner’s manual.

Anthony: Wow.

Conclusion and Sign-Off

Anthony: And with that listeners. That’s our show, and if I’ve managed to do it successfully, you’ll be listening to in the background right now.

The, what is it called? The Vietnamese March of Liberation ’cause In honor of Liberation Day, we’re playing the the March of Liberation by Lou Yoan and long hung of North Vietnam from 1966. Because it’s liberation day folks.

Fred: Wow. I can’t wait to hear it. It sounds wonderful.

Anthony: I really hope I can figure this out.

There might be dragons and beep. Alright, thanks everybody. Till next week. Bye. Thank

Fred: you. Bye-bye.

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