The Great Parking Lot Honk-Off: Autonomous Cars Gone Wild

[00:00:00] Introduction to the Podcast

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

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the center for auto safety podcast. Their auto be a law. Oh, good morning. Hey, everybody. All right.

[00:00:35] Waymo’s Parking Lot Chaos

[00:00:35] Anthony: So let’s start off with something very lightweight and easy. Waymo. Ha. There’s a great video on YouTube you can see of a parking lot at 4 a. m. in San Francisco of self driving Waymos coming into the parking lot and all trying to park.

But they wind up just honking at each other continuously. Because one’s trying to back out, they’re trying to go forward. It is literally like watching a vaudeville act. [00:01:00] But with autonomous vehicles. It’s insane. My favorite part though, is that there’s no one in these cars, and they’re honking at each other.

Let’s think what, what is happening here? And apparently, the residents of the San Francisco neighborhood where this happens are like stop it. This is annoying. There is someone, we have an article from ours, Technica. Someone was saying he was very happy, he thought this would increase local security and tranquility.

Ha. Yeah, clearly he’s never lived next to a parking lot before. There’s no parking lot in history like, oh, the neighborhood’s going to be safer now. Get on more tranquil.

[00:01:39] Fred: Yeah, Waymo’s are probably programmed for that. Since I know now that they have acoustic sensors probably programmed to slow down or alert or do something when they hear a horn honking.

So they would hear a horn honk, and then they’re gonna stop, and then they’re gonna move again. They’re gonna hear another horn [00:02:00] honk and they’re gonna move again very slowly. And what I like about this is the very sensitive comment by Waymo that said, quote, we are aware that in some scenarios, our vehicles may briefly honk while navigating our parking lots.

We have identified the cause and are in the process of implementing a fix close quote, which makes me wonder. If they knew about this, why the hell haven’t they fixed it? They just let it go on and on. Is that a, is that the public spirit minded approach that Waymo uses for all of its developments?

[00:02:35] Anthony: The fun thing in the video is you’re watching this as cars keep coming into the parking lot and they’re backing up. There’s one car I noticed it comes in and it pulls over to the side immediately and it parks without a problem. And it voids the conga line. And I’m like, huh. Why is that one programmed differently?

And then you wait a little longer, and you see it had a human driver. The human gets out, walks away as every other car keeps [00:03:00] moving forward, backing up, moving forward, backing up. But one of the automatic cars was trying to cut the line in front of everyone else. You can see it towards the bottom of the video it’s trying to cut in front.

So I was like, hey, does it have a different version of software? Is it set to a more aggressive driving style? Waymo, let us know.

[00:03:20] Fred: We know you’re listening. We know you’re out there, Waymo.

[00:03:23] Anthony: Yeah hopefully if you live in this neighborhood I hope Waymo is at least giving you free rides or earplugs or something like that.

[00:03:33] Elon Musk and Robo Taxis

[00:03:33] Anthony: So the next self driving car nonsense we’ll say is we’ll go back to This lovely little guy called Elon Musk.

He he’s not just a member, he is the, no, he’s not the founder of HairClub for Men, but, he’s a member. Anyway, he he’s been talking about that we’re gonna have robo taxis and all of the cars we’ve ever produced are gonna be able to turn into a robo taxi. This we know is a lie. And the head of Uber has come out and [00:04:00] said, I think he might be Elon might be underestimating that this is a customer service business.

Like, getting robo taxes out there is one thing, but then Yeah, deal with people. Okay, because when customers, when they want to use your car, Hansard’s the same time you want to use your car. I don’t know how this scales, but there’s a short little article in MSN where the CEO of Uber says, yeah, I don’t think he’s really I don’t really think Elon’s thinking this through.

That’s not true. Elon always thinks everything true, right? Through?

[00:04:31] Michael: Yeah. True. Yeah. Especially everything that comes out of his fingers on Twitter.

[00:04:34] Anthony: Hey, it’s called Exeter now. They

[00:04:38] Fred: must have watched Seinfeld at some point, but this is a prescient Seinfeld episode where George puts his car in a parking lot and then the parking lot attendant sends it out for other purposes and gives George a replacement.

Haven’t you ever seen that episode?

[00:04:55] Anthony: Yes, they turn the parking garage into a brothel.

[00:04:59] Fred: Yes, [00:05:00] indeed. So I would think that’s fair warning for our friends at, uh, where is it? Oh, Tesla. That’s right.

[00:05:08] Anthony: Oh, yeah. It just made it grosser.

[00:05:11] Michael: Aw. I thought that the Uber CEO, made some points right along the lines of things we’ve been saying.

Do owners really want to, let their personal vehicle go out on the town every night in the hopes of owning their, Earning them money. Is it worth the hassle? Is it worth the worries? It is, is it worth putting a 60 to a hundred thousand dollar asset out on the road as an a taxi every night?

I, it just doesn’t sound like something the average person who’s invested in that is, is really going to want to do. I also made the point that the peak times when you want to use your car, are probably some of the peak times when they would be used as a robo taxi. So there’s some conflict there.

[00:05:55] Anthony: Maybe you just sit in the car and be like, Hey, that’s how you meet people. [00:06:00] Hey, you like this car? It’s mine. Oh, you’re renting it right now? Can we be friends?

[00:06:06] Michael: Yeah, fortunately, we don’t really ever have to worry about this because it’s not happening.

[00:06:12] Anthony: Yeah, we all know none of this is true. But hey, that’s just how they roll.

[00:06:17] Waymo on the Highways

[00:06:17] Anthony: Let’s jump back to Waymo for a second because Waymo is it’s been operating in San Francisco and Phoenix and L. A., I believe. But it’s always been restricted to city streets, so that reduces the speed it has. But now, Waymo is hitting the interstates of San Francisco, so it’s getting on the highways, without human drivers, and clearly nothing bad will happen, right?

It drives down an alley and hits a telephone pole. There’s no telephone poles on freeways, it’s fine.

[00:06:49] Michael: At base here, they approved this, I believe California approved this in March. So for the last, what, six months, March, April, May, June, July, [00:07:00] yeah, five months, Waymo has been testing these vehicles on the interstates with safety drivers.

And we’ve talked about in previous episodes, there’s Interstates are the safest place to travel in America. They have very low crash rates compared to, other surface roads. So it’s, it’s. The only thing that really concerns us here, I believe, are the higher speeds, less time for these computers to make decisions about how the cars are going to be operated and you’re, they’re going to be operating at, higher speeds, which, previously we’ve said, one of the reasons that.

Autonomous vehicles aren’t killing people already in great numbers is that they’re operating at very low speeds and city traffic, and they don’t really have these higher speed collisions that result in more fatalities and injuries. And now we’re going to see what happens if Waymo is truly going to be able to operate safely [00:08:00] at higher speeds on interstates where, you have vehicles.

That can be approaching you from behind that significantly over the speed limit. You’ve got lane changes being made that can, threaten vehicle safety. So there’s a lot of new issues that I think that we’ll see come out of this.

[00:08:17] Fred: I wonder if they’re programmed to respond properly to famous hand gestures, because that’s a part of driving on the interstates as well, but I think what’s really important about this in my mind is that Waymo is exposing the public to thousands of potentially lethal exposures every day by doing this.

Without the knowledge or permission of those people who are the test subjects. And the reason they’re doing it is for no public advantage. It’s no faster than a taxi. It’s no faster than a car. There’s no advantage to the customers who are using this [00:09:00] service to compensate for the extreme danger.

It’s presenting to all of the people who are on the roads or all the people who are near the roads that this service is using. I just don’t understand it. If you do a cost benefit analysis. There’s no benefit and tremendous costs. How does this work? I don’t if you could, in my mind, the cost benefit analysis comes up zero on this.

Am I missing something?

[00:09:29] Anthony: Listen, Boomer, you clearly don’t get it. You’re not on TikTok enough. You’re missing out. What’s going down? See, what we’re doing is instead of like people with their, their Breathing and their smell. It’s gonna be a car that other people were in with their breathing and their smell.

It’s gonna be like and you can be like at the car, just drop, and I can keep doing work.

[00:09:55] Michael: No so thankfully Waymo has it together a little more than that.

[00:09:59] Anthony: [00:10:00] Yeah, but so they’ve been running these cars with human drivers, human or test safety drivers. Do we have any data on how often these human drivers have had to interact and had to interrupt the autonomous operation?

I don’t think those rights are being kept.

[00:10:18] Michael: Those, they do have to report I think they call it, I forget what the exact term is, but it’s basically every time there’s some sort of problem, it has to be reported to the California DMV. There’s a reporting system for that.

[00:10:30] Anthony: But it’s like the reporting is like the human safety driver hit the brakes.

Not that they’re going to hit something imminently or something like that, but there was traffic it didn’t notice, like it slowed down quicker than the car would have.

[00:10:42] Fred: You mean, how often do the humans have to compensate for the Waymo behavior?

[00:10:46] Anthony: Yeah,

[00:10:46] Michael: That’s disengagement. So those are being reported.

I’m not sure in how much detail or what the public availability of those is, but they are being reported from what I understand.

[00:10:58] Fred: I think that’s from the Waymo [00:11:00] perspective. Michael, but from the human perspective, from the perspective of the unwitting and unwilling test subjects and the public, I don’t think there’s any records being kept of people complaining about, how the Waymo is responding to them or not responding to them.

There are no records of that.

[00:11:20] Anthony: Hey, law student that we recruited last week to do FOIA requests for us, can you FOIA this from the California DMV for us as well? Is this public? My next question. Yeah, I think,

[00:11:31] Michael: yeah, they do have engagement reports that are public, but those are reports from, those are coming in from LAMO.

Not, I assumed that’s the role that the public utilities board played in all this. They’re probably the ones that are taking complaints from, Citizens in San Francisco who are impacted by things like honking.

[00:11:53] Anthony: Yeah, I’m not even thinking of that. I’m thinking of how beta is the software that the safety drivers like [00:12:00] this isn’t right or adjusting the steering wheel, hitting the brakes, something like that.

But with that in mind, okay, so there’s no they’re getting rid of the Waymo employees who have a death wish and letting them take these on freeways. Do these cars, we know A, B is great, but we also know that automatic emergency braking, eh, is imperfect. Do these Waymos have problems?

perfect automatic emergency braking?

[00:12:27] Michael: Oh, I don’t think I don’t think any software is can you could really say is perfect Now Waymo is using lidar and other sensors that are more advanced than what the majority of other manufacturers are using To conduct their automatic emergency braking. I would bet that Waymo has Automatic emergency braking down a lot better than, the majority of the vehicles that are on dealership lots right now.

Mainly because they’re using better sensors, the way Mo is going to have to be able to drive at night is going to have to be able to basically see in the dark. [00:13:00] They’ve got to use. Sensors that are going to be more advanced than what we’re going to find on your average consumer vehicle, or even, some of the better consumer vehicles, very few vehicles right now are outfitted with LIDAR and some of the tech that’s needed to operate an autonomous vehicle.

[00:13:15] Fred: One of the presentations at the recent arts conference was by somebody who analyzes imagery and weather and who pointed out that Autonomous vehicles have great difficulty identifying lane markings when the pavement is wet because you get a lot of reflected light off of those. So they’re a long way from.

Even being the equivalent of people, but we’re going to revisit some of these issues in a little bit when we talk about the gaslight illumination. And so stand by for that.

[00:13:50] Michael: Yeah, I have problems identifying lane markings when it’s nighttime and wet too. I’ve always noticed that. Especially if there’s a glare coming off the road.

[00:13:59] Fred: Yeah, [00:14:00] it’s never wet in San Francisco though.

[00:14:01] Anthony: No, it’s the driest city in the country. So yeah, so you don’t have to stand by, listeners, you can keep sitting down, but while you’re sitting down, go to autosafety. org and click on donate. Have you done it yet? Because if not, I can turn this into an NPR telethon.

That’s not a threat.

[00:14:18] Nuro’s Autonomous Delivery Vehicles

[00:14:18] Anthony: Let’s, since we’re still on autonomous vehicles let’s jump to Nuro. Nuro, is that how you pronounce that one? Nuro? I believe so. They make, or they have, they don’t, they’re not the actual manufacturer of it, this adorable, and it is adorable little autonomous vehicle that’s used for package deliveries right now.

And I can’t tell from the article we’re gonna link to in Clingtechnica if, cause one of the shots they have of it, it looks like it’s much smaller than a normal car. But right now they are, It is much smaller. It looks like a, it looks like, cause people aren’t in it. And it’s not meant

[00:14:52] Michael: to carry passengers.

Yeah. No passengers are in them right now. So that’s one reason why they were able to get [00:15:00] at least qualify for an exemption from NHTSA because there’s no humans being Transposing the vehicles,

[00:15:07] Fred: Humans intentionally, but I’m going to, I’m going to wager a quarter that we soon see a tick tock video of some teenager squeezing himself and it’s got to be a guy right into a new row and delivering himself to somebody.

[00:15:24] Anthony: Oh, so you are on the TikTok. I see how it is. You want to keep making videos?

[00:15:27] Fred: No. I’m just saying. Once it goes viral, I might see it.

[00:15:31] Anthony: No, I don’t think it’s I don’t think it’s going to be that. I think it’s going to be a cat on top of it. In the cat driving around. Because, cat videos are more viral, right?

But anyway, these things, right now it’s in the Bay Area. It’s out in San Francisco. They drive currently at 25 miles per hour. Their next version they want to come out and get on the road will go up to 45 miles per hour. And it they say we won’t necessarily deploy it at that speed. And they want full level [00:16:00] four driverless testing comes out.

Where what’s the issue about this one here?

[00:16:06] Fred: The difference between 25 miles an hour and 45 miles an hour is lethality. There’s very few people are killed by impact with a car that’s going 25 miles an hour. Seriously injured? Yes, sometimes killed, but not frequently. Just the opposite is true when hit by a vehicle going 45 miles per hour.

We don’t have any statistics on Avoidance of human beings by the neural running at 25 miles an hour, or how people react to it, nor do we have any on what’s likely to be the case at 45 miles an hour. But just from the standpoint of basic physics, if they’re using the same criteria and passenger avoidance logic at 45 is 25, I think there might be a problem, but we’ll have to wait and see, the California [00:17:00] PUC seems to be a lot more confident than

[00:17:01] Anthony: I

[00:17:01] Fred: am.

[00:17:03] Anthony: And so right now they’re not designed to have a human inside them, just delivering packages and food. And does it, does it get full exemption from kind of basic federal motor vehicle safety standards? Hey, FMBSS did it.

[00:17:17] Fred: Yep, they do.

But I thought that article was interesting because apparently most of that is being done by modified Prius vehicles right now, and they have a lot of trouble getting those cute little buggies that you’re talking about because of import restrictions. They’re manufactured in China, and so they’re having trouble getting them in.

So I was puzzled by that, but the Prius version is there, and There’s no way no physical way for it to keep people out of the Prius version of the new world delivery system.

[00:17:52] Anthony: You just keep it out. Cause it says Prius on it.

That’s one way. [00:18:00] No, it’s a fun car. So right now these are just in the San Francisco Bay Area because apparently a whole bunch of people there are socially inept and don’t want to interact with humans. Go Waymo! Al little too much.

[00:18:14] Michael: I should move to San Francisco then. Apparently .

[00:18:19] Anthony: All right.

That’s, I think that’s the end of our world of,

[00:18:22] Michael: oh yeah. Neuro, by the way, neuros Niro’s Chief Legal Operator is the former administrator of Nitsa, James Owen. So we’ll just say hi there.

[00:18:31] Anthony: Huh. So he just that, so it is a revolving door. Wait a second.

[00:18:36] Michael: Oh, it’s been a revolving door. Yes. Yes.

[00:18:39] Anthony: I will regulate you and you will hire me.

[00:18:44] Michael: Lately a lot of the NHTSA employees and administrators, at least from the previous administration have And, going to a lot of high tech firms, we’ve seen Neuro and Zooks and [00:19:00] other autonomous companies hiring straight from the top over at NHTSA.

We think it’s time for NHTSA to start hiring straight back from them and putting some regulations around this stuff.

[00:19:09] Anthony: So do they go to these places? Cause like they, I work for a place called NHTSA and so I can’t work for them. Ford or General Motors, because that sounds normal. So I go to NHTSA, I have to work for something else with a silly sounding name.

Neuro. Zooks. Is that a lame joke? I think

[00:19:23] Michael: it’s yeah, I think it’s more of a I think it’s just more to do with the fact they’re going to make a lot more money going to a tech company in California than they are going to a traditional manufacturer.

[00:19:34] Anthony: All right.

[00:19:35] Gaslight Illumination: Ethics in the AV Industry

[00:19:35] Anthony: With that, I think we can move to gaslight illumination.

I can see Mr. Perkins being like, stop with this. I got some good. I got some, I got the goods. For those playing the home game, Gaslight Illumination is our weekly segment where we point out the absolute absurdity, nonsense, sometimes pure BS, other times straight up lies. From the auto industry, Mr. Perkins, please kick us off [00:20:00]

[00:20:00] Fred: when we take it away.

Okay. I’m going to nominate this week, the entire engineering staff associated with the AV industry. Now that seems a little broad, but the reason for that is that our friend, Phil Koopman, who is really full of stuff. The stuff he’s full of is, of course, good ideas and good references, and he sent me some information that identified the IEEE Code of Ethics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the AV industry is full of these people.

Because of course, there’s a lot of programmers and all that AI stuff all falls under the rubric of the IEEE and its members. There are 10 items in the IEEE Code of Ethics. Do we get a passing grade if we get 70 percent of the ethics standards right? Michael, how does that work?

[00:20:56] Michael: With ethics I think a hundred percent grade is what you’re [00:21:00] aiming for.

If you’re failing on ethics three times out of 10, you’re probably not going to have a long, successful career.

[00:21:07] Anthony: I disagree. I think you can run for office or yeah,

[00:21:15] Michael: You can own a company like Tesla, but

[00:21:18] Anthony: crackerjack law school that you go to.

[00:21:21] Michael: In an ideal world, in the world that I wish humans lived in, failing on ethics three times out of ten is not good enough.

That’s not a very high bar.

[00:21:29] Fred: All right, so I’m going to read these ethical standards and you gentlemen chime in on how well you think the industry is subscribing to these. The first one is to accept responsibility in making engineering decisions consistent with the safety, Health and welfare of the public and to disclose property factors that might endanger the public or the environment.

Thumbs up, thumbs down. Thumbs down. Down. Thumbs down. All right. The next candidate is, this is almost [00:22:00] funny to be honest and realistic in stating claims or estimates based on available data. Oh,

[00:22:08] Michael: Kyle, how much I miss him. If this ethics system. applies to the engineers, right? It’s not, also going to apply to a CEO that, that pays the engineer, right?

[00:22:21] Fred: If the CEO happens to be a member of IEEE I don’t know, but I saw, I’m guessing from your laughter that you don’t think this is a completely Subscribed to by the AV industry. You

[00:22:33] Anthony: know no, but I imagine there are at least at every one of these companies, there’s at least one engineer.

That nobody likes, no one wants to have lunch with because that’s the person be like, guys, what are we doing here? We’re going to kill people. And they’re like, Bobby, here’s some more stock options. Okay.

[00:22:52] Fred: That could well exist. I worked at a company once back in the early days of analog cell phones where they built a radio [00:23:00] to listen in on random cell phone conversations with people going by.

And that was very entertaining for them, illegal, but anyway, I digress. Next one to improve the understanding of technology, it’s appropriate application and potential consequences.

[00:23:17] Anthony: Define consequences for us.

[00:23:20] Fred: Define it. It’s does it,

[00:23:21] Anthony: does it affect my compensation?

[00:23:22] Fred: All right. Moving on to maintain and improve technical competence and to undertake technological tasks for others.

Only if qualified by training or experience or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations.

[00:23:42] Anthony: See, the first part I’m with, but then it’s that that next part, the second half of that that’s hey, that full disclosure. Yeah. A little challenging for the

[00:23:51] Michael: industry, huh? Yeah, you’re never going to get full disclosure of limitations from anyone in the industry.

Full disclosure is [00:24:00] laughable, I think, coming from an industry, as I will also discuss in my Gaslight Nominee.

[00:24:05] Anthony: Full disclosure is yeah, you caught us. Yeah, we dragged a woman. You’re

Yeah. You got us.

[00:24:11] Fred: Okay. So here’s another good one. By the way, with this, We’ve, we’re 70 percent so far, just for those of us playing the home game and keeping track of things.

Okay. Next one up is to seek, accept, and offer honest criticism of technical work to acknowledge and correct errors and to credit properly the contributions of others. Just as a little side light on this we’ve very generously offered the industry experience. Thanks. Our own essentially code of ethics, which is our AAV consumer bill of rights.

We’ve not had seen people beating down the doors for permission to use that in their design. So I’m going to say that no, they don’t really seek, accept and offer honest criticism of technical work.

[00:24:59] Anthony: See, [00:25:00] having led a number of engineering teams in my life One of the things I would do is you’d always find the person who wouldn’t accept criticism and would claim the work of others.

And I didn’t care how good they were. They could have been the greatest person in the world. And as soon as possible, you got rid of them. Is that happening here? I once had to fire the founder of a company. We didn’t, I couldn’t technically fire him instead. We’re like, here you go. And we gave, basically gave him fake software to play with.

He had his own sandbox version of stuff. And because he kept destroying everything and we let him go off and play and yeah you’re doing a good job there, buddy. But yeah, you, I don’t know what it’s like inside these companies, but hopefully they’re there trying to have honest conversations, but probably they’re not just for the record.

[00:25:47] Fred: I have offered our services to participate. As a non advocate review of the autonomous vehicle safety coalition, which publishes interesting and misleading documents [00:26:00] from time to time. And surprisingly, they have rejected my offer. So we’ll see how that works out. But anyway, we’re down to 60%.

So 1 more here. to avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious action. What do you think about this one? Is that a win or a loss for those guys?

[00:26:27] Anthony: We need more detail on that one. Who is the potential victim here? One of their fellow engineers? Or someone in the public.

[00:26:37] Fred: I it’s not very specific, so I’m going to guess that,

[00:26:40] Michael: Yeah, I think it’s all persons. This is more of a, a golden rule type thing.

Just that they’ve thrown into their code of ethics to cover treating everyone fairly and with respect. I Which we all agree with.

[00:26:55] Anthony: As something that should be done, yes, but unless you’re Tesla you blame the customer [00:27:00] constantly. This is not, we’re not producing garbage, it’s the customer did it wrong.

I don’t know, this is actually, this

[00:27:06] Fred: is actually akin to the idea of the manufacturers of AVs accepting the what was that duty called? Not called to duty. What is that, Michael? The Oh gosh, we’ve been talking about that. Called arms. No. The thing that people do that, that machines don’t do, Michael, what the heck is that called?

Empathy. The assumption of blame or something. What the hell is, what was that phrase?

[00:27:33] Michael: Are you talking about assumption of risk or assumption of are you talking about the computer driver and the duty of care? Yes, exactly.

[00:27:40] Fred: Duty of

[00:27:41] Anthony: care.

How do you forget that you harped on that for months?

[00:27:44] Fred: Yeah, I know.

I’m a slow learner, but anyway I think this is actually akin to the duty of care and to avoid injuring others, their property reputation. And we know that the automotive industry, the AV industry has not done that. In fact, we know that [00:28:00] Tesla forces every injured party into a product liability lawsuit whenever they try to get compensated for the injury caused by the Tesla vehicles.

I am nominating the entire cohort of engineers working on the AV industry for ignoring their own IEEE code of ethics in developing and proliferating these vehicles.

[00:28:26] Anthony: That’s a pretty good one. That was really well done, thought out, researched. Mr. Brooks, you’re up. Can you beat it?

[00:28:33] Michael: All right.

Mine is going to dive into this massive parking garage fire that took place in Korea last week, I believe. So there was a Mercedes electric vehicle that had been sitting non charging untouched in this parking garage for, I think over 50 hours and caught on fire. Spontaneously, I guess you could say, but there was a cause for it.

So it wasn’t truly [00:29:00] spontaneous. And ultimately I believe it burned about 140 vehicles in the garage. 140.

[00:29:10] Fred: There’s different reports. One report said 41 said 140. Okay.

[00:29:16] Michael: And also 23 people went to the hospital for smoke inhalation. It basically, the smoke flooded a very tall apartment building in South Korea.

And if you look at the video of it, it’s pretty amazing, the devastation that can be called, caused by one bad vehicle or one bad battery and, this, Mercedes over the past week, adopted a stance of we’re investigating this. Trust us, don’t, we’re not going to reveal the source of this, where this battery came from.

I think that is because the battery was manufactured in China and there’s some anti Chinese stuff in it. Going on there [00:30:00] which we also see in America these days with the tariffs that are being proposed. And maybe that’s justified, but in this case, you’ve got Mercedes Hyundai and Kia came out last week and said, Hey, look, here’s the, here’s who manufactures our batteries.

And so the South Korean public was essentially clamoring. To know, what company is manufacturing the battery batteries in your vehicle. And, Mercedes is my gas light illumination candidate of the week because they finally, I believe yesterday released the menu, the suppliers of their batteries, but they pushed back on it long enough to qualify.

But also, this is broader than just Mercedes. We’re all being gas lit by the auto industry here. I would challenge anyone to try to figure out who the supplier is for, any one of the 40, 000 vehicle components in your vehicle, it’s going to be hard to do, this is an issue that we’ve come across.

In the Takata airbag situation, where there are dangerous airbags exploding in cars, and yet certain [00:31:00] manufacturers weren’t even willing to tell owners who called them whether or not they had that airbag in their car. So this is a problem that goes much further than just batteries.

[00:31:10] Automotive Industry Secrecy and Safety Concerns

[00:31:10] Michael: There are a Dozens of safety components on any vehicle that if you call your manufacturer up and asked who, who supplied them with that component, they, they will not tell you.

So there’s a lot of secrecy involved there. They claim it’s because of trade secrets, but, when you see situations like. The Takata situation, there’s really no trade secret. If you’ve got a Takata airbag in your car, you’ve got a Takata airbag in your car. And there’s a clear danger there and consumers need to be warned.

And so hiding behind the idea that trade secrets should prevent a public safety hazard from coming to light just doesn’t work for us. And for that, I nominate Mercedes and the entire industry for the way they tend to Put confidential restrictions over the public finding out what’s in their vehicles.[00:32:00]

[00:32:00] Fred: That’s a good one. This is not going to help us get contributions from the automotive industry.

[00:32:06] Anthony: I’m flattered that both of you are following my lead because last week I nominated the entire robo taxing industry. And now you guys are like, I’m doing the entire auto industry, I’m doing the auto entire A.

V. engineering industry, it’s, it warms my heart. That was a pretty good one. With the related to this fire though, I didn’t realize this, because we have an article from the Wall Street Journal and quoting from that. The perceived risk of E. V. s is particularly acute in tightly packed South Korea, a country about the size of Indiana with roughly 52 million people.

Seoul, the capital city, is, Seoul, the capital city, has a significantly higher population density than New York or Tokyo.

[00:32:45] EV Battery Fires and Safety Investigations

[00:32:45] Anthony: I had no idea it was that, that dense and that tight but Mercedes hasn’t said what the catalyst for this fire was yet, has it?

[00:32:53] Michael: No and, these battery fire battery fires take a long time to [00:33:00] reconstruct and figure out.

We’ve seen problems with multiple manufacturers that, that where there was a fire, there could be, a month’s long delay as they try to figure out the root cause.

[00:33:11] Fred: In particular, this was nothing but ash and a steel frame when it was done. It’s completely destroyed. So the evidence is hard to come by.

[00:33:21] GM Cruise and Autonomous Vehicle Safety

[00:33:21] Anthony: My nominee is anyone? Come on, you can do it.

[00:33:25] Fred: I’m guessing, I’m guessing GM Cruise.

[00:33:27] Anthony: Hey, GM Cruise, because they are the gift that keeps on giving. GM Cruise after their CEO got shit canned, or as somebody who makes that kind of money got to resign, they replaced him at first with a lawyer, because, that always That’s always what you want in charge of an engineering company.

And now they have a new CEO And he’s their chief safety. Oh, no, i’m sorry their chief safety officer. He’s come out and he said hey, we’re gonna [00:34:00] be we’re gonna be great. We have we’re gonna be a role model driver. That’s role model driver That’s better than your average driver. We’re a role model driver They’re not really defining what the hell that means or what the metrics for this are.

So that’s a gaslighting nonsense Transcript And my favorite part is, we’re going to hire third parties to review. Hey, that sounds great. We will not identify who these third parties are. We will not share their findings, necessarily. More gaslighting. This is just more BS. They don’t talk and we’ll link to this from our friend of the show, Phil Kopman.

He has a great breakdown of this. And he talks, right now, GM Cruise is saying, hey, we’re keeping safety drivers in there because remember that time we ran over a person, dragged him, and lied about it? We’ll have a person inside and eventually, we, when we hit some mysterious magical metrics, we’ll remove the human safety driver, cause we’ll be like, yo, wow, we’re with it, man.

Or some jackass at GM who’s still funding this dumb project. We’ll be like, [00:35:00] ah, let’s save some money. Those humans cost a rounding error for the amount of money we’re burning on this. But, Dave, we can save 0001 percent of the budget. I’ll get a new car. Unfortunately, it’ll be made by General Motors. But they haven’t defined what the criteria for removing the human driver is.

Expect a GM Cruze without humans at some random point in the future. They’re my Gaslight nominee.

[00:35:27] Fred: That’s a good one. This is a great example of faith based engineering where the engineering staff decides, what the future is going to be and then derives it. And for philosophy fans, okay, this is a great example of deductive logic in which you start with the premise and then try to arrange the facts to support that premise, rather than inductive logic, which is the typical Approach in engineering in which you assemble facts.

And then try to drive the conclusion [00:36:00] to whatever the facts dictate. I’m, I’m absolutely a big fan of your nomination, Anthony, but I do want to give a shout out to the philosophy community that identified you. The inductive engineering and the faith based engineering that denies inductive logic.

Thank you.

[00:36:20] Anthony: Oh, look at that hat tip to Daniel Dennett and and Rene Descartes.

Related to this with removing human drivers, there’s another company. Called Polestar and Polestar says, Hey, we have a bunch of safety features in here, We have a bunch of ADAS, autonomous driving features in there, But, we will not offer self driving until we are 100 percent sure it’s safer than humans.

That sounds impressive. That sounds like, wow, you guys are Doing the opposite of what Fred was talking about in his Gaslight nomination. We’re saying, hey We’re going to [00:37:00] draw a line and make sure this stuff is safer. They didn’t really define who that human is, but I like their approach.

I’m not, I don’t want to bad mouth them. I want to be optimistic.

[00:37:09] Michael: Yeah I the title of the article glosses over what the Polestar’s CEO actually said. He didn’t say 100 percent until we’re a hundred percent sure it’s safer than humans. They said until they’re a hundred percent sure that it’s safety enhancing.

So it’s still a little unclear exactly what was meant there, but Is 100 percent sure that it enhances safety would imply that it’s performing better than even the best driver? It’s hard to, it’s hard to interpret what exactly they mean by that statement.

[00:37:47] Fred: No, it’s really tricky because if you if your baseline is the human driver and the gross statistics of a human driver, let’s say that you’ve got a situation where the autonomous [00:38:00] vehicle kills far fewer people.

But all the people that it kills are blonde babies under three years old. Is that going to be acceptable to the public? Probably not. There, there’s a lot of dimensions to this whole argument about safe enough and what is safe enough and A lot of people have discussed that. Or that’s, but I digress.

That’s probably a discussion for another time.

[00:38:26] Anthony: You can listen to that discussion on our podcast eugenics. Good idea. Bad idea brought to you by the auto industry. No the Institute. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has a good article, it has a bunch of good articles actually, I’m not sure which one I want to go to.

There was the other one, oh, they had one where is my notes? Oh, there we go. There’s one, yeah,

[00:38:48] Michael: yeah.

[00:38:48] Anthony: Yeah, this is the one I want to do. This is the speed limiting technology one. Let’s do this.

[00:38:53] Intelligent Speed Assistance and Public Opinion

[00:38:53] Anthony: So we’ve talked about this where your car modern cars will know what the speed limit is. A [00:39:00] lot of you have cars that will read the speed limit.

It’s speed limit signs, mine does, and it gets it wrong all the time. But, mainly it fails when there’s a construction zone. It doesn’t see construction zone signs, even though they look exactly like the normal road speed signs. For some reason it ignores them. But anyway, this is speed limiting technology inside cars.

One of the people at IHS said, ah, I tried out a car that has this that will control the speed limit of the car based on the current speed that I’m in. And I was like, ah. I was like, I don’t know if this is gonna be a good idea. I don’t know if I’m gonna like this. I’m, concerned about this.

But from the article quoting, driving with the flow of traffic, I had ample opportunity to experience the system kicking in and keeping me from accelerating. To my surprise, it even happened inside the DC Beltway on both expressways and city streets, and I found that my impressions about the system depended on the roadway environment in a more complex way than I anticipated.

I often hear drivers saying that they’re sometimes surprised to discover that they’re [00:40:00] speeding due to the smooth, quiet ride of today’s vehicles. And I like that last line the most, because a certain woman I live with doesn’t realize that she’s speeding at times because of the smooth, quiet operation of the vehicle.

But the takeaway from the article is hey, I didn’t, this wasn’t a problem. This was It was not something that I, he was frustrated with or annoyed with, and it was, and it worked in varying road conditions and driving conditions,

[00:40:29] Michael: yeah, and it it follows up on IHS did a study I think it came out about a month ago, where they found that, more people than not are actually supportive of getting intelligent speed assistance into vehicles, which was a little surprising to us.

I guess the people who don’t want it are just louder than the ones who do generally. But the thing with this article really backed up was that it’s not obnoxious. It’s not a system like some people have described some of their lane keeping systems. That’s constantly beeping at [00:41:00] them or drive them crazy.

And what it really also pointed out is that, we need better mapping. We need better mapping of a lot of these. Roads to ensure that ISA intelligence speed assistance systems have proper data and are operating at the right, at the right impression of the speed limit in the area where they are.

The better mapping we have, the better. Data, the more accurately these systems are going to operate and that I think that’s coming. We’ve already seen that’s a signal support for intelligent speed assistance tech. Europe’s already moving towards installing it in vehicles, I believe this year.

And it’s only a matter of time before this type of technology is making its way to America. Get ready for it and be happy that it’s not annoying unless you want to be a drag racer on public roads.

[00:41:52] Anthony: Having driven in the state of Connecticut, the entire state wants to be drag racers on two lane highways.[00:42:00]

So what would be holding this back is obviously is there’s no legislator who’s going to be like, yes, let’s slow this down. Like Senator Richard Blumenthal from the state of Connecticut. I don’t imagine he’s going to be out there and be like, everybody, slow down. Is

[00:42:14] Michael: that, he would be maybe one of the senators.

He’s been always most supportive of safety efforts. So I’ve got to imagine he would be behind it, despite the fact that Anthony thinks that every driver in his state is a speeder.

[00:42:27] Anthony: Yeah, it’s not that I think I have Factual evidence that I will reveal at a future date as soon as Kathy Wood at Ark Investments reveals their sources for their data.

That’s when I will share my data on Connecticut speeding.

[00:42:42] Pedestrian Safety and Illuminated Crosswalks

[00:42:42] Anthony: The next article that IHS has that we’re going to link to is one about lighted crosswalks. Quoting from the article, In areas with few streetlights, drivers are more than three times as likely to yield to pedestrians at illuminated crosswalks than dark [00:43:00] ones.

Basically, hey, when when there’s a lighted crosswalk, pedestrians aren’t getting killed. Yeah, it’s a shocker. This is a good thing. The results show that simple changes can have a dramatic impact on pedestrian safety. When drivers are yielding, pedestrians aren’t dying. About 75 percent of the 7, 522 pedestrians who died in motor vehicle crashes in 2022 were killed in the dark.

Yeah, this is one of these no brainer type things. Better lighting you actually see, and we see this with The front facing camera is not being able to see in the dark.

[00:43:36] Michael: Right. These lit a lit crosswalk might actually help an automatic emergency braking system that doesn’t function well in the dark, see a pedestrian at a crosswalk.

So that’s great. And, The real takeaway from this study to me was, not only does the lighting having, illuminated crosswalks make drivers three times more likely to yield, but if you include the flashing yellow [00:44:00] beacons along with that, you’ve got drivers that are 13 times more likely to yield.

So that suggests to me that we need to have illumination and flashing yellow beacons at every crosswalk in America tomorrow, and we’ll really help turn back this tide of pedestrians that are being killed. Now, not all killed or in crosswalks. So that’s another issue. But this is something that could really help.

And, frankly, I’ve encountered a crosswalks with flashing lights during the daytime. And I think that they probably really help drivers. And first of all, notice that there’s a crosswalk there. It’s not always the easiest thing to pick out. And the flashing lights, even during the daytime are a huge help.

[00:44:41] Anthony: But will it help autonomous vehicles? Who knows? Because every time I go to a crosswalk, you’re always making eye contact with the driver in the car. But that could just be me. Maybe I’m living in the past already.

[00:44:56] Michael: Maybe you’re just into eye contact.[00:45:00]

[00:45:01] Anthony: No, I’m in New York City, which has the world’s worst traffic. I experienced this firsthand because this past weekend was in my neighborhood, it was the Dominican National Parade or something like that. Where they close off most roads, and as myself, my wife, and a friend, we were stuck in traffic that literally took us 35 minutes to travel a tenth of a mile.

I thought back to you two and said to them, Hey guys! You know what the best part of traffic like this is? And they’re like, what? And I said, no fatalities! That’s right. No one’s moving fast enough. It’s very

[00:45:35] Fred: safe.

[00:45:36] Anthony: And as soon as I said that, someone cut up behind me and went flying down the opposite lane of traffic.

Except for these jackasses.

[00:45:43] Michael: Yeah, can’t stop them.

[00:45:46] Anthony: We could try. So yeah, this is traffic in New York City. It was the worst in the world last year. Surpassing congestion even in Mexico City, London, and yes, even Los Angeles. It was. This is the second year in a row that New York City is number one in [00:46:00] traffic!

Ha! Yeah! Okay,

[00:46:03] Michael: bye.

[00:46:04] New York City Traffic and Ride Share Impact

[00:46:04] Michael: Do you, the article really takes the tack and seems to blame a lot of this on ride share. Is that your experience? Do you have any way of even knowing really? No,

[00:46:16] Anthony: I, honestly, it doesn’t seem that bad to me. Where it, where I think the problem is people get confused.

It’s literally no different than bad road design in every other part of the world and drivers saying, Hey here was my exit, but at the last second, instead of being prepared to be in the right lane to make that exit, I’m gonna cut across four lanes of traffic. And then other people in that right lane where it slows down were like, I’m gonna skip that and just cut in front, and that’s really where I see it.

And I’m mainly talking to you people going over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. Okay? Stop it. There’s nothing to see there. It’s not interesting. Stop going. Okay?

[00:46:57] Fred: That’s one approach. I like that approach. I’m not, [00:47:00] I’ve been to New Jersey. I can endorse that.

[00:47:03] Anthony: Yeah. What’s there? There’s Hiram’s hot dogs.

They’re excellent. They don’t sell them at the Piggly Wiggly though. Eh, You know I don’t know how to

[00:47:14] Fred: respond to that. I’ll let it up.

[00:47:17] Anthony: Those of you paying for the video subscription would have enjoyed Fred’s laugh there. That was great. It was mainly visual instead of audio. Hey, let’s Let’s jump into recalls. How does that sound? That sound good, right? Oh wait, we gotta talk about EV

[00:47:28] Fred: fires here.

[00:47:30] EV Fires and Organophosphates

[00:47:30] Fred: Tau of FRED. We can’t let that go.

[00:47:31] Anthony: Oh, I’m so sorry. I forgot all about that. I left time off on Tau of FRED. Okay, EV fires. You got five seconds. Go. You’ve now entered the Tau of FRED. Okay, what is

[00:47:41] Fred: the common denominator between insecticides, sarin, novichok, tabulin, VX gas, and lithium ion battery fires?

[00:47:50] Anthony: All techniques that Vladimir Putin has used to assassinate people.

[00:47:53] Fred: Wrong.

[00:47:54] Anthony: Michael?

[00:47:56] Michael: Wasn’t there a, we talked about it before, when a [00:48:00] battery fire takes place, that it releases a chemical that molecularly is similar to sarin, is that right? You’re good, okay, yes,

[00:48:09] Fred: and extra points would have gone to the word organophosphates, which is the chemical family that all of these belong to.

Thank you. And, so that is something you can expect and has been detected in electric vehicle fires as a 1 of the combustion products, but there’s another thing about these bars, which is that they cannot be put out by the sprinklers that are installed worldwide and parking garages. If 1 of these starts.

And it doesn’t happen all that often, but if one of them starts, basically it’s going to burn itself out, and it will happily ignore and laugh at the water that you’re sprinkling on it from above. That’s what happened in South Korea. That’s why so many of those cars went up, because the combustion products lit other cars on fire, and the fire was propagated [00:49:00] through.

All the cars that burned were not. EVs, there were a wide range of vehicles, so all vehicles can burn. There’s a lot of combustion, a lot of flammable material in there. But if you think about this is 1 more example of automotive technology being deployed heedless of the societal consequences of that.

This is a long term trend of the automotive industry. Led to tetraethyl lead being put into gasoline for, what, over 50 years? Something like that. Poisoning the, basically, the entire world. And now, of course, you’ve got the AVs, the autonomous vehicles, being put on the streets without notice. And without warning and endangering all of the public that’s using those highways making them into unwitting test subjects.

Yet another example of automotive technology being deployed heedless of [00:50:00] the societal consequences, a long tradition, one that should stop. That’s it. That’s all I got this week.

[00:50:07] Anthony: Hey, that was great for time consideration and also bad for buyers. So with the lithium ion fires, is it true they can actually generate their own oxygen and that’s why they continue to burn for so long?

[00:50:22] Fred: They don’t generate their own oxygen, but what they’ve got is both an oxidizer and fuel. Contained within the the battery cell itself. So the combustion doesn’t require outside oxygen, doesn’t require internal oxygen either. It just goes ahead and burns away. So it’s, it is like a hand grenade rather than a conventional fire that you can put out.

[00:50:46] Anthony: Got it. But again, listeners, yes. Internal combustion engines set themselves on fire at a much greater rate. No. They don’t? Wait, I thought ICE vehicles went up in flames a lot more.

[00:50:56] Michael: That’s a point that I always worry about people [00:51:00] missing with these fire reports, that, that show that electric vehicle fires are much lower than combustion vehicles.

But, a lot of those fires that are tracked in combustion vehicles are collision fires. Whereas we rarely see vehicles that simply. Catch fire on their own volition. There were some Ford cruise control deactivation switches that were a massive recall in the early 2000s. There’s been a few Hyundai, a few other combustion engines, but the fires and those are typically related to electronics and not to the combustion engine, but.

The, we’ve seen a lot of different manufacturers of electric vehicles and even some hybrids have recalls and safety issues with those batteries where they’re catching on fire, in parking garages and in homes and that’s something, that’s an area where I think EVs probably, maybe not by number, but at least by models.

Or [00:52:00] having more issues than combustion engines on, the catching fire when they’re not in operation.

[00:52:06] Fred: So far that phenomenon has only been observed in Chevys and or in Kia’s and. Ford’s GM, Mercedes, BMW. Have I missed a few, but yeah, it is rare, but it’s ubiquitous and it’s enormously expensive when it happens because the company has got to go out and replace these enormously expensive batteries.

GM just, or Chevy scrapped an entire product line because of the cost of the recall with some battery fires.

[00:52:40] Anthony: I figured out the solution. Ready? Submersible parking garages. That’s right. You drive your car and park it underwater. In the water. So if it does combust, boom, all the water’s there.

[00:52:53] Fred: They’ve tried that in Florida with some of the hurricanes coming through.

It had mixed results.

[00:52:58] Anthony: Oh, boy, oh, [00:53:00] boy, oh. Let’s let’s go into some recalls. Ready for recalls? Time

[00:53:03] Michael: for the recall dial down. Go.

[00:53:05] Anthony: All right. Hey.

[00:53:07] Takata Airbag Recall Urgency

[00:53:07] Anthony: Stop ignoring your Ford recall letters for your Takata airbags. Oh my god. Please stop ignoring your recall letters For your Takata airbags. Ford is not messing with you.

[00:53:22] Michael: But, if you’re listening to this podcast every week and you still haven’t gotten your Takata airbag repaired, there’s a disconnect going on that we’re not going to be able to help you out with. So you need to seek counsel elsewhere. Yeah.

[00:53:36] Anthony: So Ford is still telling people that her ignoring, at this point, a nine year old recall.

To replace your airbag. Actually, they told them to stop driving the vehicle. Because they’re at the point where they’re like, It’s just going to go off. If you have a

[00:53:51] Fred: grumpy uncle at Thanksgiving who’s always spouting unpopular political beliefs, you might suggest to them that they take a look at their [00:54:00] car.

[00:54:06] Michael: Along those lines, one of the things that we’ve, really struggled to figure out in this area is what are the factors that, some, I think we’re nine years later, eight years later on some of these vehicles being recalled with a repair available. Literally Ford has a mobile recall team that will come to your house.

Fix your airbag in your driveway and then leave you alone. So there’s no, I don’t understand what barriers are remaining for the, 5 percent or so of the owners of these vehicles who just haven’t made time or the effort to get this repair done. Now, they’re driving around a vehicle where if you have a collision and the airbags are deployed, you have a 50 percent chance of being having your throat cut by an collision.

Particles metal flying out of the airbag inflator. So it makes no sense at this [00:55:00] point, not to have gotten that repair. And it makes no sense for someone not to call forward and have them come to you in your driveway and do that repair today. So it’s this last 5 percent is makes us wonder, in other recalls, where we see if we do get a recall system that works better and better notification, maybe even more mobile repairs and that type of thing to improve compliance rates, how do you get to that last 5 percent of people?

And, yeah. I’m starting to think at this point, you should, there’s a good argument here for a state, for instance, if California came out and said, look, we’re not going to register your vehicle anymore. You’ve got a recall repair available here. This is going to kill you or someone else in your car.

We’re not going to register your vehicle and allow you to operate until you let Ford fix this vehicle. And by the same token, insurance companies have a lot of incentive here, not to insure. Vehicles that are carrying around a very dangerous safety defect. [00:56:00] So should insurance companies be stepping in here as well to try to, strong arm these owners into getting this recall repair?

Because it looks like drastic measures are going to be needed to get these recalls performed.

[00:56:17] Anthony: I like that. You can’t register your car unless you have all the open recalls fixed. I’m on board.

[00:56:22] Michael: That’s tougher. That’s a tough one because it’s, the situation isn’t quite as drastic as Takata.

But, if there are situations like Takata where there’s a clear danger, should these vehicles be registered and insured? Should they be allowed to be registered and insured?

[00:56:39] Fred: It’s my understanding that’s the status quo in Europe. That you cannot Use your car. You cannot register your car if it has open safety recalls, we don’t want America to become Europe.

There’s no way. There’s a danger of fast cheap trains and free college education and we don’t want all that stuff here.

[00:56:58] Michael: Yeah,

[00:56:59] Anthony: I don’t need no health [00:57:00] care. Cheez Its, baby, Cheez Its. Alright, next recall, Hyundai Motor.

[00:57:05] Hyundai Sonata Brake Light Recall

[00:57:05] Anthony: 38, 331 vehicles, this is the 2024 Hyundai Sonata. And, the issue is while braking heavily at vehicle speeds over 30 mph, the subject’s vehicle brake lights could flash due to incorrect brake light software selection during manufacturing.

Now this is weird because apparently people go in there and they modify the software to Blink in different ways?

[00:57:27] Michael: What? You ever been driving behind a vehicle that’s brake lights come on, but then they have this kind of flash effect? Yeah, I just figured out the procedure. Yeah you may have been, but I see that fairly frequently here.

And it’s usually in, modified vehicles that have been modified aftermarket or tuned, or, people that are into performance cars and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we’ve all seen them. And this is what they do. I don’t know if someone left that button on or it was playing a joke at the Hyundai factory, but it Does not [00:58:00] comply with the federal motor vehicle safety standard 108 for that covers all your brake lights and stuff.

So it’s mainly Intended to prevent confusion and to harmonize the way that, that brake lights work so that we all know when a vehicle is breaking in front of us, regardless of what make or model it is. And so Hyundai is going to have to recall all of these Sonatas. They’re all 2024 Sonatas.

And it looks like owners can expect that around October 5th for their first notification. So they’re taking their full 60 days to get that out to owners.

[00:58:34] Anthony: Okay. Since we’ve guaranteed to listeners that we try to keep this. Podcast at the hour mark or something like that. So you can pretend you’re still working when I’m just going to do one more recall.

And I’m not sure which one I’m going to do. I’m going to do General Motors, 27, 793 vehicles.

[00:58:52] Buick Envision Floor Liner Recall

[00:58:52] Anthony: This is the Buick Envision all weather floor liner. That’s right. I’m discussing a floor liner. General [00:59:00] Motors has decided that a defect, which relates to Motor vehicle safety may exist in certain driver side all weather floor liners when installed in 2024 Buick Envisioned vehicles.

The Oh! The floor liners can interfere with the accelerator pedal, causing it to become trapped underneath the liner and stuck in the depressed manner. Wow. That’s it’s a, how do you it’s a floor liner, like this is not cutting edge technology.

[00:59:28] Michael: No, but you would be shocked. I think, I don’t know that the data exists, but I constantly hear of situations where people’s floor mat has been moved or floor mat that’s not attached to the floor is going to be moved around by your feet as you get it out of the car and move around in the vehicle.

And you will often see your floor mat creep up towards your accelerator pedal if it’s not fixed. And this could be a real problem, especially. All weather floor mats are usually a heavier rubber [01:00:00] and they can get bent into certain shapes or get up into the floor well in a manner where your accelerator is being pushed and it’s not by your foot, it’s by your floor mat.

This was a problem on a lot of the Toyota 15 years ago. One of their, One of their, one of the recalls they did early on before they later found a software cause for this, the acceleration was a format recall. They essentially blamed it on the formats and said that they were causing the issue.

And we’ve seen, a few recalls since then that involve floor mats being impacting the accelerator and causing sudden unaccelerated. Sudden unintended acceleration incidents. So it’s definitely something that you want to get fixed. If you’ve got a Buick Envision, and it’s something you want to keep an eye on just generally as an owner, making sure that your floor mats aren’t coming into contact with vehicle controls.

[01:00:58] Anthony: So what’s the fix? They’re [01:01:00] giving them a new liner. It looks like they’re giving them It looks like they’re

[01:01:02] Michael: modifying them. Yeah, they’re modifying the my the the map in some way, yeah.

[01:01:08] Conclusion and Upcoming Topics

[01:01:08] Anthony: Hey, with that listeners, thanks for joining us for another insightful, entertaining, scary look into the world of auto safety for the week.

We’ll be back again next week, at some point soon, in the next couple weeks, hopefully we’re going to discuss mapping. We’re going to get really into mapping, right? Come on, someone nod at me. I want to talk about mapping. Yeah. Ooh, we got a nod. Yeah, there you go. All right. Thanks so much.

Listeners go to autosafety. org. Click donate five stars. Tell all your friends subscribe. Thank you. for

[01:01:39] Fred: listening. All

[01:01:40] Anthony: Bye. For more information, visit

[01:01:43] Fred: www. autosafety. org.