Do U. S. Cars Need AM Radios?

  

The National Association of Broadcasters think they do.  A bill kicking around the U. S. Congress would mandate that all new passenger vehicles sold in the U. S. be capable of receiving the AM broadcast band.  The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 has made it out of a Senate committee and is awaiting action by the full Senate, after bipartisan sponsors wrote it in response to the fact that electric-vehicle (EV) makers such as Tesla no longer build in AM radios. 

 

Despite support from both sides of the aisle, the bill is not without its opponents.  A group called the Zero Emission Transportation Association points out that building EVs that can receive AM radio signals directly is well-nigh impossible due to the short-range electromagnetic interference (EMI) produced by the electronics in the vehicles' power trains.  If EV manufacturers are forced to comply with the act's mandate, the extensive shielding required will put them at a competitive disadvantage worldwide, because AM radio elsewhere, especially in Europe, is looked on as an outmoded technology, and nobody much misses it.

 

Opponents also point out that internet apps such as TuneIn already support direct streaming of the audio content of many AM stations, so the absence of a physical AM radio in a car is no big deal. 

 

On the pro side, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has played a safety card, saying that emergency notifications are carried by AM radio and eliminating it from cars could lead to hazards for people who have no other way to get emergency notices.  "Tens of millions" of people listen to AM radio every day, they say, and many listen in their cars.  AM radio reaches remote areas that may not have consistent mobile-phone coverage, and agricultural regions rely on it disproportionally to the rest of the country. 

 

Of course, the NAB has a direct financial interest in preserving AM radios in cars, because that's how they make money.  But there's nothing wrong with an interest group trying to protect its revenue stream.

 

Those who oppose the bill say that the public-safety argument is largely bogus.  They cite a national emergency-notification test held in October of 2023 in which only 1% of those polled received the notification via AM radio. 

 

I've tried to lay out both sides of this controversy as fairly as I can.  Now I'm going to tell you what I think personally.  I'd hate to see AM radio go away, but largely for sentimental reasons.

 

Maybe it seems odd to be sentimental about a technology, but engineers sometimes extend sentiment to peculiar objects.  AM radio was the first widespread use of electromagnetic radiation, and while that alone should not be an argument in its favor for continued use, there is a kind of virtue that attaches to any sort of human custom preserved through time.  It turns out that I am a more-or-less constant user of AM radio when I'm driving alone (my wife wouldn't like the content). 

 

The station I listen to has its transmitter about thirty miles away from where I live, so I'm in the standard-signal-strength region of its 1-kilowatt transmitter.  Nevertheless, there are several places around town where it's hard to hear the signal because of interference from power lines and other mysterious sources.  On the interstate, certain trucks (possibly electric and maybe even autonomous) emit some sort of EM trash that blanks out the signal until they pass me by.  So even if you have a working AM radio in your car, all is not well with that band.

 

Worldwide, AM broadcasting has largely been abandoned for FM, which is still a viable technology in many areas.  Tesla has dropped FM radios as well, assuming that its largely young tech-savvy market will get its entertainment content via streaming or mobile-phone Bluetooth hookups.  So if the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act passes, we'd be a global outlier in preserving a technology that most other countries have dropped.

 

The world has witnessed a similar process in the fate of shortwave broadcasting.  In its heyday, which extended from the 1920s to the 1990s, shortwave broadcasting was a comparatively inexpensive way of getting your message out literally to the whole world.  Accordingly, every major international player had its broadcasting service, and the Voice of America chain operated by the U. S. government played a significant role during the Cold War. 

 

With the advent of the internet, however, a new propaganda channel opened up, and shortwave was taken over by religious broadcasters whose economics run on a different basis.  Today, shortwave broadcasting is almost gone, and the Voice of America effectively ceased operations in 2025. 

 

If the AM-in-every-car act doesn't pass, people with EVs won't be able to get AM signals directly, but the station I listen to also has a streaming service, and if I had a smart phone I'm sure I could hook it up somehow to listen to the station that way.  (I own a fairly dumb phone by choice, but that's a rarity.)  There will still be plenty of cars on the road with AM bands on their radios, and so it's not like we're banishing AM from the airwaves permanently.   

 

An outfit called Edison Research finds that more than half of listeners to AM and FM radio combined listen in their cars, so the automotive market share is significant.  Now and then I have reason to talk about AM radio technically in my engineering class, and I always preface my remarks with something like, "Now I know that none of you listen to AM radio. . ." and I've never been contradicted.

 

So as old duffers like me fade from the scene and EVs slowly make up a larger share of cars on the road, AM will continue its gentle slide toward the sunset of technology.  But whether it will get there, or be artificially bolstered by the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act for a while longer, is a decision that our august body the U. S. Congress has to make. 

 

As for me, I'm not planning to buy an EV any time soon, so I'll listen to my AM radio as long as I drive my car, which I plan on doing for a while yet.

 

Sources:  A description of the Senate's version of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 can be found at https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/315.  The National Association of Broadcasters arguments in favor of the bill can be read at https://www.nab.org/advocacy/issue.asp?id=6719.  The Zero Emission Transportation Association's arguments against it are at https://www.zeta.org/amradio.  I also referred to statistics on radio listening at https://www.facebook.com/Broadcasters/posts/a-new-report-finds-in-car-listening-now-accounts-for-53-of-amfm-radio-listening-/1358434222980434/. 

Fatal Tesla Crash Into Home Raises More Questions

  

Around 8 P. M. Friday June 19, 76-year-old Martha Avila was standing in the playroom at the front of her daughter's house in Katy, Texas.  Her daughter, son-in-law, and their children were also in the house or in the back yard.  Suddenly a Tesla Model 3 occupied by 44-year-old Michael Butler crashed into the house after reaching a speed exceeding 70 MPH on the short residential street.  The car pinned Avila, who was extracted from the crash by EMS personnel but later died at a local hospital.  Within a few days, Avila's family had filed a lawsuit against Tesla and Butler, and last Wednesday the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced it was opening an investigation into the accident.

 

Something obviously went wrong if a car failed to negotiate a right turn of a residential street and instead hopped the curb and plowed into a house.  According to those investigating the crash, Butler, who was also injured, claims that the vehicle was in self-driving mode at the time of the accident. 

 

Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has issued a statement on social media saying that the crash "made no sense" as the self-driving mode usually maintains a low speed in residential areas.  Another Tesla official stated that according to vehicle data, "the driver pressed the accelerator to 100% and reached a speed of 73 MPH before the crash." 

 

Clearly, investigators have a job on their hands to figure out exactly what happened.  Rose Hollow Lane, the street on which the Tesla accelerated, is only about 1000 feet long before it makes a right turn going east and becomes another street at the corner where the crash occurred.  Teslas are notorious for their ability to accelerate rapidly, however, so it's possible that the car was traveling at a lower speed at first and then responded to its accelerator, which might have been pressed in error. 

 

In fairness to Tesla, there are plenty of examples of non-self-driving cars crashing into structures and killing people as well.  Tesla releases quarterly statistics on its vehicles that are operating in full self-driving mode, and claims that the number of accidents per million miles is lower than the average for the entire U. S. fleet.  Critics say that this isn't an entirely fair comparison because the Tesla fleet is newer and has more advanced safety features than the average car on the road.

 

All the statistics in the world won't bring back Martha Avila, however, and that is why the family is suing Tesla and the driver of the car. 

 

According to information on Reddit, the driver of a Tesla in full self-driving mode can override the system by pressing on the accelerator.  If that's what happened in the accident, the responsibility cannot be laid exclusively to Tesla, which is why the driver is also being sued as well. 

 

If we allow imagination to roam, perhaps the following scenario occurred.  As the driver went down Rose Hollow Lane, perhaps a squirrel or other small creature darted out in front of the car.  Intending to hit the brake, Butler instead pressed the accelerator pedal.  The resulting goose of energy could have sent the car off the road into the house where Avila died. 

 

Again, we will have to wait for the outcome of the NTSB investigation to find definitive answers to the questions raised by this tragedy.  If the cause turns out to be largely human error which could have happened with a non-self-driving vehicle, then there is nothing out of the ordinary about it except that the vehicle happened to be a Tesla.  If on the other hand, there was something about the self-driving mode that contributed directly to the crash, investigators will want to know what it was, and possibly issue directives to fix the problem.

 

Other self-driving vehicles such as Waymo rely on multiple types of sensors, while Teslas have so far relied exclusively on vehicle cameras, possibly for reasons of cost.  Whether such a compromise will be viable going forward may depend on how frequently crashes occur which could have been avoided through the use of a wider variety of sensors.

 

The course of autonomous driving in the U. S. has not followed the forecasts of its initial optimistic promoters.  The SAE five-level autonomous-driving scale which ranges from Level 1 (e. g. cruise control) to Level 5 (fully self-driving in all conditions everywhere) shows that there are only a few places in the world where Level-4 cars such as Waymos operate specific routes in favorable conditions.  As we noted in this space a few weeks ago, Waymo temporarily suspended operations in San Antonio and other locations where its vehicles ran into trouble with flooded streets.  So for most people, self-driving cars are not something they encounter voluntarily, unless they take a Waymo taxi where they are available, or take a ride with a Tesla owner who wants to show it off.

 

It looks like the ideal Level-5 self-driving car is still in the future.  And even if it arrives, it may remain in a niche market favored by the handicapped, the elderly, and other people who simply can't drive at all without it, or have to hire a cab.  For the rest of us, the price we'd have to pay for even a Level-4 self-driving car is way more than what it is worth to us not to have to bother turning the wheel and operating the pedals when we're in the car.  And that may remain the case for the indefinite future.

 

As for Tesla, which still promotes its "Full Self-Driving" mode of operation in what seems to be a misleading way, the requirement for the driver both to let the computer drive the car and still remain ready to take over if something goes wrong means that the driver's attention is theoretically required all the time, but practically almost none of the time.  I don't know about you, but I would find it very hard to just sit behind the wheel and pay attention to the road just as much as if I were driving, only not drive.  It may be a situation like this which led to the accident that killed Martha Avila.

 

Time will tell, and if the NTSB investigation report reveals anything new, we hope to bring it to you in this space.  But not right away.

 

Sources:  I referred to reports at https://abcnews.com/US/tesla-allegedly-autopilot-mode-crashes-texas-house-woman/story?id=134062374, https://www.fox26houston.com/news/tesla-sued-after-katy-crash-leaves-76-year-old-woman-dead, https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/tesla-crash-katy-texas-ntsb/285-42522116-a98b-4e89-8bae-7db39b5d642d, and a reference to a Forbes report (unfortunately behind a paywall) at https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/11/14/tesla-finally-releases-fsd-crash-data-that-appears-more-honest/. 

Driverless Cars: Not as Autonomous As We Thought

  

As part of an investigation by U. S. Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), autonomous-vehicle operators Tesla, Waymo, and others have made public some details about how their supposedly driverless cars can be remotely assisted or controlled under certain circumstances.  In a report published on Apr. 8, Andrea Guzman of the Austin American-Statesman described how the companies reluctantly shared some but not all the information Sen. Markey requested.  Specifically, they refused to say how often such interventions take place.

 

It was a surprise to me, though it probably shouldn't have been, that autonomous-vehicle firms have staffs of remote operators ready to take control of a car or truck that gets into trouble.  It's a given that every such vehicle is in continuous wireless communication with "headquarters," whatever that amounts to.  And when the onboard systems determine that the situation the vehicle is facing is beyond its capabilities, it's reasonable that it sends an alert to headquarters to flag a human being to take a look and decide what ought to be done.  But in at least a few situations, the human-assisted decisions haven't been all they should be. 

 

For example, an investigation by a safety agency found that a remotely-operated Waymo vehicle illegally passed a school bus where children were boarding.  Apparently, the Waymo remote assistance operators do not take direct control of the vehicle, but merely guide it in making its own decisions.

 

Tesla's process of remote assistance seems to be more assertive.  In responding to Sen. Markey's inquiry, Tesla revealed that in rare cases, their remote assistance operators can take direct control of the vehicle, but its speed is limited to either 2 or 10 MPH, depending on whether the internal automated system grants direct control to the human controller.

 

That makes it sound like the final decision is up to the machine, not the human.  Whatever the details, the fact that human remote assistants are sometimes involved in driverless car control adds another layer to the already complex mixture of responsibilities involved. 

 

Both Tesla and Waymo emphasized that the remote assistants do not sit there watching each car passively.  For one thing, there are too many cars to monitor.  Waymo revealed that by spreading the work among staff in the U. S. and the Philippines, they can maintain about 70 remote assistance operators on duty at any given time.  Tesla's operators are all in the U. S., and presumably work day and night shifts.  They all have valid U. S. driver licenses for at least three years prior to employment, for what that is worth. 

 

The information that all companies queried refused to reveal was how often it happens that remote-assistance operators intervene in a vehicle's operation.  Perhaps justifiably, they claim that is a trade secret that might compromise their competitive position.  My guess is that they have a pretty good idea of what the competition is doing, but they don't want the competition to know that.  Until it becomes an issue in a court case, then, we'll just have to guess at whether the driverless vehicle you see cruising down the street is truly on its own, or is being supervised from Palo Alto or Manila.

 

The mixing of autonomous and human control is going to become more urgent in the future as more and more systems become capable of running themselves.  Less than two weeks ago, on Apr. 14, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that for the first time, his soldiers captured an enemy position using only remotely-controlled equipment, namely unmanned drones and "ground robotic systems," meaning armed robots. 

 

This historic achievement speaks volumes for the progress that Ukraine has made in developing agile, cost-effective military technology that augments their strength in human troop numbers.  After four years of war against a numerically superior foe, the Ukrainians have become world leaders in such technology, motivated by one of the strongest reasons around:  survival.  It is a truism in the history of technology that wars advance technical developments faster than peace does, and the Ukrainians have shown its validity once again.

 

For years, much ink has been spilled in engineering ethics journals about the dangers of autonomous warfare.  While this may not seem to have much to do with remote assistance for Waymo and Tesla, the two cases are extremes on a continuum.  In the case of peacetime vehicles, you want the machinery to do what it's supposed to do benignly without hurting anybody, but in cases where there is potential danger, you want the human backup person to intervene.  In the case of autonomous warfare, you want to damage and destroy the enemy and its resources, but you don't want the autonomous systems going haywire and attacking your own troops. 

 

Getting back to remotely-assisted civilian vehicles, it appears that the operating companies have found a comfortable medium between the extremes of completely autonomous operation—no humans involved anywhere along the line—and what would amount to a remote-control cabdriver, namely one remote assistant dedicated to each vehicle full-time.  Their comfort zone appears to be a mix of mostly automated control, but some manual control in emergencies. 

 

While it would be nice to know more details, in a free market it's up to the firms themselves to decide the optimum mix, and they seem to want to keep the details to themselves.  Until there's a major lawsuit in which the remote-assistant issue becomes a critical factor, we may not learn a lot more about it. 

 

The question of responsibility is fundamental in engineering ethics.  With the rise of all sorts of autonomous systems that are not quite autonomous, the question gets complicated.  The best we can do is to learn as much as we can about how things are actually done, so when problems arise the public and regulatory agencies are not kept in the dark about where responsibility may really lie. 

 

And whether it's a Waymo car or an armed robot capturing an enemy soldier, it's a little comforting to know that humans are still at the top of the command structure, however remotely.  Unless I'm the soldier—then it may not matter.

 

Sources:  Andrea Guzman's article "Self-driving cars still rely on humans—but how often remains unclear" appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on Apr. 8, 2026 at https://www.statesman.com/business/article/tesla-waymo-remote-operators-self-driving-cars-22192151.php.  I also referred to an article describing the Ukrainian remote-controlled capture of a Russian position at https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-robotic-systems-russia-army-positions-ukraine/. 

Tesla Smart Summon App May Not Be

. . . all that smart, that is.

 

Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:

 

"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise!  You're not in the car.  ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own.  It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."

 

What's not to like?  Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is.  And your new Tesla just quietly leaves its space in the parking lot and pulls up next to you.  How cool is that?

 

And how likely are you to follow the fine print on the instruction screen to the letter, which reads in part "Keep an eye on your car and its surroundings at all times.  Stay vigilant, especially around the fast and the furious (people, bikes, and other cars)."  No, you're more likely to be lapping up the adulation from your date. 

 

So when the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a complaint about a crash involving a Tesla under Actually Smart Summon control, it started looking around and found several other similar incidents in media reports, a total of twelve malfunctions that it is currently investigating.

 

Part of the problem is that the NHTSA has told Tesla to report directly to them any crashes on "publicly accessible roads" that involve autonomous operation of its vehicles.  The Summon software has an internal interlock that prevents it being used on public streets, and it's intended only for parking lots and driveways.  This leads to a debate about what "publicly accessible" means.  If you have a gate at the bottom of your driveway, it's not publicly accessible.  But what if there's no gate, or the gate is open?  I'd say most ungated parking lots for retail and commercial enterprises are publicly accessible.  It looks like Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming to the NHTSA, assuming in the first place that they knew about some of the incidents.  And considering how intimately the software of every Tesla is tied to corporate HQ, I suspect they had the data at their fingertips.

 

The Associated Press story about this latest kerfuffle between the NHTSA and Tesla reminds us that in the past, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has complained that the regulatory agency is stifling progress in autonomous driving technology.  There is speculation that once the Trump administration is in charge of all executive-branch agencies such as the NHTSA, Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's campaign and was appointed to a government-improvement board, will pressure the NHTSA to lay off Tesla, in short. 

 

How much regulation is too much?  It depends on who you ask:  the companies that are regulated, or the people who benefit from regulations.

 

Just to pick a historical example, ask any member of the families of the so-called "radium girls" who spent eight hours a day in the 1920s painting radium dials on watches and clocks, came down with radiation poisoning, and died horrible deaths.  The use of radium was not regulated at all back then, and the radium girls paid the price. 

 

On the other hand, a classic case of "rent-seeking," which means a firm that uses government regulation to create a monopoly or other favorable business environment for itself, came about for most of the twentieth century in the U. S. when Ma Bell (American Telephone and Telegraph) regulated away virtually all other telecomm companies except for a few harmless local enterprises here and there.  In retrospect, this over-regulation stifled competition and slowed technological advance to a crawl until antitrust lawsuits broke up the monopoly and led to the explosion of telecomm services and smartphone apps that we (mostly) enjoy today. 

 

There are two extremes to think about.  The same AP article mentions that Tesla suffered its first decline in sales in a decade last year.  Could this be a sign that regulatory burdens are losing Tesla business?  I doubt it.  There are so many other factors involved—Chinese competition in electric vehicles, the continuing high prices of EVs compared to gasoline-powered cars, even political factors (I'm sure there are some people who will refuse to buy a Tesla simply because Musk hangs out with Trump)—that blaming a sales decline on regulatory pressure is implausible.

 

Musk has a well-earned reputation for playing fast and loose with bureaucracies and their spawn, namely regulations.  This attitude on the part of a radical innovator is understandable.  Technical innovation frequently gets ahead of the law, in that it creates situations that are unprecedented and nobody has had the time to figure out what laws to pass regarding them.  Musk seems to believe that it's easier to get forgiveness in retrospect than permission in advance, and there is some truth to that.

 

On the other hand, he also seems to think that telling people to be careful absolves him and his company of responsibility if a Tesla driver disobeys instructions.  Many crashes involving the "self-driving" features of Teslas have happened because, in direct contradiction to instructions telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over if something unusual happens, the drivers have been doing things like watching videos on their phones. 

 

It's possible something similar is happening with the Summons features.  Besides the Actually Smart Summons, there is a Dumb Summons that lets you manually drive the car like a giant radio-controlled toy, and that obviously requires you to pay full attention to what you're doing and watch the four-camera display on your phone while you're doing it.  But the NHTSA is concerned about latency issues and how fast the car can go in this mode, as it looks like remote-control drivers may not have had enough time to avoid obstacles such as other parked cars and bollards (those traffic-preventing posts mounted in the ground).

 

My two cents on this is that the NHTSA is doing about right in not taking drastic action such as banning all Teslas from the road, but not ignoring new problems as they surface in complaints and media reports either.  The NHTSA will continue to spotlight problems with Teslas, and Musk will continue to gripe that they're overdoing it, and life will go on. 

 

And maybe the people making up acronyms at Tesla for the next new app will be a little more careful about what it spells.  I spent five minutes trying to think of how I could incorporate ASS in my headline, but finally took the high road and left it out.  Not everybody else will, though.

 

Sources:  An Associated Press article published on Jan. 7, 2025 entitled "US opens another Tesla probe, latest focused on tech that remotely returns car to driver," appeared at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-investigation-safety-autonomous-death-a158e4dee7b5e94b148ec3bb5c47233d.  I obtained the instruction quotes from a screenshot contained in a short video demonstrating the ASS app at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RmVk-0LlDMI. 

Consumer Reports Says Electric Cars Have More Problems

 

In a comprehensive survey covering vehicle model years 2021 through 2023, the publication Consumer Reports found that electric cars, SUVs, and pickups had among the worst reliability ratings compared to either all-internal-combustion-powered vehicles or IC-powered hybrids (not plug-in hybrids, which were also problem-prone). 

 

Results varied by brand.  Tesla, the largest seller of all-electric vehicles, rose in the reliability rankings from 19th out of 30 automakers in last year's survey to 14th out of 30 in the latest study.  This reflects an overall tendency that is probably the main cause of reliability problems with electric vehicles (EVs):  inexperience.

 

The first time you do anything, you're not likely to do it perfectly.  Young people sometimes don't understand this basic principle of life, and it leads to unfortunate consequences.  My mother once sent me to take tennis lessons when I was about ten.  When I discovered I couldn't serve like a pro right off the bat (or the racket), I promptly lost all interest and closed myself off to a lifetime of tennis enjoyment. 

 

The same thing that is true of individuals learning how to do new things is true of automakers learning how to make EVs.  An Associated Press article on the Consumer Reports survey quotes Jake Fisher, their senior director of auto testing, as saying the situation is mainly "growing pains."  No matter how detailed and accurate computer models and laboratory prototypes are, a manufacturer can't simulate the myriad of unlikely situations that will arise when a product is made in units of thousands and sent out to the great unwashed public, who will do a lot of crazy durn things that the maker could never think of. 

 

This sort of thing has been going on with internal-combustion (IC) cars since before 1900, and the automakers are supremely experienced with what can go wrong with that technology.  It may be surprising to learn, but the reliability requirements of military-grade technology are nowhere nearly as rigorous and demanding as the requirements for hardware used in the automotive industry.  Jet aircraft are inspected and serviced every few hundred hours.  But Grandma just drives her car until it breaks, and expects that to happen very rarely. 

 

Combine that consumer expectation with a radically new powertrain, control system, and body, which is what EVs represent, and you're going to have problems, even entirely new types of problems.  The issue of autonomous vehicles is formally independent of EVs, but as some of the most advanced autonomous-vehicle systems are found in EVs such as Teslas, the two often go together.  And autonomous driving is only one of the multitude of new features that EVs make either possible at all, or a lot easier to implement.

 

An EV is more of a hardware shell for a software platform than anything else, and reliability standards for software are a different kind of cat compared to automotive reliability expectations.  Software is at fault in many issues involving EVs, although it can increasingly cause problems with IC cars as well.    

 

The hope expressed by many EV makers is that consumers will recognize the higher problem rate as something temporary, and won't allow it to tarnish the overall reputation of the technology.  This depends on the age and psychology of the customer to a great and imponderable degree. 

 

Just last night, for instance, I was talking with a friend who bought his first Tesla about five months ago.  If he's had any problems with it, he didn't mention them.  I asked about charging times, and he said it was no problem.  He can charge his Tesla at his house overnight, and he knows where there are supercharging stations that will do it in only 30 minutes.

 

His attitude reminds me of a scene in the Woody Allen movie "Annie Hall."  In a split-screen scene, Alvy Singer's therapist asks him, "How often do you sleep together?"  Singer replies forlornly, "Hardly ever.  Maybe three times a week."  In the other half of the screen, his partner Annie Hall gets asked the same question by her therapist, and Annie says with annoyance, "Constantly.  I'd say three times a week."

 

My friend, a power engineer and Tesla enthusiast, sees charging an EV in thirty minutes as wonderful, hardly any time at all.  Someone like me, who is a dyed-in-the-wool IC traditionalist, can't help compare that half hour to the five minutes I usually spend at the gas pump, and the Tesla suffers by comparison.

 

The true-blue EV proponents will undoubtedly overlook or tolerate minor issues with their vehicles and rightly regard them as temporary stumbling blocks that will grow less frequent as the makers learn from their mistakes and improve reliability overall.  The big question is, are there enough such proponents to support the overwhelming market share growth that the automakers hope for, and that the federal government is standing by to enforce with a big stick if it doesn't happen?

 

The same AP article notes that the initially explosive growth of EV sales has slowed by about half in the last year.  It's a genuine open question as to where EV sales will stabilize, if they ever do, with regard to IC sales.  The problem that the automakers face is that as things currently stand, they must comply with the so-called CAFE standards for overall fleet fuel economy, or else pay heavy fees for non-compliance.  And the Biden administration has proposed steep increases in the fleet-mileage numbers that will require a large fraction of all cars on the roadways to be EVs in the coming years. 

 

One can question the propriety of government interference in the auto marketplace.  If left alone, the market will let all the EV enthusiasts satisfy their wants without driving up the overall price of cars or causing artificial scarcities of IC vehicles.  Both of these downsides are likely if the government forces Adam Smith's famed invisible hand to deal only the kinds of cars the government wants, without regard to consumer preferences or needs. 

 

Electric cars will become more reliable, but it's by no means clear if consumers will want enough of them to warrant the current pressures to overthrow the century-long reign of IC cars. 

 

Sources:  The AP article "Consumer Reports:  Electric vehicles less reliable, on average, than conventional cars and trucks" appeared on Nov. 29, 2023 at https://apnews.com/article/electric-vehicles-consumer-reports-gasoline-vehicles-charging-eed9c3b8d86c1f7708b7c6e2d4dbf55e.  I also referred to IMDB for the "Annie Hall" quote at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/characters/nm0000095, and for CAFE standards at https://www.npr.org/2023/07/28/1190799503/new-fuel-economy-standards-cars-trucks.

Uber Backup Driver in Self-Driving Car Fatality Pleads Guilty

 

When Elaine Herzberg started to cross a dark street in Tempe, Arizona on Mar. 18, 2018 with her bicycle, she didn't see the Volvo approaching.  Unfortunately for her, it wasn't an ordinary Volvo.  It was an experimental self-driving vehicle operated by Uber, and behind the wheel was Rafaela Vasquez, whose job was to monitor the car's performance and intervene before anything serious went wrong.  The Volvo was equipped with factory-installed safety features such as automatic braking, but Uber had disabled those features because they interfered with Uber's own self-driving system.  It was Vasquez's job to stop the car if it was about to run over something—or somebody.

 

Video footage recorded at the time showed that Vasquez was looking at something in her lap instead of watching where the car was going.  Prosecuting attorneys said it was a TV show she was streaming on her phone.  Her defense attorney claimed it was a messaging program on a work cellphone.  Whichever it was, it distracted Vasquez enough so that by the time she noticed Herzberg only a few feet ahead of the car, it was too late to do anything.  Herzberg died in the accident and Vasquez was charged with negligent homicide.  Last Friday, she pled guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to three years of supervised probation.

 

Most sources agree that this was the first fatal collision involving a fully autonomous car.  As such, it presented something of a puzzle to the prosecutors.  Clearly, Vasquez was not just an ordinary driver—her role was to monitor the car's performance and intervene only when it looked like it was getting into trouble.  Numerous other parties were involved as well:  Volvo itself, whose automatic braking features were disabled; Uber engineers who developed the self-driving features being tested; and Uber supervisors who issued orders and instructions to Vasquez. 

 

More than five years have passed since the accident, and the charge Vasquez pled guilty to is not the one she was originally charged with.  In a plea deal, she agreed to plead guilty to an "undesignated felony," which apparently can be converted into a misdemeanor if she successfully completes three years of supervised probation.  Vasquez is a convicted felon, having served prison time for attempted armed robbery, so she is no newcomer to the criminal justice system.  While Uber deserves credit for employing ex-convicts, their judgment may have erred in this case.

 

When I blogged on this accident back in 2018, the autonomous-vehicle landscape was very different.  Self-driving cars were a novelty and found mostly in experimental trials in a few cities.  Since that time, things have progressed in that field, but probably not as fast as its promoters wished.  Tesla, which has probably fielded the largest number of partially self-driving cars of any U. S. manufacturer, is currently under scrutiny by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration for accidents involving its so-called Autopilot feature, which drives the car without direct human-driver intervention but should not be used without constant monitoring for bad behavior.  I can testify that these days, I see at least one Tesla almost any time I'm out on the road for any length of time, and maybe several.  As Autopilot is an expensive option for an already costly car, I don't know how many drivers have it or use it, but so far I haven't seen a Tesla tooling down the expressway with nobody at the wheel—yet.

 

Simply because the current driving environment is so complex, the ultimate vision of so-called Level 5 autonomous vehicles, which could drive anywhere a human could without any human intervention at all, may not ever come to pass.  Fully autonomous vehicles can work in highly restricted and controlled environments such as open-pit mines, but the average city street is full of so many surprises and hard-to-determine obstacles that current technology cannot be trusted to navigate it without human help. 

 

If we are to realize the dream of totally autonomous cars, we might have to accept some geographic restrictions that will not be popular.  For example, if certain streets or blocks were designated for autonomous vehicles only, and no-jaywalking laws were strictly enforced, the environment could be modified enough so that fully-autonomous Level 5 cars would work with reasonable safety.  But that would require a coordination among local, state, and national governments, besides car manufacturers, that is so far lacking, and may never be achieved.

 

A few people have always enjoyed the equivalent of fully-autonomous cars:  those who can afford to hire a chauffeur.  The fact that some rich folks are driven around by hired drivers has had negligible impact on the transportation system so far, and if such an experience never makes it to prime time via the development of Level 5 autonomous vehicles, it will not signal the failure of transportation technology in general.  The only people who would really benefit in a major way from Level 5 vehicles are those who cannot drive:  the handicapped and disabled, the elderly, and children.  I am told that children used to ride the New York subway system unsupervised all the time, and some may still do so.  But we have a long way to go before anyone would trust their five-year-old to get in an autonomous vehicle for a ride to day care.

 

That dark night in Tempe, Rafaela Vasquez unwillingly made history through her negligence in trusting too much to the self-driving capabilities of the experimental Uber-modified vehicle she was hired to supervise.  The same mistake is being made by people who don't follow instructions to keep their hands on the wheel of an Autopilot-equipped Tesla, and the unfortunate thing is that they often get away with it.  But sometimes they don't, and that's what the NHTSA is looking into.  Uber was not charged in the Tempe accident, probably because there was evidence that they had told Vasquez to be vigilant and she clearly failed to do so.  But it's human nature to assume that if you can get away with something for a long time, you'll be able to get away with it indefinitely.  And the temptation to do that with advanced self-driving features is too great for some people, who should be held responsible, along with their car's manufacturer, when something goes wrong.

 

Sources:  The AP report on the Vasquez trial can be found at https://apnews.com/article/autonomous-vehicle-death-uber-charge-backup-driver-1c711426a9cf020d3662c47c0dd64e35.  I also referred to a CNBC report at https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/06/nhtsa-presses-tesla-for-more-records-in-autopilot-safety-probe.html.  I blogged on the Tempe accident here and here.

Is the Bloom Off the Self-Driving Rose?

 

Pardon the mixed metaphor—roses don't drive—but I couldn't think of another way to summarize the current prospects for truly autonomous vehicles.  For several years now, we have been promised that self-driving cars are just around the corner.  In particular, Tesla has marketed an expensive option for their electric vehicles called "Full Self-Driving Capability."  But as the NHTSA is asking Tesla for ever more detailed information about how it has deployed and modified its autonomous-driving software since 2014, it's beginning to look like the promised future of leaving all the driving to robot chauffeurs while we nap or play cards in the back seat is nothing more than hype.

 

What is reality right now regarding self-driving cars?  The Society of Automotive Engineers has established six levels of autonomy, ranging from 0 (what a Model T had, requiring you to do everything yourself) up to Level 5.  A Level 5 car could drive you anywhere that is physically accessible by a car without your having to lift a finger. 

 

The most advanced self-driving systems currently on the market are Level 3.  A Level 3 system such as that in the Honda Legend, which was introduced only in Japan in limited quantities, really does drive the car without human intervention, but reserves the right to ask the human to take over if things get too hairy.  "Hairy" in this case can mean something as mild as a rainy day, which sets up weird reflections on streets and can confuse even deep-learning AI systems. 

 

Tesla's much-publicized "Full Self-Driving Mode" is only a Level 2 system, because the occupant is supposed to be prepared to start steering at any time.  People routinely violate this rule, however, which is how several accidents involving supposedly self-driving Teslas have happened.

 

Computer scientist and engineer Anthony Levandowsky ought to know the self-driving score if anybody does, as he got into the business way back in 2003 when he teamed with some fellow U. C. Berkeley engineers to enter a self-driving motorcycle in DARPA's 2004 Grand Challenge.  He went on to work for Google, left Google for Uber amid lawsuits charging theft of intellectual property, was convicted of same, and pardoned by President Trump on Trump's last day in office.

 

If anybody has an insider's perspective on self-driving vehicles, Levandowsky does.  What is he up to now?  He runs a company that converts giant open-pit quarry trucks to be autonomous vehicles.  And in an interview with Bloomberg News, he says that the kind of highly restricted environment in which such trucks operate may be the best that truly autonomous driving can do for the foreseeable future.

 

While there have been numerous technical advances in sensors, computing power, and AI in the two decades or so that Levandowsky has been in the business, self-driving cars are up against a truly astounding opponent:  the average driver.  As the Bloomberg article points out, suppose you see a couple of pigeons on the road ahead.  As an experienced human, you know that pigeons almost always fly away before your car lands on top of them.  And even if you are contending with a particularly dopey or hung-over pigeon whose situational awareness isn't up to snuff, running over a pigeon is not going to ruin your car.  So it's no big deal to see some pigeons in your path if you're driving.

 

But to an autonomous vehicle system that may never have encountered these particular pigeons on this particular stretch of road under these particular lighting and weather circumstances, it's a totally novel experience.  And most prudent programmers will insert a default "brake when in doubt" operation when the system encounters something that might be dangerous.  So what may well happen is that the car suddenly brakes, and the driver following you may not notice in time, leading to a rear-end collision or even a pileup on a busy freeway—all because of a pigeon.

 

Multiply this scenario by the thousands of other ones that come up all the time, and you begin to understand why self-driving taxis are found only in highly restricted areas of certain cities, and why so many of the demonstrations of self-driving cars take place in California, Arizona, and other places where clear skies can be counted on.  Levandowsky takes the position that every so-called self-driving car out there is really just a pilot project, and Tesla even makes this condition explicit, calling their system a "beta version," meaning it's still under development. 

 

So when, if ever, are we going to get to have our little cocktail among friends in the back seat, heedless of the weather or the traffic?  I can picture only two situations in which even some people can get to experience this in what remains of my lifetime.

 

One is if cities establish self-driving-only zones in which only self-driving cars with similar operating systems are allowed.  This type of operation will never be a mass-market phenomenon, but it essentially transfers Levandowsky's self-driving quarry trucks to dense downtown areas, where the environment can be controlled, perhaps with strictly-enforced rules on pedestrians.

 

The other would extend this principle to an entire region or country.  Maybe we should start with Lichtenstein.  Only self-driving cars would be allowed on the roads.  This will probably never fly in the U. S., but it might take place in some dictatorial environment such as China or North Korea—assuming North Koreans ever get rich enough to buy their own cars.  And even then, the rest of the environment is still going to cause lots of problems—pigeons can't read highway laws, and they're going to land on the road anyway. 

 

It's kind of a shame, really.  Part of me was looking forward to handing the whole responsibility of driving over to some system that had proven itself at least as trustworthy as your average taxi driver.  (Not the taxi driver I wound up with in Amherst, Massachusetts once, who had been out "fishing" with a six-pack and hit a curb, blew out a tire, stopped at a gas station, got the tire fixed, and still got us to our flight to China somehow.)  But now it looks like that's going to go the way of other Jetson-inspired dreams, like personal flying saucers.  Of course, if they do get batteries good enough to operate self-flying one-person drones, we could rewrite the FAA rules a lot more easily than redoing all the traffic laws.  But you'd still have to deal with those pesky pigeons.

 

Sources:  The Bloomberg News article "Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere" appeared on Oct. 5, 2022 at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere.  I also referred to the J. D. Power website for the SAE's six levels of autonomous-vehicle operation at https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/levels-of-autonomous-driving-explained

and https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tesla-autopilot-driver-assist-system-nhtsa-seeks-details-recent-changes/, as well as the Wikipedia article on Anthony Levandowsky.

Would You Buy a Used Tesla from Elon Musk?

 

My father was a loan officer who specialized in auto loans.  In that position, he had to be a good judge of character.  I seem to remember one day he was talking about a fellow he knew, and said something like the following:  "He's stayed out of jail, but I wouldn't buy a used car from him."

 

More and more used-car buyers are going to face something like the headline's question as used electric vehicles (EVs), predominantly but not exclusively Teslas, hit the used-car market.  A recent article by Jamie L. LaReau of the Detroit Free Press, and republished by papers in the USA Today network, describes the challenges consumers face in buying a used EV.

 

As you probably know, the single most expensive component in an EV is the battery.  A complete replacement of the entire battery can cost about half the price of the car (e. g. $15,000 for a $30,000 used car).  The difficulty in buying a used EV is to figure out the condition of the battery—what its current range is and how long it will be before it has to be replaced.  Currently, there is no good way to do this.

 

LaReau recommends taking the prospective purchase for a long test drive, preferably a couple of  days, and running it on the kind of commuting route you expect to use it for.  If the battery runs precariously low in such a situation, the car may not be for you.  Some types of EVs allow the owner to replace individual faulty cells in the battery, thus avoiding an expensive replacement of the entire battery.  I would imagine that the diagnostics for such a replacement might not be straightforward, and only dealers for that particular model could do such a check.  Other types of

EVs make their batteries as a unitary packaged structure that has to be replaced all at once.  So when the battery's performance falls below what is required, there's really no other option but to replace the whole thing. 

 

Dave Sargent, whose title is Vice President of Connected Vehicles at the consumer-analytics  organization J. D. Power, is quoted as saying that mileage as reported by the odometer is not a good guide to battery condition.  More important is the way the car was driven—highway versus city streets—what the average temperature of its surroundings were (Phoenix or Bangor is bad, Atlanta is good) and how it was charged.  Fast charging, for example, is harder on batteries than the slower overnight charging that most consumers are able to do in their garages.  Also, if the battery was frequently allowed to discharge lower than 20% capacity, that tends to age it faster than otherwise.

 

In principle, all this data could be (and maybe is) stored somewhere, either on the car's computer or the manufacturer's remotely gathered database on the vehicle.  If somebody hasn't done this already, it shouldn't be hard to write software that can take such data and make an educated guess as to the overall condition of the battery at the time of sale.  At this time, however, such software doesn't seem to be generally available.

 

Some dealers will test the battery for a fee of about $150, but that only tells you what condition it is in now, not what it's going to do in the future.  A Federal government mandate to guarantee the battery in a new EV for eight years or 100,000 miles is worth something, but it is not clear if that warranty is always transferable to a used-car buyer.  On the lender CapitalOne's website, an article warns that some manufacturers won't replace a battery under the federal warranty until it is totally non-functional.  So even if the car would just get out of your driveway and then die, you'd be stuck with it until it wouldn't even do that.  And sometimes the warranty won't transfer to subsequent owners.

 

All in all, anyone buying a used EV is taking a chance that the battery will not do what they want in a time sooner than they'd like.  Of course, used cars in general are a somewhat risky purchase, but as a purchaser of used cars most of my life (I'm driving the first new car I ever bought, and that was only three years ago), there are ways to tell if you're getting a lemon or not, and state-mandated "lemon laws" allow consumers to return vehicles that were sold under clearly fraudulent conditions. 

 

But the lack of expertise on the ground who can make a reliable prediction as to when an EV's battery will degrade below an acceptable level of performance is a novelty that most buyers would rather not deal with. 

 

On the other hand, the reasons why people buy electric cars are not your usual reasons.  Currently, none of the EVs available, used or new, sell for prices that would attract what you might call the typical buyer.  LaReau cites statistics that say the current average price of a new EV is about $58,000 and for a used EV, you'll pay an average of $41,000.  So we are talking high-end if not luxury vehicles, and buyers for whom price is not the main consideration. 

 

I think one of the main motivations for people who buy EVs is a politico-esthetic one:  they think they are helping to avert global warming.  Whether buying and using an EV really does this, considering all the manufacturing steps, the mining of lithium and other metals under less-than-ideal circumstances, and the source of electric power used to charge the thing, is a question for another time.  Whether or not one really does affect global warming with an EV purchase, lots of people feel like they do, and that's what counts in marketing.

 

As with any used-car purchase, the old Latin motto caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware") applies in spades to buying a used EV.  If the car's battery performance turns out to be a disappointment, maybe the purchaser can just look upon it as one more sacrifice made in the cause of fighting global warming.  But your typical car buyer is likely to be unmoved by such sentiments, and so things will have to become a lot more transparent before used EVs become just as easy to sell as conventional gas guzzlers.

 

Sources:  The article "The future of car buying" by Jamie L. LaReau appeared in the business section of the online Austin American-Statesman for May 14, 2023.  I also referred to the article on the CapitalOne website https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/getting-a-good-deal/how-do-ev-battery-warranties-work/1960 regarding battery warranties for used EVs.