Headlines for the Week for June 18th, 2018

Flying Cars to Take Off in Ingolstadt

Long time listeners may remember a few months ago I mentioned Audi’s partnership with Airbus to start developing flying cars. As a refresher, these were very loosely termed cars. Basically it’s a three-part design, with a quadcopter, passenger pod and electric skateboard-like platform. The pod can be transported by either the quadcopter or wheeled platform, making it either flying or car, but not really “flying car.” I said at the time that the idea was pretty neat and more likely to succeed than any other system I’d seen and, sure enough, Audi has just received approval from the German government to start testing these in their headquarter city in Bavaria, Ingolstadt. Now, this is a long way from being like “oh my God, we are all going to be catching flying car taxis from the airports within five years,” but it’s a lot closer than I thought we’d see in my lifetime, so I’m hoping this actually goes somewhere. Onward and upward, Audi.

Volvo’s New US Plant feat. Dig @ Trump

In a time when automotive manufacturing jobs can be hard to come by in the US, who can we trust to bring back those jobs? Yep, the Chinese and Swedes! Volvo, which is owned by Chinese company Geely, formally opened their new factory in South Carolina, which will build the new S60 we’ll get to later. In addition to providing Volvo the chance to suck up to American buyers by focusing on the $1.1 billion investment in America and the 4,000 jobs the factory will host when construction is complete, the event gave Volvo execs the chance to cast some serious shade at Donald Trump and his supporters Nikki Haley and Governor Henry McMaster. Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson said “If you have trade barriers and restrictions, we cannot create as many jobs as we are planning to. We want to export and if suddenly China and Europe have very high barriers, it would be impossible. Then you have to build the cars there. And then all cars will be more expensive, you have to invest more tooling and have every model in every country. That’s against all the logic of modern economies that trade with each other.” It seems there’s a lot of commentary about our trade policy being against all logic, and yet here we are, threatening a 25% tariff on imported vehicles and auto parts. It’s almost like logic doesn’t factor into decisions at all, but what do I know, I’m only a master of business with a degree in political science who happens to like his cars cheap and fast.

Audi CEO Arrested, Thrown in Slammer

^Criminal

The fallout from the Dieselgate scandal continues still in Germany where this week Audi CEO Rupert Stadler was arrested based on concealment of evidence relating to the defeat devices on Volkswagen Auto Group vehicles. He’s actually remaining in custody because the prosecution thinks he’s a flight risk. Audi has had to scramble to name an interim CEO while their boss remains a jailbird, but this just continues to look bad. If the CEO of one of your major brands was aware of the effort to deceive authorities, former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is probably shaking in his boots because you can bet he knew about it too. It’s a serious problem when a culture of corruption comes straight from the top, and you would’ve thought Volkswagen had learned its very expensive lesson, but by keeping Stadler as Audi CEO this long after the scandal came to light, maybe they need a couple more billion dollar settlements before the root out all the corrupt jerks. I’ll take my settlement in the form of a V10 R8, thank you.

Teslupdate #1,000,000,000

This will again not be the week when we have no Tesla news, because there was some wild shit going on with Elon Musk’s company this week. First, the not-so-wild: tesla completed the setup of a third production line over the weekend...in their parking lot. Yes, the new line is underneath temporary tents outside because the space is needed that badly to ramp up production to meet goals. Back when the factory was a combined General Motors and Toyota venture, they managed to crank out 8,200 cars per week from the inside of the place, so if Tesla needs to move outdoors just to reach 5,000, I think you can imagine how much more complicated those production lines must be and how much more space they take up.

Amazing work by Tesla team. Built entire new general assembly line in 3 weeks w minimal resources. Love u guys so much! Pic of 1st Model 3 dual motor performance coming off the line … pic.twitter.com/Xr55P3fmGd

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 16, 2018

Next came some serious shade thrown from General Motors. Actress Mary McCormack who you may remember from some sort of television shows somewhere, tweeted out a video of her husband’s Tesla Model S, which apparently just started catching fire while he was driving it and burst into flames in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. Tesla has no idea what happened or why, but GM jumped at the opportunity, offering the actress a free Chevy Bolt as a more dependable loaner car. Nicely done, GM communications guy Ray Wert.

Okay now we get to the crazy shit - on Sunday, Elon Musk sent out an email accusing a former employee of sabotage and intellectual property theft, as well as leaking sensitive information to third parties and the press. He followed that email up with another about someone potentially trying to sabotage a production line by starting a fire. Then on Tuesday Tesla filed a lawsuit against a former employee for allegedly having stolen confidential information and making false claims to the media. Then on Thursday, someone claiming to be a friend of Martin Tripp, the guy Tesla sued, called the Gigafactory to warn that Tripp was coming in to shoot up the place, causing a minor panic and for beefed up security until the county sheriff found there was no credibility to the threat. Then AFTER THAT, Tripp posted to Twitter an email exchange that he had with Musk about the lawsuit wherein they both called each other horrible human beings and generally behaved like children.

We’re not yet sure if the Sunday email and Tuesday lawsuit are connected, but if not, that means there are several people trying their darndest to mess up Elon’s life. And jeez, people if you like constant dramabombs being dropped, no need to watch daytime television, just follow Elon Musk on Twitter. This is ridiculous.

J.D. Power Initial Quality Honors Hyundai

The annual list of J.D. Power rankings for initial quality were released this week and, if you’ve been listening to this show and looking at their recent cars, you won’t be surprised to learn that Genesis, Kia and Hyundai are the top three brands. All of them being owned by Hyundai. Even Porsche comes in at just fourth spot and Ford in a somewhat unbelievable fifth. The trick is, the initial power rankings count the number of problems experienced per hundred vehicles in the first 90 days of ownership. If things are going wrong within 90 days, that’s generally not a great sign for future reliability, but certainly not a sign that cars with good initial quality will last longer, as may be the case with Ford. They also don’t measure the severity of problems, so a busted transmission is effectively the same weight as a windshield wiper motor squeaking, which is pretty misleading. Furthermore, as I’ve discussed before, automakers pay JD Power for the right to use their awards in marketing materials, so these sort of non-firsthand user reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, Hyundai definitely deserves a look as they do make some pretty nice cars. Just, as with everything else, QUESTION EVERYTHING.

RC-6 Corvette

While I’ve never driven one, It’s my understanding that Corvettes are very fun cars to drive. But in the Netherlands, where people decided they’d rather have land where the sea was so they built a complex series of windmills to drive the sea back into the ocean, one man has gone and made his Corvette a bit more complex as well. Specifically, he modified his C6 Corvette to be remote controlled. We’ve seen full-sized R/C cars before, but doing so to a Corvette is an entirely different scale; one that cost about $4,000. It’s honestly really impressive that someone could pull this off, but I still think I’d rather be behind the wheel of that V8 rather than just puttering it around a parking lot. But that’s the Dutch for you - defying convention, and the ocean.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Header image: When your GTI is the least athletic member of your automotive family tree.

The People Fear the Autonomous Future

Waymo Autonomous Test Locations

If various tech billionaires are to be believed, the future of vehicles is electric and autonomous so none of us idiot humans can continue getting behind the wheel and killing one another. The problem is though, we idiot humans aren’t exactly totally on board with that whole giving up driving thing.

In the wake of several high profile stories about people dying in cars driven by half-baked and implemented-too-early autonomous systems, public fear of autonomous vehicles has grown precipitously, up to 73% of a recent AAA survey. Demographic wise, the biggest jump was in people ages 20 to 37, going from 49% afraid to 64%, while still being the age group most inclined to ride in self-driving cars. Women in particular are scared, with 83% saying they don’t want to ride in autonomous vehicles and a whopping 70% saying they don’t even want to share the road with them. Elon Musk will blame this on negative coverage of fatal wrecks involving autonomous tech. Journalists and safety pundits will blame it on companies rushing out technology that isn’t ready for mass consumption. The truth is, they’re both right, but only the latter led to the former, and although autonomous vehicles may end up being safer than humans, they have to prove it first. As Uber suspends its autonomous testing in Arizona (costing 300 people their jobs, by the way) and others scale back plans to launch driverless cars on roadways, it looks like there’s a ways to go yet.

Source: Tim Stevens/Roadshow

And just this week they didn’t do such a great job proving it. On a drive with journalists in Jerusalem, a Ford Fusion run by LiDAR makers MobilEye, blew through a red light during a presentation of the technology, completely ignoring the signal. Fortunately, there were no collisions and everyone is okay, but it brings to mind Uber’s incident where their autonomous Volvo failed to react to a pedestrian. MobilEye claims their cameras saw the red light, but that the electromagnetic interference from the broadcasting equipment used by the TV crew in the car screwed with the signal from the traffic light transponder, and the transponder signals trumped the cameras, so the car cruised right on through. CEO Amnon Shashua said, “It was a very unique situation, we’d never anticipated something like this,” which is exactly the problem with autonomous technology. There’s no possible way to anticipate all eventualities, so these self driving cars will never be 100 percent safe. The company claims to have fixed the issue but wouldn’t go into just how.

Karen Kasler/Ohio Public Radio

Despite all of this, the morons in Ohio have stated publicly their desire to become the “wild, wild west for self driving car testing.” And in case you think I’m kidding, those were Governor John Kasich’s exact words. For those wanting some more words from the governor, he also said “Computers do not comb their hair. Computers do not text. Computers do not talk on cellphones, and this technology, which is going to be the 21st century technology, is going to save lives.” Yeah, right up until while not texting, combing hair or talking, a computer ignores a red light and t-bones someone to death. Not only is Ohio allowing self-driving cars while other states that have done so are reevaluating their programs, they’re allowing autonomous vehicles without humans in them! Though, a licensed driver does need to monitor the vehicle remotely and be able to avoid accidents in case of system failure. This, to me, smacks of a government that has no idea what it’s doing and is grasping at straws for a way to bring some sort of investment into the state. Sorry, Ohio, but this was really short-sighted, poorly planned and idiotic.

In neighboring Pennsylvania, Uber announced they would resume testing their autonomous vehicles on the streets of Pittsburgh despite the Arizona closure, which was I’m sure very fun for Pittsburgh’s Mayor William Peduto to find out about via Twitter. After the fatal crash in Tempe, Mayor Peduto suspended Uber’s right to test, pending the completion of a federal investigation and that they would discuss how to safely resume after that. The city has outlined several changes Uber must make to continue testing, including limiting speed to 25 miles per hour, which the company is apparently fine with, and they say they met with the city several weeks ago to discuss picking up where they left off. But when the one last thing on your to-do list is “call the mayor,” you may want to get that checked off before hyping yourself on social media.

Oh, and speaking of that federal investigation? There’s some news on that, with the National Transportation Safety Board stating that the self-driving Volvo Uber in Tempe recognized both the pedestrian and bicycle she was carrying and had a full six seconds to react, but instead the system did nothing, not interpreting the woman as, you know, a human. Even at 1.3 seconds before impact, the Volvo safety systems determined emergency braking was needed to avoid hitting the woman, but Uber had disabled their systems so it didn’t interfere with theirs. The NTSB study hasn’t been concluded yet though, and they haven’t settled on a probable cause, so I’m not sure why Uber thinks this meets with Pittsburgh’s Mayor’s “completed federal investigation” ultimatum.

Meanwhile in Norway, the land of my ancestors, a company called Kolumbus has decided the future of buses is now and they will begin rolling out completely autonomous EasyMile EZ10 buses, which accommodate 15 passengers and can reach a blistering 28 miles per hour. Except they won’t be completely autonomous because Norway doesn’t permit fully autonomous vehicles on the road, so each bus will also feature a safety driver. Oh and also the buses won’t be hitting that 28 mile per hour max speed because Norway will require the bus to be limited to just 7.5 miles per hour. Oh and the buses won’t be filled to the brim with 15 passengers because Norway will require the company to haul only six people at a time. But starting in June, those six riders per bus will I’m sure have a great time speaking to their driver and watching casual runners fly by them along their route.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs