My job means I get to drive brand-new, high-tech modern cars all of the time. They have gotten safer, faster, more efficient and overall better in just the decade I’ve been doing it. But when it comes to car safety, I’ve found that there’s still no substitute for just paying attention and general competence behind the wheel.
Even so, mistakes happen, and that’s why automatic braking systems—already a super-common feature on many new cars—may soon become required standard equipment in the U.S.
That story kicks off this Monday at The Autopian. Also on tap: electric car names are bad, electric charging companies struggle with Wall Street and more on the fight over AM radio in new cars. Let’s dive right in.
Auto Braking Is The Next Big Safety Standard
I say “cars have gotten safer” over the past few years, and that’s true, but America still saw almost 43,000 traffic deaths in 2022—about 117 people per day. Those unfortunate numbers have been rising for years now and to understand why, you have to look at who is dying: pedestrian and cyclist deaths are way up compared to the previous decade. There are a lot of reasons for this, including inadequate sidewalks and road infrastructure and the fact that our pivot to trucks and SUVs means cars are bigger, heavier and deadlier than ever for anyone not inside them.
So it’s no wonder why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is proposing car companies make automatic emergency braking into standard equipment for new vehicles. Here’s The New York Times on this:
The agency is proposing that all light vehicles, including cars, large pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, be equipped to automatically stop and avoid hitting pedestrians at speeds of up to 37 miles per hour.
Vehicles would also have to brake and stop to avoid hitting stopped or slow-moving vehicles at speeds of up to 62 m.p.h. And the systems would have to perform well at night.
“We hope this will avoid many crashes,” Polly Trottenberg, a deputy transportation secretary, said at a news conference. “We know this is going to save lives.”
About 90 percent of the new vehicles on sale now have some form of automatic emergency braking, but not all meet the standards the safety agency is proposing.
What that means, according to NHTSA, is cars would be required to have automatic emergency braking systems that engage up to 62 mph and not only recognize pedestrians but recognize them at night too. While AEB systems are remarkably popular options and sometimes standard equipment on many cars, this would put them in place across the board just like airbags and anti-lock brakes.
Next, NHTSA will take public comments from automakers, safety groups and citizens before deciding to finalize the rule and that could take a year or more. After that, it’ll go into effect in another three years.
The downside, of course, is the added cost to automakers that will get pushed onto the consumer, as if modern cars aren’t expensive enough already. At the same time, we have all got to do something about this glut of person-outside-the-car deaths and this may just help make a big difference there.
What Is Going On With Electric Car Names?
Here’s something thankfully a bit lighter after that last item, but still relevant. How was “bZ4X” (something I have to continually Google each time I write it to make sure I got it right) the best Toyota could do for its first modern EV? Or Honda’s new Euro-market e:Ny1? How do you even pronounce that? E-NY 1? Eeeny-one? Is it named after New York 1, the greatest local news operation on the planet?
The truth is, all of these new EVs have names like physics equations, or one of Elon Musk’s kids. Bloomberg is here to call them out:
Over at Jaguar, a driver could be forgiven for assuming the carmaker’s electric option is the E-PACE, but that model has a gas engine. The battery-powered Jag is the I-PACE. And no one could fault a Volkswagen fan for confusing the carmaker’s ID.4, an SUV-shaped EV, with the ID. Buzz, a recast of the company’s famous van.“Honestly, a lot of these names are just trying too hard,” says David Placek, founder of Lexicon Branding, which helped name Lucid Group Inc., the Subaru Outback and the Honda Ridgeline. “Everyone is kind of scrambling.”
Placek says a great product name needs to check three boxes: It has to be memorable, noteworthy and distinctive within its category. It also helps if the moniker is “what we call ‘processing fluent,’” Placek says. “When the mind looks at it and says ‘OK, I can get that.’”
Many new EV names fall short. They either hew too closely to tradition to feel noteworthy, or stretch so far for distinction that they aren’t memorable.
A bunch of others just sound bad—EQS AMG from Mercedes, which is dumping the EQ branding now anyway—or Audi’s confusing “e-tron” lineup that also includes a standalone car called the e-tron. And it’s unlikely names like “EV6” will hold up well as these things become mainstream.
Do you know what the best EV name is right now? The Ford F-150 Lightning. Chef’s kiss, man. It almost makes up for the Mustang Mach-E, which has a hyphen even though historically “Mach 1” did not and it’s grammatically incorrect here. I will go to my grave mad about that.
Of course, now that I bring this complaint up, they’ll just bring back names I loved as a kid as EV crossovers. I’d hate to see the Honda Prelude and Toyota Celica go that way, but I also wouldn’t be shocked.
EV Charging Companies Face Wall Street Skepticism
With the glut of EVs coming soon, you’d think charging providers would be the next big thing. And they are! As I wrote for The Atlantic recently (yes, that’s a flex, but I’m pretty proud of it so allow me a moment to feel good about myself for a change) America’s public charging network needs to not only grow but grow up. This huge contingent of EV drivers won’t put up with the annoying stuff the early adopters did, like broken chargers, outdated plugs, proprietary payment apps and zero customer service.
A ton of new companies are rising to take advantage of the $7.5 billion the Biden Administration is putting forth to build out a better EV charging infrastructure, and most of the ones I’ve talked to are keen on fixing those problems.
The problem is, Wall Street investors want to place bets on the future. Revenues are up but stock prices are down at the charging providers.
And in a shitty capital market, they don’t like the overhead costs involved or the idea that many of these companies will not survive—or at lest not find a way to be profitable. Remember, many of them make their money (or the bulk of it) from selling maintenance contracts to property owners rather than selling electricity.
Here’s Bloomberg again:
But the companies are spending heavily to deploy chargers in what some liken to a land grab, and investors have grown leery of the amount of capital the companies will need to install their plugs along roadsides and parking lots. None of the charging companies has yet proven it can turn a profit, nor is it clear when any will. And the industry already has a cautionary tale: Volta Inc. The San Francisco company, worth an estimated $1.4 billion when it went public via a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, quickly used up its cash and accepted a $169 million buyout offer from Shell Plc in March.
“If you’re burning cash, and you still need to raise cash, well, that’s a stock that’s not going to get a lot of love,” said Gabriel Daoud, managing director of equity research with Cowen Inc. “There is certainly a risk that a number of these companies will run out of cash and become insolvent.”
There are larger economic factors at work here, of course. Interest rates are high, investors are carefully watching EV growth, and a few of these companies went public via SPAC deals and those have since gone kaput. I’d say a rebound feels imminent at some point; these cars have to get their electrons from somewhere.
AM Radio Doesn’t Go Down Without A Fight
Do you still listen to AM radio? Hell, do you still listen to FM radio? Both are functions automakers would love to kick to the curb as they seek to cut costs from new EVs any way they can. Plus, EV motors tend to create a slight interference with AM radio signals.
It’s an old-school technology that still has its defenders today even if automakers like BMW, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla and Volkswagen (among others) don’t offer AM radio on their new EVs. In fact, about a third of new EVs on sale in 2023 don’t have that function at all.
But government officials (and apparently, also people who long for the heyday of Rush Limbaugh) say dumping AM radio signals could have a huge impact on emergency broadcasts and disaster notifications. Lawmakers want to ensure it’s mandatory for future cars. Here’s Automotive News:
[…] Now, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, and other legislators are shepherding the AM for Every Vehicle Act through the House of Representatives. It would direct NHTSA to require that automakers maintain AM broadcast radio in vehicles for free, among other provisions. The bill’s champions in the Senate include Democrat Markey and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
The House’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology has scheduled a hearing on the issue Tuesday, June 6.
It seems AM radio may have a few years, if not decades, left in it.
Your Turn
What radio do you listen to in the car? These days I’m pretty exclusively into XM Satellite radio (I got used to it on press cars and now can’t live without it) and Spotify for streaming music and podcasts. I can’t say I’ve touched an AM dial in about 10 years or more.
You can use an AM radio to hear lightning, tune to the lowest frequency working channel, lightning strikes should be picked up, kids loved it.
Is there a technical reason they want to continue using AM for emergency broadcast?
Why not use FM which literally every car has?
Re:Charger networks.I understand wall streets skepticism.Maybe the only good solution is for the car companies to build their own
Yes, AM has a greater range than FM especially at night. Theoretically with enough power one station could broadcast to the entire continintal US at night.
Local NPR on FM (WEMU). Channel surf the FM wasteland some of the time for music.
AM occasionally for Michigan games, otherwise never. It’s clearly valuable for emergencies though.
I don’t like the idea of mandating automated emergency braking.
that requires radar
which will add adaptive cruise
which all cost more money and further inflates the costs of new cars.
when the best solution is, as always, people need to PAY ATTENTION. that goes for drivers and pedestrians.
I find adaptive cruise control infuriating. It starts matching the speed of vehicles you are “catching up on” well before I’d actually want it to, which means in heavy traffic you are constantly having to override the cruise control just so you can effectively pass without cruise control slingshotting you as you pull out to pass. Let me get a bit closer than normal following distances sometimes so I can smoothly pass without having to drastically change speeds all the time.
Or my wife will end up following someone going about 5mph slower than she actually wants to go for 20 minutes before she realizes…
Flush: I thumb through the FM stations. Austin’s got some decent ones. Usually it’s on KUTX. Longer trips get whatever music’s downloaded to my phone. Medium-length ones (or ones where I can swap the idiotic single plughole on my iPhone back to a charger) sometimes get a Spotify playlist, but I’m not the biggest fan of the extra battery-suck there.
It’s also not a Mustang, for the record.
All these jumbles of numbers and letters make “Taycan” seem normal, and Taycan is inherently a little silly. At least it lends itself well to puns, though. I’m Taycan my sweet time enjoying those.
No radio, music on my phone only. If there existed a station that could provide the specific cocktail of Ladytron, The Birthday Massacre, Metric, and Final Fantasy XIV my dopamine-starved ADHD neuron loaf requires, I’d be all over it.
Hell yeah, I would listen to this station, too.
Well now you’re legally required to blast “Torn from the Heavens” on your next Lemons attempt. Go forth, Warrior of Light!
What is that creepy abomination walking in front of the Versa in that Nissan graphic?
Don’t stop hit it.
It looks like the “stonks” guy.
Nissan, engage warp drive.
Car listening: XM because I got a lifetime subscription to each car for $8 a piece. Don’t know if that particular representative was in a good mood that day, on their way out the door, or what, but I’m not complaining. $16 a month isn’t bad. I also have Spotify and CarPlay if XM isn’t my mood that day.
Automatic braking: We used to have a 2019 Toyota Highlander with it and every time it went off and tried to “save” us from an accident, an accident wasn’t anywhere close to likely nor was the system even necessary to be activated. It was a nuisance more than anything. Our current 2016 Mazda CX-5 (we downgraded cars to save money and re-budget) has it as well but it only works in stop-and-go traffic and not at highway speeds.
Nope. No. NWIH.
Too much to go wrong with the technology, and you’d see way more crashes with following cars not equipped with automatic brake tech slamming into the car with brake tech.
On this idea, The Government and Automakers can take an aerial intercourse…
But then the old car without the brake tech is off the road… Gotta thing bigger here!
I worry that automatic braking might kill off manuals. I dont car shop often but my current car a GR86 manual does not offer automatic braking but it does if you opt for the auto. Anyway I have to wonder how many manuals get automatic braking?
All manufactures should need to do is come up for a way to clutch in for this but I have my doubts about them actually doing it.
My GTI has the emergency braking with a MT. It’ll simply stall, but then again, it’s an emergency brake..
NOPE. NO. NUH-UH.
This has absolutely fucking nothing to do with people slanderously accusing me of being a ‘Luddite’ or similar. I know more about software development than you.
Exactly how many applications or operating systems contain exactly zero bugs, and can handle any possible fault gracefully (by which I mean: not just blowing up the rocket.)
Ex-fucking-xactly. Toyota was quick to falsely blame ‘incompetent operator’ when their DBW system exhibited unintended acceleration not only to avoid liability, but because they had no fucking clue what the system was even doing. Experts who were given access to their code took one look at it and basically noped out of the undecipherable, undebuggable spaghetti mess.
This is ‘technology’ that already has and will only further increase accidents and fatalities through defect and misbehavior along with encouraging complacency. It will not reduce them.
When you can get a car with exactly ZERO bugs in the entire codebase, maybe then we can talk. And considering the state of basically everything, that won’t be any time in your lifetime or mine. Go ahead. Tell me the very first fucking thing people with ‘self-driving’ systems do is not try to browse their phone while driving or similar. How many ‘distance-keeping cruise control’ drivers have you seen playing CandyCrush on the freeway? Yeah.
Know how Europe reduced vehicle vs pedestrian deaths? They mandated additional mechanical safety measures including bumpers that better handle ‘soft object’ impacts, ‘active bonnets’ (exterior airbag systems and ‘exploding hinge’ hoods,) banning certain design aspects of cars that could cause severe injury to pedestrians, and by addressing road infrastructure including a lack of pedestrian separation (think bollard-protected bike lanes as an example of separation.)
Ah. Right. Actually fixing problems isn’t allowed. I keep forgetting that.
Proving for the umpteen millionth time that Wall Street is nothing more than a bunch of irrational idiots with more money than sense. “It’s a land grab!” Yes, morons. Because once we hit a certain point with gas stations, we just stopped building any more. That’s exactly it.
OH WAIT.
No, the problem is fundamental and proves just how stupid they are. These are the idiots that worship at the altar of supply-side economics. Well let me ask you folks something real damn basic: what happens when there isn’t enough gas being refined? That’s right, gas prices go up, which gets passed onto you, the consumer. It does not get passed on in the form of profits for gas station owners; they’re often losing money on every gallon sold thanks to credit card processing fees.
Well hey, guess what? There already isn’t enough electric capacity in the grid. There is not a surplus, there is a deficit. There also much more critically isn’t enough delivery capacity in the grid, and you can’t just load a couple hundred gigawatt hours onto a truck. And unlike gasoline, the average consumer can look at their bill and tell you how much they’re paying per kilowatt-hour.
Me, I’m paying $0.05439 per kilowatt hour.
Now granted, most people are bloody stupid, but considering your average 350kW DC fast charging station costs $175,000 excluding infrastructure, real estate, and maintenance, and they have to pay industrial rates that can vary from $0.06 to $0.25 per kilowatt hour?
Let’s say I charge people the equivalent of $0.005 a month for access, I negotiated a fixed rate of $0.09/kWh, I built two stalls at $175k/ea, they had 3 phase service already, and I negotiated a 10 year lease in a shopping center as a 2% gross revenue share. This means I need to make a minimum of $18,025 per stall per year in revenue just to break even, excluding all maintenance costs. Factoring in maintenance and needing to replace the chargers every 5 years, now it’s actually $77,000 in revenue per year.
I have to sell that electricity at something competing with home electricity rates, so that basically caps me at charging $0.10-0.11/kWh. Meaning I need to sell over 770MWh per year in the first 5 years just to break even. And I absolutely must have at least $250k in free cash at the 5 year point, or I’m bust because of obsolete equipment. Which is why everyone is scrambling for government handouts, all the time.
You know why gas stations work economically? Because they also sell other things. You ever seen a charging station that sells other things? Exactly. The ones at places like Target, restaurants, and so on? They might get the kWh rate subsidized by the business at cost, but they’re not getting any of the 30% margins on reheated food service burgers. Gas stations live or die by the non-gasoline business.
Which everyone has known. For decades.
And now as the electricity transmission deficit gets even more pronounced, guess what? Those charging stations are going to get squeezed harder. Some of them are stupid enough to sell fixed-price contracts where you pay $0.12/kWh up to some number of kWh. Guess what happens when they’re having to pay $0.20/kWh? The lack of human attendants also results in extremely high vandalism and out of service rates. Guess what doesn’t make money?
The ‘galaxy-brain landgrab’ was never anything but pure fucking stupidity. Basic economics told anyone with enough intelligence to do even the most basic of market research that there is no way to profit or long-term survival with an EV charging station in a shopping center parking lot, unless you can get the shopping center to pay you a whole lot more than it costs, and they’re not going to do that. Because having two charging stalls doesn’t and never will bring in anywhere near that much business or profit.
I usually sum things up as “I don’t want Version 1.x of anything”.
Good point about Euro vs US pedestrian safety. Actually fixing things would mean The Gummint Taking Away Your ™ massively oversize pickups/SUVs. And they’ve already conspiracy-theoried walkable cities.
I’m far from confident about where we actually are on this, but remember that AEB only needs to be better than humans, not completely bug free.
The daily commute is a cell dead zone, and FM stations fade in and out, so I switch a lot, even to AM for sports and weather. Favorite station is KPIG, and whatever station is carrying the Bob & Tom in the morning. Long drives it’s bluetooth for Pandora.
I live on the other coast and agree with you.
AM almost never. FM occasionally (NPR news, classical, and sometimes music from one of the other nonprofit stations). Tried a free trial of Sirius and it was like cable TV, 150 channels but absolutely nothing I wanted, certainly nothing I’d pay for. Trips I’d want AM available, as there may not be many other choices, but for music I’d either play from my phone, or play off of a USB stick. But almost all of my driving is in my metro area.
My phone connects via Android Auto. It has a 512GB SD card that holds my music collection. That’s how I get my car’s stereo to make noises.
I bought it on December 5, 2022 and have not used the AM or FM radio, nor the satellite radio even during the free trial. I haven’t even set up the presets, although I shoudl since it’s a little jarring when the phone disconnects an the radio goes to 530AM.
“Do you still listen to AM radio?”
Yes… great for news, sports and comedy stations.
“Hell, do you still listen to FM radio?”
Yes… for music and CBC radio.
“Both are functions automakers would love to kick to the curb as they seek to cut costs from new EVs any way they can”
Carmakers can go fuck themselves if they want to cut costs in this area. Having AM/FM functionality costs them a few pennies per vehicle at most.
They can save a lot more by deleting AWD, heated seats, leather seats and a bunch of other crap.
Plus, EV motors tend to create a slight interference with AM radio signals.
Ha, I read that Atlantic article, but I didn’t even notice who wrote it. Or at least I started it, then I was like, psh, I know this stuff, I read The Autopian every day.
Then you know before everyone else does!