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.
I feel like it would be more effective to mandate better viewing angles. Like, all vehicles have to allow someone of average height to see a 4′ tall object within x’. It would help with navigation in general honestly.
More effective and no phantom braking issues.
Or that A pillars can’t be wide enough to completely obscure a pedestrian standing within 20 yards of the car? The closest I have come to hitting a pedestrian in the last 20 years, on multiple occasions, has been someone crossing the street in the blind spot behind my A pillar. It’s not that I didn’t look, it’s that I absolutely could not see them. You know, because of safety and whatnot.
The visibility problem in both cases—thick A-pillars to withstand rollovers in unnecessarily high and heavy vehicles more prone to rolling over and the tall height of hoods allowing a shorter adult to disappear unless they’re more than 3 meters away has the same solution, but nobody wants to buy sensible vehicles, they want The Man(TM) to save them from themselves and the consequences of stupid decisions. Of course, it probably doesn’t matter much that so many of these idiots can’t see out of their vehicles when they aren’t looking in the first place.
Definitely. And I want to know 1) how much will it add to the purchase price of a car, and 2) what will it cost over the lifetime of said car? Since the average lifetime today is 12 years, let’s figure 150% of that, or 18 years, for something not living in the rust belt. There will probably be a few front-end impacts in that period. If it’s a safety item, will manufacturers be required to keep replacement parts available?
I don’t ever want to hit anyone with anything, especially not a car. However phantom braking is real for vehicles with AEB and it can be triggered by birds flying by and such.
I don’t trust it.
Me neither. I came with an inches of being flattened by a semi in my Volkswagen Tiguan decided it saw a poltergeist or something in front of me and stood on the brakes at 65 mph on a clear flat stretch of 4 lane road with absolutely nothing around. The technology simply isn’t mature enough yet.
Me neither neither.
93.9 FM in Metro Detroit, actually its a Canadian station from Windsor but they have good music and gossip.
RIP The River
How do you argue that AM is necessary for emergency alerts when you have to be turned to AM in the first place? WEA messages to your phone then have FM stations for redundancy.
Baroness’ Subaru gets emergency alerts directly on the touchscreen. It’s nice but you have to manually clear it, also it resends the alert every time you ping off a different cell tower.
Because when the shit hits the fan and the cell networks are down, people will try the radio.
I either listen to my cds or use the aux cord. Both the AM and FM are broken on my car, slightly common issue on fca vehicles from the late 2000s to mid 2010s, at least according to forums. The connection for radio audio isn’t soldered right so all you can do is scan through stations and imagine you’re hearing something. Surprisingly it’ll pick up satellite radio though.
I would say that instead of mandating more and more tech to do the job of safe guarding our driving, how about we update our likely decades out of date driver training? Anyone got a link for me to comment that directly to the NHTSA?
Also, given how slowly and shoddily out EV progress has been, I want to say I like where Toyota’d mind is at with Hydrogen. I know it’s a whole new set of problems, but supply of hydrogen, range, and fueling time wouldn’t be among them. Eventually we’ll settle on something that sticks.
And actual repercussions for distracted driving.
Gosh, the roads would be so much more manageable if Texas’ driver standards weren’t just “can you fog a mirror? ‘k!!!”
We don’t get “safety” equipment on cars because it saves lives, we get it because insurance companies believe it will save them money. All of these measures are risk mitigation tactics. Cars are not safer now, they just may be less risky, but even that conclusion is rife with conflicting data. As cars move closer and closer to appliance status, people become less conscientious about operating them and less knowledgeable about them. This contempt is what leads to rising traffic fatalities and serious injuries despite “safer” cars.
There are no safe cars, because safe is an absolute condition meaning without risk. Every car is a risk magnet the instant it’s started and those risks just multiply with motion, speed and duration of travel.
By treating safety as a thing that can be commodified and installed in automobiles, we’re creating a world of drivers with little or no respect for the dangers of operating multi-ton moving objects fueled (mostly) by explosive means. The one thing we absolutely should be adapting for safety is drivers, but we’re doing the race exact opposite by turning vehicles into surrogate entertainment centers, snack bars, and playrooms.
Meanwhile my car insurance increases are getting absurd at every policy renewal because all these systems are harder to re-align after an accident.
… it makes automakers more profits. (also, and perhaps more likely)
“We don’t get “safety” equipment on cars because it saves lives, we get it because insurance companies believe it will save them money.”
This is an absurd statement. For this to be true, there would have to be no correlation between insurance losses due to collisions and deaths/injuries due to collisions. Even if the primary objective is to reduce insurance payouts, if you reduce payouts by reducing collisions, deaths, and injuries, doesn’t that improve safety??
“Cars are not safer now, they just may be less risky”
When you say cars aren’t safer now, what are you comparing them to? Old cars (i.e. those without airbags, antilock brakes, stability control, etc.) obviously are not as safe as modern vehicles. I would agree that a lot of very new safety features (lane keeping assist, collision warnings, etc.) don’t make a car substantially safer, though. I also would agree that the focus on entertainment over driving is problematic from a safety perspective.
The F-350 and Silverado 3500 are class-3 medium duty trucks, and therefore exempt from the proposed NHTSA rule.
I see so many class-3 trucks treated like passenger vehicles, and they all have that pedestrian-pulverizer flat grille. I feel like this is the ONE category of vehicle you shouldn’t exempt from this rule.
Base models of each already have them standard. Ford/GM aren’t suddenly going to remove them now that they aren’t legally forced to have them.
Pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed in tandem with the market’s shift to giant trucks and SUVs with head-height grilles and cripplingly poor forward visibility due to A-pillars thicker than oak trees.
I guess there’s just no way to solve this problem. We certainly couldn’t penalize automakers’ safety ratings based on hood height and forward visibility parameters. And it would definitely be impossible to price the negative externalities of a vehicle’s mechanical design being more likely to kill a pedestrian.
All we need to do is rewrite CAFE from scratch. How hard could that be?
Auto-braking can be nice for motorcyclists. Waiting at a crosswalk once, I heard the tires chirp as a driver tried to pull up a little too close behind me. No broken back that day!
Radio mostly SXM, there’s a half dozen stations I skip around between and as others have mentioned it can get repetitive, then I have my songs on USB I flip over to, occasionally stll FM as we have a good amount of them, not sure last time I listened to AM.
For the safety thing, the real solution is to enforce stricter vulnerable road user testing so things like the Sierra 2500 and it’s 8′ tall wall of chrome bumpered magnificence would get a 0 star safety rating, but instead sure let’s add more tech that doesn’t always work right and for it to work better will cost a heck of a lot more.
For the EV names, yes they’ve been terrible, it’s almost like they don’t want people to buy them… 😉 Even Chevrolet had the Volt, and then the Bolt, and the Bolt was the all electric one? Here’s a list of good names in no particular order, Ampera, Fusion, Electra, Lightning, Thunderbolt, Volt, Aurora, Stealth, Charger, Barracuda, Typhoon, Syclone, Hurricane, Neon….
When I’m in my ’68 Oldsmobile, it’s nothing but AM through the dashboard speaker. I can hear the news channel clearly when I’m not on the highway and that’s about it.
If AM wins the fight to stay in cars, they really need to put some work into simulating not being able to hear it on the highway and getting a high-pitched whine when you plug your cell phone into the cigarette lighter.
Yeah, I’m mostly SiriusXM or podcasts at this point. I have an Echo Auto device in my cars (even the MGB) that don’t have Android Auto, so I can just tell Alexa what SiriusXM station to play. We keep an active SiriusXM subscription in my wife’s car, and then I use their streaming app. I like the streaming app channels better anyway because they just play music without the DJ’s, and you can skip up to 6 songs an hour. I just contact them once a year to lower my rate back down to $60 for the year.
BMW seems to be the most consistent with the electric naming. If it has an “e” after the number, it’s a PHEV. If it starts with an “i” it’s a full electric vehicle (maybe with a range extender in the case of the i3).
The Volt/Bolt names were decent, but too similar to each other. Chevy’s current strategy of just tacking an “EV” on the end of the name seems pretty straightforward, but having a Bolt EV and Bolt EUV was a little confusing.
Car companies are totally missing out. They need to name electric cars after electric-themed animals (real and fictional) I don’t care who makes it but the first EV named “Pikachu” will have my money in a heartbeat.
I will buy an Electric Eel Camino
My guess is Nintendo because Nintendo will sue whoever uses their IP into the stone age.
Stingray would be a cool name.
In town, I listen to FM. Out of town, I use Spotify.
Every car I’ve driven with automatic braking has experienced some phantom braking issues. It doesn’t matter if it’s radar or vision based. The only positive I see to it being mandated is that OEMs will get enough data (and angry customers with some possible accidents) to work the remaining kinks out of the software.
Yeah, I wonder if anyone really gets it right, because I’ve never experienced an auto braking system that was anything other than annoying, same with lane keeping
The forward collision alert and lane departure in my 2014 Volt was so horrible that I turned it off. If it was automatic braking, it probably would have caused accidents a few times. I haven’t experienced any false engagement in my newer vehicles that have emergency braking and forward collision alert (2021 RAM and 2023 Acadia) though, so I feel it’s gotten much better. I even leave the lane departure on, unless I’m towing a trailer.
It looks like the auto-braking requirement covers vehicles up to 10,000 lbs GVWR. I hope that doesn’t mean we start seeing even larger pickups to dodge the regulation.
I pretty exclusive listen to SiriusXM in our cars, as well as most of the day while I’m working at my desk (at home). I had a few years of hour+ driving commutes in areas with few/terrible local radio stations, a bit before smartphones and streaming were common and data was cheap. I had an iPod and big music library, but even that gets old eventually, and figuring out what to listen to next can be distracting.
SiriusXM was better before the merger, or at least XM was. Felt much more designed overall for all-day listening with a lot more variety of songs played, at least on the couple of music stations I listened to (XMU, Fred). There were some interesting freeform stations too. It really felt like they found the best DJs and program directors from around the country and let them do their thing, like having a great local radio station for every genre. Post-merger and even still, playlists are fairly repetitive and hits-oriented for the genre – unless it’s a special curated show like Blog Radio on SiriusXMU.
Most new pickups are already available with this tech standard on the premium models, and as a relatively affordable option bundled with cruise control, bling spot awareness etc on even the cheapest work trucks.
This shouldn’t really change anything other than raising the base prices another thousand or so. Other than supply chain issues with chips, the hardware for the tech is dirt cheap.
99.99% of the time Apple Carplay. I only go to AM for breaking news
I listen to spotify in the Camaro, and use my iPod Nano in the Beige Unicorn. I will listen to 40’s Junction or Liquid Metal if satellite is free and available.
Another one for ’40s Junction – also Radio Classics on long trips – if I want to keep awake and alert for hours, something with a plot that needs to be followed helps, vs music that can just be tuned out as background noise
Yep – 40s Junction Junkie here as well with the 70s channel a close second. I haven’t listened to AM radio since Art Bell went off the air/was abducted by aliens.
Abducted from the Kingdom of Nye?
Most of my vehicles don’t have radios and it’s been years since I’ve used the radios in the other ones. I prefer to listen to the ambient sounds of my surroundings with a particular ear for any early warnings that something may soon go wrong, usually with the vehicle itself.
Say you own a Volkswagen without saying you own a Volkswagen.
(kidding)
About 25 years ago I owned a ’74 and a ’77 Bug but those actually had radios. I don’t think the one in the ’77 worked, though.
Hey, now—I throw a Bluetooth speaker in the 411 to drown out the farts.
my problem with auto braking in my 2018 VW SUV is if I am braking already it still overrides what I am doing and makes it feel like a panic brake with the screen going to a red icon and the car *feeling* like it’s slamming on the brakes
it feels LESS in control and makes me feel like I am more likely to react in the wrong way as a result – it does not understand that I am paying attention or reacting properly or that the car it is auto braking for is 95% out of the way turning right. How could a system that is mandated learn to tell the difference with something unseen (a pedestrian at night for example) vs. overriding a drives actions making something more dangerous?
/puts on flamesuit
The cheaper (at least on the consumer-end) and simpler solution to drastically reducing traffic fatalities is simple. Require cellphone service carriers to have all their phones’ OSs to limit all functions to hands-free while the driver’s vehicle is in motion. It might even be possible to have those functions tied to the vehicle’s run state. That would allow them to implement this without requiring location permissions to be active.
I’m sure they’d lobby hard against it, about the costs and feasibility, or that it would be invasive, somehow for the cellphone user. But I think they have enough money to figure it out and change with the times.
How could that be done without precise enough location data to tell if the phone is in the driver’s hand vs a passenger?
I’m no software engineer but if I had to guess, the most reliable way to do that would be via the driver’s phone paired with the vehicles infotainment and there being some communication between the ECU so all devices know which gear or run state the vehicle is in.
I’m no expert either, but it seems like that could be defeated by simply not pairing the driver’s phone to the car.
Touché. Well come on now, figure it out with me. Let’s pretend to solve the world’s problems here! 😉
(although, to be fair, most people would rather cut off a finger than not pair their phone to the car…)
BZ4X sounds like one of those weird, cathinone-substitute party drugs you can buy on the internet.
AM is handy (at least in Washington State) as they use low-power signals it for WSDOT traffic warnings / notices on interstates.
If I’m within broadcast range of KEXP, I’ll listen to FM, otherwise it’s my own music – that way I can choose what I want to listen to.
Regarding auto-braking, I don’t necessarily have a problem with it, I’m just concerned that at some point, somebody will mandate that vehicles without auto-braking shouldn’t be allowed on the roads.
Starred for KEXP. A trip through Washington usually goes KAOS, KUPS, KGRG, K
CMUEXP, then five minutes of static while I try to guess if I’m out of range or they’re playing something particularly crunchy.Hell yeah, KGRG was a staple of my drive to school. Sometimes I’ll even use its app to listen from down here. Good stuff.
KEXP was great 20 years ago. Not so much now. I think it’s more a case of I changed than they did though.
Haven’t listened in a while let’s see?
Yup still stuck on emo.
Call me callous or paranoid if you must, but when regulations start mandating my car’s behavior be engineered to consider the safety of anyone who isn’t inside it, the slippery slope to the trolley problem begins.
If in the future, some smart car can save a busload of children by driving me off a cliff, it won’t console me a bit to know that the greater good was accomplished.
The Greater Good.
https://media.tenor.com/wiDtdCLJc4oAAAAC/shut-it.gif
Are you saying given the split second to make that decision you wouldn’t already drive yourself off a cliff to save a busload of children?
I think I speak for most when I say I have no idea how I’d react.
I would rather not have the decision in the hands of a computer’s interpretation of the situation though.
A piece of equipment that I bought and paid for should have my own safety as priority #1, at least that is my opinion.
You mean, beyond regulations on emissions, noise, headlights and nose shape?
None of those things take actual control of the vehicle away from me the way this does.
I have no problem with engineering a vehicle to be safe to others, as long as it isn’t at my expense. A vehicle that can take control away from me in the service of protecting others (as opposed to myself) is the first step in a dangerous direction.
Vehicles are currently engineered to be safe to others at your expense. Every piece of emissions control equipment in your car is 99% beneficial to others and 100% paid for by you. Hell, the extra few inches of dead space above your engine is for pedestrian impact safety but adversely affects forward visibility.
I still agree with your main point about concerns regulating the behavior of your car. It’s a slippery slope, just a less steep one than I think you’re making it out to be.
That’s fair, I guess paying for something is an easier swallow for me than giving up control.
Perhaps that’s an indictment of my personality.
I used to listen Sirius XM but I couldn’t take Madison anymore.
FM for me now.