The United States introduced the idea of a “Five Star” crash rating in 1979 after Americans started getting sick of having their giant cars crushed like the first can of Lone Star on Saturday morning. The idea wasn’t to ban cars from being sold, it was to browbeat automakers into doing a better job of protecting passengers by placing a score on the window of every new car for sale.
These tests are getting a big upgrade and, while the actual crash-testing portion isn’t changing, automakers will now be required to add more safety systems in order to make the window sticker really shine. It’s a Morning Dump all about safety today and, while we’re focused on the near term, the Trump Administration is focused on safety in the longer term via autonomous cars. You know what’s maybe safer? A car driven by a human, but that human has a gun; there is a new ride-share service offering exactly that.
The Trump Administration hasn’t even begun and already there’s a debate over whether or not ending the EV tax credits is a good idea and it sounds like a lot of people want to keep them. Perhaps the safest bet of all is that no one will ever agree on anything.
Everyone Wants Five Stars
If you’ve ever seen a car commercial, listened to a radio spot for a car, or just been alive in the last 40 years then the idea of a car having a “five-star crash-test rating” isn’t going to surprise you. It’s likely the automaker is referring to the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), a crash-test standard going back to the 1970s.
It’s a soft power thing and now, in spite of complaints from some circles, NHTSA is updating its testing for 2026 model year cars to include more crash avoidance features. Here’s what NHTSA says is changing:
- The addition of four advanced driver assistance technologies that will enhance crash-avoidance safety: pedestrian automatic emergency braking, lane keeping assist, blind spot warning and blind spot intervention.
- Updated and strengthened testing procedures and performance criteria for advanced driver assistance technologies that are already included in NCAP, such as automatic emergency braking.
- The addition of a crashworthiness pedestrian protection program to evaluate the ability of a vehicle’s front end to mitigate pedestrian injuries and fatalities in vehicle-to-pedestrian impacts.
- Midterm and long-term roadmaps to accommodate future updates amid ongoing research and technological advancements in vehicle safety, including crash avoidance and crashworthiness improvements to protect bicyclists and motorcyclists and an updated rating system.
This joins adding automotive emergency braking as a priority on the list of ways the federal government is trying to make cars safer. How is this actually going to work?
The agency said that the five-star crash test ratings, which most vehicles now get, would not change under the new system. But consumers would also see green check marks if vehicles they’re shopping for have the safety features and can be assured that they meet standards set by the government, Buttigieg said.
Early on, the features will get a pass or fail grade, but later will get scores so buyers can compare vehicles, he said.
I guess you get a “pass” if you have the feature and a “fail” if you don’t?
Trump Administration Wants To Make Robocars Great Again
While incoming President Trump’s team wants to gut the EV tax credit (more on that later), which is maybe long-term good for Tesla, it also wants to make it easier to build driverless cars, which… is also good for Tesla. [Ed Note: And if done right, for everyone else on the road. That’s a big if, though. -DT].
Here’s Bloomberg explaining what might happen:
Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have told advisers they plan to make a federal framework for self-driving vehicles one of the Transportation Department’s priorities, according to people familiar with the matter.
If new rules enable wider deployment of cars without human controls, it will directly benefit Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc. chief executive officer and Trump mega-donor who’s become a powerful fixture in the president-elect’s inner circle. He’s bet the future of the EV maker on self-driving technology and artificial intelligence.
Tesla’s stock rose more than 7% shortly after the market open Monday, extending their 28% advance since election day. Shares of Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc., which could face competition from Musk’s long-planned robotaxi network, each fell more than 6% in intraday trading.
I have some mixed feelings about this.
Regulations and hurdles in the way of driverless cars are quite onerous, with GM trying and failing to get approval for two years. A car without a steering wheel or controls is considered SAE Level 5 autonomous driving and it’s not clear that anyone is great at it yet, but it’s better than the confusing garbage that is Level 3 partial autonomous driving. Given how distracted everyone is, imperfect technology might be better than extremely imperfect drivers right now.
Plus, there are already cars driving around without drivers, so who cares if it has a steering wheel?
The other side of me worries that upscaling these cars from the limited miles they have now into something broader is going to quickly and terrifyingly help us discover all the edge cases. I also don’t fully trust that Tesla’s camera-based system is going to work.
While the next administration can take a lot of steps to make autonomous cars easier to deploy, it’ll likely take an act of Congress to make them truly mainstream. It’s also here that I should mention that President-elect Trump has also selected former Rep. Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation. This is one of President Trump’s more mainstream picks and he also has experience, having appeared on MTV’s Road Rules: All Stars. This is not a joke.
It’s Like Uber, But With Armed Drivers
There’s apparently a viral rideshare service, called BlackWolf, that will allow you to get a driver who has been in law enforcement and at the minimum has an active security license.
According to KVUE, this service will soon be coming to Texas and allow you to specify a driver that’s armed:
BlackWolf started in Atlanta in 2023 and quickly grew a following on social media, leading to its rapid expansion. Now the rideshare service operates in 11 cities across three states, with hopes of coming to Texas in early 2025.
Those interested in driving for BlackWolf can apply under the “drive” section of BlackWolf’s website. Drivers will then undergo a thorough screening to make sure they qualify.
BlackWolf also has a list of eligible vehicles and standards for their “BlackWolf Premium” and “BlackWolf Comfort” tiers.
Growing up in Texas I remember that there was also a service where you could get a ride with an armed driver… it was called getting in literally any car.
Utilities Want To Keep The EV Tax Credit
It seems like there are a lot of groups lining up to save the $7,500 EV tax credit, which is high on the list of things that President Trump wants to end when he’s in office. If you’ve kept up with the saga of David’s $1,000 Nissan Leaf it won’t surprise to you to learn that power utilities are companies hoping to maintain the credit.
After years of stagnant growth, EVs have the potential to increase demand.
The U.S. utility industry wants the incoming Trump administration and Republican-led Congress to preserve clean energy and EV tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, Pedro Pizarro, the CEO of utility Edison International said on Saturday.
The 2022 IRA contains hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for clean energy and is billed as outgoing President Joe Biden’s signature law to combat climate change. President-elect Donald Trump, a climate skeptic, has vowed to rescind it, something that would require support of Congress.
Pizarro, who until recently chaired the board of industry trade group Edison Electric Institute, said the lobby group’s members have been making the case with the Trump transition team and Republican members of Congress that preserving the IRA is good for businesses and consumers alike.
Utilities have money to spend so it’ll be interesting to see how successful they are in trying to pick up the 2-3 Republican members of the U.S. House they’ll need to stall any changes.
What I’m Listening To This Morning
Every week, at least once a week, I have to listen to “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin, and now so do you.
The Big Question
Should we just skip straight to Level 5 autonomous cars?
My takeaway from the recent Morning Dumps: Stellantis is doing great.
Should we skip straight to free unicorns and rainbows for everyone?
Should NASA have skipped the moon and gone straight for Jupiter?
We currently got, at best, level 4 in known, somewhat controlled environments. It’s still unclear if general level 5 is feasible at all.
Trying first for the hardest problem is how we’ve thrown tens of billions of dollars into something that kinda sorta works in some places with a lot of backend humans monitoring things. Incrementally solving problems apparently hasn’t occurred to anyone in the industry. Not when you can get billions thrown in your direction by promising the barely plausible.
The clear answer is yes. I want to skip straight to free unicorns. Then again, the cheapest thing about any horse is the price you pay to buy it…
It’d be cool if rather than make the cars safer for pedestrians, they’d get to the root cause and make pedestrian infrastructure better. Pedestrians and cars should not be in such close proximity all the time.
The answer to your big question: NO.
It’s an iterative process, and impossible to bypass any given step. The development process will be nearly identical to that of making things round. We never started with a round thing. We iterated (aka made) millions of round things from non-round things. Then, we used the previously made round things to make newer, more-round things. This process continues today, as we have not yet made an object that is “perfectly” round.
Self driving will go through the same process. Also, Level 5 will NEVER happen until all vehicles on the road are communicating with one another. There is not enough time for any computer to react as we start to close the gap between cars. As such, we will need the vehicles ahead of us to warn us to what is happening to them in order to be safe. Also also, a vision based system will never achieve this, as stated in comments below.
I’m totally disappointed that there isn’t a single complaint about how all this proposed new tech is just more junk to break in the future. (Third owner)
“To the funny farm
Where life is beautiful all the time
And I´ll be happy to see
Those nice young men
In their clean white coats”
Imagine how much less we’d need cars that don’t hit pedestrians if half of America wasn’t in trucks with blind spots the size of a small family… thanks CAFE
How do you become one of trumps buddies without having billions to spend on helping him get elected?
Being open to getting grabbed by the %&$$Y is a great start.
Host a show on Fox News?
“Should we just skip straight to Level 5 autonomous cars?”
Honestly, yes. Level 3 is pretty much universally agreed to be a mess that manages to be less safe then level 2 or 1. Nobody really makes a level 4 car, but it seems to suffer from the same problems as a level 3 car- if you require human intervention in emergency situations, and that human is going to understandably distracted doing whatever else they were doing because Car Drives Itself, then you are guaranteed to have bad results. I know you are not supposed to have to intervene in a Level 4, but the whole premise is that it won’t operate under certain conditions- what happens if those conditions suddenly arise when you are doing 60 on the freeway? Because of that, I’m not sure there is actually a meaningful distinction between 3 and 4. Also, this incidentally means the Tesla “vision-only” model is out. Side note- if you want to criticize Musk this is a great point to do it on- it is an obviously stupid engineering decision that has no future. One of the great things about automated cars is they can use senses beyond human limitations, to throw that away is ridiculous.
There needs to be a very clear distinction about who is under control and responsible for the car at all times. With Level 2, its the driver always. With Level 5 its the car always. Anything in between is a grey area that I think is actively dangerous.
So yes, let’s jump to level 5 and screw the intermediate period. It would probably be best to implement it in a limited access environment, like special lanes on the interstates first before allowing adoption on all roads.
My guess is the L5 will have to start on controlled access highways and/or the interstate system, and vehicles will need steering wheels for a long time.
You’ll drive to the entrance ramp and engage L5, and the car will take over and get you to the specified exit. At that point, you’ll have to take over again.
Freight will benefit the most, as OTR will largely become a thing of the past. I envision “ports” just outside cities and towns, where fully automated rigs will pick up trailers and haul them to the next “port”, and “harbor pilots” will manually move the trailers between the ports and where they need to be in town.
Controlled roadways are the only places I see L5 being realistic for at least the short to medium term.
Very much agreed. But fuck, I would pay a lot of money for a car that I didn’t have to drive while on the freeway.
It’s called a bus.
This is called a “freight train”.
Also, need to pressure pedestrians to become better pedestrians.
Look those drivers in the eye!! If you don’t get eye contact, assume they will hit you!
Until, of course, there are no eyes…
I was riding a motorcycle and I thought the lady who pulled out in front of me had made eye contact three times before she pulled out. Turns out I was invisible and she was looking past me. I was so so close to avoiding her, but not quite.
Tesla still has a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong ways to go. They’ve made things much better even this year but it’s still far from perfect. Source: I have a newer Tesla. It came with a month trial of FSD and I’m now in the middle of another complimentary trial. This time it got updated to the full AI for city and highway. Before it was AI for city only.
On the highway it’s driving just fine. In the suburban sprawl it needs assistance in parking lots, school zones and adapting to changing speed limits. TBH so do a lot of human drivers. But having a system that is supposed to be good enough for L4 or L5? I’ll believe it when I see it.
Level 5 is certainly a wild concept. Maybe it is possible? I dunno. The only way I see it working is if it’s like cars on a roller coaster that have defined gaps before launch and mandatory brake zones. This would require a complete and total overhaul of how roads are used and intended for use. It doesn’t seem feasible.
It’s one of those “believe it when I see it” kind of things. Until that time, I’m not going to concern myself about it one bit. There are way bigger fish to fry, and I’d rather not divert an iota of energy to it. It amounts to watching a Jacksonville Jaguars game to see if they tank for a #1 draft pick.
The easiest route to level 5 Autonomy is if we have dedicated lanes for autonomous cars, or some way to have their wheels kind of locked to the road, possibly using an overlapping lip configuration between like a solid wheel and the surface. Then if it’s all autonomous cars, or even vans in that lane, they could all drive super close, possibly even connected together. Instead of having to merge back with regular traffic it’d probably be better for them to have designated common areas to stop at where a lot of people can get in and out at the same time and oh dear I’ve just explained commuter rail….
Well, sir, there’s nothing on Earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car
monorailcommuter rail!And have to share a common space with strangers! X The Everything App told me strangers are actually danger. They do things like work service industry jobs and crime. In my future I will only interact with human beings over X The Everything App. Where I feel safe and secure interacting with other definitely humans.
GM had that figured out in the 90s. I remember seeing a fleet of Buicks flying down a specialized highway nose to tail at 60 MPH in Automobile Magazine when I was in high school. Pretty sure MotorWeek also had a segment on it.
Ignoring the rail part, which while true isn’t the part I want to talk about. It’s true that this would accelerate autonomy in some cases, but it would still not be Level 5. SAE J3016 defines Level 5 as fully autonomous under all conditions. The word All here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. A dedicated HOV/Express type lane for autonomous vehicles would only ever be in the order of an L3/4 system as it’s possible to have it be automated for large amounts of travel, but cannot account for every other driving condition such as local roads, neighborhoods, off-road etc.
Edit: The even greater irony of this is that Elon has literally made almost exactly this with the Vegas underground tunnel system running Teslas as a janky, hacked together monorail/train/subway replacement, and even in this hyper-idealized environment the cars are still babied by humans and the throughput of people is hilariously poor.
I’ve beat this drum before when it comes to autonomous vehicle programming, but the principle is the same here.
The job of my car should be to protect me, the person who bought it. Its safety ratings should reflect that, and that alone.
That isn’t to sound callous or uncaring, but it is to say that once the safety of others becomes a concern of my car, I can no longer trust that it will have my best interests at heart 100% of the time.
I don’t think the following scenarios are far-fetched:
-A new technological advance in design allows a car to be 50% safer for pedestrian impacts at the cost of 25% less safe for occupants. Is that a tradeoff worth making? From a purely rational, maximize the welfare of society POV, perhaps it is. That’s scant consolation to the person who bought the car.
-The “crash avoidance” feature of a new car is programmed to swerve into oncoming traffic rather than hit a bicyclist who cuts you off because the risk of death is higher for the cyclist than the passengers in either vehicle. Again, perhaps correct, but not exactly great for the person whose car is now wrecked.
I mean, the crash safety rating of the occupants is still there. You’ll now have a full report card to pick from.
Spoiler alert: Full size trucks and SUVs are going to have godawful ratings in these departments.
Good news though, you’re free to buy them anyways! As stated in the article, it’s not a law, it’s just a way to shame auto makers in to making better products.
I think we may differ on what a “better product” entails, as well as how slippery the slope toward my examples may be.
We made cars more dangerous for pedestrians when we grew them in size and weight in the name of occupant safety. It’s now time to achieve balance.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. That privilege should come with an effort to protect the environment in which these vehicles operate.
If anything, you have more right to drive an old vehicle that’s dangerous to the operator, but does less damage to the general public in both weight and size.
If shared responsibility for the general public is too big of a burden, public transportation operators can relieve you of that burden. They have big shoulders.
I’m often a pedestrian, runner, and cyclist, but I agree with you.
Getting hit by a vehicle sucks, period, no matter how “pedestrian friendly it is”, unless they start making cars out of nerf.
A big thing is situation awareness and watching for cars. I see so many people riding or walking and paying near zero attention to their surroundings, it’s a wonder not more people are killed.
OTOH, drivers are often distracted or in a hurry too. Recently I was walking my dog and was waiting at a crosswalk to cross. Cars in both directions stopped, but the knucklehead behind the car stopped on my side of the street started to pass the stopped car ON THE RIGHT, then slammed on the brakes when they saw us. I had anticipated that, so I hadn’t moved off the curb until they stopped, at which point I gave them my best “WTF is wrong with you?” look.
Basically, everyone on the road needs to pay more attention.
Yeah everyone seems to think that the increase in pedestrian deaths correlates with the rise of SUVs and heavier vehicles, which may be partially true, but anecdotally it seems the rise of phones (for both drivers and pedestrians) would be the bigger issue by far.
Oh distraction behind the wheel is totally the main driver behind increased accidents. However, size and weight are increasing the severity of those accidents to infrastructure and/or bystanders/pedestrians.
Your scenarios are not far fetched at all. It has already occurred, where the car chose to cause an accident with another car, rather than hit the pedestrian.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-veers-to-avoid-pedestrian-who-fell-right-in-front-of-it-crashes-into-oncoming-car-241294.html
But what you describe is very much what the protagonist of the movie I Robot deals with. He hates robots because they only make the practical “welfare of society” decision, and so he is rescued, no the child. And its a very real concern.
What do you mean “skip straight to Level 5”? Just like … magically have that exist?
Documenting the arrangement of the deck chairs on Titanic.
Instead of putting band-aids to vehicles that makes them more expensive, make windows bigger, its amazing how big cars are now and their windows shrinking. When the rear camera of my Polestar refuse to work I cant see behind, I had to turn the radio off and put my windows down hoping to listen someone. There is a reason why the Blazer EV has a rear camera option along the regular rear mirror, you cant see behind with the regular mirror.
I love driving my old cars because I don’t need all the electronics to drive them properly.
First noticed this when I bought my ’00 300M. The trunk lid was so so damn high I couldn’t see anything behind me. This was before backup cameras and I got really good at guessing. Contrast with my ’94 SHO which had much better sightlines all around, I really knew where all the corners were.
Had a 1500 Silverado as a rental a few months ago, terrible visibility. And I once drove a slew of GMT400 and OBS Fords at various industrial facilities I worked at.
Mustang rental I had recently felt like a dark bunker/cave. The Fox bodies were light and airy. The Camaro is even worse.
Raised belt lines and thicker pillars were a response to crash safety. Unless you want a giraffe vs. trees type of evolution in the height of cars, the greenhouse had to shrink.
So increasing the safety of the occupants lead to decreasing the safety of pedestrians. So in theory, we could make greenhouses bigger and reduce crash safety, which is potentially as effective in reducing pedestrian danger as advancing technology. Which ties back to V10mous point about reducing the occupant safety to increase pedestrian safety and what is the proper weight given to each side of that.
Raised belt lines and thicker pillars are the easy way to do it, but some manufacturers have proven you can achieve a large greenhouse with better sightlines without compromising safety.
My girlfriend’s 2023 Subaru Forester for example, has great visibility compared to the 2023 Rav4 I drive for work. The Rav feels nearly claustrophobic.
There’s also a few studies out there where consumers prefer higher beltlines and smaller greenhouses because it feels safe to them but I haven’t looked too deep into them yet.
Geometry plays a big part as well. I feel like a lot of sight lines were lost to aesthetics.
I’m glad that my car will be safer when a largely unregulated robotaxi plows into me.
Skip straight to L5? If we actually could, objectively, the answer is yes. We can’t, and we won’t for at minimum decades. Furthermore, Vision only will n e v e r exist in any level 5 capacity. Level 5 is driving with impunity, always, under every condition. Every. think about the edge cases, fog, dense snow, hurricane type winds/weather. These are cases vision can objectively never handle. Vision only autonomy will only ever be, at its absolute best, Level 4.
If you cannot operate a vehicle safely in these extreme conditions, neither can the car. It can only see what you see, usually a bit worse. Vision is handicapped from the start because there is no objective data, only interpretation. Radar/Lidar/Sonar all gather actual distance and size data that is objective and not open to interpretation. If you cannot understand why this is an issue like Musk, then I don’t know what to tell you.
For that exact reason, I’m incredibly skeptical of what regulations will go in to place to govern autonomy. They are absolutely needed as the guidance is flimsy and vague at best, however Elon being the architect of any new regulations will certainly be a disaster as he genuinely has no grasp on the subject matter. Elon does not have a degree in engineering, has no formal background in programming, data analysis, or algorithm development. He is not, and should not be treated as as an expert to guide autonomous vehicle policy.
Regulations to guide autonomous vehicle policy? Just let the market decide! Let all the “autonmous” cars free to do their thing. If people don’t like it, they can vote with their feet by never leaving their homes!
” We can’t, and we won’t for at minimum decades.”
Try again – More like a few months from now.
Mrs Elmo is here with his D.O.G.E. friends to
eliminate the NHTSAbring us unregulated Level 5 driving using a couple cameras, WiFi, crossed fingers, and an iron-clad indemnity clause in the usage agreement, upheld by friendly MAGA judges, making all damage and deaths your fault.The severe level of dis-trust for the incoming administration is insanely high. I can’t recall a time when the level of trust at this moment (of the cycle) was so low. While, in the past, no one wanted the current administration, I never felt that they didn’t trust them to do the right job.
I mean they nominated a guy who paid teens for sex to be AG.
I, for one, can’t wait to get ran over by a robotaxi when crossing the street while Mr. Krabs live tweets the video feed as proof that being a pedestrian is super lame and only the poors walk.
We need cheaper electricity more than cheaper evs. I live in ma and my last bill was $.45/kwh. Why would i want to electrify anything as a consumer
I’m in MA at $0.1966 / kwh.
Rates are quite lower in cities / towns with municipal electric utilities. Of course, local water rates would have me cringing at the idea of a water-powered vehicle.
I’m in Waterbury, CT. $0.30/kWh
We won’t have a government any more. We’ll have an oligarchy, and absolutely none of this stuff will matter.
Eh, let’s not hyperventilate here, lol. The same type of stuff was said about W., and while his tenure was less than ideal (to be kind), he was up against Gore and Kerry, both of which were about as useful as a $0.05 stamp
What “W” suggested vs what the current choice has suggested are vastly different in scope and dumbfuckery.
Totally agree. Time will tell.
Anyway, did you manage not to drink that day? I was really hoping you didn’t, and was actually thinking about you far after I logged out for the day.
Many thanks for your thoughts. I didn’t drink. Everyone here was motivating enough to not. It was a little overwhelming to see how much the community here actually cared. Positively overwhelming.