Michigan Lawmakers Want To Ban Chinese-Tagged Vehicles From Even Visiting The State. You Know, For Privacy.

Overhype

from the performative-fixes dept

Michigan lawmakers are pushing legislation that wouldn’t just ban the sales of Chinese-made cars in the The Great Lakes State, it would ban cars with Chinese tags from even visiting. The Protecting America From Chinese Cars Act joins the Connected Vehicle Security Act aiming to protect U.S. car companies from cheaper Chinese EV competition in an election season where every campaign contribution dollar matters.

This new legislation is required, we’re told by Michigan Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Haley Stevens, because the country simply cares that much about jobs, consumer privacy, and national security:

“We’re gonna be aggressive here because Michigan jobs are on the line, but also so is national security. So close our border to Chinese vehicles and Chinese technology in the vehicles, even for day trips. That’s how aggressive we believe we need to be right now,” Stevens said while speaking at a policy conference.

Her partner in the legislation went much further. “They can certainly come across the border, drive up to Selfridge Air Force base, take some video with the car. The car is a traveling surveillance package. And all of that data that the car is collecting is being sent straight back to Beijing,” Slotkin said.”

So, a few things. One, it’s curious how normally very vocal “free market” Libertarian groups always mysteriously get quiet when this sort of obvious anti-competitive pandering to large corporate campaign donors pops up. Two, it’s adorable how Slotkin and Stevens want you to believe that simply banning Chinese cars somehow solves the major privacy issues inherent with modern, connected cars.

For one, U.S. and most of the overseas vehicles sold in the U.S. basically have nonexistent security standards. Carmakers collect an ocean of biometric, location and phone data, and then sell that data to a parade of largely unregulated data brokers, who in turn sell access to that data to any random asshole with money to spend — including domestic and foreign intelligence.

They then lie about it when asked. And if they do openly acknowledge it, they insist it’s okay because the resulting data has been “anonymized” (a term that means absolutely nothing).

Which is to say the Chinese, if they really want access to detailed U.S. street information and public movement data, don’t need to sell their cars in the U.S. to obtain it. Because Congress has been too corrupt to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law any time in the last quarter century. In part because we’re greedy, but also in part because the U.S. government also buys this data to avoid getting warrants.

As a result of this country’s grotesque corruption, we’ve been awash in major privacy and national security scandals for 25 years, including the recent revelation that sensitive U.S. location data obtained by telecoms, apps, and every other device we use (whether it’s made in China or not) is being bought from data brokers by other countries and then utilized to track, target, and kill U.S. troops.

So maybe Stevens and Slotkin actually care about this stuff, but generally privacy is used as a lazy talking point by politicians who have other motivations; in this case making giant U.S. carmakers who don’t want to face meaningful price competition happy ahead of the midterms to ensure the campaign financing funding keeps flowing.

Slotkin was one of numerous Dems who supported the “banning of TikTok,” which really just involved offloading most of the app and its profits to Trump’s billionaire friends, who are as bad, if not worse, on issues like privacy and propaganda than ByteDance ever was. Now Slotkin is going around calling cheaper Chinese EVs “TikTok on wheels,” as if the whole Dem TikTok face plant never happened.

Pretending you’re being extra tough on privacy by going so far as to even ban cars with Chinese tags from visiting from Canada (as if Canadians want to visit the U.S. right now anyway) is particularly weird, performative, and ignores the real problem.

U.S. politicians need to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law and tightly regulate data brokers, or shut up about how much they care about consumer privacy and national security.

Filed Under: anti-competition, cars, china, chinese, competition, elissa slotkin, EVs, free market, haley stevens, privacy, protecting america from chinese cars act, security, vehicles, warrants

Nikola Finally Files For Chapter 11 To Try To Wind Down Smoothly

Failures

from the long-time-coming dept

While I have no interest in celebrating the demise of a company, one in which very real people had and have jobs that are going to go away, this was also a long time coming. The five year story about how EV trucking company Nikola ended in bankruptcy started in spectacular fashion in 2020, when it was discovered that an official video the company put out in order to keep and lure in additional investors, one in which the Nikola One was said to be “fully functional”, was doctored in the most hilarious manner. As in, the truck was towed to the top of a hill and then allowed to roll down it, while the camera filming it all was tilted to make it look like the truck was powering itself along a flat highway.

While that is objectively hilarious in the most conman-ish manner, nobody was laughing when Nikola’s contract with General Motors evaporated, nor when the company apparently thought the best method for combatting this PR nightmare was to try to silence critics using copyright law. And while the company both ousted CEO Trevor Milton and defended the video, stating that investors knew the capabilities of the truck at the time it was posted and tried to play word games with the company’s description of the truck’s capabilities, the government opened several investigations into the company and Milton got four years in the clink for securities and wire fraud.

Experts gave the company a 1 in 5 chance at survival. Nikola failed to beat those odds, however, and has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Nikola said it decided to initiate a sale process of its assets to maximize value and ensure an orderly wind down. The firm will continue some operations for trucks in field and some hydrogen-fueling operations through the end of March. The company listed assets of between $500 million and $1 billion, and estimated its liabilities were between $1 billion and $10 billion, according to a court filing.

What’s somewhat interesting here is that, while the Nikola One debacle was an obvious fraudulent flop, the company did actually produce a running truck, the Nikola Two. The tech isn’t perfect, with reports that the battery-operated semi has a range of roughly 900 miles maximum, but it’s not nothing. There was the potential for a successful product here.

Which will make it interesting to see who scoops up these assets at auction. Perhaps someone or some company that hasn’t so brutally nuked its reputation by actually being truthful and transparent that they can flip all of this into an actual marketable product.

Filed Under: bankruptcy, chapter 11, EVs
Companies: nikola

How The Other EV Transition — To E-bikes — Is Changing The World

Innovation

from the power-to-the-people dept

One of the most important transitions taking place today in technology is the shift to electric vehicles (EVs). Most attention is focused on electric cars. That’s in part because they are big glamorous items, and they have high-profile cheerleaders like Elon Musk. But there is another side to this transition to electric power, less glamorous but arguably more important, at least in some parts of the world. This is the shift to electric bicycles — e-bikes.

According to a recent article in Bloomberg, battery-powered ebikes now outsell pedal-only models in several European countries. You might think that would be great for the local environment. But Philippe Crist, a micromobility researcher at the Paris-based International Transport Forum, the transportation arm of the OECD, points out why that might not be the case. Asked by Bloomberg whether e-bikes have demonstrably reduced emissions from transportation, he replied:

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it has not. Again, most e-bike buyers [in Europe] — not all, but most of them — are replacing a bicycle, so they were biking already. Of course, lifecycle emissions from bikes of all kinds are far lower than from cars.

By contrast, the uptake of e-bikes in the US has real benefits:

Compared to Europe, in North America you have a greater population of people who’ve never cycled for everyday travel. For that reason there are more people in North America who are buying an e-bike as their first adult bicycle, or using the e-bike to get places or do chores that they’ve not used a bike for before. So the benefits of e-bike adoption in North America may be greater than in Europe, because more car trips could be replaced.

That’s good news for US cities. But in other parts of the world, the shift to ebikes has a more direct positive impact on the lives of people. For example, in Bangladesh e-rickshaws are widely used, but were illegal until a couple of months ago. An article on the Rest of the World site explains:

There are between 2 million and 4 million e-rickshaws in the country, which have operated without any regulations or monitoring. Once the new regulations come, e-rickshaws will rule Bangladesh’s roads, according to experts who have studied the vehicle’s usage.

Rickshaws powered by electric motors not only make the physically demanding job of a rickshaw driver easier. They open up the profession to women, with important knock-on benefits for their independence. CBC News reports on an example from India:

A faded battery-powered rickshaw weaves in and out of traffic in New Delhi’s northwestern Jahangirpuri neighbourhood on a weekday morning, looking for passengers before sputtering into a narrow space in a row of brightly-coloured three-wheelers to charge its dying battery.

Behind the wheel is Suman, a 36-year-old mother of four, who takes pride in her chosen profession. Suman, who like many Indians goes by only one name, fought against the wishes of her husband and extended family to drive an e-rickshaw to provide for her daughters, who range from four to 18 years old.

As Suman explained:

“The best thing about an e-rickshaw is that you are not working under someone,” Suman told CBC News. “You can make some money, then take a break when the kids need to be sent to school.”

These very basic e-rickshaws, which cost around $1,500 to buy in India, lack the massive impact — both metaphorical and literal — that ultra-heavy EVs have in the US. But they may well change for the better the lives of many more people.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

Filed Under: bangladesh, bicycles, ebikes, electric vehicles, elon musk, EVs, india, rickshaws

Ultra-Heavy EVs Will Easily Demolish Nation’s Unprepared Guard Rail System

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the once-again-we-aren't-prepared dept

The U.S. is a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with a thirty-percent jump in the last decade. That’s in contrast to every other developed country, which saw a decline.

So, of course, it’s a perfect time to flood American highways with a parade of extremely heavy EVs with unprecedented acceleration. Some of which are extremely pointy and feature half-cooked automation technology with a growing body count.

The dual-motor Cybertruck weighs 6603 pounds, while the three-motor Cyberbeast weighs in at 6843 pounds. The electric Ford Lightning weighs 6,500 pounds. The Hummer EV is even heavier, clocking in at 9,000 pounds, with a battery alone weighing more than a Honda Civic.

Experts have pointed out the significant safety ramifications of this transition for a while, but U.S. officials have yet to prepare the regulatory and policy landscape.

There are steps that regulators could take to get ahead of the problem and minimize fatalities, such as a scaling tax on vehicles over a certain weight. Or regulations designed to limit the ever-growing grills on giant vehicles (even big truck owners think trucks have gotten too big).

The U.S. is, of course, doing none of that. We’re also not preparing the road infrastructure — including basic things like guard rails — for our new daily driving reality.

The University of Nebraska was recently the latest to conduct a study on what ultra-heavy EVs do to our existing guard rails, which aren’t really designed to handle impacts beyond 5,000 pounds. As it turns out, when vehicles that weigh more than 7,000 pounds impact guard rails not designed for anything over 5,000 pounds, bad things happen:

“Last October, the researchers directed a passengerless 2022 Rivian R1T truck weighing around 7,000 pounds toward an MGS guardrail at 62 mph and a 25-degree angle, reflecting common highway crash conditions. The Rivian demolished the guardrail, passing through it before striking a concrete barrier that the researchers had installed as a backstop.”

The rush toward heavier EVs will result in everybody upgrading to bigger, heavier, and less efficient vehicles in an act of family and self protection. Add badly constructed and poorly regulated automation into the mix, and things get messier still.

It would cost $8 billion to upgrade the nation’s MGS guard rail system to protect public safety, so we aren’t going to do that because getting out ahead of obvious, avoidable problems isn’t really our thing. We’re going to wait until long after a parade of people die, at which point we might start thinking about implementing more meaningful physical and regulatory safeguards. Maybe.

Filed Under: auto safety, consumer protection, consumer safety, electric vehicles, EVs, regulators, vehicles, weight tax

Tesla, Who Famously ‘Freed’ Its Patents, Sues For Patent Infringement (But… It Kinda Makes Sense)

Patents

from the details-matter dept

People accuse me of unfairly bashing Elon Musk, but I’ve always highlighted the things he’s done that I thought were smart as well, and a big one was his decision nearly a decade ago to free all of Tesla’s patents. The company put out a blog post, saying that anyone could use its patents, and that Tesla would never initiate a patent lawsuit. We’ve been happy to see him continue to stand by this position over the years.

Musk’s rationale for doing so was exactly correct: patents tend to hold back innovation in many cases, especially in innovative and emerging markets, such as electric cars. That’s because whoever gets to the patent office first might not actually be the best at building a product that users want, and to really drive the market forward, letting everyone try to build better products for users is the most important driver of innovation and overall consumer welfare.

Patents stop that, by saying only whoever made it to the patent office first is allowed to innovate.

Obviously, Tesla has held a somewhat commanding lead over the EV market over the last decade, but with a bunch of new EVs coming on the market, combined with Musk’s seeming infatuation with suing others, I wondered if the pledge would stand. So it caught my attention when I saw that Tesla had sued an Australian supercapacitor company, Cap-XX, for patent infringement. The patents came to Tesla when it purchased Maxwell Technologies a few years back.

So, at first I worried that this was Musk going back on his word. However, the company claims that this is actually a response to Cap-XX’s own patent lawsuit against Maxwell that goes back to around the time of Tesla’s purchase of Maxwell. Remember, the Tesla promise was simply that it would not initiate infringement lawsuits. If it’s just suing a company that is already engaged in a patent infringement lawsuit against it, the situation is a bit more understandable and reasonable, and is more akin to the frequent belief in Silicon Valley of mostly using your patents defensively, rather than offensively (basically collecting patents to say that if someone sues you for patent infringement, you’ll sue them right back, in hopes of deterring the initial lawsuit).

That said, it’s not clear why Tesla waited around four years to hit back with this lawsuit, and it will be interesting to see if Cap-XX tries to use Tesla’s patent pledge in court against the company. Some could argue that a full patent disarmament would entail never suing over patents at all, but given the circumstances, I think this move is mostly understandable.

However, it’s still worth watching to make sure Tesla doesn’t go back on the full patent pledge in the future.

Filed Under: defensive patents, electric vehicles, EVs, open patents, patent pledge, patents, public domain
Companies: cap-xx, tesla

The Electric Car Could Finally Put AM Radio Out To Pasture

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the it-was-nice-knowing-you dept

There’s a long way to go before the electric car revolution even comes close to the version that currently exists in everybody’s heads. Getting enough rare-Earth minerals to ramp up EV production at the scale most have in mind will be a big challenge. Then there are other issues related to safety thanks to EVs’ incredible acceleration combined with higher-end EVs incredible weight.

One less dramatic challenge created by the inevitable ascension of the EV has emerged: vehicles don’t always play well with AM radio. As a result, many automakers are considering eliminating AM radio from electric vehicles entirely, marking the end of, or at least some meaningful shrinkage in, overall AM radio usage.

Since EVs generate more electromagnetic interference than gas-powered cars, they can potentially disrupt the reception of AM signals causing static, noise and an annoying hum. This could be managed with shielding cables, filters and careful placement of the electrical components, but Tesla, Audi, Porsche, Volvo, and Volkswagen have found it more economical to cull AM radio functionality from EVs entirely.

FM radio doesn’t appear to have the same interference issues and should be safe. But AM broadcasters aren’t particularly thrilled about it, often arguing that AM radio remains an important communications medium for minority communities and during emergencies:

“It’s a killer for us because most of our listening audience is in the morning drive and afternoon drive, when people are going to work and coming from work — and if we’re not there in their car, we’re nonexistent,” said Ron January, operations manager at WATV-AM, an adult contemporary station in Birmingham, Ala.

Roughly 47 million Americans, or around 20 percent of the total U.S. public, still listen to AM radio, whether it’s religious programming, actual local community news, or right-wing propaganda. But between AM’s aging core userbase, AM radio’s steady decline in Europe, and the shift away from it in EVs, the medium’s days as a mainstream technology could be numbered.

Filed Under: AM radio, automakers, evolution, EVs, fm radio, interfernece

Battery Shortage Poses Major Innovative Threat To Electric Vehicle Push

Predictions

from the bigger-better-bupkis dept

In most people’s heads, electric vehicles are going to very quickly supplant gas-powered vehicles in the next few years, resulting in massive disruption and a massive boost to climate change mitigation. But there’s trouble in paradise: experts continue to warn that we lack the elements and supply chain necessary to ramp up production of electric vehicles at the scale that exists in everybody’s imagination.

Oddly, this is usually some kind of weird footnote in EV discourse. But last week, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe clearly pointed out that we’re facing a massive battery shortage (warning: paywall) as companies engage in a mad dash to lock down supplies of cobalt, lithium, battery-grade graphite, and nickel needed for batteries:

“All the world’s cell production combined represents well under 10% of what we will need in 10 years,” Scaringe noted. “Meaning, 90% to 95% of the supply chain does not exist.”

I imagine that as a smaller player, Scaringe is nervous about all the bigger players engaged in a mad dash to lock down already limited resources, and his call could be construed as a call for some government help. Though that doesn’t make his concerns any less true. The scale of the challenge is fairly massive:

Battery evolution will continue and engineering may lift some of this strain in time, but it’s pretty clear that the speedy EV timeline that exists in many people’s heads isn’t realistic. Such restrictions should also probably result in a re-assesment of what kind of vehicles get build priority, since you can build a dozen smaller vehicles with the components and minerals needed to build one Hummer EV:

This being America, the demand side of the equation isn’t likely to want to meaningfully integrate those considerations.

Granted this is occurring at the same time as folks are finally realizing the massive weight of some of these much larger EVs is going to pose a notable safety threat on the road to smaller vehicles, incentivizing Americans who already like big stuff to prioritize bigger EVs for family safety, therefore accelerating supply constraints.

Addressing that cycle will require more actual engineering innovation, and less… innovation performance art.

Filed Under: auto regulation, auto safety, battery, disruption, electric vehicles, EVs, innovation, supply chain