A Tour of Behaviour I Cannot Condone

Off-Ramps for 27 February 2025

Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight interesting pieces across three categories that I think you will enjoy reading (or watching, as the case may be). Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.

Automakers I Cannot Condone

Traditional automakers have been having a rough go of it lately. The world seems to have hit ‘peak traditional car’ back in 2017; the pandemic crushed production and consumption of new vehicles. Demand has increased since the pandemic’s end, but not for internal-combustion engine (ICE) cars; increasingly, consumers want electric vehicles: wholly battery-electric or hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles are where the growth is happening.

But, as we’ve discussed before, that market is being absolutely dominated by Chinese exports, leaving the big European and American carmakers fighting each other for market share.

Perhaps that explains why, lately, they’ve been abusing their customers.

Stellantis has been pushing pop-up ads to some models of Jeep mid-trip. The ads completely cover the vehicle’s touchscreen interface, meaning that to access controls, users have to play ‘hunt the pixel’ to find the X button that dismisses the ad.

How often do they appear? Why, every time the vehicle comes to a stop.

I have written before that cars need buttons, not touchscreens. The idea that the carmaker might hijack the touchscreen to advertise to owners is an argument in favour that, I must confess, I had not considered… mostly because I hadn’t considered that a carmaker would do something that would so obviously infuriate its customers.

Not to be outdone, General Motors has, for years, been secretly monitoring the precise location, and driving habits, of their customers, and selling that data to third parties. Some of these third parties are insurance companies who have used that information to raise rates on drivers they deemed to be behaving unsafely. (No word on who the other parties might have been. Law enforcement? Divorce lawyers? The People’s Republic of China?) In some cases, the geolocation data was collected as often as every three seconds, providing precise information about a vehicle’s movements, and thus of the occupants as well.

GM’s defense, apparently, was that customers agreed to this when they signed up for OnStar service, but the USA’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was unimpressed. The FTC has ordered GM to stop collecting and reselling data on their customers’ geolocation and driver behaviour… for the next five years.

Huh. I would have thought a better duration would have been ‘indefinitely’.

Bringing up the rear, readers will recall that last October I predicted Tesla’s commitment for all Tesla drivers to have access to unsupervised Full Self Driving in 2025 would not be met. I stand by that prediction.

Partly that’s because the firm now admits many Tesla vehicles lack the hardware to support Full Self Driving, meaning that retrofits will be required. But mostly it’s because the firm’s supervised Full Self Driving (FSD) still fails to handle straightforward situations.

Timothy B. Lee

highlights a now-deleted Twitter post in which a Cybertruck under the control of FSD failed to determine that the lane it was in was ending, and so continued ahead, off the road, directly into a lamppost.

I can’t say why the original Tweet was deleted. I can say that, in other instances of FSD leading to road incidents, Tesla’s response has been ‘see you in court’.

Transit Heads I Cannot Condone

I don’t know Jeffrey Tumlin, neither personally nor professionally. Until very recently he was head of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), and I understand he managed the agency through the Covid pandemic, a difficult job in which he acquitted himself well. He’s currently on sabbatical and I wish him the best.

That said, he recently gave an exit interview to Governing magazine, and some of his statements there make me wince.

In response to the question “What do you hope people learn from the rollout of these services [i.e., robotaxi services like Waymo and Cruise] in the Bay Area?” Tumlin observed that San Francisco’s experimentation with new technology worsened the experience of the overall transportation system: robotaxis would get confused at complicated intersections, or at train tracks, and their hesitancy or paralysis would slow everything down. I had expected Tumlin to take a bow for incurring these headaches in service of a robotaxi future for the city, and indeed for the USA.

Instead, he said “I wouldn’t recommend that anyone be the beta test site. What you want to do is let somebody else be the beta test site and then be a rapid follower so that you can take advantage of the upside of new technology while minimizing the downside.”

You don’t need to be a Kantian to see the problem here. The head of a public transit operator saying, in Governing magazine of all places, that he doesn’t recommend that anyone try something new; let some other poor soul do that… the implication is that no one will go first, and no change will happen.

If you want to understand why there has been no progress in public transit, I give you Exhibit A.

In my view, Tumlin should have stopped there, but he kept digging.

Shot:

“For many new mobility technologies, in order for them to make money, what they need to do is appeal to the convenience of the privileged, and oftentimes that comes at the expense of the efficiency of the transportation system as a whole. We remain concerned that autonomous vehicle companies will have the same negative impact on the overall transportation system performance as we saw from Uber and Lyft.”

Chaser:

“Granted, I use all of these modes of transportation, because they are convenient.

“But if too many people avoid taking the bus… then you end up in a situation where you have a lot of Ubers and autonomous vehicles that are stuck in traffic with nobody moving.”

I could respect the head of a transit agency saying look, it’s a prisoner’s dilemma, and the key thing is not to defect: everyone should take public transit so that we get the best outcomes on net. And I could respect them saying look, everyone’s needs are different, people should take the mode that best suits the trip they need to take; that will lead to inefficient outcomes but liberty is more important than efficiency.

But to say, in effect, look, the best outcome is where the unprivileged take the bus, and some of the privileged too, but it’s okay for me, the head of the transit agency, to take private modes when I find it convenient…

This, I struggle to defend.

Others I Cannot Condone (Quick Hits)

Some rapid-fire links with commentary:

• (Alleged) robber tries to use Waymo as a getway vehicle (hat tip to Reilly Brennan). This is the first time this has happened, I think. It won’t happen often, because of course a police car with lights and sirens going rolled up, and the Waymo dutifully pulled over. Of interest as a historic first, and as proof that robotaxis, equipped with today’s technology, can cooperate with law enforcement

• As per the New York Times, Trump Administration Prioritizes High-Birthrate Areas for Transportation Funds. The subtitle is deliciously dry: “Some policy experts said they were not sure how the move was connected to the president’s overall transportation goals”

• Speaking of the Trump Administration, it is also proposing to rip out all the EV chargers at federally-owned buildings nationwide. This move is being taken because the chargers are not deemed to be “mission critical”. In which case, choosing not to build new ones might be defensible… but why dispose of existing, functional ones? It’s not a mystery: the President has said something to the effect that he likes Elon Musk, but he dislikes electric cars more