Talking About EVs is Complicated

February 23, 2023·1 hr 26 min·5 clips

The hosts say Tesla did not even look at the car’s data after the fatal crash.

The episode opens with all three hosts back together. They settle quickly into the familiar mix of news, plan updates, and half-formed ideas. Nick's Cayman plan has already changed again. That becomes the running joke. The group treats it like a phoenix rising from the ashes of the last plan. A few Porsche mentions follow. Yellow calipers come up. R8s come up too. The conversation has that familiar shape where one car detail leads to another before anyone tries to pin it down. Soon the topic shifts into EVs. From there, the tone gets more analytical. The hosts start talking about how tangled the EV and autonomy conversation has become. That leads into autonomous driving and the moral side of what a self-driving car should prioritize. A 2018 crash involving a former Apple engineer enters the discussion. The details are still something they want to read more closely. They also bring up the way Mercedes and BMW framed driver safety in their documents. That opens the door to a bigger question about what carmakers are actually deciding for people. One of the hosts describes a classroom exercise from teaching ethics. The exercise asks people to choose what an autonomous vehicle should value in different road scenarios. The first example makes the choice feel obvious. An illegal road crosser versus an occupant in the car is framed as a straightforward case. Then the setup gets messier. A lawful pedestrian in a crosswalk changes the shape of the question. That is where the conversation gets interesting. The hosts keep pushing on how people assign blame, risk, and responsibility. The discussion does not stay abstract for long. It keeps finding its way back to how these questions would feel in real driving life. The episode closes by widening back out to the show's own rhythm. They mention that this is one of five or six recordings in a row. They say the episode was recorded about six days before release. They talk about a video coming in the next 14 days. They tease a truck, a Volvo, and more cars in the lineup. There is also talk of a Turo series and Nick's future supercar search. It ends with the usual sign-off and the sense that the next plan is already forming.

As heard by us

Loose car talk that turns driver-assist ethics into the real subject.

AVE Automotive Podcast opens like a car conversation that changes direction almost at once, then settles into autonomous driving and the moral questions that come with it.

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Why you'd press play

For when car debates sound like three friends thinking out loud.

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