A glove box is the little storage compartment in the front of the car, usually on the passenger side. It’s where you can keep things you want to have handy.
An emesis basin is a special bowl/container meant for throwing up. It’s the kind of thing you’d see in a hospital, and it’s shaped to catch vomit safely.
This is a device that collects urine so it doesn’t spill when someone can’t get up. In the description, it’s basically a bag with an attachment that directs where the urine goes.
In long races, the same car is driven by several people. When one driver hands off to the next, whatever happened before (including bathroom gear) can affect the next driver.
Le Mans is a famous long-distance race that lasts 24 hours. Because drivers rotate, anything like bathroom gear can matter for the next person getting in.
Crash test dummies are special mannequins with sensors. They help engineers measure what happens to a person’s body in a crash so cars can be made safer.
Cadavers are human bodies used for research. The segment explains that early safety testing needed real injury data to understand what the crash measurements meant for the body.
A crash sled is a rig that simulates a crash by quickly slowing down, like a controlled “impact test.” It lets engineers test safety systems repeatedly without destroying a whole car every time.
A head-on crash dummy is a “test person” used to simulate what happens in a front-end crash. Engineers use different dummy setups depending on the type of crash they’re studying.
A t-bone crash dummy is used to test side-impact crashes, like when one car hits the side of another. It helps engineers check whether safety systems protect people in that specific kind of collision.
Underbody blast means an explosion happens under the car. That kind of force is different from a normal crash, so engineers use special tests to understand how people would be affected.
IED means an improvised explosive device. It’s a kind of bomb that can detonate under a vehicle, which is why safety testing has to account for that special kind of danger.
Rear-wheel drive means the back wheels get the power. It can make the car feel different when you speed up or turn compared with cars that drive the front wheels.
The Ford Mustang is a famous American sports car. Here they’re talking about an older, mid-1960s one that drives the rear wheels, which changes how it behaves on the road.
Term
minimum speed limits
A minimum speed limit is the slowest speed you’re allowed to drive on some roads. Going slower than that can cause problems for other traffic.
The Mini Cooper is a famous small British car. The key idea here is that the engine is mounted sideways, which helps the car fit more usable space inside.
“Four cylinder” means the engine has four working cylinders. “Front wheel drive” means the front wheels do the driving, which affects how the car feels and fits.
This means safety features that are controlled by the car’s computer. Instead of being fixed, they can be designed and adjusted in software.
Term
output sensors
The car has electronic signals it sends out to the world. The episode is saying those signals can be customized, so the car has to “choose” what it tells other people.
A horn is the car’s warning sound. The episode is talking about how the horn’s design and behavior can be engineered to be loud, reliable, and long-lasting.
LIVE
I'm Jim Farley, and this is Drive.
Today I'm talking with Mary Roach.
She's the author of Stiff, Packing for Mars, and Replaceable You.
All these books dive into everything from cadavers to digestion to what really happens
to the body and space.
Mary has a rare ability to go straight to topics that most of us would avoid and come
back with something that's completely entertaining and funny and of course informative.
We started with a story about an item that she always keeps in her glove box of her car.
You know what I have in my glove box, and I guarantee you no one else has this.
It's, and I'm going to have to explain it, it's an emesis basin.
You might know because you've spent time in hospitals, but it's that little plastic thing
that if somebody's going to throw up, you put it right under.
It's curved.
It's an emesis basin, and mine is signed by the astronaut Rusty Schweikert, because Rusty
Schweikert was famous for being the first astronaut.
This was Apollo, I forget what number.
He was like the first one that was really honest about, look, I'm really ill.
I'm going to throw up.
I can't even leave the capsule.
He had space motion sickness, and he was like the poster boy for that, and I have, I got
him to sign a throw up.
Literally, it wasn't good enough for you to have a standard puke bag.
You had to get it signed by the astronaut as the first human to puke in space.
Literally, is that what's in your glove box?
That's what, yeah, because it's a good size, I have a mini Cooper, okay, and it's a good
size for organizing a little bit of hand sanitizer, some Kleenex, the tire gauge thing, all that
little stuff.
Oh, you put stuff in it.
In it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not for people to get sick in.
No, but in a pinch, you could dump that stuff out and hand it.
One of the grandkids gets sick on a straight road.
She's just like, you have to bring a lot of vomit bags, and so we have, I have this
ready to go if we need it.
That is.
That's a whole another definition of a preparer, given that Artemis' travel further than any
humans from our planet.
I thought maybe it'd be great to start off and just get your feedback on, for all of
us who don't really understand space or living on Mars or the moon, what do you think people
should be prepared for when they go to space for, in our lifetime, perhaps a trip to Mars
or a lengthy trip on the moon?
I can say right off the bat that this trip, unlike during the Apollo and Gemini era, during
the Apollo era, going to the moon was a very different experience in one particular and
quite important to morale way.
And that is, on this trip, there is a little compartment like bathroom, because on the
Apollo moon missions, what they had was a bag, a bag with an adhesive ring.
It was called a fecal bag.
You had to strip down, peel off the adhesive, stick it on your butt, and there's no gravity,
so the stuff's not going to pull away yet, it kind of like coops it down.
Anyway, I don't need to gross people out any further than I already have, but the astronauts
were like, we've got to do better.
This is not acceptable.
We have to move forward, yes.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And they did.
The shuttle toilet was a big step up, but still complicated and required testing in
zero gravity.
Can you imagine if you study your whole life and you're an expert and you finally get hired
by NASA, you tell all your friends, I made it, I'm going to be part of the space program,
and then your assignment is you have to design the fecal bag.
That would be...
I hope they got to work on something more interesting on the next trip.
I know.
Why don't we talk about it?
That's so interesting that you brought that up because I race cars, and one of the things
that people don't understand, I know you're in the specifics, most of the people don't
understand, there's a lot of race fans.
What do you do when you're in a race car, you're fully hydrated, and there's a four-hour
yellow flag, and you're stuck in the car for four hours, and what happens?
I only guess.
Let me guess.
Can I guess?
Yeah.
Wait, wait, do you have those?
See what they had on the Apollo missions, they had, it was a urine containment device,
so it's basically, it's a bag.
So you're waiting, again, like what you're describing, for liftoff, you're in there for
hours and hours, and you can't leave to go to the bathroom.
So they had a bag and then a sort of like a condom-ended thing that you would pee in.
So you could just go.
Right.
Do you guys have that?
Well, so that's so interesting because I've been watching motorsports literally for 50
years, and not once has anyone in all that media coverage ever talked about this topic.
And yet it's literally a huge topic for drivers, like we talk about it all the time.
And it's one of my first questions I have for our pro drivers, and you've got two groups
of people.
You've got the diaper people, and you've got the people who want some container.
And then there's a third category that's kind of the grossest category, which is they don't
really care because if they have to go, they'll go, and then there's a puddle in the seat
when you jump in after them because in an endurance race, they're multiple drivers.
And so in a 24-hour race at Le Mans, you'll have four drivers.
And so all four have a different tactic.
Now if you're a diaper person, that works great, and if you're a catheter person, that
works great.
But if you're a guy or girl who doesn't care, the next driver, you get in, you're like,
wait, whoa, whoa, what's going on here?
Shouldn't that be against the rules?
Shouldn't they be disqualified for peeing in the seat?
I think so.
No.
I know.
You should wear a diaper, big deal, right?
Or you have a...
I think there's maybe a sense of, see, drivers are all competitive with each other.
So if you're on the same team, you want to be better than the other drivers.
So it's kind of a little way to say, good luck, buddy.
I see.
You've literally marked your territory.
Yeah.
Mark your territory.
Perfectly said.
Oh, man.
Wow.
So this is interesting.
And that's something erasing it.
That's the first thing I would have asked.
Yes.
I know that would be a married question.
That's why I brought it up.
Okay.
So tell us about your thoughts around the replaceable you as such a breakthrough kind
of book for me.
I love reading.
And for me, it was very thought provocative.
What do you think the big arguments we're going to wind up having around politics and
religion relative to kind of human parts?
Well, right now there's sort of disagreement about with organ donation.
There's a lot of work going on with, okay, tweaking animal organs so that they're more
genetically...
It's really a dominant mammal that we use for a lot of organs.
Right.
So, but if you tweak the genetics of these organs or these pigs rather, then the body
doesn't react as strongly and if you could use pig organs that have been genetically
tweaked as it were, that would relieve some of the shortage that we have in this country.
But my thinking, I'm like, that's great, but wouldn't it just be easier if we could
just get more people to donate, not while they're alive necessarily, but to just put
that dot on their license and agree to donate.
In other countries, in some European countries, it's assumed that you want to donate and
if you don't, then you have to take action.
It's called an opt-out system.
You're automatically opt-in, I see.
Or like Carol Shelby, who's really a pretty esteemed person in the Ford world.
He helped us win Le Mans, but he had a replacement heart, kidney, and I think he was one of the
first and when I asked him, Carol, he was from Texas, Carol, what's it like to have
all these other organs in your body?
He goes, Jim, I'm the only person who can play in a foursome by myself.
I love that idea.
That's great.
He thought of the organs as associated with a person, another person.
For him, the way he thought about it is like I had three other people's body inside me.
I thought that was interesting.
Do you think that's a thing?
That's interesting.
I was going to say, I once did a story about sushi and the parasites that may or may not
be in it, probably not, don't worry.
But I was asking this researcher about tapeworms.
And I said, is that actually a weight loss strategy to have a tapeworm?
Which some people say, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think they used to be sold for that years ago.
Anyway, she said, no, not really.
She said, the only advantage is that you get to refer to yourself in the plural.
It's the same kind of thing, right?
Both of us, yeah.
Both of us feel great.
We're not hungry today.
We're not hungry today.
Yeah, me and my tapeworm.
No, no, you mean you are not hungry.
No, no, both of us are.
We're not hungry.
Yeah, we're good.
It's not that unusual for somebody who gets specifically, who gets a heart from someone
else to start feeling that they've taken on some of the characteristics of that other person.
Oh, now that is interesting.
Yeah, like I never used to like classical music.
And now I do, or I used to love to eat popcorn, and now I don't like the smell,
something like that.
And there was a doctor, in fact, the person who told me was Mehmet Oz back when he was
just a heart transplant surgeon and not where he is now.
But there was a study where they actually talked to some of those people and said,
you know, who do you think your donor was?
Give me all the characteristics.
And then they looked at the donor to see if, in fact, any of that fit.
And sadly, it did not.
It didn't?
It didn't?
No, no, it didn't.
I know, I was kind of hoping that people were able to, you know, like that there was some
vestige of that person's character in the heart.
But I mean, if you took a brain, sure, there'd be, if you could do a brain transplant,
you'd have certainly perhaps too much of the other person.
The other question I had looking at your research and getting your perspective on is,
I see a lot of people, wealthy people now, doing full body scans.
And I've actually met several of them who saved their life because they had a tumor or something
in their body scan that they were not aware of.
But when I asked my doctor, should I do one of these?
He goes, no, you cannot believe how imperfect you are.
You're going to find all sorts of things.
90% of them will not be actionable, but you're going to be walking.
He goes, I know you.
You'd be walking around freaked out about all the 92 things that they found that weren't right about you.
And I wondered, where do you line up on that argument?
I completely understand the desire to do it.
Like you, I mean, I imagine I know rationally that there's a lot of false negatives and a
lot of false positives.
So even if everything is A, okay, you can't really trust it because maybe the signals weren't
strong enough yet for the cancer that is growing in there.
But there's also a lot of false positives.
I'm talking about those blood tests, but the blood tests, not the scans.
The scans though, yeah, everybody has some weird little lump or cyst or irregularity
on them that's going to now require further follow up imaging, opening you up and taking a look.
You know, I haven't done it and it's not that expensive.
Are you going to do that?
No, I decided not to.
And maybe it's because I feel pretty healthy, but I just feel like I trust in my doctor.
And he's like, I've seen a lot of patients do it and, you know, you're healthy.
If you had an unhealthy lifestyle, then maybe I would recommend it, but I don't.
One of the parts of listening to you and learning from you that I found most fascinating,
because I'm getting older now and I'm thinking about, you know, what is my role to help our country,
not just my faith or, you know, personal life for my family, the people I love.
And I watched this movie that I was very taken with called Taking Chance.
And it's Kevin Bacon who takes a Marine Corps veteran who's died back to his family in Montana.
And it follows in in great detail almost how they processed his body after he left Iraq.
And I was so impressed with the military's diligence in respecting our service people.
And yet I don't think most people understand from the diagnosis of how they were killed,
trying to learn about their care, the uniform, respecting their physical body,
preserving it, cooling it during transport. Like the whole thing was just mind-boggling
because I often think about our government spending too little money on things.
I never thought that they would be so diligent.
I wrote a book called Grunt, the Curious Science of Humans at War.
And that book looked at not the science of killing in war, but the science of keeping alive
for the most part. But for one of the chapters, I went to Dover to the morgue
where when somebody is killed while deployed, the body comes back,
not just for a ceremony, but they do this really interesting,
it's a program called Feedback from the Field. And they leave all of the life-saving equipment
in place, whether that was a tourniquet or something to relieve a collapsed lung or whatever
it is, they leave it in place and they have a meeting with the folks in Dover, the medical
examiners, and the folks where this person had been deployed. The people who had rendered
first aid and they have a conversation like, what could we have done better? Was everything
done right? It was the tourniquet placed right. And there's no blame, no but everyone, the way
the conversation unfolded, it was very respectful. There was an assumption that
you did everything you could to save this soldier. But let's just look at what happened
and how the medical equipment was placed. And I sat in on one of those meetings and it was
extraordinary. There was so much care and the whole idea behind that is, yeah, let's do this
better if we can. So in my industry, in the car industry, the anatomy of the human body is very
important. And we've learned a lot. I mean, car crashes for a long time, we're the number one
killer. And so we've learned a lot about how to test. And when I joined Ford, for example,
from Toyota, I asked, what makes a Ford engineer different than a Toyota engineer? And the
executives that I talked to were like, I don't know, go talk to them. So I went to our safety
studio and there was a gentleman during lunch working on what looked like an adolescent
child. And I asked them what you're doing. And he said, well, during my lunch hour, I'm
constructing an instrument, a test for abdominal internal bleeding for a mid teen. I said, why?
Because that's not required by law. He said, because my daughter died in a car accident.
And I was a doctor at the Philadelphia Children's Hospital. And I realized I could save more lives
working at Ford than there. So I've been a safety engineer at Ford. And the government
requires us to test certain way. But my daughter died of internal bleeding. So I'm trying to
learn about our safety systems, our airbags, our seat belts, where they're placed on the
body for a different kind of instrument. And that got me really thinking about
how we test and how our industry thinks about the human anatomy. How do you think about,
or not what advice should we give me, but how do you think we should think about the human
body in a car company or an industrial products company with a safety critical device like a Ford?
Do we get anything wrong? Is there anything I should think about?
Well, I would just emphasize for people how far automotive safety has come.
The early days of cars, they were designed to look cool. The safety of the passenger
wasn't really given a lot of thought for a while. And I reported on for stiff for my first book,
the early days, I came across this bunch of books called the STAP Car Crash Conference,
and it was all about what happens to the body when a car hits something. What are the injuries?
And how might we minimize these either by changing the design, because people would hit
the steering wheel, they would hit the chest, or the head would hit the dashboard. Initially,
and there weren't even seatbelts, little lone airbags, and crash test dummies. In order to
calibrate them, they had to do all this work with cadavers. You needed to know, okay, this dummy,
this instrument can tell you what's the force, what kind of deceleration is happening. But you
didn't know, what does that do to a body? So the early days of crash test dummies were, I mean,
this was critical to figure, to have these dummies, to calibrate them correctly using cadavers.
Usually in the beginning, sometimes the engineers themselves up through about 20 miles an hour,
they'd get on the crash sled, the deceleration sled. They just did it themselves, because there was
such a desire to make these cars safer. And then when seatbelts and airbags started to come in,
you needed to test, you need to make sure that they weren't going to cause
serious injuries of their own. So it's been this ongoing effort to bioengineers and automotive
safety folks, and first there was the head-on crash dummy, and then the t-bone crash dummy,
the military came up with a crash test dummy for underbody blast, because that's completely
different kind of forces coming up from below if you drive over an IED. So all of this work going on
in the background to make vehicles safer for people. And I think people, you know, might not
be aware of it, unless of course they read stiff. Yeah, gotta read your book. But
well, it is something that we take a lot of pride in. And, you know, when I asked that same
safety engineer what was a favorite part of your job, and he didn't hesitate, he looked at me,
and he said, when I see a crash and I see people on their phone calling the loved ones,
that's why I do what I do. That was very meaningful for me. And like you said, that does not surprise
me at all that in the early days the engineers at Ford or others would literally just hop in the car
and say, well, no better test than myself. Tell me about your dad, not only his burgundy
Mustang, but also just your dad, like what made him tick and driving with your dad. What was that
like? My dad, he was an unusual dad in that he was 65 when I was born. Wow. Right, so, but that's all
I knew. That was my normal. So, he was just my dad. He was a really interesting guy. He was
born in England. He came over on the Lusitania. I found the ship's manifest because I was like,
did he make that up? No, he actually, he came over in the teens on the Lusitania, fortunately,
before it was torpedoed. He had good timing. He had some good timing. And he basically,
my dad, he was Irish Catholic in England, which means at the time you were lower class,
you were not going to get an education past say eighth grade. Your opportunities were limited.
And he's like, nope. He had a relative in Chicago. He's like, I'm out of here. He ended up getting
his high school equivalency. He went to college. He got his master's degree and he ended up teaching
at Dartmouth, which is where I was born in New Hampshire. So, he was, yeah.
He drove a rear wheel drive Mustang in Dartmouth. It was mid 60s vintage burgundy Mustang. Yeah.
And that's hilarious because my dad used to drive my brother crazy because he would drive below. Back
then, they were not just maximum speed limits. They were minimum like you couldn't go slower
on the freeway. And my dad was always tooling along below that minimum. He was not, and yet
he's got a Mustang, you know? He's got this sexy kind of, I mean, I guess I don't, never
as a kid really appreciated, you know, that my dad's driving a Mustang. You know, it's like a
really cool, I don't know, he's like the world's probably oldest Mustang driver, but he's driving
you know, below the minimum speed limit. Minimum speed level. Car driving came a little bit late
for your life because I read that you loved going around San Francisco with an old Vespa.
I did, yeah. I had a Vespa. I thought I was really cool, but the thing with that Vespa is that it
would foul the spark plugs. So, I'd have to stop and I'd get out, you know, I had a piece of sand
paper to kind of like clean off the contacts. Yeah, clean off the electrodes in the contacts.
Yep. Yeah. The Mini Cooper makes perfect sense to me. That car has the same spirit as the Vespa.
It's a little bit irreverent. It's, it's not something you see every day. It has its own
kind of swagger. And yet it's really efficient transportation like a Vespa. It's very efficient.
Yeah. And I lived in San Francisco where parking is always a problem. So, the Vespa was perfect.
The Mini was as close as you could get in a car to a Vespa, you know. Ideally, I would have driven
one of the original Minis. I have a 1960 Mini Cooper, which I absolutely, one of my favorite cars.
Oh yeah. And the reason is because the Mini came out in 59 and it was a complete revolution.
It was not only a four cylinder front wheel drive, but it was actually transverse. So,
the engine is mounted not kind of north-south, east and west. And it was done that for just
to get the maximum interior space. It was a complete revolutionary design. Not even traditional
springs in the suspension had electro, it would use the motor itself to create the damping for
all four corners of absolutely breakthrough technology. So, to me, Vespa, which is also a
very innovative design, Mini, modern Mini Cooper, all makes perfect sense to me. That's the same
kind of the same DNA. I am absolutely blown away of like all the things we talked about.
I learned a lot. Well, I have to ask you a question that I end all my interviews. I really
don't want to end this interview because I could talk to you forever. I've learned so much.
I know. Let's do that. Let's not stop. Yeah. I want to ask you this question,
which I ask everyone. As a CEO of Ford, what advice would you give me, Jim?
As a CEO, I have so many questions for you as a CEO, not so much advice. Like,
can I ask you a couple of questions and still give you advice?
Of course. Okay. Sure.
As a CEO, like I'm sort of the CEO of my own books. So, that is, on the one hand,
incredible freedom, but also this, you know, responsibility and it's always kind of hanging
over you. For you, does being a CEO give you kind of some freedom or is it just
there's always something to worry about because I'm the CEO?
Well, how I look at it is that, look, my grandfather was an hourly worker at Ford.
His job put my mom through college. So, very much like your life story,
you know, I feel like serving Ford as a CEO is kind of a calling. It's not like a bummer.
I think the cloud over my head is more the pressure of doing the right thing for all of our team,
all the people like my grandfather. And they may be in Brazil or they may be in,
you know, they may be all over the world. If I do my job just right,
you know, a lot of good things will happen and society will be better. And then,
I also think of it maybe differently than you is that it won't be forever. And so,
I better do a good job because it's a precious time and I have to make really good choices
and lead the right way. That's how I look at it. It's not a burden at all. It's actually
something I feel like I chose doing. And even though someone chose me, the board of directors,
I don't really think of that. I think if they chose me because of, you know, who I am and how
I lead and therefore I better do a good job for everyone. So, it's kind of like a little,
little burden you carry, the pressure about it. And that's why I think it's so important to,
you know, be able to be yourself because that's how you put money in the bank and dealing with
that little pressure, that big pressure is that you have that part of you that's still you. I
don't have a lot of time to do that. So, maybe it's doing this podcast and learning from you.
That fills up my bucket like almost nothing else. I got one more. Sure. Less deep. Okay.
Maybe it's, I have, oh, it's a suggestion. It's advice. Good. I love suggestions.
Okay. It's a suggestion. Okay. And maybe this exists in the world, but I don't know of it.
Why can't there be on a car horn a friendly beep and then a get out of my way beep?
Oh, yeah. Totally. Totally. I always, I love this, I love this suggestion. I always imagine
when navigation started, I went, I did a, and I was a long story. I was running Lexus and,
in our country, we can't like refurbish wheelchairs. So, we had this program of collecting
wheelchairs that are dealerships and then reconditioning them at prisons and sending them
overseas for people who had lost armor or leg in conflict. And so, I went to this high maximum
prison in Colorado and I was talking to one of the lifers there and he was like, hey,
dude, what's cars like now? I see the TV, but like, I said, yeah, it's, you know,
we have a navigation system. This was like 20 years ago. Navigation and it'll tell you where
to go. You don't need the Thomas guide or a map anymore. And he's like, oh, I was a bank robber.
I wish I had that. And so, I was thinking about, about your question
in that regard. And as soon as I left the prison, I was thinking, what if we made a voice
customization choice for navigation? Like, what if you had, I like Rodney Dangerfield
or pick your comedian like my cousin, Chris Farley. I would love Chris to be my navigation voice.
Hey, where you going? Come on. That's wrong. Take a U-turn. What are you doing? That would be great.
I think because let's say an electric car, yeah, because an electric car, you don't hear. And so,
if your site limited, you know, is it important for us to have a sound in an electric car when
it's going slow? Because if not, people who don't have sight are going to have problems when they
cross the walk. So, absolutely, we're thinking about, hey, what noise should a car make? And
should that be intentional? Should it be friendly or confrontational or more importantly, an automated
car? Should you have a driving disposition in an automated car? Like, I want to get to the
airport really quick. You lean over to the cab and say, I just need you to get there quick.
I'll give you an extra 20 bucks. But what's the equivalent of that in an automated car that has
to, because the insurance and the responsibility of your automated car really turns to the company,
because the company is driving the car, not a person. And so, companies are conservative.
They're always going to pay attention to the law. And so, should you have a mode of getting quickly
to the airport in an automated car? It's the same kind of idea you had.
Yeah. Does that exist? Has anybody done that?
No. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If you get into Waymo today and you got into Waymo two years ago,
they drive completely different. The Waymo drives very human like now. It'll cut across
three lanes. It'll go through a yellow light. Two years ago, Waymo would never go through a yellow
light ever. Wow. It would always stop. So, in the world of automation and cars and also digital
safety devices, like a horn now is a digital thing. It's no longer analog. Yes, all of these
output sensors, they all have the option of being customized. And we have to decide on those.
It's a great suggestion, but I think it would not stop with a horn. It would keep going
to a lot of other things. Yeah. You know what country in the world has the most challenging
horn design? No. This is a very human question. The most challenging horn design. Horn design.
Like, it has to be the most robust. It has to last the longest. It has to beat more than any other.
You would think it'd be like Sicily or Italy or something. No, it's not that at all. Yeah,
what is it? India. Oh, India. India is a place. Yes. In India, we literally have to spend
50 extra dollars on a horn in India because in India, socially, it's completely normal to use
your horn for any kind of communication in the car. Yeah. Not only is it, they encourage it,
like on the back of a truck, it'll be written, please toodle vigorously. Please toodle vigorously.
Like, let me know when you're passing. Let me know. And they have different horns there.
They have different horns there. The trucks will have normal horns and then they'll have like
passing horns sound. Yeah. Yeah. Same kind of thing. Yeah. It's a little bit like New York
taxi drivers. Yes. Yeah. Just it's constantly. So your suggestion makes perfect sense to me,
but the way I think about it as an automotive person is like, well, we would have to only
have two. And we probably have to go to the government and say, don't make there to be
any more than two and let's standardize both of them. Yeah. Right. So one's like, yeah,
do it. Do it. You have my blessing. All right. Okay. Thank you. I'll get right on that.
Mary, I love our conversation. I have so many other questions, but I think the only question
I never got to and I'm disappointed myself is what makes you tick? I find you one of the most
fascinating interviewers I've ever had and I still am. And maybe that's okay. In fact,
I think it's okay. I'm going to leave that open and I'm going to try to find the answer to that
question because you are one of the most fascinating people I've met and your thank goodness for you.
Well, thank goodness for you. And would that all CEOs thought the way you thought? It's very
impressive. I just, everyone asked me like you, you're the CEO of your company and people go,
Mary, how's it going? And you kind of feel this need to say good or bad. I don't ever say that.
I never say that anymore. I always say I'm learning. Yeah. And it's a bit of a surprise for people.
They're like, wait, the CEO can't be learning. They need to know what's going on. You can't
be learning. And I'm like, no, no, no, you want me learning. I was criticized once for driving
a Chinese car. I think even the president said to me, I don't want my most American car company CEO
driving a Chinese car. I'm like, why? I mean, we always should be learning from the best from
others, even if it's a terrible car. So I think for me, I don't really think of being a CEO. I don't
really think of good days or bad days. I just think we're all learning and I have to action the
learnings, especially if I make a mistake. Well, thank you so much for your time and
I'll let you get back to that beautiful place, Oakland, California.
Thank you so much, Jim. I enjoyed it so much.
About this episode
Mary Roach brings body-science curiosity to the DRIVE conversation, from a signed “emesis basin” she keeps in her glove box to how astronauts handled waste in microgravity. The talk then pivots to race and crash logistics: hydration during long yellow flags, endurance driver rotations, and how seatbelts/airbags are validated with crash sleds and even cadaver-calibrated instrumentation. The episode closes with how automated cars and even horns become software-controlled, culturally shaped signals.
DRIVE welcomes author Mary Roach to discuss her books and the unusual science of the human body, from a signed astronaut emesis basin she keeps in her glove box to the realities of motion sickness in space and Apollo-era bathroom logistics. The conversation also covers advances in automotive safety research, organ donation, crash-test calibration using cadavers, and the challenges of customizing horns and vehicle sounds.
00:00 Meet Mary Roach
00:35 Signed Space Sick Bag
02:22 Space Toilets and Morale
07:11 Replaceable You and Organs
20:54 Evolving Crash Dummies
24:37 Vespa to Mini Cooper
26:51 Pressure and Purpose
29:46 Two Horns Idea
36:44 Always Learning Mindset
DRIVE with Jim Farley is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhi and Kristen Mueller with help from Lori Arpin, Angela Brewer, Max Owen-Dunow, Anne Roberts, Samantha Singhal, Darnell Macon, Brandon Kennedy, and Mark Truby.
Follow Jim:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Jim.Farley
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