Car Keys with Robin Leech and Jay de Marcken – November 10, 2025

He is Robin Leach. He is Jada Markins. This is Car Keys.

Hello to this week's show of Car Keys with Jada Markins.

Robin Leach, it is moving towards predictability.

We may have snow to talk about in a future show.

Fairly shortly if the weather gets cold enough to create snow conditions

that might create dangerous driving conditions,

we talk about dangerous driving conditions often on this show

and from wet leaves to wet roads to treadless tires and all the other things.

But snow will be a new experience.

One of the things I like to talk about in winter time with tires

are the people that put studs in their tires.

I am not particularly a fan of studded tires.

I don't know what Jay is going to say and we will let him say something in a minute.

But I noticed mostly in the spring when they should be off the cars

when they are clattering down the roads,

possibly eating up our asphalt surfaces,

because people have not had their studded tires removed.

And that is what I think about why you have to have studded tires.

Jay, here is a reason to have studded tires. Go ahead.

Not in this neck of the woods.

That is what I was thinking.

If you were in Alaska with ice on the road all the time,

I would think studded tires would be very good to have.

I just consider them a nuisance for road damage.

That is what I think about with studded tires.

Have you ever driven a car with studded tires, Jay, to let our audience know

whether they are not as good at stopping in some certain situations?

In most situations, they are not meant to be driven on ice.

Even then, modern winter tires can do the job.

As well as studded tires.

In most circumstances.

I would agree with that.

There are not too many people driving around with studded tires.

That is true.

I used to have a weekly alert about vehicle safety recall updates

that the National Highway Transportation Safety Group puts out

when they find that there are things that the manufacturers need to do

to communicate with their owners of their vehicles.

I have noted that in recent times, the safety recalls have been minimal

in terms of importance.

It is still so today.

I have not generally brought this up on a regular basis,

but to fill in some of our data this week's show,

the ones that seem to be happening most now

are rearview camera image failures.

Lucid has a recall out.

Mazda now doesn't have it, but they have a front suspension bolt

not tightened properly.

I guess during assembly on some of their models.

Not to mention them, they are not enough out there.

Fuel filler cap seals may leak, fuel.

These are little things.

Chrysler has high voltage battery may fail and cause fire.

Yes, we get to electric vehicles and we get to the electric batteries.

Periodically, they are a problem.

What is the deal with Jeep?

You are a Jeep owner.

Have you gotten any?

Well, no, you don't have the hybrid or electric.

I don't have the hybrid.

We got the Jeep Gerand Cherokee has the hybrid version

and a Wrangler has the hybrid version.

Have you talked to any other dealers?

You are always hovering around.

I haven't talked to any dealers to find out whether they indeed

have ever had a problem on their lots with the cars that come in

off the truck and they wait to sell them.

I don't know what causes the fires to start.

Rivian apparently had a major fire at a production plant

or a dealer that I hadn't seen it.

That makes you really wonder about whether you should own an electric vehicle.

I don't think it makes you want to own one.

It does trigger the question of where to park them and what are the consequences.

I know that in the cities where they have parking garages

and electric vehicles parked in them,

there is a concern of if they do catch fire inside a building,

the intensity and the heat of the fire can cause structural damage to the building.

Obviously that is a serious concern.

That is a very serious concern.

Jay, you go to New York a lot.

Has there been an in-garage fire of an electric vehicle,

notably in publicity?

I don't know, but I know that the concern is there.

I think moving forward, yes.

There are going to be building codes that may be different.

The cars need to become safer.

Yes, we hear stories of electric cars igniting,

but as I've said before, we've had gasoline-powered cars burst into flames, too,

in the past.

Ford Pinto's were notorious.

Jeep had a problem with their Wrangler,

not the Wrangler with the Grand Cherokee a few years ago.

I don't know if you remember this.

This is not that old.

We're talking in the late 90s, early 2000s,

where the only fix they came up with was to add a hitch to the car

because that, in effect, was creating a secondary or primary rear bumper

to protect the gas tank a bit more.

Is that the Pinto or the Jeep?

The Jeep.

When you looked at those old cars and they had the gas tanks in the back,

you could see them hanging low if you were following one.

With the metal straps rusting.

Right.

So, yes, there's an issue with electric cars and the risk of fire,

but hopefully less and less of them will burst into flames.

Back to the vehicle safety recall.

The list I'm looking at, as we're doing this show,

is just basically minimal stuff.

Seed anchor bolts may fail in a truck.

You know, and Mazda, or Toyota's entire line of vehicles from 2022 to 2025 or 6 even,

is listed in this week's recall list.

Back to the rear view camera image may not display,

which is basically saying if you put the car in reverse

or you may not get a backup view,

and it seems to be occurring in several car lines periodically.

Does this pose the question of the following?

With all this technology, are we going to see dashboards start failing

and rear view cameras not working as they age,

or are they just a wiring situation that is just happening?

So, I have a 2015 Volkswagen Touareg.

Yes.

It has a backup camera.

It has some modern functions,

but the technology is not what things are now.

Like, I don't have CarPlayConnect.

There's no crash safety feature on the car.

But, you know, there's a decent, or was a decent rear view camera,

and it stopped working, and of course, I would do like everybody else,

and went online on YouTube and tried to figure out what the problem was

and could figure it out.

The local shop where I bring the car to to get serviced

diagnosed a bad sensor in the rear bumper,

and that automatically triggers the shutdown of the camera.

So, it's not a huge deal.

Did they fix it?

No, because it takes a $50 part and $100 to paint it the color of the bumper,

if I wanted not to have a black dot in my white bumper.

We'll get to colors in a minute if you want.

So, but my plan is to get it fixed, obviously.

It's not a big deal, but yes, you're right.

There are going to be issues with all the electronics,

but I also think that they're more reliable than they were before.

Well, to that end, to reverse my complaint part of the comment,

I will say that in my 2015 Jeep Cherokee, which is a base model,

but it still got an electronic screen for the speedometer and the tachometer

and various other things there, there has been no failure in that

in what is now an 11-year-old vehicle going forward.

And I don't know whether we're going to have,

so I don't know whether it's going to be ensuing failures of all these cars

with these electronic devices and things going forward,

or whether it's just going to be a, like you said,

it's going to be a connection problem somewhere in the line of connectors

that go through vehicles from front to rear

or from engine compartment to the dashboard inside

that corrode and fail on that basis as opposed to the whole display failing.

So, speaking of recalls, I brought two cars to emissions in the last week,

or so both of them were overdue, and I'll get to that in a second, too.

But along with your emissions test result, you now get,

and I don't think we used to get that,

a little recap of all the ongoing recalls and safety issues

that may be an issue with the particular car

and associated with the VIN number.

So, if you've missed that one...

You get that at the emissions station?

Yes.

Correct.

Where is it?

I did... This has not happened to listeners, audience.

This did not happen to me,

and I've just had two recent vehicles go through emissions

in our local emissions area, and I did not get anything,

but whether it was a failed slip or a past slip.

But nothing came through mentioning all the recalls.

Well, maybe there were no outgoing recalls out there,

and if there's no issues, you don't get a little recap.

Okay.

Both of my cars had a little recap sheet.

Two pages, actually.

And what were they, what did they involve,

or what did they eliminate?

Oh, one is on my four-transit connect,

is a door latch issue, which I guess I should get looked at.

But I also figure it's not a huge deal.

But that's also the thing, is a lot of us in our area

take our cars to not dealerships.

So, if we're sloppy about filing our notices

when we get them from dealerships,

the local shops may not see the outstanding recalls.

On the other hand, if that information goes

to the emissions testing stations,

I'm sure that is available through their whatever

software and service they use,

whether it's Carfax or anybody else.

Did it come out on your passing slip,

or was it a separate printout that they handed you?

Yeah, it's a separate printout.

It doesn't affect the pass or fail test.

It's a courtesy notification, which is a good thing.

Interesting.

Which also begs the question of,

is it really a good thing that we don't have any testing anymore,

other than emissions?

I'm happy we don't, because it's a pin in the neck

to go and get our cars tested for safety issues

and get failed for whatever reason.

But the bigger picture is we probably shouldn't have something.

I want to chime in about something that bothers me

about cars that have tail lights on one end

or the other that are out, and Jay's talking about

thinking about whether it would be good to have safety checks

on cars like you have emissions checks every two years,

where you would have the whole car go over, gone over,

and especially with respect to whether the lighting

is all functioning properly on these cars,

because at nighttime now, when vehicles come down

in the dark with one light out or one light on,

let's say you can't tell whether it's a vehicle

or a motorcycle, in many cases,

or if a turn signal doesn't work going one way

or a brake light doesn't work,

and you don't know whether it's out or whether...

And people don't seem to be getting them fixed

in a timely fashion, whereas if you had these cars

inspected for this kind of failure,

they would fail the test and be either cited

for not getting their registration renewed

in a timely fashion if it wasn't fixed

or whatever could be done to enforce the owner

to get the non-operating part of their vehicle fixed.

Look at the bright side. No pun intended.

Bright lights. Yes, bright lights.

Two lights rather than four is better than no lights.

But anyway, let's move on.

One pedal driving, for those of us who drive electric cars,

and I don't very often, or hybrids,

the concept is...

And Robin, have you driven one pedal drive cars

with the accelerator that when you lift off,

the car slows down whether it's electric or hybrid?

Well, I will say that the Q5 Audi

that has a plug-in hybrid

does not have one pedal driving to that degree.

However, there is a definite...

If you let take your foot off the pedal,

there is a computer telling the braking system

to increase the braking force

but not to a point of stopping

versus letting the car coast freely when you're going down a hill.

But it does slow down a bit or not?

Well, not significantly enough to have you slowing down the vehicle.

You could just feel the friction, so to speak,

of the brake of the car being...

Its speed being inhibited from increasing going down a hill,

but it's not really slowing down below what you may be coasting at.

You just can feel it.

Oh, okay, it's now charging the battery,

but it's not doing anything to slow me down enough

so I do not need to use a brake pedal.

So, both with hybrids and electric vehicles,

it seems like some of the German manufacturers,

like Audi, I guess,

but I can also test to this with Porsche and Mercedes.

There is only mild regenerative braking

when getting off the accelerator in an electric car.

And on most cars, you can tune that and adjust it to your preferences.

All the Teslas can stop, right, without using the brake pedal.

It can pretty much stop.

And it is a good feature because you are charging the batteries

when you are just lifting off the accelerator,

and I'm not seeing the gas, and not using the brakes.

It saves on brake wear and it recharges the batteries.

And if you do it smoothly, and here's the key,

you can make your driving very smooth.

And for people who have a tendency to push on the gas,

push on the brake, push on the gas, push on the brake,

it's a good learning exercise in driving smoothly.

And some people just can't get used to it so they just deactivate the feature.

Where are the adjustment controls if there are such adjustment controls

so you can define just how much braking force you get with an electric car.

So you either don't come to a stop completely,

but you do regenerate enough power so that going down a steep hill,

let's say we go down what I call Smith Hill on the way to Canaan,

there used to be people that would stop at the bottom

and then at the top of the hill and start coasting down the hill

and you'll see how fast they got going at the end of the hill part

under the flats and the person that did this to find out what his car would do

ended up going 75 miles an hour from a complete stop at the top of Smith Hill

to the bottom where I guess he maxed out at 75 or maybe it was 80.

But this would be where you might control the degree of friction

in the braking of an electric car if you had a paddle control on the steering wheel.

Maybe Jay, is that where the Tesla control would be?

I think it varies from car to car.

I mean you have to go into settings and change that.

But speaking of paddles, I drove recently a hybrid Mercedes

and realized that when you use the paddles in electric mode,

it actually acted on the regen and you could slow the car down

and if you ticked the left paddle once it would slow it down a little bit,

ticked the left paddle a second time it would slow it more,

but it never brought it to a complete stop.

There's also the issue of whether the tail lights are going on or not.

Yes, I don't know whether that's happening or not.

It's worth having somebody follow you on your phone connection

sometime to see what happens.

I think in the Audi situation, Audi has a very good active braking system

for keeping you on cruise control at the set speed

even if you're going down a hill like Smith Hill,

so that you don't coast significantly above, if at all, above the speed

you've set your cruise control at.

So if you set it at 50, coming around approaching the top of Smith Hill

and go down, you will have active braking.

You can feel the car braking as it will not let it coast up to 70 or even 55.

But that's not an electric car.

That's a fossil fuel car, but that's an active braking system.

The system on the Jeep Cherokee is useless as far as I'm concerned

about holding a set speed under cruise control.

What it does is it downshifts a nine-speed transmission,

which may be in seven or eight, or six or seven.

And as far as I can tell with these nine-speed transmissions,

there is very little braking effect that you can actually find

usefully braking the vehicle.

And we've gotten off the electric vehicle situation here, audience,

but the cruise control tries to keep you at a speed you've set in the Jeep Cherokees

that I have, but the nine-speed transmission is useless in terms of getting it down.

Getting the engine rev up in a significant fashion to actually control the speed

of the car going down the hill.

What it generally does is it goes down and your RPMs go up to the rev limiters,

but it does not use an active braking system.

It tries to use the engine braking system, which is useless.

And I don't know how many other cars...

Now that we're on this tangent, let me ask you this.

Do you use a cruise control a lot?

I do. I use it a lot.

I never use it, ever.

I find it very useful.

I'm an active driver, so I'm very conscious that I'm in cruise control.

And the thing about using a cruise control, I mean, I'll use it at 45 miles an hour

or 55 between Sharon and Lakeville.

So here's the irony.

I'm a firm believer in self-driving cars, and I never use cruise control.

You find all the reasons in the world to dislike to be opposed to self-driving cars,

as far as we know, unless you change your mind.

And yet you use cruise control.

Where's the logic here?

What logic are you trying to address for our audience?

You don't believe in self-driving cars, and yet you use cruise control.

I don't believe in self-driving cars, because I don't like the idea of being able to take your hands off the wheel and do nothing.

That's the part of the self-driving I don't like.

Would you be willing to take your foot off the...

I would use cruise control in an electric car, and I have, but I've driven a Tesla.

It's fine. It's like using a fossil-fueled car.

But I won't take my hands off the wheel and try to read a book, because I've got...

What do you do with your right foot when you get... when you put your in cruise control?

When you use your right foot, you... on the brake...

No, no, but what do you do?

You deactivate the cruise control.

Okay. Once you're in cruise control mode, I'm asking you, where does your right foot go?

I don't know where my right foot goes, actually. Probably just on the foot... on the floor pan below the accelerator.

So if you need to stomp on the brakes...

It's that hard. It's that hard for me to go to the brake and hit the brake as fast as I would if I were on cruise control.

But the time...

I don't have a problem with it. I don't know what your problem with driving is.

But I would guess it's something that... lazy leg or something.

Well, but it's the same. I'm just... I'm arguing with the pedal.

It's, you know, the same time it would take maybe to take your hand off the center console and put it back on steering wheel.

My point is, if you can deal with one, you should be able to deal with the other. I don't do either.

I just... I don't use cruise control.

Well, but...

I guess we're getting into the area of all the drivers like us.

And I don't think many of our audience is probably driving as actively driving as we are.

I don't know that for a fact, but judging from what I see going by me, I don't think people are spending much time sometimes watching the road.

When they're watching their phones and whatever else they're doing to be distracted from actually one where their foot is,

is it right close to the brake pedal so they can get it there real quickly?

Are their hands off the wheels so they can get it real quickly on?

I don't know the answer to that question, Jay.

I was just asking about what you were doing.

Anyway, what else? You had some questions in Q&A. Do you want to put on the show?

No, I think... Well, I just did a little segment of Q&A with you, but...

What else do you have in mind?

Well, the usual situation is I've opened the show with discussing about possibly having some snow shortly after this show has been heard or held,

or maybe even before the show is heard, and it'll be...

We'll see what happens to the road services.

Obviously, the answer is they're going to get slippery because the snow starts getting the surface to slippery before the trucks are actually out,

sometimes applying snowmelt treatment to the services.

I do not know whether the state of Connecticut is using the liquid pre-storm application the way they used to do it.

I think they did it last year, and they might have done it a couple of years before that,

but I'm not sure it's been used continuously.

Whatever chemical it is, you used to be able to see up to four to five or six lines of something that had been applied to the road

and showed up in white, sort of how effective it actually was in terms of melting the snow upon the first contact of snow falling from the sky or not.

I think it was a very corrosive material, which is not scientifically correct necessarily,

that if you didn't wash the underside of your cars because this stuff would probably come off the surface of the road and get splashed up under your car chassis,

you really need to pay attention to doing under car washes, which is something I could say the salt applications to around here.

Although, I must say that the newer cars seem to have far more corrosive resistance,

maybe because of different materials underneath that they used to have back in 40 years ago or less.

Speaking of new cars, anything out there that excites you?

No, I'm not excited by much of the new cars.

I'm less excited, as I've said to our listeners before, about the new fall width lighting systems that are showing up.

I will say that I put my high beams on very angrily the other night manually.

I had to hold the high beam lever on because it was the automatic lighting system that tends to automatically dim your lights so you don't have to.

As one of these, I think it was a pickup truck came with not only the headlights, very bright, but those light bars that you talked about recently.

There was a cross between the headlights, and there were LEDs, and I couldn't read how many LEDs there were, but there was a bar.

It seemed to be about two and a half feet wide, and it was very annoying, blinding.

Even if it was supposed to be aimed lower to not blind the oncoming driver.

More and more people are putting these lighting systems on their pickups.

I must say it's mostly pickups, I think.

I believe they're for off-road use only, supposedly, but people seem to like to turn them on, and they are very distracting at nighttime driving.

I find it very hard and difficult to see some of the sidelines, too, at nighttime, especially when they fade after they've been applied,

which they seem to do too quickly, and that may be in terms of several weeks after they've applied or after the rains have come.

And I'm noting that driving at night, and there may be aging eyes part of it, but also all these different lighting systems are becoming very distracting because they're not synonymous between vehicles.

We'll come back with more comments about driving in the next edition of Carkeys with Robin Leach and Jada Markin.

Carkeys with Robin Leach and Jada Markin is produced at the facilities of WHDD91.9 FM, robinhoodradio.com, Sharon, Connecticut.

Car Keys with Robin Leech and Jay de Marcken – November 10, 2025

About this episode

studded tires

modern winter tires

recall

Lucid

Mazda

Chrysler

high voltage battery

electric vehicles

Jeep Cherokee

Jeep Wrangler

Rivian

Ford Pintos

Jeep Grand Cherokee

hitch

gas tank

Toyota

rear view camera

Volkswagen Touareg

backup camera

bumper

sensor

paint

one pedal driving

Audi Q5 Audi

plug-in hybrid

regenerative braking

Porsche

Mercedes

charging the batteries

electric car

active braking system

cruise control

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