00:00Your team have been so on top of what has become a global concern about the design of door handles in the latest EVs.
00:07And the big concern here, I feel like, in these issues of crashes and battery fires is particularly the troubles that people are having with getting into these vehicles from the outside.
00:19Yes, there are issues with mechanical releases that are different from inside the vehicle and different from the typical way you get out of the vehicle.
00:29But what's really, I think, alarming for people and particularly for first responders is if these door handles are built from the outside to where they just aren't operable when the low voltage battery fails or sort of purposely goes out of commission to sort of prevent against these battery fires, you're just not able to get into the vehicle without bashing through a window or some other means.
00:57And so to have built a vehicle where the external door handles are inoperable without low voltage battery, that's just a problem and sort of on its face a concern for regulators.
01:09Well, while we might see a rush of buying mini hammers and cutters to go inside vehicles at the moment, Craig, which is the latest purchase I've just made, it might be focused on the regulatory pushback.
01:19And you're seeing China in particular looking for feedback, open comment by November the 22nd.
01:25But what else are we expecting Chinese regulators to do here?
01:29Yeah, I think it's interesting that, you know, this is this has been spurred, this rulemaking and this soliciting of views from the industry got underway because there was a similar incident back in March also involving a Xiaomi vehicle.
01:44And so we've seen the regulator in China move pretty quickly here in terms of, you know, there was an incident that got a lot of attention.
01:52There's the second incident. And I think interestingly, we may see some manufacturers not necessarily wait for the regulator to change the rules.
02:01I think Linda Liu's story about this latest incident out today goes into this idea that, you know, some manufacturers already are changing their door handle designs to take into account that this is a concern.
02:15And I think one of the things that we've seen in China's car market is just the level of competition is so intense that any way you can sort of sell your car as being incrementally better from different performance aspects, including safety, you're going to jump at that opportunity.
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