Thanks for downloading Making a Killing. I'm Bethany mc lean. We've had some amazingly fun conversations so far in the series. My favorite, I think, is my old friend Alex Gibney talking about the line between a visionary and a fraudster. It's a theme that we return to again and again. Picture this, when it's time to drive your children to school and go to the office. You don't search frantically for your keys and head out to your garage, worried already about congestion parking you name it. Instead, you simply use an app that summons a car, but not a ride share as we know it, rather a driverless electric car that will arrive within minutes and whisk you and your children to your destinations. Because everyone else is doing the same thing and often sharing rides, there will be less traffic. The world will be cleaner. Mackenzie has claimed that self driving cars could reduce traffic related carbon dioxide ambitions by as much as sixty percent. It will be safer. Driverless car certainly can't text and drive, much less drink and drive. Bloomberg wrote that the self driving car could be a lifesaver in the same class as penicillin in the smallpox vaccine. You won't have to have a garage. That's exciting, and the evangelists say our economy will save billions of dollars or as my guest today, tech crunches Kirsten Kurosak wrote in a recent piece, autonomous vehicles are often painted as a utopian light technology that will transform parking lots into parks and eliminate traffic fatalities. She quotes a source who says that there are some two hundred and seventy eight million cars globally on the road today and that that number is expected to plummet to as low as forty five million once autonomous vehicles take over. Some say that day is now. The BBC said recently, you have probably already bought your last car. Talk about disruptive. From the dawn of the railroads to the advent of the automobile, our economy has shaped and been shaped by transportation. A line in the car sales in the nineteen twenties just might have been a spark for the Great Depression. And owe the money there is to be made. Ford Motor CEO has sent the market for autonomous vehicles and other mobility services could reach ten trillion dollars, half the size of the US GDP. It sure sounds like we are on the cusp of dramatic change, but is that future really all it's cracked up to be. It seems to me that there are many unanswered questions and that so far the path from here to there has been way more difficult than the evangelists would have told you. And while the talk is big, some of the statistics are pointing in a different direction. Car sales in the United States are at their highest level in forty years. According to a Deloitte survey of twenty five thousand consumers, half half of them said they didn't believe autonomous vehicles would be safe. So I'm delighted to be here at a studio near Silicon Valley, which, as an asside, may not end up owning this revolution with Kirsten, who is a top thinker about these issues, and her peace, who will own the future of transportation? She writes, Even if as many predict autonomous vehicles are deployed in mass, the road to that future promises to be long, chaotic, and complex. Indeed, so Kirsten, welcome, Thanks. What's the promise here in its grandest terms. When you've spoken to the biggest believers and autonomous vehicles, what do they tell you about what this holds for the future. Well, it's sort of recently laid it out in the story that you referenced, which is really this utopian vision of zero emissions, because there's oftentimes this link with electric vehicles being used for autonomous vehicles, this idea of access for all, and this idea of the zero deaths and then parking lots suddenly becoming parks. One of the larger design and architecture firms in the world, Gensler, actually advises people to change the way that they design their parking garages in large city or regional project because they imagine a day and they are true believers. I've talked to the co CEO before. They believe that there will be a time pretty soon in which these parking garages aren't used to park cars anymore. They can be converted to offices. So it's a whole, this whole reclaiming space back and then the access piece, and then of course there is zero death's piece. That's the big promise. That's what a true believer envisions and visions sooner rather than later. And when you talk about the access piece, what do you mean by that? So, if you listen to pretty much any autonomous vehicle company, if they've ever made a pitch or a lobbying message, or even in some of their marketing, they talk about reaching people who are elderly, who have people's with disabilities, that type of access, people who might not have a license, and even in other cases, you know kids, So if you don't have a license and you have the inability to drive, well, suddenly now you will have access or so now kids aren't dependent on their parents to get them to their sports whatever. And it's an equalizer, right, And that the child who otherwise wouldn't have had a parent able to take them somewhere the old person is disabled can suddenly now have transportation. Yeah, it does sound like a pretty pretty world. No, it sounds like an amazing world. And you know, as any kind of innovation that happens in our world, it is never easy to get there. And there's also consequences that we might not be considering. Before we move on, let's pause on something you said often this conflation between autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, right, Mary Bara, the CEO of General Motors, recently said she said this was GM's mission, zero missions, zero crashes, zero congestion. So is that electric? Is that automotive? Why do these get conflated? Where are they the same and where are they different? So that all goes back to this idea of the robotaxi and not necessarily the idea of a privately owned passenger vehicle. The belief, I should say for the unit economics is that in order to make money on this type of the future of autonomous vehicles, traditional conventional thinking is that these need to be right hailing, and then right hailing oftentimes happens in cities with increased emissions regulations. You would need hybrid or a low emissions or zero emissions vehicle, and so there is this idea of going towards electric. In the beginning, a lot of the test vehicles were actually hybrids. But there is this, you know, pushing forward of this future of transportation vision and tying it in with evs. Now you see some companies talking about what has always been considered even a more distant future, which is people being able to personally buy a vehicle and have that be an autonomous vehicle, and we're not talking about Tesla but everyone else. That has always been kind of like an outlier. But you're kind of hearing that a little bit more. But when Mary Barrow talks about eliminating congestion, eliminating does and eliminating emissions, it's a tall order because so far we haven't seen other experiments in transportation translate to that. One of the big promises of right hailing was to give people access who didn't normally have access, which it has. There's definitely demand there. They also had a promise of eliminating congestion, and research shows us that is had the opposite effect. Man, try getting around any urban area now Ork to Chicago exactly exactly. So the thing is they haven't solved a single occupancy problem. And so you know what we found is that people don't really love sharing. I mean, as someone who used to live in Chicago, like yeah, after a while wears on you to be on the l for like and jammed like the sardine. And so when people have the means to opt for a single occupancy they do. How are av is going to change that? So maybe they are electric, but are they going to eliminate congestion, and are they going to also eliminate dust? I mean, will it completely eliminate every crash? Well, we're going to get to that. But it's true we as Americans like to be in our own little bubble of a car, right, And so just because there's an EV or just because there's ride sharing available, doesn't mean everybody's going to take advantage of it. And I guess you can think of these things in different spheres, right. So you have evs, and then you have autonomous driving, which could be either people driving their own vehicles autonomously or could be this idea of a fleet where people no longer own their own cars, right. And then there's this idea of the shuttle. So Zoos is kind of an interesting company because they won't even use the term car. They're building their vehicle from the ground up, and whether or not they're successful in that because it is incredibly capitally intensive effort that they're making. I mean, to build it from the ground up and then to operate the services a huge task. But there are some companies like that that are talking about these sort of shuttle unlike car like of vehicles that will change the way that we think about vehicles and then maybe then we'll share. You know, we don't know if that will happen yet, but even if they did that, how is that different than the subway. I mean, that's a vehicle we all share, right right. It seems to work pretty well, at least until they are stopped repairing their subways. But that's another story, right well, but it does speak to infrastructure though, so you know, we could all improve our infrastructure here, but it is capitally intensive. It's another thing, you know, building trains, high speed trains. I mean, the US is behind when it comes to high speed trains. If you were to compare ourselves to Europe or Asia and infrastructure without it, then the answer is, well, instead of these fixed points trains and subways the l in Chicago, we'll have a more dynamic, on demand type of shuttle and then also make it autonomous. And so that's considered the solution that could potentially be. I don't know if it's really going to be lower costs, but that is the one of the promises, right, So that will eliminate transit deserts, you know, people who can't access public transits now and just to use Chicago as an example, because we both live there, have lived there, are you live there now? The closer you are to the L, the higher price the apartment right oftentimes, and so if you have to if you can't afford that and you live far away, then how do you get there? All of a sudden, this idea of a non fixed point dynamic on demand avy shuttle seems really encouraging and something that why wouldn't you want right at zero degrees and snow? Of course? Yeah, who wants to walk like several blocks to the L. So I mean that's the promise. You can see why people really have jumped on it. And there's also potentially money to be made there, Yes, a lot of money to be made, right, So where are we technologically speaking? And would you say, is it fair to say that it's been much harder technologically than people thought it would be to do this? You know a lot of this existed in academia for years, and the early Darba challenges, you know, show that there was a possibility to do this. It's not a question. God, pause for a minute and just tell people what DARPA is, just speaking just in case listeners. So DARPA is an extension of the US government, and in the mid two thousands there were a few of these challenges that were issued to see if teams could send an autonomous vehicle around a course. The first year, no one made it, and through Dave Hall, who founded Velodine as a result of creating this light r the following year teams. It all came out of academia, and then there were some companies that were backing these efforts. They were able to actually complete it. And what happened and why that's important, is that many of these people went back into academia, not all of them did. A direct result of DARPA Grand Challenge led to Google making its own moon shot of the Google self driving project now named Weymo right now named Weymo, and a number of these other people who were involved in different teams out of CMU, out of Michigan and all these major universities have now gone on to being part of some of the more promising startups and companies working on autonomous vehicle technology. So Argo has an investment from Ford VW. I mean the folks from there had participated in in DARPA as well. I mean, so there's there's all sorts of really interesting connections. If you were to look at every single team member at every single university, you would start to see a picture of oh, I know, I know these names. Now they're at this startup or this startup working really assassinating scatter grow. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, So technically speaking, what most people in the autonomous vehicle on the technical side will tell you is that, you know, we've been at ninety nine percent for a long time, and it's that last nine nines that is the difficult part, and there's all sorts of reasons why that is. But we do have better compute than we've ever had before. Sensor technology has absolutely gotten a lot better, and depending on the approach that you use, you could argue that we're right on the cusp of that. But yes, I would say, in a very simplistic way, yes, people I think got excited or thought that they were farther ahead than they were and that that last piece has taken a lot longer. And really, to me, it comes down to when will companies decide that what the product they have is safe enough? And that's a question that actually people have a very hard time answering is how safe is safe enough? And so what we're going to see because of some of the difficulty of answering that question, We're going to see what is called geofenced robotaxi deployments. And a geofence means you think of it in your operational domain, right, which is where does this vehicle operate. A geofence can be a a geographic fence. Think of it that way, a barrier if you will, that that car cannot operate outside of that actual space. But it can also mean limitations on when it operates, so maybe never in rain, or how it operates, so maybe never making a left hand turn. So when people say autonomous vehicles will be here tomorrow, well yeah, that you could technically say that WYMO is now pulled the safety driver out of some of its vehicles in a very specific geofenced area in the suburbs of Phoenix, completely driverless. We just had a freelance reporter take we think one of the first drives first journalism or journalist drives at least in this driver lists vehicle using an app and inhaling it on public streets. I might be terrified, Well, it's people get used to early fast. I mean, I've been on a number of these autonomous vehicle drives and it's amazing how easily we kind of give give up concern on them. And that's kind of the difficulty, is that people kind of like opt in and trust it. Maybe before this shit, I'm not sure, like I've certainly trusted it, trusted things like that before. And so Waimo is an example. They are they're not charging it, so these are free, but you could see a time soon I would say, I would say before the end of the year where they're going to start charging. I mean, that's my prediction. It's really interesting. So there's a fascinating psychological component involved here. What does it take us to trust them? And then when we do trust them, do we trust too much? Right? Right? And then there's this moral question that you raise, which which is really interesting too because it's a different one for Silicon Valley to contend with, because Silicon Valley is a customed to rolling out vaporware products that don't work perfectly, and you'll figure out how to make them work as users iterate. But here it's really different. For some reason, we have we're okay with people killing people, but we're not okay with machines killing people. Right, So there's this idea that the driverless car has to be perfect before before it can be rolled out, and can we ever get to perfect? Well, so doctor gil Pratt, who's with the Toyota Research Institute, is a really interesting guy, and he has talked about this very thing, which is that robots, we don't give them the same forgiveness value. Right, we have thirty seven thousand i think traffic desks last year in the United States. But would humans even accept one death from a robot? Well, we've had a couple, right sort of, Well, yeah, we've had We've had the one fatal crash in Tempe with an Uber self driving car which did have a human safety driver behind the wheel. But he's he checked out back to your other points, yeah, yeah, so he actually would agree with you and say that that there isn't a lot of the comfort level with in the forgiveness level, I'd say it's pretty low. It's kind of informing how Toyota is approaching this whole idea of autonomy, and they have this philosophy where it will act as a guardian sort of operating in the background. And we'll take over if you need. And it's actually, in my mind, almost a harder challenge in a way, but it is informing some of what Toyota is doing. For example, if that's the direction that goes, doesn't it obviate the advantages? In other words, suddenly, if you have autonomous vehicles but a human still has to be there, aren't we taking away some of the utopian promise of this? Well. Toyota's approach is kind of a dual approach, which is, on the one hand, they absolutely see a desire to have what we would call full fully driverless, meaning our human being does not need to be in the loop at all. And then they also see a need for essentially having automation in privately owned vehicles, so which would get them closer to that zero death goal as opposed to just going all in with a VS for everyone and have them all be robotaxis. So they're taking a dual approach, And there's some automakers by the way, that are like kind of they won't necessarily spelled out, but it's sort of like that seems to be how it's shaking out, just that they're all taking a little bit slightly different technical approaches. So when you look at the competitive landscape, who's most interesting to you? Who do you think of as the leaders in this? Or is that shifting so quickly that it's hard to even keep track of that. I mean, so I could give you some names and then a year from now I'll have a whole new group of names. There's a few startups I'm keeping an eye on, and so I'll put them in category. So there are companies like, of course, I'm always going to pay attention to what Tesla's doing because they sort of do everything backwards in a lot of ways and just throw you know, they throw technology out there. They have huge fan base that is absolutely happy to be beta testers, and the Muscans weeping right, and then the rest of us are like, you know, shocked and scared about what's going to happen. So I always pay attention to them. Before you go on pause a little on that point. They do everything backwards, what do you mean, Well, Tesla is very good design and prototyping and thinking on their feet, but they do things backwards. From a traditional automaker, a traditional automaker would take seven years to bring to ensure that every piece of their vehicle is of automotive grade that it would gone through a number of iterations. It would be on the and this is changing by the way, but it would go on the auto shows circuit and it would be very specific. And Tesla has done none of that, right, So they made headlines and made their model less. One of them are popular cars and like very innovative with this seventeen inch screen, but it's not automotive grade, right, But they put it out there. They will roll out software updates and you know, with fun games and also changing the performance of the vehicle or fixing software bugs. Other automakers don't do that. So it's completely different from how other automakers have ever acted or conducted their business before. And I'm not saying it is as good or bad. It's just it's just different. It's just different in reality. Yeah, So before we come back to Tesla, let's finish just thinking about the competitive landscape and Weymo, right, you pay it's a lot of attention. I pay a lot of attension to Weymo. I pay a lot of tension to Zoos because I'm fascinated with this idea of building a vehicle from the ground up. And what they're going to do with it. I think it's a mistake to not be considering some of the Chinese startups and also what some of the OEMs in Korea and Japan are doing. Hundai just as basically put like thirty five billion dollars towards this idea of autonomous of vehicles any five billion oh Man and mobility, and in the Korean government is you know, doubling down also on that in making huge efforts and mobility. So to not focus on those companies a huge mistake. Just to focus on SLOC and Valley would be a huge mistake. But then there are other companies like Voyage is really interesting. They're an autonomous vehicle company. They're operating in retirement communities. And one is the Villages, which is in Florida, and it's it's like two hundred thousand people there. It goes across county lines. It's huge, and there's a human safe driver behind the wheel right now. But they are getting closer and closer to pulling that person out. But they're starting and that's their business model right now. They're starting in these retirement communities and then they're going to slowly have that geofence, that operational design domain expand, and so about providing access to people who haven't had it before. That's awesome, right, So it's interesting, although I will say that they have a vehicle that you could not put a wheelchair in right now, no one does. So I'm waiting for that idea to come around. I'm waiting for that vehicle that essentially replaces paratransit because if you speak to anyone, any person with a disability who is wheelchair abound, it is a huge problem for them to be able to get a ride. So I'm waiting for that one. But there's there's a number you get kind of the picture. There's there's there's companies in Michigan. There's companies. I mean, I pay attention to what Argo's doing. They have investment from two major automakers. Mean to not focus on them is again another huge mistake. So and then there's like these smaller startups that no one's ever heard of. I think you're going to hear about them more. There's a company called Ghost that I'm keeping an eye on, and they have a very interesting approach and really basically turning your personal vehicle into an autonomous vehicle. Ah, so taking your existing car and turning it into an autonomous vehica. I mean there are certain requirements like is be a newer model or whatever, and so there I think a company to watch and just that they're taking a different approach. Of course, I always like to pay attention to what Comma dot Ai is doing. I don't even know who that is. So that is founded by George Hots. George Hots also known as Geohote. It was the well he was a kid at the time. He was one who jailbroke the iPhone. He's done a number of other things too, But Comma dot Ai is an aftermarket kit that he was creating. He has some venture backing him that you could turn certain model cars into kind of a Level two meaning an advanced driver assistant system that handles some highway driving. Got a letter from NITZA and then he basically open sourced everything. So it wasn't a season to desist order, but I think it was treated a little bit like that, and so they kind of pivoted a bit and they've kind of open sourced all there. So if you were really motivated, you can buy their kit, the hardware piece, and then you can hack your own car. Yeah, exactly. So I have two thoughts coming to mind and hearing this. One is that it is analogis in some ways to the early days of the personal computer revolution, right listening to you talk with these tools that people can use to essentially hack things themselves. But the other thing that's so interesting we got used to over the last however, many decades of thinking of the car industry. The vehicle industry is just dominated by a handful of big names, right, But that's not the way it was back in the heyday when the auto industry was first getting started in the late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen hundreds, they were hundreds and hundreds of companies and then they all kind of got combined into GM, Chrysler, Ford. So we're almost back in that time of creative proliferation, right in a way that's really interesting. Yeah. I mean with a couple of caveats. One is manufacturing making cars is still hard, and I think that Tesla would be the first to agree they were right around. I don't know if you remember this, but post recession we're still sort of in the drugs of that. In two thousand and nine, two thousand and ten, there was a lot of interest around clean tech, and there were a number of car companies that were little startups Coda, Fisker, Tesla and all those None of those survived early. Tesla is the one of the few so still are one of the only ones. So we still haven't seen any car manufacturer, like new car companies come up that have had the same level of success as Tesla. They've folded or whatever. What we are seeing, though, to agree with you, is this kind of interesting revolution and evolution of the autonomous vehicle industry and the number of companies. And I will say, yeah, I think that we've already seen some closed down, and I think we're gonna get a second wave and then we're going to see more consolidation again. And it'll be interesting to see how many of these little startups actually turn into big companies and if the rest of them just get gobbled up by automakers. I don't think all of them will. I think some of them will be come eventually like the size of a Weymo today. Yeah, I just don't know which ones. I mean, I could guess, but I'd probably be wrong. And there's something encouraging about that. Let's talk about Tesla, but talk about Tesla versus Weymo because it's interesting, right. Weymo seems to me to be fairly quiet. You don't hear a lot of big promises from them about what they're doing. And then you have Elon Musk on the other hand saying there's going to be a fleet of what a million robotaxis on the road by twenty twenty. How do you think about those two companies? I treat them totally differently. Okay, yeah, well yeah, Weymo is pretty relatively quiet. Well, first of all, there's the obvious. I mean, Elon Musk is a personality and a lot of people are committed to him as a person. He's incredibly high profile. Waymo doesn't really have. They certainly have executives, but there's just no one. I can't think of many other companies that have like this, almost a cult of personality around them, and a lot of followers who believe in what he says, and so anything he says or anything that he tweets, I should say, gets covered and is written about in a way that we if Weymo does, it just doesn't. So yeah, Weymo also just look at how it was started. It was started under this premise of not necessarily initially being like this is going to be a commercial business. I mean, it was considered a project. Now internally, there's probably some aspirations early on to turn that into a commercial business, but it wasn't treated as such. It wasn't already a company that had a product it And there I've definitely heard some criticism of people saying, well, why did it take them so long to get here? You know a lot of people have jumped on those coattails and were worked there and now have gone and start their own companies. Tussla is doing something very different whiches. You know, they are selling vehicles and they are using over their software updates to improve the performance of the vehicle and improve some of the advanced driver assistance features in the vehicle. But we should say right now tuslas are not self driving. So let's be clear, like, these are not self driving cars. They are considered level two plus, which is kind of the SAE terms are difficult, not everyone understands them, but this is an advanced driver assistance system with increasing levels of automation, but is not fully self driving car. A driver has to be in the loop and absolutely should be, and we've all seen the videos of people not doing that. Yeah, but this is not a driver least car. But even the name is a little bit of a game or a wink when they call it autopilot right well, and also don't forget that they're selling an upgrade package that they call full self driving AH or the acronyms FSD. And so the interesting thing is when FSD was first put as an option, it was put out my believe it was in twenty sixteen, and so people leasing those cars leased them and paid you know that amount, and right now the cost kids is going up. It's about six thousand dollars now for this upgrade. And you know, if you leased a car, those leases are up now and you never actually got your full self driving. And you know, there are people who have absolutely pushed back and they're no longer super fans, but there are a ton of fans still who's seem willing to just throw the money and in the hopes of being part of this revolution. But my guess is, and sort of my theory all along has been the more cars they sell, the less tolerance some people will be. Because early adopters are always going to be like up for the fun of it, right, and they're going to be more forgiving of the mistakes. Absolutely. I mean I've talked to numerous owners over the years who loved Tesla and are always like constantly annoyed by their cars, but they love being a part of this big experiment. And it's just it's an interesting study in like human psychology. But you know, that's for another show that now that's totally fascinating. It is definitely part of it's part of this whole thing, right, here's the interesting thing. So, like, if Tesla is successful in what they're doing, and I have some real doubts about it, on you know, they do have a new computer chip, the custom chip that they build that they have in their newer models, that is supposed to be able to handle basically to unlock this full self driving, and that the only thing that has left if you were to listen and fully believe everything Elon Musk is saying, is that once it gets to quote unquote feature complete, it's really just the regulatory bodies that are going to be preventing that. But on a federal level, to be clear, if you're have a vehicle that has passed FMBSS, which is like you have to have a seatbelt, and you have to have you know, breaks and pedals and things. If your car meets all those standards. There is technically, right now, not a federal guideline that would prevent you having an autonomous vehicle. Really, that doesn't mean that you can't be right hailing. You can't charge money in the state of California, you know, you can't. You know, there's all these other things that could you know, happen and prevent certain things. But right now, on a federal level, there's no regulation preventing this. I mean, there's nothing that's going to prevent like let's say Comma, dat Ai or ghost you know, as far as I know, and I've asked federal regulators, there are guidelines, but they're not. So this is a different This is a different thing. So WAYMA is trying to do a ride hailing service. They're also, by the way, working on other things too. They're working on self driving trucks and other uses for their technology. But if we're talking about the Robotoxi service, they would they would operate the service. These would not be privately owned cars. This is very different from what Tesla is doing, which is they're privately owned cars that are in their view, going to get better over time in terms of automation, and that then those people can use those. So it's a bit of an aside. Is the regulatory system lagging behind where it needs to be? Yeah, I mean there are guidelines right now, but we also live in a country where there's states rights as well, and so some states have jumped forward to bring in business by the way, to make it more welcoming, and others. Some are more regulatory averse and some are welcoming of the regulation, in California being one of them as a hotbed of testing activity. Right, So you have the DMV in the state of California, you have to have a permit to test your autonomous vehicles on public roads. But if you want to operate a ride healing service, that is through the Public Utilities Commission, and you're not allowed to charge for rides. So it's two different permits and it's so it's so this is really regulatory either arbitrage you could think of it, or just a regulatory morass through which you have to tread sure, and I think that it's in part because Calvinia is a hotbed of or a test beat, if you will, and where a lot of these companies are located. And also on many of these cities were burned by ride healing, and so they do not want that to happen again, burned by ride hailing in the sense that it increased congestion, rather than they're dating it. And also it just there were a lot of let's look at the very early days of Uber was all about going into a city and then asking for forgiveness in some cases, and so that created a lot of chaos. And while a lot of that has been worked out, I mean, people kind of might forget about those very early days, and but they're scars. Yeah, for sure, it'sn't that interesting. I hadn't. I hadn't thought about that, And that's that's really interesting. And there's a Bloomberg headline recently Tesla's autopilot could save the lives of millions, but it will kill some people first. And I did think it was interesting that because of the way Tesla is innovating and letting these first adopters test and in some cases rest their lives, right, but they're getting the real time feedback. That's what's key to developing the software to make this work. So there is some argument maybe that being aggressive could and being aggressive with the rules and with the safety could actually let Tesla make a breakthrough ahead of other people. Well, I mean, I think Ellon would agree with you. And in fact, he has aggressively come out against journalists who have brought up concerns about autopilot because there have been a few deaths in which autopilot was engaged, the most famous being in Josh Brown in Florida, yea, and that reporting around that and even questioning even the name autopilot and in just any kind of reporting around it has He has push back and said, you are essentially killing people by reporting on this, because if regulatory bodies come in and prevent autopilot being used, then you'll cause more deaths as a result. And so he would agree with this an interesting version it's not my fault. It's your fault for telling people this is happening, right, not my fault for causing it. Right. Journalists are easy targets. But I do think that it goes to an interesting point that I wish he did more of, which is, let's forget about autopilot for a minute, and let's talk about the whole idea of zero deaths. There are things that we could do today as a society and federal and state regulatory bodies that could help decrease the number of people who are being killed and crashes today without autonomous vehicles, and that is making things like driver's license as more difficult. And there's a whole host of things and safety features that you could you could have that would actually reduce it. Would it get you to zero probably not no, but it would definitely reduce it. And yet we don't do that. And so it's I find it kind of very interesting that we're like jumping over some of the like uneasy practical things that you know, people won't have the freedom to drive and all this stuff, and instead of going to the technological answer, instead of just like potentially creating more regulations. No one wants that, right, especially not in the United States. Well, the utopia is always a lot more fun to imagine than than the messy practicalities either involved in getting there or and just making things a little bit better today. Right, It's easier to imagine a new world. And aren't there a lot of questions around this that cities have to answer too, because a lot of this is are been planning issues right, and what cities decide to enable, And so the idea that this utopia is just somehow seamlessly going to come into being because the technology exists, well, it's a matter of personal choice what people choose to do, but it's also a matter of what cities choose to enable, right, right, the hottest job in Silicon Valley or any place that is looking to like launch their evies any where is going to be a really good government relations and policy person who is able to walk into cities and help them understand today exactly what they want and work with them proactively to do things like congestion pricing and be okay with that and then curb pricing, because what type of world do we imagine, Like, where are these avies going to go? If there are no parking lots, they will eventually have to be maintained and charge and all those things. But are they just going to simply circle the block? Will they be parked? How long will they park? Will they know? There are all those questions that have them been answered. Is that an opportunity for cities, for example, to make more money by if a car pulls over and is iLINK for a bit on a curb in a busy area, can they capture some money from that? You know, all those questions. So like every av company should absolutely like if they don't already, and I think they all do, but is to have really good people on that government relations and policy and legal side. Let's say you jump through all the hoops and you get all the technical stuff down, well, then you have to operate a business, and how are you going to do that, and so how you operate in a city as part of that. I don't know if there is going to be a need for all this extra special infrastructure, because the thing is, it's not like we snap our fingers tomorrow and suddenly the world is just a vis It will have lots of human driven cars in there as well, and so to just suddenly change roads just I just don't see that happening right away at all, especially with bike pass right. I mean, we haven't even figured out like basic infrastructure on how to deal with the humans that we have driving cars and on bikes and scooters right now. So a few autonomous vehicles is I doubt will you up end cities now? Eventually that might change and happen, but it's not going to happen overnight. Like many revolutions, there will be a series of evolutions before we get to the revolution. Right. Thank you so much for being here today. It was really fun. Thank you. So. I knew there was a gap, I mean, the utopian vision and the reality isn't there always, but I hadn't thought of all the ways in which there was a gap. I thought it was primarily technological, that last one percent about which Kirsten speaks, But there's also a logical gap. Just because avs are possible doesn't mean they're going to reduce congestion and bring all the other benefits the believers promise. There may also be a behavioral gap. Will Americans, who after all, love their cars, really adopt avs and mass And then there just may be a governmental gap. If cities are going to enable or disable avs, it may take some advanced planning to make it all work. Given my utter lack of driving skills, and less selfishly, the potential that avs have to make transportation possible for those who are currently deprived. I actually hope in this case that the utopians proved to be correct. On a side note, if you're interested in further discussion of Elon Musk, I recorded a podcast with journalist Lynette Lopez about America's favorite visionary that I think you might enjoy listening. To Make You a Killing physical production of Pushkin Industries and Chalkin Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison mcclein no relation and Making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Lobell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany mcclin. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.

Thanks for downloading Making a Killing. I'm Bethany mc lean. We've had some amazingly fun conversations so far in the series. My favorite, I think, is my old friend Alex Gibney talking about the line between a visionary and a fraudster. It's a theme that we return to again and again. Picture this, when it's time to drive your children to school and go to the office. You don't search frantically for your keys and head out to your garage, worried already about congestion parking you name it. Instead, you simply use an app that summons a car, but not a ride share as we know it, rather a driverless electric car that will arrive within minutes and whisk you and your children to your destinations. Because everyone else is doing the same thing and often sharing rides, there will be less traffic. The world will be cleaner. Mackenzie has claimed that self driving cars could reduce traffic related carbon dioxide ambitions by as much as sixty percent. It will be safer. Driverless car certainly can't text and drive, much less drink and drive. Bloomberg wrote that the self driving car could be a lifesaver in the same class as penicillin in the smallpox vaccine. You won't have to have a garage. That's exciting, and the evangelists say our economy will save billions of dollars or as my guest today, tech crunches Kirsten Kurosak wrote in a recent piece, autonomous vehicles are often painted as a utopian light technology that will transform parking lots into parks and eliminate traffic fatalities. She quotes a source who says that there are some two hundred and seventy eight million cars globally on the road today and that that number is expected to plummet to as low as forty five million once autonomous vehicles take over. Some say that day is now. The BBC said recently, you have probably already bought your last car. Talk about disruptive. From the dawn of the railroads to the advent of the automobile, our economy has shaped and been shaped by transportation. A line in the car sales in the nineteen twenties just might have been a spark for the Great Depression. And owe the money there is to be made. Ford Motor CEO has sent the market for autonomous vehicles and other mobility services could reach ten trillion dollars, half the size of the US GDP. It sure sounds like we are on the cusp of dramatic change, but is that future really all it's cracked up to be. It seems to me that there are many unanswered questions and that so far the path from here to there has been way more difficult than the evangelists would have told you. And while the talk is big, some of the statistics are pointing in a different direction. Car sales in the United States are at their highest level in forty years. According to a Deloitte survey of twenty five thousand consumers, half half of them said they didn't believe autonomous vehicles would be safe. So I'm delighted to be here at a studio near Silicon Valley, which, as an asside, may not end up owning this revolution with Kirsten, who is a top thinker about these issues, and her peace, who will own the future of transportation? She writes, Even if as many predict autonomous vehicles are deployed in mass, the road to that future promises to be long, chaotic, and complex. Indeed, so Kirsten, welcome, Thanks. What's the promise here in its grandest terms. When you've spoken to the biggest believers and autonomous vehicles, what do they tell you about what this holds for the future. Well, it's sort of recently laid it out in the story that you referenced, which is really this utopian vision of zero emissions, because there's oftentimes this link with electric vehicles being used for autonomous vehicles, this idea of access for all, and this idea of the zero deaths and then parking lots suddenly becoming parks. One of the larger design and architecture firms in the world, Gensler, actually advises people to change the way that they design their parking garages in large city or regional project because they imagine a day and they are true believers. I've talked to the co CEO before. They believe that there will be a time pretty soon in which these parking garages aren't used to park cars anymore. They can be converted to offices. So it's a whole, this whole reclaiming space back and then the access piece, and then of course there is zero death's piece. That's the big promise. That's what a true believer envisions and visions sooner rather than later. And when you talk about the access piece, what do you mean by that? So, if you listen to pretty much any autonomous vehicle company, if they've ever made a pitch or a lobbying message, or even in some of their marketing, they talk about reaching people who are elderly, who have people's with disabilities, that type of access, people who might not have a license, and even in other cases, you know kids, So if you don't have a license and you have the inability to drive, well, suddenly now you will have access or so now kids aren't dependent on their parents to get them to their sports whatever. And it's an equalizer, right, And that the child who otherwise wouldn't have had a parent able to take them somewhere the old person is disabled can suddenly now have transportation. Yeah, it does sound like a pretty pretty world. No, it sounds like an amazing world. And you know, as any kind of innovation that happens in our world, it is never easy to get there. And there's also consequences that we might not be considering. Before we move on, let's pause on something you said often this conflation between autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, right, Mary Bara, the CEO of General Motors, recently said she said this was GM's mission, zero missions, zero crashes, zero congestion. So is that electric? Is that automotive? Why do these get conflated? Where are they the same and where are they different? So that all goes back to this idea of the robotaxi and not necessarily the idea of a privately owned passenger vehicle. The belief, I should say for the unit economics is that in order to make money on this type of the future of autonomous vehicles, traditional conventional thinking is that these need to be right hailing, and then right hailing oftentimes happens in cities with increased emissions regulations. You would need hybrid or a low emissions or zero emissions vehicle, and so there is this idea of going towards electric. In the beginning, a lot of the test vehicles were actually hybrids. But there is this, you know, pushing forward of this future of transportation vision and tying it in with evs. Now you see some companies talking about what has always been considered even a more distant future, which is people being able to personally buy a vehicle and have that be an autonomous vehicle, and we're not talking about Tesla but everyone else. That has always been kind of like an outlier. But you're kind of hearing that a little bit more. But when Mary Barrow talks about eliminating congestion, eliminating does and eliminating emissions, it's a tall order because so far we haven't seen other experiments in transportation translate to that. One of the big promises of right hailing was to give people access who didn't normally have access, which it has. There's definitely demand there. They also had a promise of eliminating congestion, and research shows us that is had the opposite effect. Man, try getting around any urban area now Ork to Chicago exactly exactly. So the thing is they haven't solved a single occupancy problem. And so you know what we found is that people don't really love sharing. I mean, as someone who used to live in Chicago, like yeah, after a while wears on you to be on the l for like and jammed like the sardine. And so when people have the means to opt for a single occupancy they do. How are av is going to change that? So maybe they are electric, but are they going to eliminate congestion, and are they going to also eliminate dust? I mean, will it completely eliminate every crash? Well, we're going to get to that. But it's true we as Americans like to be in our own little bubble of a car, right, And so just because there's an EV or just because there's ride sharing available, doesn't mean everybody's going to take advantage of it. And I guess you can think of these things in different spheres, right. So you have evs, and then you have autonomous driving, which could be either people driving their own vehicles autonomously or could be this idea of a fleet where people no longer own their own cars, right. And then there's this idea of the shuttle. So Zoos is kind of an interesting company because they won't even use the term car. They're building their vehicle from the ground up, and whether or not they're successful in that because it is incredibly capitally intensive effort that they're making. I mean, to build it from the ground up and then to operate the services a huge task. But there are some companies like that that are talking about these sort of shuttle unlike car like of vehicles that will change the way that we think about vehicles and then maybe then we'll share. You know, we don't know if that will happen yet, but even if they did that, how is that different than the subway. I mean, that's a vehicle we all share, right right. It seems to work pretty well, at least until they are stopped repairing their subways. But that's another story, right well, but it does speak to infrastructure though, so you know, we could all improve our infrastructure here, but it is capitally intensive. It's another thing, you know, building trains, high speed trains. I mean, the US is behind when it comes to high speed trains. If you were to compare ourselves to Europe or Asia and infrastructure without it, then the answer is, well, instead of these fixed points trains and subways the l in Chicago, we'll have a more dynamic, on demand type of shuttle and then also make it autonomous. And so that's considered the solution that could potentially be. I don't know if it's really going to be lower costs, but that is the one of the promises, right, So that will eliminate transit deserts, you know, people who can't access public transits now and just to use Chicago as an example, because we both live there, have lived there, are you live there now? The closer you are to the L, the higher price the apartment right oftentimes, and so if you have to if you can't afford that and you live far away, then how do you get there? All of a sudden, this idea of a non fixed point dynamic on demand avy shuttle seems really encouraging and something that why wouldn't you want right at zero degrees and snow? Of course? Yeah, who wants to walk like several blocks to the L. So I mean that's the promise. You can see why people really have jumped on it. And there's also potentially money to be made there, Yes, a lot of money to be made, right, So where are we technologically speaking? And would you say, is it fair to say that it's been much harder technologically than people thought it would be to do this? You know a lot of this existed in academia for years, and the early Darba challenges, you know, show that there was a possibility to do this. It's not a question. God, pause for a minute and just tell people what DARPA is, just speaking just in case listeners. So DARPA is an extension of the US government, and in the mid two thousands there were a few of these challenges that were issued to see if teams could send an autonomous vehicle around a course. The first year, no one made it, and through Dave Hall, who founded Velodine as a result of creating this light r the following year teams. It all came out of academia, and then there were some companies that were backing these efforts. They were able to actually complete it. And what happened and why that's important, is that many of these people went back into academia, not all of them did. A direct result of DARPA Grand Challenge led to Google making its own moon shot of the Google self driving project now named Weymo right now named Weymo, and a number of these other people who were involved in different teams out of CMU, out of Michigan and all these major universities have now gone on to being part of some of the more promising startups and companies working on autonomous vehicle technology. So Argo has an investment from Ford VW. I mean the folks from there had participated in in DARPA as well. I mean, so there's there's all sorts of really interesting connections. If you were to look at every single team member at every single university, you would start to see a picture of oh, I know, I know these names. Now they're at this startup or this startup working really assassinating scatter grow. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, So technically speaking, what most people in the autonomous vehicle on the technical side will tell you is that, you know, we've been at ninety nine percent for a long time, and it's that last nine nines that is the difficult part, and there's all sorts of reasons why that is. But we do have better compute than we've ever had before. Sensor technology has absolutely gotten a lot better, and depending on the approach that you use, you could argue that we're right on the cusp of that. But yes, I would say, in a very simplistic way, yes, people I think got excited or thought that they were farther ahead than they were and that that last piece has taken a lot longer. And really, to me, it comes down to when will companies decide that what the product they have is safe enough? And that's a question that actually people have a very hard time answering is how safe is safe enough? And so what we're going to see because of some of the difficulty of answering that question, We're going to see what is called geofenced robotaxi deployments. And a geofence means you think of it in your operational domain, right, which is where does this vehicle operate. A geofence can be a a geographic fence. Think of it that way, a barrier if you will, that that car cannot operate outside of that actual space. But it can also mean limitations on when it operates, so maybe never in rain, or how it operates, so maybe never making a left hand turn. So when people say autonomous vehicles will be here tomorrow, well yeah, that you could technically say that WYMO is now pulled the safety driver out of some of its vehicles in a very specific geofenced area in the suburbs of Phoenix, completely driverless. We just had a freelance reporter take we think one of the first drives first journalism or journalist drives at least in this driver lists vehicle using an app and inhaling it on public streets. I might be terrified, Well, it's people get used to early fast. I mean, I've been on a number of these autonomous vehicle drives and it's amazing how easily we kind of give give up concern on them. And that's kind of the difficulty, is that people kind of like opt in and trust it. Maybe before this shit, I'm not sure, like I've certainly trusted it, trusted things like that before. And so Waimo is an example. They are they're not charging it, so these are free, but you could see a time soon I would say, I would say before the end of the year where they're going to start charging. I mean, that's my prediction. It's really interesting. So there's a fascinating psychological component involved here. What does it take us to trust them? And then when we do trust them, do we trust too much? Right? Right? And then there's this moral question that you raise, which which is really interesting too because it's a different one for Silicon Valley to contend with, because Silicon Valley is a customed to rolling out vaporware products that don't work perfectly, and you'll figure out how to make them work as users iterate. But here it's really different. For some reason, we have we're okay with people killing people, but we're not okay with machines killing people. Right, So there's this idea that the driverless car has to be perfect before before it can be rolled out, and can we ever get to perfect? Well, so doctor gil Pratt, who's with the Toyota Research Institute, is a really interesting guy, and he has talked about this very thing, which is that robots, we don't give them the same forgiveness value. Right, we have thirty seven thousand i think traffic desks last year in the United States. But would humans even accept one death from a robot? Well, we've had a couple, right sort of, Well, yeah, we've had We've had the one fatal crash in Tempe with an Uber self driving car which did have a human safety driver behind the wheel. But he's he checked out back to your other points, yeah, yeah, so he actually would agree with you and say that that there isn't a lot of the comfort level with in the forgiveness level, I'd say it's pretty low. It's kind of informing how Toyota is approaching this whole idea of autonomy, and they have this philosophy where it will act as a guardian sort of operating in the background. And we'll take over if you need. And it's actually, in my mind, almost a harder challenge in a way, but it is informing some of what Toyota is doing. For example, if that's the direction that goes, doesn't it obviate the advantages? In other words, suddenly, if you have autonomous vehicles but a human still has to be there, aren't we taking away some of the utopian promise of this? Well. Toyota's approach is kind of a dual approach, which is, on the one hand, they absolutely see a desire to have what we would call full fully driverless, meaning our human being does not need to be in the loop at all. And then they also see a need for essentially having automation in privately owned vehicles, so which would get them closer to that zero death goal as opposed to just going all in with a VS for everyone and have them all be robotaxis. So they're taking a dual approach, And there's some automakers by the way, that are like kind of they won't necessarily spelled out, but it's sort of like that seems to be how it's shaking out, just that they're all taking a little bit slightly different technical approaches. So when you look at the competitive landscape, who's most interesting to you? Who do you think of as the leaders in this? Or is that shifting so quickly that it's hard to even keep track of that. I mean, so I could give you some names and then a year from now I'll have a whole new group of names. There's a few startups I'm keeping an eye on, and so I'll put them in category. So there are companies like, of course, I'm always going to pay attention to what Tesla's doing because they sort of do everything backwards in a lot of ways and just throw you know, they throw technology out there. They have huge fan base that is absolutely happy to be beta testers, and the Muscans weeping right, and then the rest of us are like, you know, shocked and scared about what's going to happen. So I always pay attention to them. Before you go on pause a little on that point. They do everything backwards, what do you mean, Well, Tesla is very good design and prototyping and thinking on their feet, but they do things backwards. From a traditional automaker, a traditional automaker would take seven years to bring to ensure that every piece of their vehicle is of automotive grade that it would gone through a number of iterations. It would be on the and this is changing by the way, but it would go on the auto shows circuit and it would be very specific. And Tesla has done none of that, right, So they made headlines and made their model less. One of them are popular cars and like very innovative with this seventeen inch screen, but it's not automotive grade, right, But they put it out there. They will roll out software updates and you know, with fun games and also changing the performance of the vehicle or fixing software bugs. Other automakers don't do that. So it's completely different from how other automakers have ever acted or conducted their business before. And I'm not saying it is as good or bad. It's just it's just different. It's just different in reality. Yeah, So before we come back to Tesla, let's finish just thinking about the competitive landscape and Weymo, right, you pay it's a lot of attention. I pay a lot of attension to Weymo. I pay a lot of tension to Zoos because I'm fascinated with this idea of building a vehicle from the ground up. And what they're going to do with it. I think it's a mistake to not be considering some of the Chinese startups and also what some of the OEMs in Korea and Japan are doing. Hundai just as basically put like thirty five billion dollars towards this idea of autonomous of vehicles any five billion oh Man and mobility, and in the Korean government is you know, doubling down also on that in making huge efforts and mobility. So to not focus on those companies a huge mistake. Just to focus on SLOC and Valley would be a huge mistake. But then there are other companies like Voyage is really interesting. They're an autonomous vehicle company. They're operating in retirement communities. And one is the Villages, which is in Florida, and it's it's like two hundred thousand people there. It goes across county lines. It's huge, and there's a human safe driver behind the wheel right now. But they are getting closer and closer to pulling that person out. But they're starting and that's their business model right now. They're starting in these retirement communities and then they're going to slowly have that geofence, that operational design domain expand, and so about providing access to people who haven't had it before. That's awesome, right, So it's interesting, although I will say that they have a vehicle that you could not put a wheelchair in right now, no one does. So I'm waiting for that idea to come around. I'm waiting for that vehicle that essentially replaces paratransit because if you speak to anyone, any person with a disability who is wheelchair abound, it is a huge problem for them to be able to get a ride. So I'm waiting for that one. But there's there's a number you get kind of the picture. There's there's there's companies in Michigan. There's companies. I mean, I pay attention to what Argo's doing. They have investment from two major automakers. Mean to not focus on them is again another huge mistake. So and then there's like these smaller startups that no one's ever heard of. I think you're going to hear about them more. There's a company called Ghost that I'm keeping an eye on, and they have a very interesting approach and really basically turning your personal vehicle into an autonomous vehicle. Ah, so taking your existing car and turning it into an autonomous vehica. I mean there are certain requirements like is be a newer model or whatever, and so there I think a company to watch and just that they're taking a different approach. Of course, I always like to pay attention to what Comma dot Ai is doing. I don't even know who that is. So that is founded by George Hots. George Hots also known as Geohote. It was the well he was a kid at the time. He was one who jailbroke the iPhone. He's done a number of other things too, But Comma dot Ai is an aftermarket kit that he was creating. He has some venture backing him that you could turn certain model cars into kind of a Level two meaning an advanced driver assistant system that handles some highway driving. Got a letter from NITZA and then he basically open sourced everything. So it wasn't a season to desist order, but I think it was treated a little bit like that, and so they kind of pivoted a bit and they've kind of open sourced all there. So if you were really motivated, you can buy their kit, the hardware piece, and then you can hack your own car. Yeah, exactly. So I have two thoughts coming to mind and hearing this. One is that it is analogis in some ways to the early days of the personal computer revolution, right listening to you talk with these tools that people can use to essentially hack things themselves. But the other thing that's so interesting we got used to over the last however, many decades of thinking of the car industry. The vehicle industry is just dominated by a handful of big names, right, But that's not the way it was back in the heyday when the auto industry was first getting started in the late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen hundreds, they were hundreds and hundreds of companies and then they all kind of got combined into GM, Chrysler, Ford. So we're almost back in that time of creative proliferation, right in a way that's really interesting. Yeah. I mean with a couple of caveats. One is manufacturing making cars is still hard, and I think that Tesla would be the first to agree they were right around. I don't know if you remember this, but post recession we're still sort of in the drugs of that. In two thousand and nine, two thousand and ten, there was a lot of interest around clean tech, and there were a number of car companies that were little startups Coda, Fisker, Tesla and all those None of those survived early. Tesla is the one of the few so still are one of the only ones. So we still haven't seen any car manufacturer, like new car companies come up that have had the same level of success as Tesla. They've folded or whatever. What we are seeing, though, to agree with you, is this kind of interesting revolution and evolution of the autonomous vehicle industry and the number of companies. And I will say, yeah, I think that we've already seen some closed down, and I think we're gonna get a second wave and then we're going to see more consolidation again. And it'll be interesting to see how many of these little startups actually turn into big companies and if the rest of them just get gobbled up by automakers. I don't think all of them will. I think some of them will be come eventually like the size of a Weymo today. Yeah, I just don't know which ones. I mean, I could guess, but I'd probably be wrong. And there's something encouraging about that. Let's talk about Tesla, but talk about Tesla versus Weymo because it's interesting, right. Weymo seems to me to be fairly quiet. You don't hear a lot of big promises from them about what they're doing. And then you have Elon Musk on the other hand saying there's going to be a fleet of what a million robotaxis on the road by twenty twenty. How do you think about those two companies? I treat them totally differently. Okay, yeah, well yeah, Weymo is pretty relatively quiet. Well, first of all, there's the obvious. I mean, Elon Musk is a personality and a lot of people are committed to him as a person. He's incredibly high profile. Waymo doesn't really have. They certainly have executives, but there's just no one. I can't think of many other companies that have like this, almost a cult of personality around them, and a lot of followers who believe in what he says, and so anything he says or anything that he tweets, I should say, gets covered and is written about in a way that we if Weymo does, it just doesn't. So yeah, Weymo also just look at how it was started. It was started under this premise of not necessarily initially being like this is going to be a commercial business. I mean, it was considered a project. Now internally, there's probably some aspirations early on to turn that into a commercial business, but it wasn't treated as such. It wasn't already a company that had a product it And there I've definitely heard some criticism of people saying, well, why did it take them so long to get here? You know a lot of people have jumped on those coattails and were worked there and now have gone and start their own companies. Tussla is doing something very different whiches. You know, they are selling vehicles and they are using over their software updates to improve the performance of the vehicle and improve some of the advanced driver assistance features in the vehicle. But we should say right now tuslas are not self driving. So let's be clear, like, these are not self driving cars. They are considered level two plus, which is kind of the SAE terms are difficult, not everyone understands them, but this is an advanced driver assistance system with increasing levels of automation, but is not fully self driving car. A driver has to be in the loop and absolutely should be, and we've all seen the videos of people not doing that. Yeah, but this is not a driver least car. But even the name is a little bit of a game or a wink when they call it autopilot right well, and also don't forget that they're selling an upgrade package that they call full self driving AH or the acronyms FSD. And so the interesting thing is when FSD was first put as an option, it was put out my believe it was in twenty sixteen, and so people leasing those cars leased them and paid you know that amount, and right now the cost kids is going up. It's about six thousand dollars now for this upgrade. And you know, if you leased a car, those leases are up now and you never actually got your full self driving. And you know, there are people who have absolutely pushed back and they're no longer super fans, but there are a ton of fans still who's seem willing to just throw the money and in the hopes of being part of this revolution. But my guess is, and sort of my theory all along has been the more cars they sell, the less tolerance some people will be. Because early adopters are always going to be like up for the fun of it, right, and they're going to be more forgiving of the mistakes. Absolutely. I mean I've talked to numerous owners over the years who loved Tesla and are always like constantly annoyed by their cars, but they love being a part of this big experiment. And it's just it's an interesting study in like human psychology. But you know, that's for another show that now that's totally fascinating. It is definitely part of it's part of this whole thing, right, here's the interesting thing. So, like, if Tesla is successful in what they're doing, and I have some real doubts about it, on you know, they do have a new computer chip, the custom chip that they build that they have in their newer models, that is supposed to be able to handle basically to unlock this full self driving, and that the only thing that has left if you were to listen and fully believe everything Elon Musk is saying, is that once it gets to quote unquote feature complete, it's really just the regulatory bodies that are going to be preventing that. But on a federal level, to be clear, if you're have a vehicle that has passed FMBSS, which is like you have to have a seatbelt, and you have to have you know, breaks and pedals and things. If your car meets all those standards. There is technically, right now, not a federal guideline that would prevent you having an autonomous vehicle. Really, that doesn't mean that you can't be right hailing. You can't charge money in the state of California, you know, you can't. You know, there's all these other things that could you know, happen and prevent certain things. But right now, on a federal level, there's no regulation preventing this. I mean, there's nothing that's going to prevent like let's say Comma, dat Ai or ghost you know, as far as I know, and I've asked federal regulators, there are guidelines, but they're not. So this is a different This is a different thing. So WAYMA is trying to do a ride hailing service. They're also, by the way, working on other things too. They're working on self driving trucks and other uses for their technology. But if we're talking about the Robotoxi service, they would they would operate the service. These would not be privately owned cars. This is very different from what Tesla is doing, which is they're privately owned cars that are in their view, going to get better over time in terms of automation, and that then those people can use those. So it's a bit of an aside. Is the regulatory system lagging behind where it needs to be? Yeah, I mean there are guidelines right now, but we also live in a country where there's states rights as well, and so some states have jumped forward to bring in business by the way, to make it more welcoming, and others. Some are more regulatory averse and some are welcoming of the regulation, in California being one of them as a hotbed of testing activity. Right, So you have the DMV in the state of California, you have to have a permit to test your autonomous vehicles on public roads. But if you want to operate a ride healing service, that is through the Public Utilities Commission, and you're not allowed to charge for rides. So it's two different permits and it's so it's so this is really regulatory either arbitrage you could think of it, or just a regulatory morass through which you have to tread sure, and I think that it's in part because Calvinia is a hotbed of or a test beat, if you will, and where a lot of these companies are located. And also on many of these cities were burned by ride healing, and so they do not want that to happen again, burned by ride hailing in the sense that it increased congestion, rather than they're dating it. And also it just there were a lot of let's look at the very early days of Uber was all about going into a city and then asking for forgiveness in some cases, and so that created a lot of chaos. And while a lot of that has been worked out, I mean, people kind of might forget about those very early days, and but they're scars. Yeah, for sure, it'sn't that interesting. I hadn't. I hadn't thought about that, And that's that's really interesting. And there's a Bloomberg headline recently Tesla's autopilot could save the lives of millions, but it will kill some people first. And I did think it was interesting that because of the way Tesla is innovating and letting these first adopters test and in some cases rest their lives, right, but they're getting the real time feedback. That's what's key to developing the software to make this work. So there is some argument maybe that being aggressive could and being aggressive with the rules and with the safety could actually let Tesla make a breakthrough ahead of other people. Well, I mean, I think Ellon would agree with you. And in fact, he has aggressively come out against journalists who have brought up concerns about autopilot because there have been a few deaths in which autopilot was engaged, the most famous being in Josh Brown in Florida, yea, and that reporting around that and even questioning even the name autopilot and in just any kind of reporting around it has He has push back and said, you are essentially killing people by reporting on this, because if regulatory bodies come in and prevent autopilot being used, then you'll cause more deaths as a result. And so he would agree with this an interesting version it's not my fault. It's your fault for telling people this is happening, right, not my fault for causing it. Right. Journalists are easy targets. But I do think that it goes to an interesting point that I wish he did more of, which is, let's forget about autopilot for a minute, and let's talk about the whole idea of zero deaths. There are things that we could do today as a society and federal and state regulatory bodies that could help decrease the number of people who are being killed and crashes today without autonomous vehicles, and that is making things like driver's license as more difficult. And there's a whole host of things and safety features that you could you could have that would actually reduce it. Would it get you to zero probably not no, but it would definitely reduce it. And yet we don't do that. And so it's I find it kind of very interesting that we're like jumping over some of the like uneasy practical things that you know, people won't have the freedom to drive and all this stuff, and instead of going to the technological answer, instead of just like potentially creating more regulations. No one wants that, right, especially not in the United States. Well, the utopia is always a lot more fun to imagine than than the messy practicalities either involved in getting there or and just making things a little bit better today. Right, It's easier to imagine a new world. And aren't there a lot of questions around this that cities have to answer too, because a lot of this is are been planning issues right, and what cities decide to enable, And so the idea that this utopia is just somehow seamlessly going to come into being because the technology exists, well, it's a matter of personal choice what people choose to do, but it's also a matter of what cities choose to enable, right, right, the hottest job in Silicon Valley or any place that is looking to like launch their evies any where is going to be a really good government relations and policy person who is able to walk into cities and help them understand today exactly what they want and work with them proactively to do things like congestion pricing and be okay with that and then curb pricing, because what type of world do we imagine, Like, where are these avies going to go? If there are no parking lots, they will eventually have to be maintained and charge and all those things. But are they just going to simply circle the block? Will they be parked? How long will they park? Will they know? There are all those questions that have them been answered. Is that an opportunity for cities, for example, to make more money by if a car pulls over and is iLINK for a bit on a curb in a busy area, can they capture some money from that? You know, all those questions. So like every av company should absolutely like if they don't already, and I think they all do, but is to have really good people on that government relations and policy and legal side. Let's say you jump through all the hoops and you get all the technical stuff down, well, then you have to operate a business, and how are you going to do that, and so how you operate in a city as part of that. I don't know if there is going to be a need for all this extra special infrastructure, because the thing is, it's not like we snap our fingers tomorrow and suddenly the world is just a vis It will have lots of human driven cars in there as well, and so to just suddenly change roads just I just don't see that happening right away at all, especially with bike pass right. I mean, we haven't even figured out like basic infrastructure on how to deal with the humans that we have driving cars and on bikes and scooters right now. So a few autonomous vehicles is I doubt will you up end cities now? Eventually that might change and happen, but it's not going to happen overnight. Like many revolutions, there will be a series of evolutions before we get to the revolution. Right. Thank you so much for being here today. It was really fun. Thank you. So. I knew there was a gap, I mean, the utopian vision and the reality isn't there always, but I hadn't thought of all the ways in which there was a gap. I thought it was primarily technological, that last one percent about which Kirsten speaks, But there's also a logical gap. Just because avs are possible doesn't mean they're going to reduce congestion and bring all the other benefits the believers promise. There may also be a behavioral gap. Will Americans, who after all, love their cars, really adopt avs and mass And then there just may be a governmental gap. If cities are going to enable or disable avs, it may take some advanced planning to make it all work. Given my utter lack of driving skills, and less selfishly, the potential that avs have to make transportation possible for those who are currently deprived. I actually hope in this case that the utopians proved to be correct. On a side note, if you're interested in further discussion of Elon Musk, I recorded a podcast with journalist Lynette Lopez about America's favorite visionary that I think you might enjoy listening. To Make You a Killing physical production of Pushkin Industries and Chalkin Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison mcclein no relation and Making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Lobell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany mcclin. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.