I have done an experimental podcast discussion show on the hot future-of-transportation issues so far this year.

You can watch it on YouTube, where I have chapter markers to let you easily find the topics of interest to you, as we spoke for almost one hour and 20 minutes. I was joined by Mario Herger of The Last Driver Licence Holder

You can also download audio of this and future podcasts at https://robocars.com/podcast or subscribe to the RSS feed in podcast format.

You can also read a nice summary with timestamps at My Forbes Page

Transcript

Below is a machine generated transcript of the discussion. It has the usual errors but can help you search for things of interest:

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Brad

Hello everybody, I'm Brad Templeton from robocars.com and as an experiment I'm going to try doing a podcast style discussion show about self driving cars, electric cars and the future of transportation. I've invited my friend Mario Herger, who has the website and book “the last driver's license. Holder is already born” who writes as well about self-driving car technologies and is fascinated. We're both also Tesla owners. So if we start dissing on Tesla, don't get too. Said of this, but I want to go over some of the issues that have sprung up just in the beginning of 2023. It's been a pretty active period already in terms of news and events, and we're going to discuss these things and maybe try and give some insight into what they mean.

The first one I want to talk about is something I actually published an article about today. Which is the letters that were sent to the California Public Utilities Commission about the operation of Cruz and Waymo in the city of San Francisco. So the city of San Francisco doesn't actually have the authority to regulate driving on its streets. That authority goes to the states they own their sidewalks and other matters. But they're not exactly happy with what Cruz and Waymo have been doing in their cities, both operating vehicles which drive with nobody in them. Crews only at night and way more all day long. There have been some incidents and issues and so the city wrote letters to the California Public Utilities Commission. Saying these guys want to expand their territory and operations, we think we should slow down. We want more transparency. We're worried about the cars that have stalled in the middle of the street. We're worried about a whole raft of issues and you can go into their letter into the details. So Mario, have you looked at these letters and had some thoughts on it?

Mario

Yeah, well, I think this is a natural development that these cars become more prominent in the things happen here. We have incidents. Thank goodness nobody got hurt or is got killed, but of course it is nasty. Knowing if those cars are stopping in the middle of the street, blocking an intersection, or bumping into a bus because they cross the line, mark a line mark or something like that. So I think we have more of those cars now on the roads and we heard that crews alone has 130 cars driving in the night in San Francisco, and way more probably a similar number. Then we will see more of those incidents. The thing is, The thing is of course those cars need to drive on public roads. So you can't build the perfect airplane by just testing in the wind tunnel, right? So you can't build a good robot car by just testing it on a test track. You need to have. That in the city and they are doing things that they shouldn't do. But of course I think when you look at human drivers they do more of those things that are bad in the.

Brad

Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of press and now I think there are definitely room for improvement here, but particularly crews. The city published a map and the map showed quite a number of places where crews had this happen only a couple where Waymo had had it happen, although. Famously got a major artery jammed up during rush hour, and that's a difference to give credit to crews. They're only testing at night where any mistakes are much less likely to cause any kind of problems with traffic or other issues. They did have an issue with a fire truck, which I also wrote about earlier this week. That what's happened. Which has been disappointing, is that both companies in these inside. Have not been able to resolve the problem. Now of course there are going to be situations that robots don't understand. They're not quite that smart enough yet, but what how they're resolving the issue they're supposed to resolve the issue by bringing in a human remote operator as they're called, who looks out the cameras of the car looks at the situation, sees all the data. And makes a decision for the car not driving it by holding a virtual wheel. But telling it, take this path or turn around and that's not working.

For some reason they are deciding in these cases to say we can't resolve the problem with our remote operator. We're going to send a rescue driver. A real physical person is going to try and get through the traffic and get to the car, get behind the wheel and drive it away. And so that's taken, you know, 10 to 15 minutes. I think they have teams of these people around the city. They hope to be able to get to them pretty quickly, although at night that's easy and the rush hour it's hard. And I've asked Cruz about this. They've said that basically they're taking a very conservative philosophy, which is to say they do want the remote operator to solve the problems. But they're not always confident they can do that 100% right? And because of that, they know that sending a rescue driver is going to be 100% right if obviously very slow. So the question I think we want to ask. As a society is. Does that mean they're not ready yet? Or is that just the kind of teething pain that we should tolerate? My general view is if nobody's getting hurt, you know we accept that student drivers are out there on the roads. They have a little sign on them saying Please be patient. I'm a student driver. They're learning all we get out of that is one teenager. Learn how to drive when the robots learn something that all the robots learn and they learn it forever. I hope forever. And so I think we should tolerate these teething pains. The question is how? When do they get too much? I mean is is blocking traffic in Russia or is that? Too much.

Mario

And and also also in in addition to that, what is the right solution for that? You know you mentioned already. Is it a teleoperator that takes over remotely or is it you give the car instructions to find out it's the path of the situation? Or do you send somebody physically there? You know who also might get stuck in this traffic? That it caused in.

Brad

Yeah, the they're never gonna be worse than a human, though of course the the rescue driver, other than than being slow. Well, so I think they're planned. Well, obviously the plan is for the cars to handle as many situations. Possible and for the remote operators to only be involved a little bit, but there are some companies Chris and Wimmer are not among them who actually built remote driving stations. Where you know you can literally have a remote person use. You know one of those race you know simulator game stations with screens and wheels and pedals, and that's OK. But most of these teams have said we don't want to do that. We want to just give guidance to the car.

Mario

But would this? Would this work with the current infrastructure that we have? You know, cell phone broadband Internet reception in the city and especially when I look at San Francis. You know you have some skyscrapers in the financial district where the signal may be off. Would we need infrastructure for that?

Brad

Well, I believe I haven't got confirmation from the companies, but that they map the wireless dead zones and they don't want their car to go somewhere or get stuck somewhere that has a wireless dead zone. They do have these rescue drivers as a a potential solution when a car goes into. If a car did get stuck dead zone. But yeah, I know you're from. Ostrich and there they probably have better cell infrastructure than they do in San Francisco. I don't know. But it's true that American cell dead spots are much more common, but the 5G rollout that's going on should make that happen and out in the country. Our good friend Elon Musk, who I'm sure we'll talk about a couple of times today with his space hat on instead of his car head on, that's actually he solved the problem of getting connectivity everywhere you can. See the sky.

Mario

I would also also say it's it's teething pains at the moment, so let's hope that nothing serious happens except of a traffic jam. But that's I think why we need to be patient also, and I understand the regulators or the administrators in the city of San Francisco. What they want is of course a a good situation. For everyone, and not just the robocars, right? So so, of course they are concerned that is valid, but. Let's be patient a bit.

Brad

Yeah, I mean I again these these student drivers and even the newly minted drivers who just had a fresh drivers license. They're very risky. They're not very good at it, but we have them on the roads because there's no other way to get safe for drivers.

Mario

Remember also we had similar discussions. I think back then when the street scooters were here and this is E scooters and they were laying everywhere around so they they cancelled everyone's license and then started fresh with issuing. Licenses to scooter providers that could show solutions of how not to have them lay over the sidewalks everywhere, right?

Brad

The The funny thing is that San Francisco, which you think of, hey, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, World Capital of technology. It's actually a bit of a Luddite burg at some times. I mean they ban. They were the one the only places to ban the Segway. They banned sidewalk delivery robots. I was actually at that Council meeting because. And work with Starship. One of the sidewalk delivery robot companies that wanted to put its headquarters in San Francisco and decided not to because hey, not friendly. And now the same thing's going here all right. Let's take a look at a second aspect of this topic, which was in the complaint. By San Francisco. So they complained that several times, Waymo and Cruise have had someone in the car passenger in the car who has, you know, just Not gotten out of the car when it gets to assassination, doesn't respond when you talk to them, and so they've called 911 and so the paramedics have come to the car and found someone just drunk and asleep. Actually, I don't know about the drunk part, I'm just assuming that if that I think they're just a much better sleeper than I am, let's put it that way. Or maybe they have been possibly visiting an establishment which sells different substances. The of course the emergency people are ****** about that they don't want to be called to wake up somebody who is sitting in a taxi drunk now in a regular Uber. Of course, this wouldn't happen because there'd be an Uber driver who could know, hey buddy, get out of my car and kick him, and once the car stopped, they can't do it.

I think is the best trick which is. Drive really fast and slam the brakes and see if that wakes them up because you know obviously. I'm not going to do that either. This one's not easy to solve. I mean there's a couple of interesting solutions that I've explored, but it led me to another question, which is that one thing you might want to do to deal with this. Is have a surveillance camera in every car to watch everyone so you can get a sense. Is this somebody who just is drunk and we got to do something about them like you know set off a siren or whatever you do to wake them up. Or do we have to call for emergency because it's someone who's had a heart attack and a surveillance camera might help with that? That I'm not comfortable with the ID. Since I want to see a world where we move a lot of our travel into robo taxis and I don't want us to at the same time end up creating an Orwellian level of surveillance when we do that.

Mario

But they have already surveillance cameras in the car, so when you take a cruise ride, you see at least I think 2 cameras inside.

Brad

Oh yeah.

Mario

And also you Tesla. The Tesla is inside the camera, so so there is already. Potential surveillance possibility. But I think I think the issue is here that this may not be enough to figure out what's going on with the person this person sleep. Or is there really a medical emergency with this person and I think there may be an opportunity for looking at additional sensors built in. Inside the car, maybe in the fabric, maybe in some other places here that measure vital signs of a person to figure out. Is this really a medical emergency that is going on here and and also notice? By already when it's going on, it's happening often time is is is critical here or is this person really sleeping or drunk? Sleeping in there and and then what to do then? Is it slamming on the brakes? The right thing to do, or something else?

Brad

You better make sure their seat belts on before you do that that way or that way you get to take to the hospital either way, because you killed him, but that would be bad. Never kill a customer. The Monty Python rule. Well, actually so radar. A little small radars that like dollar radars can actually tell someone's breathing. And there are cameras that can tell your pulse. So there are ways to do this sort of thing, and maybe that's what they. Want to look at but I'm talking about the surveillance camera that is, you know, recording a full video of you. And yes. Those cameras are in the cars right now. I don't want them in the production car of the future. I am OK when you were learning and testing, but that sets a precedent that maybe they're there forever that camera in our Teslas. Tesla actually has a document saying this. We never upload this video up to the cloud. This camera is only feeding our AI software to make sure you're watching the road, and you know that makes sense to have a camera for that.

Mario

Yeah, yeah.

Brad

But of course they could put new software in the car that then captured the video and uploaded it. It's not like physically impossible. I want it to be. Really impossible. I actually want a shutter on the camera. Which can only be opened in emergencies because, so how you gonna make out with your girlfriend in the back of the car if you're on video camera, it's just.

Mario

Well, you know that yeah.

Brad

Going to put a complete damper on that.

Mario

Well, well, you know that that Europe, the European Union, has basically no regulations start that started last year in summer that you have to have driver monitoring devices in the car. So I was I was just at the CES in the header test drive with one of these wind fastest Vietnamese cars. In the they demonstrated this gaze detection and driver monitoring and and it was really monitoring not just where my eyes were looking. Yeah, and then telling me look at the road, but it also looked at. Do I have a smartphone in the hands? Do I eat something? Do I smoke things like that?

Brad

Are you thinking impure thoughts?

Mario

Right, I'm this far.

Brad

Not not, not yet, but eventually it might go well anyway. So yes, I think we're going to have that. This is my real point because we're going to have some need to monitor some aspects of what people do.

Mario

OK.

Brad

Can we think about it in advance and can we design so that we don't create the Orwellian level camera that's just got pure video? Everything you do? And you have no privacy when you travel because today we live in a world where we either drive our own cars and we have privacy there. Or we're riding. Even in we used to ride in cash taxis and yes the driver when he wasn't looking at us, but he could hear what we were doing, but we just paid cash. There was no record that I had gone from A to B everywhere we went. So listen. We we're. Very quickly, building the surveillance state that we don't want, and I just say we want to think about that, and I hope that the teams building this do think about this and think about how can I solve my problem without gathering more data than I need to solve the problem because the the instinct of most companies is gather all the data.

Mario

Yeah, yeah.

Brad

You can record all the data. You can keep it. Forever, that's the default instinct, that's the. One we have to break.

Mario

You know, I think I think we may here looking at a similar issue like the the the the, the first problem that we discussed it. Let us when the car stall. Do we need for example, like supervisors across CD's, you know, human supervisors who can access the car quickly and see if there is something happening or something going wrong with the car or with the person in the car? I'm not sure.

Brad

Yeah I am. I have actually proposed for not just for these but also for carrying children. That this is something should happen already, which is just everyone who is a a doctor emergency worker, paramedic, anyone with the appropriate training should just have a little app that they run that says that tracks where they are. It doesn't. Again, it's not surveillance device. It's always reporting where they are, but that if I need medical attention anywhere. Right the the classic thing is you know someone goes on stage and the play and says is there a doctor in the house? Is there a doctor on the plane? Well why don't we have our devices answer that question? For us, and we'd say we need a doctor here and would say, oh, there are three doctors. We'll ping them on their phones if they want to help, they'll come.

Mario

Yes, Sir.

Brad

So if someone can run over and deal with you and and pay them, and you want a mechanism that would give them cash to incentivize them. To do this? Any of them would probably do it, you know, out of goodness, but there's someone who can help, probably within 30 seconds of you anytime, and I think this is actually going to be important for children that ride in self driving cars. Because parents will eventually be willing to put children in these on the way to school. Obviously aged 10 and above, that's not too hard, but even 789 and a way to do that would say there's a responsible adult that can always the car can always get to a responsible adult. In 30 seconds. Might have something happen so.

Mario

You know, I think I think they they may be already trying to do something similar like that. Because I've I've taken some rides in the crews and the driverless cruises and what I've noticed is first that they have multiple locations where they launch the cars so so basically across the city there are multiple locations and the other thing is that I notice that such cars also cruise cars, but with people in there that then they were relocated. They're parking on the side, which is unusual because they're normally not being parked. They're driving around in the empty. Yeah, in this case the engineers were in there and then basically coming quickly to the places where those cars stopped, so this could be. Said maybe a weed that that they operate in the future, having people stationed across the the city or across the location and approach the cars within 5 minutes or something like that.

Brad

Well, I I already advanced to the next topic because we wrote up a whole bunch. It's amazing how much in January there's been to talk about Consumer Reports. Did their review of all of the. Well they called them ADA and I really hate this name. They have picked and I don't think it's going to stick, but I hope it doesn't stick. But all of the systems like Tesla, Autopilot and blue crews and the Super cruise the systems that will you know, keep the car in the lane on the highway and do sort of. Supervised driving for you, and the thing that caught a lot of attention when they published this aside from the stupid name. Because if you, the plural of of ADA is, aside from it being a woman's name, it's also ADA as the plural, which is and another thing, and it's American disability. Anyway, enough about the name. The reason people were kind of curious about is because while Tesla was the pioneer in this field and everyone has been excited for a long time about Tesla Autopilot, which I've driven with a lot that they rated Tesla near the bottom in terms of how good their system was and the criticism, I think a lot of people might have. On this rating is they use as Consumer Reports often does many factors for rating how good the system is, one of which was the performance of the system. How well it handled the car. But there were also and I don't know how they weighted them, but they seemed to almost rate them equally, which was how much it nagged you. If you weren't paying attention to the road, how easy it was to understand what it was doing and what was the other factor it was. Or whether it would do, whether you could understand when you could turn it on, right? So that's a. You know, so the thing that bothered me about their rankings was that I think people are, well, actually. I don't think very many people are. Thinking that the nags are a positive feature, I mean they may say yes, that should be there. That's important, but Consumer Reports has never downrated a car because it lets you drive faster than the speed limit and do other dangerous things. Quite the reverse. Consumer Reports, like all car magazines, will say this is a better car because it's more zoom zoom. Because it can go faster. I mean it has more engine power that we love that in our cars and consumers want that. And so, as a consumer magazine, that's how they think when they're talking about the speed of the car. But here they're saying no, we want to to downgrade it if it doesn't nag you enough. And I'm I'm not saying that's nothing, but I have a feeling what they need to do in these ratings is make the performance of the system. 90% of the weight because I have a feeling from people buying it. They're mostly interested in how well is it going to drive, how pleasant is the driving experience going to be? I don't. I don't know if you think the same or I've argued with the Consumer Reports people. About this one before.

Mario

Yeah well I I keep seeing new features coming in. For example, the last two days ago when I drove highway again, it told me multiple times that it detected you got a cheat device on. The on the.

Brad

Ohh you, you got the cheat warning ohhh you bad boy.

Mario

I I didn't cheat, I didn't cheat. I didn't even have the hands on the on the wheel. Nothing in there. I was just absurd, so I'm not a cheater here, but so this this comes in and I think there were some false positives that it had and then probably. That you know every 15 seconds or so, you have to yank the steering wheel to show that you're here. I I know that actually from from my childhood not that our cars headed back then we didn't have a car, but my father was with the railways and they had a so-called Totman system. The tooth man literally means a dead man, so. The the the engineers on the train had to press like every minute or 2A button to show that they're still here, otherwise the car would. The train would break so so I think I think that is annoying for a lot of people and and the warnings that it does or yells at you. I have the feeling somebody yells at. Me if I'm not. Pulling yanking the wheel or holding it.

Brad

Yeah well no, no. I mean, I think everyone believes the system should be there to some degree. What was odd was that when they were trying to give you, you know a consumers rating about how much do you want to buy this and they were looking more at public safety issue rather than what consumers think about it. No, no, so there's been some controversy. Of course, about the different styles. Tesla, as you mentioned, requires you to put torque on the wheel. I have a particular style that I use with that which is I'm always putting work on the wheel. I put my fingers on the wheel like this. I put my elbow you can't see here. I put my elbow on the window. Bill and I just constantly and then I'm think driving. I'm just imagining in my mind what will happen and then my if my hand does what I imagined all is good. If my hand doesn't do what I imagine cause the car is veering off the road.

Mario

OK, so.

Brad

Which it doesn't do too often, but occasionally it does. Yeah, the then I take over control and that seems to be pretty safe. Some people, though, you're right, they sort of like are better. Pull this thing every 20 seconds. Some people of course have put on these cheat devices to put constant torque on the wheel, which has gotten Tesla, some criticism and so they've put in this only by the way if you have their inaccurately named full self-driving product, I think. Do they have this cheat detector warning going on? And there been a number of people complain that. Yeah, it's it's. Going after them, but here's a more interesting. The other companies like Super Cruise which General Motors and Blue Cruise from Ford and some of the others out there. They don't use wheel detection, they look at your eyes to make sure you're paying attention to the road, not looking at your phone, and they let you take your hands off the wheel and just rest them on your side. And an interesting question. So that's watching your eyes is important. I think Tesla has learned this. They now do watch. Guys watching your eyes is important, but is letting you take your hands off the wheel. A good idea for 8 hours or not in terms of how quickly you will respond when you need to do something and I don't know if we have the answer to that, but I I do feel that when your hands are on the wheel, it's and doing this think driving than I do.

Mario

Yeah, yeah.

Brad

It's more likely that you're going to. Be able to quickly respond to a problem. I don't know if there's science on that.

Mario

You know now what I've noticed. I think I've noticed yeah, and I cannot confirm that is. I think that Tesla is already doing the case detection and looking at what you're doing. Right, you're not.

Brad

Oh yeah, yeah there are.

Mario

Because I have the feeling when I'm, you know, on the highway, no traffic, straight line and I'm checking my phone get these remind us to put torque on the steering wheel to yank. It comes more often.

Brad

Well, no, no, you actually can't get a warning saying stop looking your God. On phone, it doesn't say it that way, but you you will get that alright. So let's take a look at another topic, Daimler. They have. Of gotten approval to release their S class, this is $121,000 base Model S class. So not every person watching this is probably gonna run out and order one, but it will do and I hate the levels and I I try to never say them but it'll do what they will. Call Level 3 in a traffic jam. Which is to say. The car will drive itself in a traffic jam under, I think 60 kilometers an hour.

Mario

About 40 miles away.

Brad

Yeah, about 40 mph. Well I'm Canadian, so I'm bilingual. I grew up with English and then switched to metric while I was teenager. But anyway, yeah. So basically though only on the freeway. So you got to be on a freeway. It's a road that has, you know, very high speed limit. Hundred 130 kilometers an hour, 60 miles an hour and but you have to be going much slower than the speed limit and then it will drive you. Now they only have permission to do this in Nevada right now. They also and in Germany, sorry. United States they just got permission in Nevada. And yes, no. Obviously they are German and they first buy this in German and the speed limit on the German autobahn is kind of interesting, and many of them it's quite an experience. To to be going 200 on them. Not that I would ever do that, but nonetheless in a traffic jam it will let you take your eyes completely off the road. Let you. Watch a movie. Read a book. You know which is? Sort of, you know this is actually Honda released a product that would do this in Japan a few years ago. They only sold 100 of them and they decided not to sell it anymore. Audi got approved to do it as well, but this looks like it might be the first sort of. You know real commercial product where you can not pay attention to the road. Although, again, the United States, it would only be of interest to someone who commutes in the Las Vegas rush hour because they're not going to encounter freeway traffic jams in Nevada, except in the Las Vegas, Russia. Obviously they are trying to get it approved for use in California and a lot of things. And I don't know, maybe you were just in in Germany, were you or in Austria? And maybe you could talk about how people are reacting to it over there?

Mario

Well, the the Germans think they they are basically beating now Tesla and everyone else, and they're kind of the greatest in autonomous driving. Also, because they have a law in Germany regulation that allows autonomous driving on all public roads. If you have the license for that, so that's what they. I think, well, I would say this Mercedes S class in Nevada and in Germany this this this traffic jam pilot so to speak. Shows one thing first, that Mercedes apparently has done all the pins to go through the legal process in those two locations. Yeah, that is. I think already an achievement in itself. If you're not Germany and if you.

Brad

Yes, yeah Germany is. Germany is very German.

Mario

Yeah, but I'm not sure if they are looking at the right problem. You know people were telling keep telling me, yeah, we we are doing it step by step but we know also both you and me know it from way. Well back then when they were school project that they saw people behaving in a way with Level 3 cars that they were so scared and said you can't expect the people the driver to take over and have a complete understanding of the situation. Especially when you check mails or read a book or watch the movie. So it takes. Ford has shown that I think in the studies that it sometimes takes up to more than 20 seconds to get a full understanding of the situation. And if if the car is the way 22nd. The car can safely handle the situation, so I'm not sure if this is the right approach to it. It looks for me more like how do we get to the moon? Yeah, we be a little better because that's where we see step by step progress. Yeah, but you need a new solution and that's a rocket and and hit the same. I think it's the better candle. Not not the light bulb that everyone is else is building.

Brad

It it it, it is true and what we found as well is that even when they were employees and under orders not to do so, people still fell asleep in these systems and you cannot. I mean, you can monitor their eyes and and I guess hit the brakes on them. Like I said, if they do. Fall asleep, but it's pretty challenging, but nonetheless the car companies have pretty much all slowed down their deployment of actual robo taxi, self-driving style vehicles. All of them, except Tesla, which believes it's number one in that area.

Mario

You mean you mean the manufacturers, the OEMs?

Brad

Yes, the car OEM's yes they they have all been scaling back, including Daimler.

Mario

Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

Brad

But they do believe that ADA style tools and something like this traffic jam assist are where they're going to go for the next little while. Mostly they're putting their efforts and their sensors into pure driver assist systems is the first one to go a little bit beyond driver assist? I've often wondered with Tesla that the because they've been so fully. Dedicating all their effort to their not very good yet self-driving full self-driving system that they might have been able to pull off something like this, which would actually be deployable, and people would use it, although at first when you think about it, oh, that's nice in a traffic jam, I'll be able to do my e-mail. But how much of your life do you really spend in traffic jams? Well, if you can afford a Mercedes S class for $120,000, maybe even saving 5 minutes a day is worth the money for you.

Mario

Yeah, yeah.

Brad

But I I'm not sure this is ever going to be a really project. I think if they can make a product that could fully freeway drive me on my commute or on my drive up to. Country House or something like that? Where I could, you know, just not pay attention to the road except. In a construction zone or special circumstances with lots of warning, I think that's a commercial product people would buy. And of course, I think people argue with me about this, but I think people will buy self driving cars and robotaxi, right?

Brad

Yeah, yeah.

Mario

I I totally I totally agree with you. I mean I think these are features that that really do not have much of a use case. I'm not sure what Mercedes is expecting with that. I mean, there's a second one. And I'm not sure we talked about that before. Is this parking function the valid parking in garage? Is that Mercedes?

Brad

In Stuttgart, you can do. Yeah, that's right.

Mario

And and and that is and I was thinking, why would you spend time on building such a feature? Because this is not what I want. I wanna be basically dropped off at the terminal, not in the garage and next.

Brad

Well, yeah.

Mario

Have to work there and then I want to send home the car and not have it in the garage where I have to pay for that. So this is a feature and then you need need smart devices in your garage. It means you need installation. The infrastructure who's going to do that? And that's just one car Mercedes S and how many people really?

Brad

Oh oh, yeah, yeah. I think that's a that's just a like a demo show off feature concept feature obviously. Are you gonna buy a car? The only thing you can do is park it at the strip card airport parking lot. That one particular expensive lot. No, I mean, as you say, you're going to, you're going to want, I think that cars have parked themselves. People would like that if it was a more general thing. In fact, I have predicted if I'm going to video about this at some point that when robo cars and Robo taxis want to park themselves, they're going to do it super cheap because they don't have to park where you're going the way your car has to, right? The only reason parking costs ten $1520.00 an hour is because you need to park. Where you're going if the vehicle can go half a kilometer and and bid out for the cheapest parking and park at the top of the parking lot like a valet does very densely parked. And leave if the parking gets more expensive. Suddenly the price of parking goes way, way down and it's kind of interesting what happens, but let's let's that's going to be another video to talk about that, but I think you're right, this is a. This is mostly a gimmick product. I don't know if we'll talk about this one too much. I I did write about this, but many people will have heard guy driving Model S 2021 Model S on the Bay Bridge in. In San Francisco Bay Area, which is it's a 5 lane wide bridge that's also an Interstate highway. And he said he was in Tesla FSD. He was mistaken about that, because the way that system currently works is that it switches to autopilot the older system whenever you're on a freeway. But, and the full details haven't come out, but his car suddenly decided to both break and change. Planes to the left right in front of someone else and well as we can guess. Happens the other guys behind him. Hit him and then the other guy hits the guy behind him behind him. The eight cars end up smashed up because this Tesla makes. This mistake many people are wondering, is this something that Tesla drivers all call phantom braking, which we've all experienced, especially in more recently when Tesla took the radar out of their cars. It sees a ghost and it breaks for it, and the ghosts are very happy that this happens because they're never hit. But unfortunately it can cause something like that. So normally if you're rear-ended, it's your fault in the vehicle laws. But there's one exception, which is if you've just cut in front of somebody and and you jam on the brakes, it is not your it's not the the guys. Sorry, when you're really is the other guy's fault, it's not your fault and this is the one case where it's your fault when you get rear-ended and that's how the police ruled on this particular case. But the issue that I thought was kind of interesting that I decided to write about was OK. They got the phantom breaking thing. They obviously should fix it, but. They're not fixing it yet, and they probably will never fix it perfectly. So how's the best way to be a supervising driver? Because this guy obviously did not clue in the normal thing you're supposed to do. If your Tesla Autopilot makes a mistake, you're supposed to grab the wheel, hit the pedals. And drive and Tesla keeps saying anytime anything crashes, it's never Tesla's fault. It's always the fault of the driver, because that's. Rules and you know, in spite of the name, Autopilot, and other things, they actually make these rules very clear to you. And and when you buy it, when you it activate it, they make it very clear to you that it's your job to sometimes intervene for that car. And if you don't do that, you are going to have a crash as we saw with this guy. So how do you cause I'm saying to myself? I'm pretty good at grabbing the wheel when the car tries to drive into the guardrail or do anything else of that sort or gets too close to another car. But one thing I'm not instinctive about is. You know hitting the pedal? I guess that's not your usual emergency response is I got to accelerate cause my car is breaking for no reason whatsoever. Would would you think you could have been hitting this crash or would you have survived?

Mario

Probably also not. I mean I of course I have my food always somewhere over a pedal, even if I so, but but the question is, would I have it already accelerator or over the brake pedal?

Brad

Oh, you're better than me.

Mario

Yeah, in. When I'm following the situation I'm I'm trying to switch between between that stuff. Yeah or when, but in this case it it also breaks so quickly that I think you don't have a chance what's what's really going on? I think for me it's a sign also that we need to look more. Also how to do forensic analysis of such a situation? You know, especially from a regulator perspective. Here, what really happened? And I guess regulators need car. Companies need to have a data stand or something like that so that the regulator can download this data, put it in the systems, test it and make better test cases. Maybe also require them before they license. Something like this? This is for me, the larger message here. Everyone of us who has Autopilot has experienced phantom braking sometimes. Quick deceleration, sometimes slower and there was nothing. And sometimes you realize, oh, there was really something.

Brad

Yeah, I mean some people are bothered by it a lot. Some people get it a lot more than others, and some people are bothered by it a lot.

Mario

Yeah, yeah yeah, that's another. That's another thing. You know. Some people really get it more I I don't have that that often, but I hear from some people who complain constantly about. Right?

Brad

Yeah, I mean my girlfriend when the first time she got it she said she stopped using autopilot. For a while. She said because this was quite jarring anyway, I've got a lot more about that you can find through my website. Let's look at another topic. Oh yeah, well, I think the one we can go on for too long about. But just some background. For a long time, every year every quarter. Sorry, Tesla would publish some numbers claiming how wonderfully safe they were, and they said that Teslas Dr. You know 4,000,000 miles between crashes with autopilot on they drive one million 2,000,000, whatever the. There is and also police say that there's a crash every half a million miles for ordinary other cars, and they use these numbers to go out and say, well, look at us. We're so wonderfully safe. Autopilot is so wonderfully safe and you should all. Love it now. They stopped publishing the numbers a year ago and I had hoped. It was because I and many others had complained to them about these numbers. Are a lie. And but but no, they published them again just a few weeks ago. They they now published the numbers for most of the quarters of last year, all at one. And they're getting repeated again by people, so there's a couple of things about these numbers that I wanted to point out to people. The first one is this. Tesla measures, not crashes, but airbag deployments. That's they get a signal from the car when the airbags are triggered, and so they're saying we go this many miles between car crashes where the airbag goes on, but the police are just reporting every crash. They see the airbag does not go off in every crash that the police go on, so you you really can't compare the numbers. But the biggest. Fault in the numbers is that and we there's some research that's been done about how people use. Autopilot and it found that autopilot is used. No giant surprise about 95% on freeways and the Tesla Manual says that's where you're supposed to use it. You're not really supposed to use it on your ordinary streets. Some people Do now, it turns out that the number of crashes per mile on freeways is 1/3, at least the number of fatalities. It's hard to get data on the number of crashes. Is about 1/3 of the number on regular streets, and that's even with the. Speed, and that's because of two reasons. The freeway is easier to drive, so people make fewer mistakes, and you're also going more mph because I think the rate of human crashes is better measured per hour of driving and not per mile of driving. It's just naturally less on the freeway because every hour of driving takes you 3/4 times as far as hours of city driving, where the average speed. Is you know 12 miles an hour or something in in the city. So so because of this, of course it has a better record when on for something for freeway driving than it does. It would be very surprising if it wasn't better, but unfortunately they interpret this other way. So why do I really fault them on this? I'm I have a degree in mathematics. I very rarely use it, just show it to immigration officials every so often to make them think I'm. I know something about something, but anyone who studied mathematics or science or statistics or a lot of other fields knows that when you're trying to answer a question like is this safer than that, or does this happen more? That you try and control for any other variable, because every other factor will introduce bias, like the fact that Autopilot is mostly on highways, introduces natural bias, and this is not a secret. This is, you get taught this. Anyone with any training fully knows that you try and compare as much as possible apples to apples. And you try and factor out everything else. And now the reason that a lot of research you see is flawed is because that's hard to do. You cannot just eliminate other biasing factors so easily. It takes work and then people don't like to do work. That's the main reason. Sometimes it's impossible to actually separate out the factors, but not for. Tesla's got. All the data they know exactly where each crash was, what Rd. it was, on what type of Rd. it was on, what type of person was driving, how fast they were going. They have all that data. It's trivial for them to control for all the biasing factors and so they have just no excuse to not do that. So much of no excuse that I can only say, especially since it's been pointed out many. Times that I think they're kind of, you know, kind of. Trying to fool us.

Mario

I mean first first I. Want to give certain credit to Tesla? Namely that they even go the links and publish this kind of data and not really a way of other companies doing that. But then then of course if you don't publish the. Complete data set that you paste it on. You have a problem, you should, I think always hand it over to some independent. Organization could be university, could be I don't know company that that uses the data even basically gets on the same baseline with other data that they have and then makes an analysis of that. And we know from for example the autonomous driving data that the companies in California have. To share with the DMV the disengagement report that's coming out that they have a lot of leeway of. What is the disengagement, right? So so and. Then also I think what we have to be careful as well is beside all that what you mentioned. Net people are jumping on the things that are happening, but not looking really the stuff that's not happening. So like in crime or terror attacks. You know, if you tell them you prevented crime, nobody believes you that because nobody saw it. But if if something happens, then it's your fault you're being plain. But that you you know prevented ten others from happening. Nobody sees that nobody congratulates you on that. Did the same. Everyone sees their accident video like the pile up on on on the Bay Bridge yeah, but nobody sees the ones where it prevented an accident and serious injuries. So that's a long way to go. I think we'll be learning from that, but I I think with those cars being more and more these computers, we will see much more data coming out of the different manufacturers and and then probably coming in the same baseline that we can compare them to each other.

Brad

Well, I I agree with you about the the bias we have and we you know we pay attention to the crashes and right now we've been having flooding. Where I live and people are calling me saying isn't it completely flooded everywhere? Is it no? But cameras go where there's. A flood and and. But I I I can't give a lot of credit. A lot of.

Mario

OK.

Brad

To Tesla on this one because I think they publish these numbers because they make them look very good and they get to say, look how safe we are and I don't think it's because of out of the the of a desire for transparency, and in particular the. Fact that they include. A number of police crashes for other cars and airbag crashes for Tesla's. I think they could go and get the airbag numbers for other cars. Actually, it's a little hard to find. I looked for it. I didn't find it right away. Anyway, I just recently been seeing these numbers keep getting cited, and in spite of the fact that I think I and many other people have debunked them pretty well.

Mario

Well, let's talk about talk about marketing budget. For Tesla. It's always says on $0.00. I think I think.

Brad

Yeah true.

Mario

The market money goes into these studies.

Brad

You could be right all right. Well, one little fun topic that Waymo, which operates in Phoenix, downtown Phoenix and also in Chandler, AZ which is a suburb of Phoenix. Has announced that they're doing a little promotion for the Super Bowl, so the Super Bowl is coming up and this is the you know of course, for you Europeans watching this, it's the World Cup of American Sports in the in in the game the Americans called Football. And it is. It's very big deal actually. I know people do see it and. I hold a party most years, not during the virus where we watch the commercials. We don't care about the the sport. But anyway, it's being played in Phoenix. This in the next. And it's being played in the stadium that's not in Waymo's service area, but Waymo is sort of just proving people, hey, you may not have realized you can ride a robo taxi, at least in the other areas of Phoenix. And that's fun. But this led me to ask a more interesting question, which is, how do you, if they did, serve the stadium? How do you empty a stadium of 60,000 fans? With Robo taxis and it's not an easy problem. Admittedly, in a town like Phoenix there's no public transit to the Europeans going to think I'm crazy when I say this, there's no public transit to their giant stadium. I mean almost done. I think if you really want to take a very long route. You can get there, and so the. Stadium is surrounded, of course, with Big giant parking lots and so fans are going to park their cars in those lots. They're going to drive out, however, it's going to be each person with their own individual car. Robotaxi fleets are designed so you only have maybe 1/4 of the number of robo taxis for the number of customers that you have, because obviously they're. Taxi serving many different people during the day. So how do you? How do you get the stadium empty with your wamos?

Mario

So how many people are there in the. Stadium 6 about 6

Brad

I I don't remember the capacity of that stadium, but typically fifty 60,000 for these American football stadium.

Mario

56,000. So imagine you only can take like 3-4 people in a car. You're not in the way more so I think it's three or four maximum. If these are.

Brad

Actually, the Waymo's in in Chandler they still have. I think they're Pacifica minivans, which can help more people.

Mario

Community events community events.

Brad

And also they don't let anybody sit in the driver's seat of these vehicles. They now do let people sit in the. Under seat a, future ROBOTAXI could have more seats for per square meter.

Mario

But legally, they they, they seek a vehicle that they had showcased at the CS I think has space for five people. If I'm not, if I'm remembering that correctly. Also, this looks robotaxi has four the cruise origin I I think also four probably.

Brad

Is it just where I thought they could get 6IN that guy? It's a pretty. Big guy, but I don't know for sure.

Mario

Yeah, yeah, so so. Imagine now to get out 40,000 people. Let's let's make it simple. It means you need 10,000 cars. If each car goes only one route or one time or.

Brad

Well, no, but those those people are not all the same family.

Mario

Yeah again all the same value, so that's that's a complication, so you need probably more. You have two people or three people in the in in in the vehicle, yeah, and let's say each car could service 222 rides potentially, yeah.

Brad

Some of them are.

Mario

Then you get a number of how many cars you would need in order to empty out the stadium. There's probably 5 to 10,000 vehicles, yeah?

Brad

It's and and also I mean the regular life in the town is going on and people will need the vehicles.

Mario

Right?

Brad

The No there was a well. Getting people to the stadium is actually easier because people don't arrive at the same time going to. But in many cases, after a game, they all want to leave around the same time, and so that's a I think the Super Bowl is a bit different. It's more of a. It's a giant party going on there, so you spread people out.

Mario

Yeah yeah, yeah.

Brad

So I think the answer is this is where we'll start seeing robotic transit as well as robotic cars. And so if you put buses, they could be human driven or robots and those buses, and you have a lot of them and they take people in all the directions so they take them. North SE W to parking lots where you then have 500 Waymo's waiting to take people that last pit or even smaller vehicles. I think that's what we're gonna end up doing. Well, that's we can go on about that for a while. I I've put too many topics down here, but. We recently saw two different. Articles one from some academics at the University of California and Davis. Nice people, I'm sure, but not necessarily groundbreaking, that they wanted to write about this, but also from Gil Pratt, the chief scientist of Toyota Motor, which is of course, the world. Largest car company and Toyota, of course, is famously not the leader in electric cars. They were by a long margin, the leader in hybrid cars. Prius changed the world for sure and and all props the Prius and Gil was basically saying as he's also that you know, hey, we're going to eat a lot of lithium if we want to. Make all our cars electric and that's going to be really hard. So the Toyota approach of hybrids is much better because you can put less lithium in each car for plug in hybrids. In this case, not not ordinary Prius for the plug in Prius and plugs for Rav 4. They make you can put a much smaller amount of battery in each of those cars. Still have almost all the driving around town be electric and have gasoline for when you go outside of town and that this is a much greener solution. In fact, Gill argued because we're going to make more of the Miles electric. If we do it this way. Yes, each car will drive some gasoline miles, but the overall because we can now do all the cars with less lithium, we it's a win. The researchers at UC Davis. They also took this extrapolation. Let's imagine that batteries look exactly as they do in 2023. Let's imagine the cars look exactly as they do in 2023, and let's play. That out of them all, converting over to being lithium batteries and it's going to need a crap load of lithium, and that's going to be really hard to get. And it's also going to be very environmentally destructive to mine it now. I don't think that's true. I think that we are remarkably good at figuring out new solutions when they're I've. I've written an article saying that. That people misunderstand the law of supply and demand because they are taught in the first class they ever take in economics. They're taught the law of supply demand, which is demand for something goes up, and then the price goes up because the we can't meet the supply. But the real law is the reverse. The demand for something up and the price goes down. And that's true of all technological things, including car batteries. Car batteries have seen massive increase in demand over the last few decades, and we've seen massive falling in price. The same is true for solar panels, and of course the greatest example in history of the transistor, which literally costs one. Trillionth of what it did when people were first trying to make computers. So as the demand for transistors and computing went up, the price dropped by a factor of a trillion. Now it's not always going to be that good, but it's even natural gas went down in price as the demand went up. As people discovered new fracking approaches, so this could even apply to natural resources. So anyone who predicts Oh my God, we're all going to run out of things and we're not going to be able to pull off what we need to pull. They've almost always been wrong in history. I can't say never, never, ever wrong, but it's the way to bet. But what about Toyota's proposition that? Because lithium is expensive right now, we should all just by plugging hybrids and not electric cars. What do you think?

Mario

So, so first first say the shout out and the book is super abundance.

Brad

Oh OK, there you go, gotta plug gotta plug your book it's.

Mario

Yeah, basically all the studies that you just mentioned. You know there is a famous waitress here from the 80s where? Economist went and bet that he thinks that the the prices for five different metals, copper, nickel, tin. And and some others will be going down in 10 years. And while the others all said no, it's going up and he famously won was 1/5 of the price when they started. Yeah, so The thing is, scarcity is not material. Scarcity is ideas and humans, but we always when the prices go up for lithium, we always find ways to get. Eight or more lithium. Yeah, the deposits there are more than enough deposits, they're just not mineable at the moment, so we have not made mines, but with the prices going up suddenly they become economically to to make them explore. Or we found alternatives or use less of those things. And that led. I mean when you think about it. 200 years ago. Yeah we had humans basically on subsistence. Most of humans were basically working 7 hours a day, 7 hours a day just to be able to afford the. The food of the day. Today we are working in minutes to have the entire food and we are way more people living much longer, having a much more wealth and health in that thing that means. Humans are able to to overcome that.

Brad

I we're agreeing too much. I I should have. I was afraid of that because yes, and what I've written in particular that's not well understood is that, you know, oil is not a the good or even lithium is not what we want, right? We want. Affordable, effective, clean transportation.

Mario

Right, right?

Brad

That's the actual good in the middle of that you could say batteries or electrical storage. Storage technology is what we want, and so even if the natural resource and there are a few natural resources and a few things out there which are harder to make abundant but. But usually that's not the thing we actually want. The thing we want is at first simply batteries. But or storage or transportation and the world has shown that if we really want something, we figure out how to make it cheap, and so the more demand. If you learn supply and demand in economics school, put that out of your mind. Because that only happens for a very short time, even when you get a crazy war in Europe, that suddenly raises the price of things. The net result of that war is going to be that Europe figures out to stop buying oil and gas from Russia, stop burning oil and gas as much as they. And in the end, the price of energy will go down, not up. Even though Putin can benefit a little bit from it going.

Mario

You know they did they.

Brad

Up in the short term.

Mario

Did that Germany had like 50% of its oil and gas coming from Russia at the beginning of last year to date zero. So if you want we can yeah now.

Brad

That now the Germans are crazy and and have decided to shut down all their nuclear reactors. But that's another long story which we could. Do another day.

Mario

But coming back to Toyota, yeah. I mean, there's a good reason why they are trying to do that and that is they are being hit by disruption. They were so they they had their first mover advantage with the. Plug in hybrids, prios toilet, prios, and so on. But then they stalled and now they see basically this disruption coming at them, and that requires some hot cuts. So what what is what is the what is a hybrid? The hybrid is basically you have still a combustion engine and you have a battery. So that means you have more people working on that you have a more complex solution, so it's good for the company itself, not so good for the customers because the customers buy a more expensive and potentially. Break breakable system that has to be maintained so and what the switch to electric vehicles would mean across the industry is estimated about 1/3 of the people that you today have working in the combustion engine cars building the combustion engine, the transmission. The gasoline fuel system. The exhaust system that, out of those 1/3 of the people who are doing that. You need only 10% and that is hard cut. That means with Toyota having 200,000 plus employees, it would mean 1/3. Him would become superfluous. Yeah Volkswagen with six or 600,000 people, you know, like 200,000 people that you would not need if you simply calculate it like this. And this is where you see the resistance in these companies because as a CEO. You you can't just layoff 1/3 of your people in such big companies. There's a lot of repercussions and shareholder. And and I think this reality is something that especially Toyota has tried to talk away and now they had to. Basically, I'm not sure that to Yota was his grandson or something like. That was the CEO.

Brad

Well, he's he's resigning and they can have a new CEO.

Mario

Yeah, resigned voluntarily. Yeah, or he basically was told. I'm I'm not sure if this was really so voluntarily because they've seen the numbers probably going down everywhere.

Brad

Yeah, many people are speculating that when the new CEO takes over, we're going to see a major change in direction from the company. And as you're saying, it's they'd better make a major change in direction. There's one hybrid design I think is. Kind of interesting, which is the design that it was in the BMW I3. The the folks from Byron had a an electric car with a small very small gasoline engine and motorcycle. That was tuned to only operate at exactly 1 speed, so it's much easier and simpler to do it, and it was not a parallel hybrid but a serial one, so it could only charge the battery when they sold it in the United States. The law made them use it in a very stupid way, but the European configuration, which by the way people found out how to hack and convince the car. In Europe, and so it could drive properly, might make some sense, because right now we're seeing a lot of people want. I want a, you know, a giant battery that'll do 350 miles in my car and you actually don't. That, and one thing that might makes some sense is you know a car that can go 150 miles, but you can slot in this gasoline generator for those few times a year that you want to go far from the charging grid you want to go up in the in the hills and mountains, or just not worry. I could see that as a reasonable approach that engines. Inexpensive. It's still got emissions of course, but it could be. You could even be a Stirling engine, which is actually even more efficient. No one's ever tried that, so, but you know the the the the BMW. It was actually a lot of people were saying, hey, this was one of the nicer electric cars out there because it seems a BMW and they know how to make a nice car. But pretty soon it was the same price as the Tesla and and it had like 90 miles of electric range and nobody wanted it so. I don't even know.

Mario

It was also an unloved child at BMW.

Brad

Yeah true.

Mario

And that's that's where they also manufactured it. Far off from the headquarters far off in German distances you're not in or around there, but in Leipzig. This former eastern Germany are far far away. A different world. Yeah yeah. And let them let them do that. It was kind of a SWAT team the the the I3 was a fantastic car. I mean there was so much innovation that went in. Yeah, when you look at the Sandy Munro made a complete analysis of that vehicle, but people had. Issues I think with the design there was concern.

Brad

Well, it had the suicide doors and it was it was kind of small and Spartan for a Beamer.

Mario

And then the the true BMW folks in Munich they. Just hated it. Yeah, yeah.

Brad

But but but one interesting, and I mean they didn't invent that idea, but they they were first car company to sort of make a a serious play at it. I mean, I've even proposed a battery swap. Is something that's a pretty silly idea and it's been tried and failed before and there are people trying again, but actually the technology behind battery swap as not swapping your whole battery, but the ability to temporarily. Drop in a larger battery. In this space, could actually make sense, because right now we're all driving around town carrying these, you know, 7080 kWh batteries, which we don't need to, and there's a lot of weight carried around for no reason. A lot of money spent for no reason I I'm this also would help if we ever really were going to have a shortage. Of lithium, but we already showed why we're not really going to worry about the shortage of lithium. Another paper that I had to debunk this month. Came from a grad student at MIT, but because of MIT it gotten a lot of attention and people paying attention then what she wrote was that, well, the self-driving software, especially the neural networks, very compute intensive, very energy intensive using a lot of. Watts and. She made the assumption that some cars are indeed using about 800 watts to drive their self driving AI accelerators today, which is. A lot now your car is using about 15 kilowatts to drive on the highway for example. So it's still a small portion of what an electric car is using for driving. It's using less when it's driving in the city, obviously because it takes less energy to drive there, but anyway, So what? What happens if we we just to extrapolate this out? And the 800 watts is going to grow and become kilowatts and kilowatts and kilowatts more. And even though the processors are more. Efficient in 2050. We're still going to see immense amounts of power, so you did a calculation that's make every car autonomous, every car drawing three or four kilowatts while it's going. Oh my God, that's more electricity than all of the computer centers in the world today. More compute than that. More electricity than some countries as we as people love to say about Bitcoin mining and. So there were two ways this was wrong, which was the first one? Was that's wrong?

Mario

It's not.

Brad

That's not how you extrapolate. It was not going to be burning 5 kilowatts in all these cars, and we're not going to, you know. We are going to gain more efficiencies and the neural networks are going to get better in the sensors are getting better and just as we have in computation, not only made our computing vastly cheaper, we've actually made it get much more per Watt, and that's factored in the paper, but not correctly. But there's another factor which is. Less understood about self driving cars. Self driving cars are also self charging cars which means to say they can go off to the charging when it's time for them to charge if. Electric they can't plug themselves in quite yet, although there are a few companies that have made prototype robotic charging plugs and I think we eventually actually will develop yet another charging plug standard. We have so many today, but that doesn't mean we can't have more, which is designed for the cars to plug themselves in with. Just because the car is a robot and so you don't need any other robotics, if you do it right, but whether that will happen or not, I don't know what cars are going to charge themselves. If nothing else, they'll drive to a charging lot and they'll be. Just like there used to be gas stations, a a dude or a woman who is going to plug you in and but they're doing it like just plugging in all day. And so it's relatively cost effective. Alright, so the cars charge when they want to because. Unless you're a fleet car that's driving 200 miles a day, you don't need to charge every day. You can pick when you charge, so the power grid. Has all sorts of sources on it which have different amounts of emissions and we have our fossil fuel plants, like our coal plants and natural gas plants that have a lot of emissions and we have our nuclear plants, our solar farms, and wind farms, and various other forces which have no emissions. Or, you know, different levels of emissions. Hydro of course as well as in the. And energy storage will be in. But the nice thing about cars is and it's a problem that everyone complaints about solar solar power only during the day. Not entirely surprising only when it's sunny, and that's the biggest problem with solar power. Solar power is cheap, it's clean. It's wonderful in every possible way, except for the fact that it only happens when it's sunny and you want power when you want it, not when it's sunny. But self driving cars aren't like that. Self driving cars will take power when you tell them I have it for you cheap. If you send a message to the self driving car, hey. Extra solar power available now because there's lots of sun and nobody is, you know, running the air. I'll sell you power for a really low price because I got to sell to somebody. If solar power, that's the other problem with solar power. If you don't sell it, it's gone. You might as well sell it for a penny or half a penny, if if you'll get that for it. And so you get this magical marriage where the the power plant send a message out of the car saying we got cheap power, the wind plant. Say we got cheap power the nuclear plants. Which, when they're running at night, they don't have too many people buying their power, and with a nuclear plant you don't really turn it up and down. It's always on and they're going to send a message out. Cheap power for you and the cars are going to say great. They're going to drive off if they're not in use. If they're just parked, they'll drive off plug-in charge up. And all the power that's surplus, the nuclear, the wind. The solar happens to be the power with no emissions. So in fact, while we're still maybe going to be burning all kinds of coal and evil coal. Plants for running our air conditioners and running our factories. The cars aren't going to take. Any of that coal power?

Mario

Yeah, yeah.

Brad

Because that's expensive power power at three in the afternoon when everybody wants it. Super expensive. Never charge your car. Then anyone electric car knows. Never charge your car. If if you pay the time price of power never. Charge it then.

Mario

So I I I agree with you and and there is even more more to. First, autonomous vehicles are now mostly becoming electric, and in California the governor signed, I think already 1 1/2 years ago. Law that starting 2030 all electrically sorry all autonomously. You just have to be serial mission. Yeah, so this is first one thing that means I can have an electric vehicle. For example, that may start out with the. Energy mix that may have fossil fuels in there as well but slowly or quicker can move over to football type sustainable energy sources. Yeah, that is not happening with, of course a combustion engine car. The other one is we must not forget that autonomous vehicles can drive completely differently than humans. Which means more sustainable. They don't have to. They drive smoother, they don't accelerate in the way human would do. Yeah, they could do. We could, for example, have the cars drive through intersections without having traffic signals basically coordinates.

Brad

Yeah, that's that's not happening for a long time, if ever.

Mario

Well, rockets landing so so in anyways that means those cars could drive in more sustainable ways because they are computers that can. That and then the other one is. If you think of that, how many accidents? Sorry, how many crashes we have every year collisions in the US? I think there's a number of over 10 to 12 million collisions with 40,000 people dying and over 1,000,000 being injured. That means also that there's a carbon footprint. For all the the damage that they create, if we if we if we achieve the goal that we can reduce that with autonomous vehicles, let's say 90% of those we avoid. Then we have here a lot of energy. A lot of COM footprint reduced that today humans would generate simply because they. I'm not paying attention.

Brad

Yeah, so you know the thing that makes me want to talk about this because I think most of these papers, both the lithium paper and this paper on emissions were not very well done is that there are people who have political views on electric cars and self driving cars and so when a paper comes from. MIT UC Davis, whatever. Paying some talking point like oh self driving cars are going to cause huge emissions and are going to emit tons of greenhouse gases. Everybody, even if the paper were correct by the way, and this one isn't. But even if we're correct, people will just take that headline and suddenly you've got all these people saying ohh yeah, well, but I. I heard that self driving cars are going to cause more emissions than 300 coal. And you know it ain't true, and unfortunately, I mean I don't want to discourage anyone from doing research they believe is true. I think they should and I think we should challenge any assumption. Always challenge the science. Yeah, but you want to take some care of that. The way you express this, because you're going to become a talking point for people who are not. Up to any good, let's put it down.

Mario

So I I I actually was was. Felt compelled to create a special section on my own website on my own blog. It's called myths looking at the they carbon footprint of electric vehicles versus other propulsion systems, battery life cycles, recycling of those hydrogen.

Brad

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Mario

And then. Autonomous vehicles, there's another one coming now, so maybe. This is something to put in there.

Brad

Well, I I've, I've considered doing a video series. Yeah, and I I, I think Mythbusters would be a good name for it or something. But maybe that's taken, but there's definitely enough of them.

Mario

Could be.

Brad

You you could do one season of a show like that. Every company in the transportation business, every high tech company has done a lot of layoffs recently and people are getting scared and they should be. I mean, we definitely have an economic downturn. We're definitely in the through of of disillusionment and self driving cars. But one thing that surprised me was that even Waymo Which has been pretty immune from layoffs. Did have some layoffs. And the press said, you know the memo didn't actually announce the details, but based on people on blind and so on, that nevertheless were at the trucking part of Waymo Waymo via, which is surprising. Because if you look at another company, Aurora, which was founded by Chris Urmson who was the person who was the lead of Waymo for all of its early life. They made a reverse decision. They originally were going to be about self driving cars and then they said no, we're all about trucks now. They they say they're still about cars, but definitely everything you hear from them these days is about their trucks. And so it was interesting to see Waymo potentially going in the other direction they've been interested in. Both trucks and cars. And yesterday I actually had an interview, which I'll be writing about with. The head of the Swedish company Enright, which is making electric, autonomous and driven trucks.

Mario

Robert Faulkner and linear.

Brad

And they have a very different philosophy from Waymo Ville and the other truck companies. They don't want to do long haul trucking. They think long haul trucking is well, not useless. It's not the market they want to be in, and it's not the. Best and biggest market and I was starting to wonder it's way more thinking the same way about long haul trucking because. It's many people been attracted by trucking because it seems like it's something you can pull off sooner. It seems like you know it's sort of a well defined problem with clearly delineated commercial customers who will pay you money. You know there's there's not as much debate about whether or not there's a business in long haul trucking that there is in Robo taxi because after all Uber in the non robo taxi business is still not a profitable company. But what do you think is Waymo rethinking that? Or is it just they decided we have to pick one?

Mario

I have the feeling when I look at this layer of this is all kind of political internal politics, politics, maybe pressure from investors to basically follow suit with the thing and it doesn't spare. Apparently something like way more here. And I understand also why women may be affected, because if you look at the numbers of how much they spend in the past decade since they started doing that on average, I think they they spent about 2 to $3 billion a year on developing the technology. And with the revenues of what we're talking about less than a million or so per year that that they felt probably the pressure to do that, not because they don't believe in it, but the pressure became just too large. With everyone laying off people. And also also given maybe looking at. Having in the past two or three years during the pandemic hired a lot of people because suddenly everyone went online. You know, companies such as Apple and Facebook hired immensely Facebook. 55,000 people in just two years or something like that, and laying off now again 12,000 people at Facebook means we are back at this date. March 2022 of the hiring. Yeah, so I think I think everyone failed. The pressure also from investors from shareholders from others, and there may be there may be. A CEO that is not a founder, maybe more under pressure to do that and cannot resist object against it than than a founder, so I would. I would potentially put it into that category.

Brad

Well, way more, of course, doesn't really have investors. The way most of the people. Google has investors and there have been some Google investors who have been saying, hey, you're spending too much on Waymo in general. But of course, Google is still entirely controlled by its founders because of the stock structure they have, and So what happens there? They're no longer involved day-to-day, but what happens there? You know it has to be in line with what they want and Larry Page, who is really in many ways the most responsible person for the rise of the self. Driving car in this century. He you know he believes in them, and he's willing to invest a lot of money to make it happen. So it could be that trucking was, you know, was not. I don't know if what Larry's been talking was never talking about that, but it could be something as simple as that. But anyway, it's one of the first signs of scaling back at a company which is funded by the visionary billionaire. And of course there's a lot. People are dumping on billionaires in the last few years. I think visionary billionaires do a lot for society even though they do some bad things.

Mario

Let me maybe also extrapolate a little bit on that when I look. Especially, you know German and common effect, just other common effectors that were founded about 100 years ago or older, and where families and not anymore, or they founders are not anymore in there. Just think about Volkswagen. And when Waymo sorry, Google started their project in 2009, there's been now 14 years doing autonomous vehicle development without. Much to show for in in in in regards to revenue. Yeah at the same time Volkswagen had five I think 5 seals. So there were multiple crises in between and good times, but for each of those CEOs it basically meant 2 to $3 billion spending on that. That's basically taking that that money that flows out that may come back in 10 years when I'm long retired when I'm long not the CEO anymore, so why should I? Yeah, and.

Brad

I can't imagine why would Volkswagen have had changes of CEO. Is there anything happened recently to them?

Mario

Oh, that's a slaughterhouse inside there.

Brad

Well, you you know I've I've consulted for two automotive CEO's of Carlos Gohn of Nissan and Rupert Stadler of Audi. And they're both now under indictment. So basically I don't know if. I'm going to get any more clients.

Mario

It's you, it's you, it's.

Brad

It's don't listen.

Mario

Do here we go.

Brad

Don't listen to me. Pretty crazy stories in both cases.

Mario

No, it it is. It is a very political at this hellhole. Those things you know because also of almost structures, let's say at Volkswagen or or even at Nissan you know the Japanese and the French and they're all clashing here. So it is not very easy for a CEO as smart as you may be, but you are being set up basically in an incentive system and with pressures from outside that make it impossible for you to survive longer than than you want to.

Brad

All right, well, we've made this show way too long and this part you could talk about more than I will because you went. I decided not to go to this year's COVID exposure show. But I must say that looking from afar, I wasn't too much regret. There were some things I definitely would like to see that were on display and but as far as self-driving announcements of significance, I didn't see a lot that ZF did something with the whole bunch of shuttles. They're going to build, really. Large volumes of autonomous shuttles, so I thought that was interesting. Other than that, what what was there that was the surprise announcement? All of the world's changed.

Mario

Well, I've been at the last four. I think this year, so the last year the one this year, the one and the two, two before that.

Brad

Yeah no. I was at the ones before the virus, but.

Mario

Yeah yeah, so so last year it was disappointing in so far because like 2 weeks before that 30% of the automotive manufacturers just cancelled. Even Samsung canceled and they're also. But this yes, this year this year there was a lot going on. But you're right, what you've seen was on the one side. The way more history vehicles plus the truck and the new one that was that was nice to see and to sit in there. And I had the I had the luck to be exactly the same time. There when they see you was there all right. So I was I was.

Brad

Usually, he's seen the car before.

Mario

I was sitting in there that sneaking with this delegation into the car and out of the car. And when they finally figured out that I'm not part of the delegation, I had already all the pictures and videos.

Brad

Who let this Austrian in here?

Mario

Yeah, I was definitely not looking Asian even if I have smaller eyes, but I was not looking like that. I I saw also demos that we write did so they they let you hop on in the demo track or on on the road. So I did the. The one on the demo track there was this robotaxi. There it was. Nice to see it live looking at it sitting in there having explained to us. Then there were the people mover that, like Sedef said, have had in some other companies. This one, others had more concepts, you know Pininfarina and and Sony, I think, was it Sony.

Brad

Oh yes, only had some crazy concept, but does it have shuttle? That's a real thing they're. Saying they're making a lot of right.

Mario

Yeah, so the set of things looked really, you know, like like you would expect to be a bus looking like today inside. You know with some cute ideas like like. A charger for your phone that you put there, but everything felt like a real bus, just not with the driver anymore, so that looks good. But you're right, there was not really some. There were not really big announcements of self-driving. What was the same again, is that you had. The the bigger Williams being there and showcasing stuff, we're just questioning their sanity. Yeah, everyone shows self driving cars or even taxis people with them from the hotels to the Conference Center. But they show Mercedes was talking about. The garage parking. Yeah, the valid parking and and and BMW. You know you could do some test rights on their on their with their electric vehicles that they. Yeah, but I'm not expecting much anymore from them there. It's always kind of. You have the feelings are two different worlds. Yeah yeah. And then you're asking why actually are there to see?

Brad

I mean, you know it's become the big automotive show, and self-driving show. I'm sure there were several 100 lidar companies there. There seemed to always be not all of which will survive, but all right so? Do you want to talk about more Tesla stuff or shall we maybe wrap it up and?

Mario

We can wrap it up. I think we. I think we.

Brad

We've gone pretty long and maybe fewer topics.

Mario

Yeah, we don't wanna exhaust our audience. Here this yeah.

Brad

Well, I'm assuming nobody is still watching at this point what I'll be doing is in YouTube. I'll be putting the should at this beginning, of course, but I'll be putting in those chapter markers so that people can just listen to the issues that they're interested in. And of course, that will also be the transcript that used to. Forward, so I think we'll we'll keep doing this if unless nobody watches and or with different guests and maybe even letting people come in and maybe with fewer topics. Originally I thought about doing this. I was going to say, oh, just a week's worth of topics, but we've ended up with a month.

Mario

No, I I. I thought I thought right away that you have a very challenging agenda created here.

Brad

Yeah no, no for sure the I will. I will remove the agenda from the screen and just say that that's anyway. It's been a fun more over an hour. Almost an hour and a half and lots of great issues and there are more to come. So as always, come to this channel for the latest on both the future of transportation with self-driving and electrification, and you can visit Mario's website, the last drivers. Holderisit.com is it the whole yeah.com where he also opines on these topics and he also does a fair bit of coverage of the European scene which even though he has been seduced over to the United States, he's still very much in touch with what's going on, especially in the German speaking world so.

Mario

Dot com.

Brad

I will look forward to seeing you again and maybe even some viewers as guests in the near future. I'm Brad Templeton from robocars.com.