The Great Google Car Crash of 2016

CarStuff's Scott Benjamin comes on to talk about Google's self-driving car causing its first car accident. What happened? And how will Google prevent future accidents?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Technology. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff. I am
Jonathan Strickland and dig today together again at last, Scott Benjamin. Hey,
I'm back joining the show and and I actually have

(00:25):
you here talking about cars as usual, but thank you.
You know what, I always appreciate the invite. And uh
and this one is again right in my wheelhouse here,
so yeah, I'm excited about It's where I keep my
wheels in the house. Yeah. So we we're talking today
about a peculiar event, something that happened in February, and
it's just taken me this long to finally get around

(00:47):
and addressing it. You might have heard in previous episodes
of Tech Stuff about how I would champion the fact
that Google with their self driving cars had had enormous
success flawless. You might argue success something like one point
four five million miles driven without a single accident caused

(01:09):
by the autonomous system. That there had been about fourteen
or so accidents, but all of those were either the
fault of a person manually driving the car in manual
mode or another driver colliding with the autonomous car, but
never the fall of the autonomous car itself. It was
a perfect system until February, and that is the day

(01:33):
of what what I'll cahol And I really don't mean
to over dramaticize this at all, So maybe I'm titling
this episode. I think maybe we should call this the St.
Valentine's Day Google self driving Car Massacre. That is an
excellent title and definitely not overly dramatic in any way. Well,
I mean it's it's also funny because we're recording this, uh,
the week after I've gotten back from south By Southwest,

(01:57):
and this was a topic that was discussed heavily at
south By Southwest because until this incident, it was a
very easy sell to say autonomous cars are the way
to go. And then this little accident happened, and and
it it wasn't terrible. We'll get into the details of
the accident. But this little accident happened suddenly it sounded

(02:20):
like Google's autonomous car had caused an enormous pile up
on the highway. Everyone was much more cautious. So you're
maybe not buying my alternate title, then, is that what
you're saying? What's your alternate No, No, that I'm totally no.
I think it is a massacre, but I think it's
a massacre in the sense of the public perception of
autonomous cars. I see, okay, yeah, I'm thinking of from

(02:44):
a pr stuff. I could I could take this opportunity
to gloat and say, ah, they're not as infallible as
you thought they're They're not perfect. But but I'm going
to take a different stance here in this in this podcast,
And and I think that as we as we talk
through this, h we're gonna realize that they've been held
to a much higher standard than they probably need to

(03:05):
be right. And I know that's that's tough to to take,
you know, when you when you just hear it that way,
But listen to our argument back and forth about this,
and and understand that they're being held to perfection when
they probably shouldn't be when humans, I mean, we're not perfect.
Of course, there's a vast um a chasm between what

(03:26):
the standards that they're held to versus the standard that
human test drivers are held to. Sure, yeah, if you
look at if you look at the standard driving test
that you have to pass before you get a license, uh,
I would argue most autonomous cars could likely pass such
a test as close to flawlessly as you can get,

(03:47):
but you don't have to be flawless when you take
a driver's test. There's room for you to not completely
do something perfectly, like if your parallel parking isn't exactly right,
you're gonna get points to die did from your total,
but you may still be you know, high enough, score
high enough so that you could pass the full driver's test. Exactly.
Knock over cone. It's not really a big deal, but

(04:09):
an autonomous car knocks over a cone, everybody points at
it and says, look at that thing, it's it's pilot junk. Yeah, exactly.
It's interesting that you point that out too, because that
ties into a different discussion. I saw it south by
Southwest that wasn't specifically about autonomous cars. It was about robots.
So this is a little bit of a tangent, but
it it goes to illustrate the point you just made.

(04:31):
So this this UH panel about robots. There was a woman,
Layla taka Yama, who used to work for Google X
but not in the autonomous car division. She talked about
how she ran a a an experiment. She got a
guy from Pixar to do a series of very simple
animations to show people, the interactions between a robot and

(04:54):
a person, and then to judge which robot is considered
UH in elligent versus not intelligent. And the whole point
of this was to show the differences between succeeding and failing,
but giving no indication that the robot understands it succeeded
or failed, or building in expressions for the robot to

(05:15):
follow a success or failure UH to indicate it quote
unquote understands what happened. And it was fascinating because they
showed a very simple UH experiment with a robot trying
to open the door. And again this is an animation,
so there was a different scenarios. There's one where the
robot opens the door and the door opens and then

(05:38):
the robot just sits there and it's it's done because
it's done what it was supposed to do. There's one
where the robot opens the door and then kind of
perks up like, oh, I did what I wanted to do.
There was one where the robot fails to open the
door and then does nothing UH. And then there was
one where the robot fails open the door and then
slumps down a little bit as if to say, oh,

(06:00):
I'm disappointed I didn't succeed. They then asked people to
judge which robots they thought were the most intelligent, and
everyone said the robot that failed but showed disappointment was
more intelligent than the robot that succeeded but didn't show
any expression at all. And when you think about that again,
it's holding robots to a standard that doesn't necessarily apply

(06:21):
to them because of the human element this human robot interaction.
We're holding autonomous cars to a similar standard that perhaps
is not fair. We're holding robots to a standard that's
not fair, But that means that people who are designing
autonomous cars and people who are designing robots have to
take that into consideration because that's the way humans are. Well,

(06:44):
this is interesting because you're you're mentioning specifically imitating human behavior.
And this comes up in an article that I read
in I let't see it was in the Verge, and
the Verge you might have read the same thing article.
It really is and a person by the name of
Jennifer Haroun. She's the head of business operations for Google
self driving project. And by the way, let's come back

(07:06):
to the details of the accident and just a moment,
we'll describe what happened. But she says that, well, you
know what, maybe I need to back this up just
a second here. How about this, Let's describe the accident
and then we'll talk about what she said, because it
plays perfectly into it, so and helping understand what happened.
So here's here's how you can imagine it. All right,
You've got an intersection, uh in Mountain View, California, which

(07:27):
is where Google's headquarters is located, and you've got the
Google self driving car. Correct me if I get any
of this wrong, Scott, I'm going from memory. I'm doing
mostly the same. It's so the Google self driving cars
in the right lane and at once it's playing on
making a right turn at this intersection. Now, at the
corner of the intersection, there were some sandbags that were
a partial obstruction of the lane. Then I think you're

(07:48):
blocking a sewer entry a great maybe or something. Right,
So the Google car detected that there was an obstruction,
and so it had to plan an alternate way to
make its right turn. It still wanted to follow the
route that it had planned, so the change would have
been for it to kind of edge into the next
lane over, the next lane to the left before making

(08:10):
a right turn. Behind the Google car, approaching at a
blistering speed of fifteen miles per hour, was a bus.
And so the Google car recognized there was a bus coming.
It was moving at a very slow speed at two
miles per hour. The Google car said, well, based upon

(08:31):
my programming, what I should expect happen is that the
bus will slow down, allow me to move through. I'll
clear the intersection, the bus will continue. What actually happened
was the Google Car made the move into the lane,
the bus continued, and there was a low speed collision
and there were no injuries. No one was hurt. There
was in fact a driver behind the wheel of the

(08:52):
Google car. It's just the driver wasn't in control. The
autonomous system was in control. And some people might say, well,
you know, the bus driver just a let the car end.
But Google actually said, and this is important. Google came
out and said, we accept responsibility for this. This is
something that uh, it's it's valuable that this information has
come to light because it means that we need to

(09:13):
revisit this particular part of the autonomous car programming. Now
I thought that was really interesting. First of all, I
have never heard of a company accepting responsibility for something
so fast in my life. Well they did, and they didn't.
I mean, there's a couple of versions of this. Now,
you got the details of the accident, correct, Although I
did hear, and this this is a bit confusing. I

(09:35):
didn't hear that the lanes in this particular part of
town are extremely wide, and so what happened was the
car uh kind of edged itself over toward the curb.
So it was I guess mimicking human behavior again. And
I'll get to that in just a minute. But um,
you know, once, once this accident happened and they said,
you know, we do need to investigate this. They did
that to the tune of about thirty five hundred new

(09:57):
tests that they have now implemented since this accident, that said,
we're gonna watch for this. You know that we need
to understand a little more deeply that some of these
larger vehicles may have a different and more difficult times
stopping in traffic than a smaller vehicle will. And and
that's the reason why some of these bigger vehicles like
to continue on their path and think, well, maybe someone
behind me will let them in. Google did say we

(10:20):
were relying on an element of human kindness UM to
let us into that lane. And that's normally what happens.
It really does. Usually there's a back and forth or
you know, maybe there's always gonna be that off handed
time where you know someone does cut through and they're
just like they're like, no, I need to get through
that intersection in this light cycle, and no one is
gonna stop me. Yeah. I mean I'm gonna be ten
feet ahead of you when all this happens. And that's
where I you know, that's that's my goal. But uh,

(10:43):
usually what happens is it's an alternating pattern and they
expected that to happen, and it didn't happen in this case.
And this is where it plays right into what UM
Jennifer had mentioned. Jennifer Harun, who is the head of
business operations for Google self driving project, explained at and
I think she was at the south By Southwest Kind
Prince as well, and she said that the Lexus, it's
a Lexus vehicle. It was outfitted with this gear so

(11:05):
that it struck the bus in part because it was
imitating human behavior. And that's I found that interesting. That
she she kind of is deferring the fault here and
to say, well, we were just imitating what we see
on the streets and that's that's kind of what happened.
So it's a it's a double deferral in a way, right,
because first they say we were counting on an element

(11:26):
of human kindness, which is already kind of a deferral
in itself. You're you're essentially saying, well, we were concert
we were thinking that the bus driver would be a
decent human being and not a Lexus hating scumbag. That's
I'm paraphrasing what they said. Obviously, I'm taking a little liberty.
And then in this one you're saying she's also saying, well,
we designed the car to behave the way we see

(11:46):
actual cars behaving on the road. So in both cases
you're almost it's a little bit of backing away from
taking full responsibility exactly. And this imitating human behavior that
she's talking about was that they had recently taught the
eals to hug the right hand side of that lane
when they're making that right hand turn, and that that's
when it's encountered the sandbags that were unexpected, and so

(12:09):
this is what I find interesting is if it's a
wide lane and she's saying that it was hugging the
right hand side of that lane, trying to make the
turn as most humans do. If it was in the
center of the lane, she's saying, if it had just
behaved as they normally would do it, you know that
it would be in the exact dead center of that lane.
The bus wouldn't have had the gap, I guess, and
try to try to make it through that gap, so

(12:29):
it would have just been behind the car. Never would
have happened. So she's saying, in effect, because we're trying
to make it mimic human behavior, and we were hugging
that right side, that's why this accident happened, maybe we
should have done that. But then again they come back
and say that that's absolutely necessary for them to mimic
human behavior, because if they don't, that causes trouble as well.
There's proather issues that are right, like if a if

(12:51):
a vehicle, let's say that it's an autonomous car heading
toward an intersection, the light goes from green to amber,
and there's technically enough space for the car to break
safely and come to a complete stop as the light
turns red, knowing that most humans would just gun it,

(13:14):
or at least just continue at the same speed to
go through the intersection while it's still amber. You might
want to think about that when you're designing your autonomous
car so that you don't cause a pile up behind
you like you don't. If the person directly behind the
autonomous car expects the car in front of them to
continue through the intersection, you could potentially get rear ended.

(13:35):
That happens a thousand times around. I mean more than that,
but it happens all over the world, especially in Atlanta,
where the rule is that the light turns red, three
cars get to go through. It is so true, isn't it.
It seems like once one goes through, two more follow you.
That's crazy. Yeah, I've seen it happen in multiple places
around the city. There's some neighborhoods where it's worse. I'm

(13:56):
not gonna name any names, Buckhead, but I'm just saying,
never accelerate immediately on a green light anywhere in this area,
because you can expect there's gonna be that that odd
ball car that comes through it, right, and there's gonna
be like a car that's been waiting to turn left
the whole time, and they say, I'm not waiting another
light cycle, I'm just going now, like even if they're
behind the stop line. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it
happens everywhere. It's it's particularly bad in these congested areas. Yes,

(14:20):
So to your point, it is important to take those
things into consideration when designing the autonomous car. You don't
want an autonomous car to drive like an inconsiderate jerk
of a driver. But at the same time, you can't
have it be so clinically precise that it is standing
out from all the other drivers. The only way that
works is if you get to a point where you're

(14:40):
at a saturation point with autonomous cars on the road,
where then you can affect the behavior on a mass
scale across a fleet of cars and not have that
issue of human drivers having awful interactions with robotic drivers exactly.
Here's here's the way they state at these These spokesman
stated and say it's vital for us to develop advanced

(15:01):
skills that respect not just the letter of the traffic code,
but the spirit of the road. I think that's a
good way to put it. The spirit of the road.
I understand that. I completely get that when I read
it is that, Yeah, there's little rules here and there
that we'd bend, but everybody bends them, and you you
expect you you understand how other drivers are gonna behave
in the same situation, and you expect that to happen,

(15:23):
and you behave in that way, and it all works.
But when something comes in, a spoiler comes in, um
and it follows exactly to the letter of the log
the way that's supposed to happen, that person maybe the
you know, the standout right. Another great example of that
in Atlanta would be, uh. We have a couple of
different highways that run through the city and one that
runs around the city and is often thought of as

(15:47):
the type of highway that if you get on it,
you have to speed. You cannot go the speed limit
on two five. It's just too dangerous because everyone else
is going above the speed limit. Massive truck traffic, yeah
and yeah, and there are enormous, enormous semis uh rushing
down there, and you don't want to get you don't
want to be poking along when they come up behind you.
So again, an autonomous car would need to have that

(16:09):
information and take that into account unless you've got to
a point where you had so many autonomous vehicles on
the road that it was no longer a concern. Yeah,
and this is where we we discussed this yesterday because
we're talking off air about this just a little bit
too prep for today. And uh, the idea would be
that's kind of like schooling, almost like fish schooling, UM,
and that the cars know where the other one is

(16:30):
at all times and they can communicate between them. The
problem is when you throw in the human driver element
into that mix, or you know, if if if you
have just one autonomous car among all humans. That's the
other problem with the other issue, and right now, that's
the battle that they're fighting right right. So once we
get to a point where there's that that tipping point
one way or the other, then things will be very different.

(16:51):
But there's going to be some growing paints. And this
also leads into something that I talked about earlier in
UM when I went to ce S Toyota had their
big AI discussion. You know, they're they're investing millions of
dollars in AI research for autonomous cars and beyond. And

(17:12):
one of the things they've talked about was how autonomous
cars in general are really really good at handling all
the mundane stuff that you would typically encounter on a
normal day driving from point A to point B. What
they are not good at is dealing with stuff that's
outside of that norm, and the sandbags that we talked

(17:33):
about earlier would be a great example of that. It's
some form of obstruction that's partially blocking off part of
the road and that ends up causing a different scenario.
And sometimes the card behaves in a way that works
out for everybody. In this case, it didn't, And it's

(17:54):
not it's not that the car couldn't handle the situation.
It's just that the method that the car used turned
out to not be reliable. Yeah, this was an extremely
slow speed crash, as we've said, and the bus was
traveling fifteen miles per hour in the other lane trying
to get through that gap. But the Google car was
traveling i think they said to two miles per hour. Yeah,
very very slow, very slow speed. So the thing is

(18:18):
like with the with the the compensation for this, you know,
the thirty five hundred tests that they're now going to
run additional tests, uh to determine or to to find
a way around that situation. Said, it's never gonna happen again.
We're gonna do everything we can, but to to think
about it that way, to say, the thirty five hundred
tests that are gonna allow this vehicle to to think

(18:39):
about that exact situation and never let it happen again.
Where where just kind of noses out into uh, into
a lane that appears open. That's remarkable. I mean it
just lets you know that, uh, they're there are tens
of thousands of of UM programs are or or thoughts,
I don't know how to say it, that are they're
going through this thing at all times. You know, um,

(18:59):
all these calculations, calculations and parameters and just you know,
if this then that you know, those scenarios are being
run all the time. It's just incredible, mind boggling, it
really is. And and I was looking into you said
one one point four or five million miles have been driven,
uh flawlessly, right, I mean they hadn't have any problems,
you know at at fault. I guess the autonomous vehicle

(19:20):
Do you know how much they test on a daily
basis and on actually on a daily basis. Okay, well,
let's see, I've got I got a note here I
should have looked for that reading. Okay, here we go.
All right, So, actually this is a per week and
then a per day thing. They drive ten thousand miles
per week and that's like, you know, somebody in a
vehicle on the road, ten thousand miles per week. Per day, though,

(19:43):
this number is incredible. Per day, they're driving three million
miles of computer simulation miles, so three million the equivalent
of three million miles. That's because they can quickly just
go through that and have multiple systems running these things,
you know. So so the amount of testing that they
do in a year is just unbelievable. I don't have
yearly stats or anything, but you can extrapolate those numbers

(20:05):
to that. Well and and uh, the other point in
the Toyota press conference that was interesting to me, and
this goes back to what you were saying at the
beginning of the show about holding autonomous cars at a
different standard than we hold human drivers. Uh. They talked
about how you offer a lot of the autonomous car
industry talks about the hundred million mile um benchmarks, saying

(20:30):
that you want you want a hundred million miles traveled
of proven safety, and they said, you know that's not enough.
You need to go much bigger than that, a hundred
billion miles. And I thought, wow, that is I mean,
I get it for you want that many miles so
that you can encounter as many possible different situations as

(20:52):
you might encounter on the road. Because obviously, if you
if you plan a system and it's great for handling
percent of the situations, that's fine until you run into
that one percent. And when you do figure out how
many cars are on the road in the United States
alone traveling on any given day, you realize the odds

(21:14):
are Eventually, I mean, statistics show statistics proved like odds are,
sooner rather than later, one of those autonomous cars will
encounter a situation that would have been impossible to anticipate
in the programming phase. So I get it. On one hand.
On the other hand, I get frustrated because I really
want to see this feature get here as soon as possible.

(21:36):
But I totally understand the need for that level of
of precision that's demanded so that you can be sure
that nothing catastrophic happens when a car encounters something that
the programmers just did not anticipate. Now, Chris again, he

(21:57):
was the what was his title, I think his director
of the self driving car project director, that's right that
I couldn't remember if he's director or not, but he
um he did say, and this is I don't you
can find this troubling, I guess if you want to.
But I understand what he's saying. He says that, you know,
of course the February fourteenth was a tough day for
his team, obviously, but he says, and I thought this
was interesting. He said, We've got to be prepared for

(22:19):
more days just like that if we're gonna ever succeed
in creating this this project, you know, making this work,
and we're actually gonna have worse days than that. And
when I when I hear that, you know we're gonna
have worse days than that, of course you think, you
know the worst. Do you think that it's going to
be involved in an accident that is fatal or you know,
harms somebody, anybody in any way, And of course that
would be an awful day, that'd be a worse day

(22:39):
than what we've seen. But you kind of have to
expect something like that. Is gonna happen if you're traveling,
If you're traveling three hundred billion miles like you said,
or you know whatever, the the enormous number of miles
on the road that they want to travel is um
I would guess that when you're talking about three or
three million or billion or whatever it was, those might
be computer simular to miles, because you know, the three million,

(23:01):
three million a day is a is an enormous number,
and that adds up quickly. But you know, ten thousand
miles per week of actual you know, physical drawn the
road testing, that's that's pretty impressive still, But how long
would that take to get up to million? And you know,
I think somebody who laid it out pretty clearly here
is the U S Transportation Secretary. His name is Anthony Fox,
and you know he's the one who said where I

(23:23):
initially read, I guess, don't don't compare these two perfection
You can't do that. And one of the quotes here
in an article that I read from the BBC says
that he says, it's not as surprised that at some
point to be a crash when they've got this brand
new technology in the road. But what I what I
would challenge anyone to do is to look at the
number of crashes that occurred on the same day that
the result of human behavior, and that gets right back

(23:44):
to what you were saying, and that you know, there's
so many miles driven every day just here in the US,
around the world, all over the place, that you just
you know that bad stuff is happening all the time,
every minute literally. All right, But this is a great
opportunity for me to transition from the Google story, which
is you know it's again it has huge implications for

(24:05):
the autonomous car industry. H even though it was in
in the grand scheme of things, a minor accident, it
was something that uh once once you realize, oh they're
not perfect, then it starts raising some questions. These talks
were a bit more subdued after that point. Yeah, and
the south By Southwest like that was definitely happening, although

(24:27):
I went to a couple of different panels about autonomous
cars where they didn't even bring it up. They were
gung ho. I mean, the general feeling and south By
Southwest is that autonomous cars are a definitive future that
are coming and that uh that most likely there will
be some form of shared services model for autonomous cars.

(24:47):
I think most people UH agreed that personal ownership UH
is going to slowly phase out, largely because younger generations
don't necessarily see the necessity of owning a car. And
there were some interesting statistics too. I saw a panel
it's called Robot Cars and sharing, road rage or smooth

(25:10):
sailing and UH. This was This had three panelists on it,
a moderator and two panelists. One was the moderator was
Frederick Sue of a company called NATO. NATO creates an
app and a camera set up where you can essentially
upgrade your car into a smart car, not an autonomous car,

(25:30):
but a smart car where it's able to use information
from the camera and run it through some algorithms that
are on the back end of the data system that
then transmits to your app to let you know things
like how well, how good of a driver is the driver,
that kind of stuff. So it's also used for like
fleet management. UH. You can use it to figure out

(25:53):
if the driver you've just hired to be one of
your your employees, if that was a good choice or
not it or maybe you need to rethink that. That
kind of stuff based, yeah, and uh, and it pulls
information from a lot of different sources, but the camera
is the primary one. He was the moderator. And then
you had Shad Laws from Renault. Uh and who was

(26:17):
funny because he talked about Renault is a brand that
is famous around the world but not here in the US,
but you might know our partner Nissan. And then uh, yeah,
we knew Renault back in what the mid eighties I think, yeah, yeah.
And then there was Mark Plattchen from BMW, who was
actually a substitute. Originally it was supposed to be Maryanne

(26:37):
Wu of ge Ventures. But we'll have a little bit
more to say about BMW in just a minute, because
I can't wait to tell Scott about this. So one
one some let me throw you some some statistics at you,
or some of the facts at you that Sue brought up.
So one of the things he said was that the
typical American car spends of its life part of its

(27:02):
life park That's an enormous chunk of time. Yeah, so
only four of your typical American car, knowing that there
are cases outside on either end, uh, four percent of
it is actually used driving around. So with that, when
you when you hit someone with that. Assuming that that
is in fact correct, I don't know where his source

(27:23):
was for, but assuming that is in fact correct, you
can start to see an argument for a fleet of
autonomous vehicles that can drive around on demand and pick
someone up and drop them off, because that means you
could free up the space that would be taken by
a parked car and use it for something else, because

(27:45):
I mean, a lot of our spaces are reserver for parking.
In fact, there are regulations for office buildings about how
much square footage you have to set aside for parking
in certain cities. It depends on the city. But imagine
that you of a world where people are relying on
autonomous cars to pick them up and drop off, you
don't need that space for parking anymore. You can actually

(28:07):
dedicate that to something else and make becausa money. I
think it's the way they put it. But anyway, plant
a tree, plant a tree, you could also do that.
Come on, you tree hugger, um No, I also think
that would be awesome. So one of the things that
I thought was shocking it. I think the effect on

(28:30):
me was not what the speaker was planning. Shad laws
of Renault was talking about the the safety factor of
autonomous cars, and his argument was that um safety a
Thomas cars. First of all, we can't determine that they're
more safe than human driven cars yet because we don't

(28:51):
have enough information. We don't have enough autonomous cars on
the road, we haven't had enough scenarios to really tell.
But then he also said safety is really not as
big as as you might think, because the safety benchmark
is to try and have fewer than one fatality per
one million kilometers driven. Now, in the United States it

(29:11):
is one point oh eight fatalities for one million miles.
But a mile is longer than a kilometer, right, one
mile is one point six kilometers, so it's still below
that one fatality per one million kilometers. And then he
said for most countries that's the case. There are a
few that are above it, but not many. So is
this an unrealistic standard to be to be held to? Well,

(29:32):
I think I think what he was trying to say
is that human drivers are pretty safe already, and therefore
you can't sell autonomous cars on the promise of safety
because we're so safe already. I would counter that argument
by saying more than thirty thousand people died last year
as a result of car accidents, as thirty fewer people

(29:54):
around today because of a car accident, and more. Something
around the order of ninet percent of car accidents are
at the fault of the human of a human driver,
at least one human driver. And so my counter to
that argument is that it may be statistically speaking a
safe thing, but when you get down to actual numbers,

(30:14):
with real human being lives attached to it, I would
argue that the autonomous vehicles so far have proven to
be a really good move in the right direction to
reduce that number dramatically. This is dangerous territory you're waiting
into here, because on our show on Car Stuff, we
sometimes talk about, you know, the uh, the incredible rise

(30:37):
in in fatalities on Georgia highways last year because there
was a huge increase increase or something, you know, year
over year, and it was really big and it was
the first time in a long, long time, long stretch
of time where um, you know, it had had actually
been on the rise. It it was going down up
until that point, and then suddenly this big spike and
trying to figure out why, and we're talking about distraction

(30:58):
and all that stuff, you know, smartphones and things behind
the wheel and trying to just, you know, guess why
it is happening that way. And of course somebody writes
in and says, well, thirty eight thousand people is not
that many people. And you say, well, that that's a
lot of people that die on on US highways. And
they say, now, now, back in the nineteen fifties, the
number was like forty four thousand, and that you know that,

(31:19):
and that was with less drivers on the road. And
they give you all these stats about population and number
of miles driven and all that night, and I get
I gotta be honest, I get kind of confused with
with that, you know, with that angle, like trying to
compare apples to apples, you know, back then, you know,
sixty years ago to today. That's it's kind of tough
to do well, especially you know, there's so many other

(31:39):
factors there. Right, Yeah, you might have fewer drivers on
the road, but your safety regulations weren't anything like they
are today years ago exactly. That was one thing and
we always argue that point too. There were no crumple zones,
there were no air bags, there's none of that stuff
going on, so maybe that it counts for it, but
then they counter with another argument. So I'm just saying that,
you know, I feel that somebody out there is going

(32:01):
to have some kind of issue with you know, mentioning
that thirty. You know, thirty a huge number. That was
what it was last year in the U. S. Alone.
That's a huge number, no matter how you look at it.
I mean, even if even if there're more people driving,
I think my response to anyone who would argue like
that that this is less than in the past, I
would say, that's good, but it could be lower and

(32:24):
lower number of people who die as a result of
car accidents. I think it's hard to argue that that's
a bad thing. No, you certainly want that number to
be as low as close to zero as you could
possibly make it. Of course, automakers strive for that. They're trying,
they're they're trying everything they can to make essentially a
death proof car. I mean, you can't, you know, you
can't account for every situation, every single situation, but they're

(32:46):
doing their best to make what is essentially a death
proof car. And there's several that, you know, several marks
that they've got they've gone years without a fatality, and
they've got you know, the stats somewhere back on my desk.
But there there's a few that have gone. I'm gonna
guess here, just based off my memory, it was like
five or six years without fatality caused by a fault

(33:06):
in a system in their vehicle, right well, And and
that also leads me to a different panel that I saw.
We'll come We'll come back to the road rage one
because we got to get to the BMW's But the
other panel I saw that was related to this was
called looking Forward to Rush Our the Future of Transit
looking Forward to Russia. Yeah, this was from a couple
of industrial designers without to it design talking about the

(33:29):
future of transportation, and it wasn't just autonomous cars or
even just the future of cars. That was one half
of the panel, and that was done by a guy.
The guy who who led that part was not Dan Dorley,
but there was also Chip Walters who did the other half,
which was more about the hyper loop. Also fascinating, but

(33:49):
that we're not talking about the hyper loop today. So
switching back over to Dorley, one of the things Dorley
said that I thought was really interesting was that once
you get to a level where you have a lot
of autonomous cars on the road, like let's say the
majority of cars on the road or autonomous, and you
have proof I mean, obviously this only works if everything

(34:12):
is working properly, but you have proof that because of
the number of autonomous vehicles on the road, the number
of crashes decreases dramatically, the number of deaths decreased dramatically.
Then you can start to play around with other stuff
because if the autonomous cars are approven technology that's safe,
you can let up on some of the major safety

(34:35):
considerations you've had to put into place over the last
few years. In order to minimize that number that we
talked about, that thirty thousand or higher number. You could
remove crumple zones. You can make cars smaller and lighter,
so which is especially important if your cars also are electric,
because the battery will have less weight to have to
move around. That will extend the driving range of your vehicle.

(34:59):
But because you've made your vehicle lighter, not that not
that the battery has gotten any better, but it doesn't
have to push as much weight around. And again, this
this only works though, if every vehicle out there is
the same. Yeah, you have to have you have to
have enough autonomous vehicles, at least the majority, if not
of them out there, so that you can be confident

(35:20):
that by eliminating those safety features that are important right now,
it's not going to make any difference. Um, and I
think that, I think we're pretty far away from that,
but I thought it was an interesting point. He also
talked about more man car manufacturers creating a sort of
a universal chassis where lots of different bodies of vehicles

(35:41):
could fit on top of the same basic chassis, leading
to a future where ultimately you can and you can
do this now. Actually, if you've got enough money, you
can go to certain specialty companies and three D print
a car design. You could design a car if you
wanted to, and three D print a car body that
fits on top of a particular chassis and motor drive

(36:05):
train configuration, and uh so you can have your own.
Like people would say, well, what kind of cars as
that's my car. I call it a Strickland. Yeah, it's
it's a Strickland. It doesn't drive anywhere. Um, yeah, that's
that's a joke about me not driving. But yeah, that
I thought it was interesting that he was looking into

(36:26):
implications of autonomous cars well beyond safety, well beyond the
shared model. He was looking at au Thomas cars like, well,
what does that do to the design of the car itself.
That's interesting that, you know, you could eliminate the things
that we find that we have to have now. And
that's that's an interesting way to think about it, Like
if if, if it's just not necessary, what could you

(36:48):
really pair that design down to? What what what smart
things could you do with that to make it work
better as an electric platform, as an autonomous platform. You know,
it all makes it makes good sense. But again you're
you're counting on you participation in this. Yeah, you need to.
You would need to have enough buy in so that
there isn't a risk of having something like we saw

(37:10):
with the previous Google tests. You know, we talked about
there were more than a dozen accidents involving Google self
driving cars previously only only the previous ones until before
February two thousand sixteen. They were all at the fault
of a of a human driver, either the person manually
controlling the self driving car or another driver. So the

(37:34):
same thing is true if you're in an autonomous vehicle
and there are human drivers on the road, then there's
a chance that one of them could make a terrible
like there could just be an accident, it could be
a failure, it could be a distracted driver, drunk driver,
could be anything. And until you eliminate those possibilities, it
is pretty dangerous to just say, let's eliminate crumple zoneserous

(37:56):
you could do other stuff like imagine, you know, you
have no need for controls, so you free up all
that space in the front that would be normally be
dedicated to steering wheel and pedals and that kind of stuff.
You could have a workstation or an entertainment station. Because
you're not driving, you don't even necessarily have to face forward. Yeah,
you can face backwards. I had a discussion about this

(38:18):
on Forward Thinking and Lauren immediately said, yeah, I could
never do that. I'd be yakking all over the inside
of that car. I think a lot of people have
their trouble on a train already or a buss, you know,
in certain situations. But imagine if you could sit sideways. Uh,
the design of the vehicle could just be so radically
different that none of that really matter. You could you

(38:38):
could probably design you know, those honeycomb systems where you
could sleep in the car if you want it. Yeah,
it's kind of funny because it actually opens up an
enormous opportunity for designers, right, unprecedented opportunity, because you would
be completely transforming the interior of a car. All the
things we associate as being well, not all, but a

(38:59):
lot of the things we are so as being the
definition of what an inside of a car would look
like go out the window, I mean figuratively speaking. And
so you could then have all kinds of different configurations
and designs almost like almost more like home design really
or room design and some sort of interior design for vehicles. Yeah,
it's strange, strange thought. Hey, by the way, I want

(39:20):
to clarify one thing really, just something that's been bugging
me for last ten minutes. I do know that there
were were no cars on US roads prior to the
nineteen eighties. I was just mentioning their brief comeback, you know,
with the Alliance lineup and uh and and the kind
of I guess I'm going to mention the failure that
that was. It was, it was not not all that
well received. Yeah, but I think most of my listeners

(39:42):
are most of them let me let me clarify, most
of my listeners in the US are probably unfamiliar with
the brand Rent. Yeah, probably because I'm I'm guessing many
of them were born in the eighties. Yeah, it's a
It is a seldom seen vehicle on the roads here
in the United States, but in other parts of the
world it is a very popular. Yeah, I mean a

(40:02):
lot like pougeot or something like that. You know, there's reasons,
but not the right show. It's so funny when you
start throwing around, uh, car manufacturer names and car brand names,
and then you come to that weird realization that in
other parts of the world they're totally different ones that
and some some of which that are prevalent in the
United States are largely unknown in certain parts of the world.

(40:26):
And it just reminds you like, oh, yeah, that's right.
The whole world isn't the US. Yeah, it's it's it
is strange. And once you travel outside and you see that,
you see the same vehicle but it's named something different
or something like that, it's just unusual. It's just it's
it is eye opening. Really. Now I've been teasing this
for the whole episode. But let's get back to BMW

(40:47):
and Mark Platchen. Is this intended to hurt me? No,
it's not tend to hurt you. I just want to
see what your reaction is. Scott. I. Scott and I
started talking about this off microphone yesterday, and as I
was talking, a little voice in my head said, shut up, Jonathan,
save it for the show. So that's what we're gonna do.

(41:07):
It's not really you might just shrug and say, oh,
all right. But in order to set this up first,
what is bmw slogan? Now they're known as It's It's
a driver's car, right, It's a it's um the ultimate
driving machine means the ultimate driving machine, the ultimate driving machine.
So you would think that, you know, of course they're
gonna dabble in autonomous systems like you know, maybe adaptive

(41:30):
cruise control something like that. But I just I've had
a hard time all along seeing BMW going fully autonomous
because of the way they market their company. Right now,
it's it is the ultimate driving machine. It's a driver's vehicle.
If you want something that's fun to drive, that's an experience,
you get a BMW. You get you know something that's uh,
it's it's top of the line, it's expensive, it's plush,

(41:51):
it's it's it's a well handling car, it's powerful, it's
it's everything you want, and again, ultimate driving machines. So
so why are they messing around with autonomous vehicles? That's
that's my thoughts. Plantation works specifically with the autonomous vehicle
section in BMW, and his response to the first part

(42:12):
would be, I imagine I'm putting some words into his mouth,
so take this with a grain of salt, But I
imagine he would say, it's where the future of vehicles
definitely happens to be completely understand that and you cannot
ignore it. If you do, you'll be left behind. Yes,
he said that the company was at a real um.

(42:36):
They were in a quandary. He actually said that. I
think it was last year he was brought in to talk,
or maybe it was a few years ago. He was
taught brought in to talk about the concepts they needed
to talk about in an upcoming conversation. They were gonna
hit like some corporate milestone, and they wanted to talk
about what are the next one years of BMW going

(42:59):
to look like? Now? Anyone who's listened to forward thinking.
You know, predicting the future is hard. Predicting five years
out is hard. Predicting a hundred years out is impossible.
I can't. Yeah. Uh. The only thing I can predict
tomorrow is that if I don't wear some block, I
will be sunburnt. That's it, because I know I'm gonna
be outside a lot. But he said it was his

(43:19):
job to try and help coordinate this, this vision of
BMW for the next one years, and taking into account
the fact that autonomous cars are I mean, everyone is
stuff byself. West was talking about them as if it's
a foregone conclusion. That's the future, that's where we're going.
So taking that as part of it, they actually had

(43:40):
serious internal discussions what does this mean with our slogan
the Ultimate driving Machine? What do we do? Do we rebrand?
How do we rebrand? This is something we pride ourselves upon.
It is a corporate identity. It's it's kind of the
center role mantra of the company's it's the DNA of

(44:03):
the company. They started playing with alternatives to the slogan,
like maybe we change it to something else, and they
tried a few different things out and all internally, and
no one liked them. No one liked them. And then
finally someone said, well, technically it's a driving machine. It's
a machine that's driving. It is the driving machine. We

(44:27):
can make the ultimate driving machine. So it's still the
same slogan. The context is redefined. Yeah, boy, I don't know.
That's why I went, yeah, I don't know about this
all right. Well, so it's almost like you're putting the
the emphasis on the on the other part. I don't
know how how do you even look at that? I

(44:48):
guess it's just how you would say that. I'd say
the emphasis. The emphasis previously was on driving because you
think of driving as a verb that people indulge. So
now it's the ultimate driving machine. I okay, Well, a boy,
that's so subtle. So if you make And this was
also an interesting discussion because people ask the questions and
what happens to brand identity in a future of autonomous

(45:10):
vehicles that are likely not going to be owned by
individuals but will be in some form of shared economy.
And they had a really good response for this. They said, well,
you could argue that all autonomous cars would essentially be
alike that one you know, robo uber car would be
the same as the next robot uber car, except eventually

(45:33):
someone would come along and say, you know what, We're
going to make a different robot uber car that has
X features in it, which appeals to why demographic somebody
will pay a premium for that feature, right, Because if
you're like, hey, we noticed that, uh that young people
between the ages of such and such and such and such,
they really care about these things and they don't care
about these other things. Let's make some cars that go

(45:56):
straight straight to what they care about, and we'll be
able to dominate that market. And then you get competition
there because other companies will follow, which means you still
end up getting that differentiation. You still get the brand identity.
The question is how do they define themselves so that
the experience of being in, say a BMW autonomous car
is different from being an Alexis autonomous car. And now

(46:19):
we know all they do is put the emphasis on machine.
That's it, right, But I thought, I guess it beats
like BMW we give up or BMW it was fun
well at last, Yeah, yeah, you can come up with
a bunch of funny slogans. I'm sure for it. But
but honestly like to stick with what they have. Really,

(46:41):
I think maybe if if that's what they're gonna do,
and they're gonna push it that way, that may be
exactly what they do. They may you may hear that
emphasized machine over over driving, which we are now. So
that's gonna be really weird, isn't it. I think so.
I mean, I also think it's gonna be weird to
be in a world where, assuming that the shared car
approach is what what wins out, it will be weird

(47:03):
to live in that world for lots of different reasons,
because a lot of us are very used to having
our own personal vehicle for multiple reasons, not just for
the convenience sake, but convenience outside of just I have
a car whenever I need to go someplace, assuming that's
not broken down. What about all the stuff that's in
a car, Like a lot of people have stuff that

(47:24):
they keep in their car, and it might equipment or
you know that diapers, Yeah, stuff like a new parents
might have a box of diapers in the car so
that when they travel places they have their supply right there.
If they need to run out to the car, they
can or but in the future if you have shared vehicles,
obviously you can't just keep stuff in a car. You'd
have to carry everything you need with you all the time. Uh,

(47:47):
and you either have to pare down the stuff so
that you're saying, well, I might not be prepared for
certain situations. But yeah, but it's a trade off. Isn't
it really nice to just kind of leave an umbrella
in your car and have it when you need it
and you don't have to remember every single time you
go out the door. It was funny because Plain actually said, well,
maybe we'll have services where you could actually store your stuff.

(48:09):
Uh and what would account what would end up being
like a mobile storage unit and you could just call
upon it to come to you whenever you needed it.
And I thought that puts more cars on the road.
That's a terrible idea. Yeah, I I'll just tell you
right now, that's a bad idea. Joe and Lauren both
agree with you, and I do too. I also thought like, well,
that doesn't sound like that's ideal. So yeah, there's obviously

(48:30):
some huge trade offs that would happen. We'll imagine a
block of lockers, you know, that's would it be a
block of lockers driving down the road with your stuff
and everybody else's stuff in it, And what if some
went across town. Need I know that they would probably
keep it in a central area, central area, but people
don't all like Like, let's say that my next door
neighbor and I both use the same unit because we
both live next door to each other. We don't necessarily

(48:52):
work anywhere close to each other, so he might work
on the other side of town. He needs his umbrella.
I need my umbrella. That car, I mean, easily you
could see problems with that model. There was a similar
model that I also. Let me see what you think
about this one by Scott so talking about shared cars. Now,
in the examples I've been giving so far, it's essentially

(49:12):
a fleet of service vehicles, something along the lines of
an uber or a lift, only with no human drivers. Right.
One of the alternatives I heard, Shad Law actually mentioned
this possibility, which I think is uh almost as bad
as the traveling locker idea. What if instead of it

(49:35):
being a fleet car, it's a communal car among multiple households,
and you own like a sixth of that car. Can
you imagine that working out? How would you guarantee that
the car would be available for all the households. Well, okay,
this isn't as bad an idea is, and I understand

(49:56):
that it's it's not great, and there's a lot of
flaws to this one as well. But um, isn't this
kind of the idea behind you know, the the companies
that allow you to have kind of a lease on
three different types of vehicles at one time and you
can use the one that you need when you need it.
So you lease, um, you know, a a sedan, you
lease a compact car that's very good, you know with mileage,

(50:17):
and you lease, you know, a pickup truck, and when
you need to pickup truck on the weekend, you can
rent that. You can you can have that brought to you,
or you can go get it. Um use it for
that amount of time. But what if somebody else is
using that that that sedan when you need it, you know,
they need it for the week and you also need
it for the week. I mean, how does that all work?
I don't Again, same set of problems. I think, yeah,

(50:38):
maybe a smaller scale and the one that I'm talking about, mean,
maybe if there's maybe the only way I can see
it working. Is that you again go back to the
fleet of cars. So you've got a fleet of autonomous cars.
You've got a group of people who have essentially collectively
invested so that they own the quote unquote owned one
of those cars it and actually own a car. They

(51:01):
just own a share share. Yeah, it's like a timeshare
for those vehicles that are on demand. So if I
call for a car and my neighbor calls for a car,
and they're both and we're both on this this plan,
two different cars come because of the way we've agreed
with this fleet, and it's the purchase price of the
vehicle that ends up covering the cost of the individual

(51:24):
trip as opposed to doing a trip, you know, a
fee per trip, like you like a typical rental car. Now. Yeah,
so essentially it would be like, all right, well, collectively,
we all got together and we put in thirty dollars
to quote unquote buy a car. What that really does
is give us unlimited travel using this service within its

(51:47):
range of service, you know, assuming that it isn't you know,
state or a countrywide or whatever. And I can see
it working that way maybe, but I can't see it
working in such a way where you actually physically have
one car to share between the multiple house That would
never work, just wouldn't work out. There's gotta be a

(52:08):
way around it, Like you said, it's gotta be there's
gotta be a pool of vehicles to draw from. It
just wouldn't work. But this was the I wish you
could have gone because I wish you could have seen, uh,
panels like these and some of the other ones too.
Like I was only able to go to three panels total,
but there were so many there were, all about autonomous vehicles.
It sounds fascinating. I really didn't know until some of

(52:30):
the you know, the reports that have been reading just
for this podcast, uh, that that this show is so
focused on that type of technology. I tend to think
of more of cs to be like that rather than
this south By Southwest. Yeah, it's it's It's interesting because
south By Southwest Interactive for many years was focused on
mobile apps, like that was the big thing, mobile apps

(52:51):
and some gaming. But usually you're talking about the next Twitter.
You know, a mere Cat and Periscope both came out
in mere Cat went under. Periscope is still around because
it's owned by Twitter. Uh. Anyway, that's the kind of
stuff you would expect. But they had different tracks of

(53:11):
programming under Interactive and one of the tracks was titled
Intelligent Future, and that's where all the robotics and autonomous
vehicles and AI all those discussions fell under that. And
uh so a lot of it had to do with
the future of cars, and again not just autonomous cars,
but the idea of, uh what what is it going

(53:32):
to look like? From multiple standpoints. I think autonomous played
a huge role because everyone just assumes that's going to
be part of the future, no matter how it turns out. Yeah,
you know, And one thing we should probably point out
here is that we always talk about how it's happening.
It's it's incrementally happening. What's going on, and we're we're
getting little bits and pieces of it now and we
see it, you know, in our everyday cars, but not

(53:53):
the whole package yet. And the whole package they always
it seems like it's always ten years out, is what
they say. But I'm seeing estimates now that rain anywhere
from three years to thirty years, and and those are
all to be honest, those are all realistic. I mean,
it could take thirty years. It could be faster than that,
it could be we could I have this by you
never know. Yeah, I think I think three years is

(54:14):
probably what we would we would start to see actual
vehicles make their way onto the roads. Thirty years is
where you get to the point where you're at saturation. Yeah,
and you know, I know on this podcast, even especially
in car stuff, but on on this one, we've we've
mentioned before they're already out there their cars that can
drive you home from work without you touching the wheel
or doing anything. You but they simply can't say it's

(54:36):
an autonomous You have to be sitting down the wheel
and allow it to You can allow it to do it,
but you have to be there, and you have to
be ready to take control at any moment. And often
often you'll get a little little beep asking you to
make sure you make contact with the wheel to prove
that you're still paying attention and everything exactly, you're not
taking a nap on the way home. You don't wanna,
you know, those companies don't want to be liable for

(54:57):
a terrible accident. So the three to thirty years were
talking about is where the companies are actually confident enough
to say, this is an autonomous you know, self driving car,
Let it do it. Yeah, and and uh, I'm so
glad you're able to join me on this this episode
and talk about this kind of stuff. I know that
I come across as I love to needle you with

(55:17):
these because you're the car guy and it's fun. It's fun.
I should also mention that pretty much everyone's agreed that
personal car ownership is not ever going to go away
entirely in the United States, that no one seemed to
believe that that was the case. Uh. People said that
it may be that fewer people own their own vehicles,

(55:39):
but you'll you'll still be allowed to own and operate
your own vehicle. I could see that happening, especially for
things like rural areas. It doesn't make sense to have
an autonomous car service out serving way all the way.
Rural areas, like you know, cattle ranchers aren't going to
have any need for that. Now, this is a congested
city situation. Yes, this is for been dense urban environments

(56:01):
and not it's not ideal for other situations. So, but
one guy did say that he could envision a future
in which car ownership of like an actual car owner
will be about as rare as horse owners are today. Yeah,
so there's plenty of people who still own horses, just

(56:23):
not the general population. There's a there's a lot of
wide open space out there, and I think that you know,
that's where they will be still used. Of course, and
maybe in cities, you know, I hate to say it,
but there may be a point where you know, you
can't drive into the city in your own personal vehic.
You maybe have a giant parking lot in the outskirts
of the city and you get out from there and
then you take your city city approved transportation once you're inside.

(56:47):
And I wouldn't that be something. I mean, it'd be
a dramatic change in the way that we do things now.
I mean it would significantly changed the well, the entire
city escape really everything would be different. So um, it's fascinating.
Top and again, thanks for inviting me in today to
do this. I always have fun talking with you, and
I know you like to rib me a little bit
about car ownership and you know the way it's going,

(57:08):
and uh, you know, I agree on a lot of
this stuff. I mean, I think we we can have
a decent conversation back and forth about Um, I understand
that you know things are moving towards autonomous vehicles, but
I also and I'm glad that you said it too,
that you know it's never gonna go completely away. Well,
and and to be fair, we're so so so in
the baby stage of this, right, we're in the earliest

(57:31):
stages of this autonomous era. That making any definitive statement
such as autonomous cars will completely replace manual cars, or
that car ownership will completely become a thing of the past,
or even that manual cars will no longer be allowed
in within city limits, any of those, It's so premature

(57:52):
to make any kind of statement like that, Um. And honestly,
it may turn out that we just see that the
idea old mix is somewhere in the middle, with a
mixture of autonomous cars and manually driven cars. We don't know,
you know, the mathematical models suggests that if you went
all autonomous, you avoid a lot of problems, but that's

(58:13):
not necessarily the way it will actually shake out in
real life. Well, I'm with you. I try to avoid
the predictions because it just ends up making you look
like a fool later, right when when what happens eventually?
But that's pretty much status quo for me. Well, you
kind of have to though, you know, anyways, I really
I don't like to do that, but that I like
to just kind of sit back and and kind of
just take it all in because there's so many changes

(58:35):
happening right now. It's it's actually pretty exciting. Yeah, I mean,
and you know, you got to remember the autonomous cars,
if they've become a thing, like a real serious thing,
like most people believe, there are implications well beyond the
auto industry that things that could really be effective, like
like airline industry. You know, if you're able to jump

(58:56):
into an autonomous autonomously driven car and you can do
or you can go to sleep and you are not
you don't need to get to whatever your destination is
within a couple of hours, that could really impact a
lot of airline travel. So well, yeah, I mean, okay,
I know we gotta wrap up here, but you're you're
making me think of you know, the the uh, the
kind of pros cons you you wait, if you're making

(59:19):
a short trip on a plane, you know, if you're
flying from here to or Lando, sure, and it's like
like from here, it's like an hour a little a
little less than an hour and a half flight. Yeah,
but then then then you have to take a new can.
You gotta get up early, you gotta pack the car,
you gotta get to the airport and park and all
that stuff. It ends up taking more than half of
the day. But you could just drive there too, And
if you can do that in in a way that

(59:40):
doesn't it's not taxing on you. It's it's it's actually
comfortable and you're in your own your own car. It's
a lot more comfortable than being crammed into an airplane.
Why would you not do that? You have the opportunity
to stop at a specific place to have food rather
than just buying whatever little snack box happens to be
on the plane. Yes, so you're right. It does change
even you know that short distance travel. Yeah, Now for

(01:00:03):
long distances, obviously, I think air travel. Unless you're determined
to do the Great autonomous American road trip, I think
you're The airlines will still be very much a strong
player in that, but it will affect their bottom line,
and that will affect how they route planes, how they
design planes, how they how they price tickets. So there's

(01:00:27):
some big potentially disruptive things that could happen ripple out
from the automotive industry out into many other ones. So
it's pretty interesting stuff. So, Scott, it's been fantastic. Thank
you so much for joining. Well, thank you for having
me again. I appreciate it. I'm I I'd be happy
to come back and talk about stuff like this anytime
you want. Well, I'll definitely be having you back on

(01:00:49):
here before too long, I'm sure. And of course people
can listen to your show car stuff you and Ben
bowl and tackle all things vehicular. Uh, and that's it's
amazing show. So if you guys haven't listened to that,
make sure you go and subscribe to it because, uh,
if there ever happened to be a question you had
about vehicles, whether it's how they work or the design

(01:01:14):
stories behind them, or even stuff like I still love
the series you did about Coast to coast races. I
loved it very good. I didn't know your listener. Well,
I appreciate the you know, the plug for our show there.
That's that's very nice. And and we have something like
seven hundred and fifty episodes. So if you go to
our you know, our our website which is car Stuff

(01:01:37):
Show um dot com and you can find every one
of the podcasts we've ever done there. I think iTunes
limits it to what like two or three the latest
two hundreds. So if you go to car Stuff Show
dot com, then you can check out all of them
and yeah, you know, take a look, find some that
immediately tickle your fancy, listen to them, and then I

(01:01:57):
guarantee you're gonna get hooked, and then you're just gonna
go on a binge. Shucks. I appreciate it. Thank you.
So guys. If you have any questions for me, any
suggestions for future episodes or guests I should have on
the show, anything like that, send me a message. The
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(01:02:21):
And I will talk to you again really soon for
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