Autonomous Autos And High-Tech Gear

Scott Benjamin of CarStuff joins the show to talk about autonomous vehicles and how they are changing today's manual vehicles.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with text stuff dot com.
Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan
Strickland and now today I'm joined in the podcast studio
by my esteemed colleague, the co host of Car Stuff,

(00:24):
Scott Benjamin Scott welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for
having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, and Scott, you you
this is your first time on tech Stuff. It is
first guest by Yeah. Ben's been on several times. Uh,
he spoke highly of you, thank you, So I have
I have high expectations. Uh. If you guys have not
listened to Car Stuff, you definitely need to go and

(00:44):
check that out. I know I've recommended it multiple times.
When we did our transmissions episode, I was silently hoping
that Scott was not sitting at his desk cringing in horror,
just from psychically understanding that we were completely in mistating
how they worked shocks. You're just saying, editor, I probably
couldn't poke too many holes in the in the narrative. Yeah,
we were. We were I think pretty consistent, uh and

(01:07):
and more correct than not. So that was good. And
I you know, we kind of were talking about what
was going to be the subject, you know, I said, well,
we could pick any topic you want, and we talked
about autonomous cars being the subject, the idea of, uh,
you know, the whole history of autonomous cars, the technology

(01:28):
that more or less is allowing autonomous cars to work,
and how that technology is finding its way into cars
you can drive today, and not not autonomous cars, not
driverless cars, but that technology is making the cars we
do use either easier or more safe. And so I
thought I'd start off by saying, Scott, the first autonomous

(01:49):
car story I could come up with was from fourteen
seventy eight. Yeah, that goes way farther back than I
had anticipated. Although you said it, I remembered what you're talking. Yeah,
I mean as soon as I said I thought it
was really good. I I said, before we came in here,
and I thought I was gonna really catch you off guard.
And you said, Leonardo da Vincius, dang, Yeah, he he
sketched out an idea for a driverless cart. You're not

(02:11):
gonna stump me on Leo too often, because we talked
about Leo so many times in the early days of
car stuff. I think we've talked about just about every
invention the guy's ever had, which again maybe not because
you know thousands, it seems like it happens for thousands
of things that patterns, but ideas for thousands of things, right,
tons of sketches, some of which were ideas that ultimately

(02:34):
had no way of working, and a lot of which
had you know, some real, some real great thought behind it.
And this is one of them. That was a pre
programmed clockwork cart. So it's not autonomous in the sense
let it could you could set it down on a
road and it would just be able to follow the road.
It would follow a predetermined pathway and it did so.

(02:56):
It had a had a cam that you could put
cam stops on, which would tell it tell essentially the
steering mechanism win to turn left or right along its pathway,
and a spring that you would wind inside the cart
gave it the the energy needed to propel itself forward. Yeah,

(03:16):
and uh so if you knew that I needed to
travel forward approximately this far because approximately because you're gonna
get and then turn left, you could put the camp
stop in the right spot and then it would do that.
But that's it. It would have to be the predetermined path.
And now it's just the one you can refresh my memory. Yeah,
I don't think that this was ever built in his time.

(03:38):
I believe that some engineers created it later for a
museum pieces that right, that's right, the the original one
was probably never built in Leonardo's time, which is not
a big surprise. A lot of his inventions were again
just the realm of the sketch book. They were never
actually built. But it was Mark Rossheim who made a

(04:01):
working model of it. He also made I did an
episode with Josh Clark about humanoid robots. He also made
a clockwork mechanical night based on Leonardo da Vinci's design,
which supposedly was built during da Vinci's time. But we
just have a written account of it existing as opposed
to an actual example of it. So it may that

(04:23):
that story maybe apocryphal, but the actual design worked interesting,
So it's fascinating that it would work. You know, these
these drawings of his that finally came to life, you know,
hundreds of years later, and and they truly do work. Yeah. Yeah,
we have the story from I believe you said about
a radio controlled full size car, not not a not

(04:44):
a radio control car like a toy car. We're talking
about a full sized car being controlled by radio. That
is amazing to me. How granted that's TELA operated right. Again,
it's not autonomously controlled, so a little different from a
car that drives itself. A little bit different. Yeah, I
guess so. Um, you know you said that it would
be controlled by someone outside the vehicle. I guess it's

(05:05):
you could consider it the earliest remote controlled or radio
controlled full size car ever. And it was tested in
a very difficult situation too. It was New York City
during a traffic jam. So we're talking about driving up
Broadway and down Fifth Avenue in heavy traffic in you
can I measure what that was like. And that's a
pretty rigorous first test. Yeah, I'm amazing to think that.

(05:28):
You know they were doing this in n I mean,
but again, look what we're look where we're at now. Yeah.
So we get science fiction author David H. Keller, who
wrote a story called the Living Machine in the anthology
Wonder Stories. Keller's story involved lots of different things, but
had a description of driverless cars that took all the

(05:50):
stress out of the commute. You just jumped in. You
can put the kiddies into the into the car. It
would take them to school, and you wouldn't have to
worry about, you know, a chauffeur making a wrong turn.
I did mention a show fair, which I thought was
meant that the story must have been for a very
specific audience. But uh, in nineteen thirty nine, we have
the infamous World's Fair. This, this is a World's Fair.

(06:13):
I wish I could travel back in time and visit myself.
You're talking about GM's Futurama exhibit, right, this is amazing. Yes,
that's exactly what I'm talking about. But this particular World's
Fair had tons of science fiction a ee kind of ideas,
as most of the World's Fairs did, but the ones
that this one had really excite me because there was
everything from robots to the these this idea of the

(06:36):
smart highway system in the Futurama presentation. And I actually
watched the film that was shown back at the nineteen
nine World's Fair, and it's pretty interesting their approach. You know,
they they foresaw a smart highway system in place by
nineteen sixty that's what they were predicting in nineteen thirty nine.

(06:58):
And GM has been on this in this bandwagon for
a long long time. I mean probably prior to nine,
to be honest with you, I mean the development of
that system alone. And this is the one that showed
showcased electric cars that were powered by circuits that were
embedded in the roadway. So this is a an infrastructure system,
as we'll talk about in this episode, but this was
also a radio controlled system. Yeah. And they had there

(07:22):
their highways were like trenches, so you would have a
lane that was essentially a trench. You could not change
lanes because you had these barriers on either side, individual
lanes or trenches. Yeah, and the idea was that you
would you would get there would be open spots where
you would get into the correct lane depending upon what
your destination is, but otherwise you stay on target in

(07:43):
the death Star lane. And uh. It also had radio
communication between vehicles to make sure that the vehicles were
maintaining the proper distance from each other. The ideas were incredible. Now,
most of this was infrastructure that was built into the
road system itself. So we're talking smart roads, smart highways,

(08:03):
and uh, we're not talking so much about smart cars, right.
The cars themselves didn't have as much of that technology
built into them because the the thinking at the time
was that this is a system that's going to require
an infrastructure to support it. It's going to be an
external system that operates the vehicles that that operate within

(08:24):
that system. I got I got it. And the cars
have to be able to read the system communicate with
the system that's outside the vehicle. I got it. I've
got a lot to say about that in a little while,
because there's some interesting things that happened mid nineteen nine
or so. Yeah. Yeah, that's where some some big thinking
started to kind of shift from this, because this was

(08:45):
the predominant approach for the idea of a driver less system,
or at least automated car system was that you would
have the the the largest part of the system built
into the landscape, not of the vehicle. The vehicle would
be a receiver and the landscape would be the transmitter.
And it makes sense, I guess when you think about
the size of the I guess, for lack of better

(09:07):
way to say this, you can correct me on this,
but the electronics that are required the cars simply couldn't
handle that big. Yeah. Yeah. The for a very long time,
the the technology that would allow a vehicle to be
autonomous was so huge that you couldn't put in a
commercial vehicle, in a moving vehicle. Yeah, you needed to

(09:27):
have it as something that was all along the side. Yeah,
with the transistor wasn't even developed till the nine So
we're talking about time where you're looking at electro mechanical circuitry,
vacuum tubes, actual moving parts to complete circuits. Uh, that
is enormous and you would not be able to fit
that and it would make a vehicle so heavy as
to make it impractical. And it's so so different now

(09:50):
because they're actually you know, those components are actually saving
weight in vehicles over the versions of the technology that
we used prior to that, the mechanical versions. So it's
just amazing that way this thing is advanced. Yeah, And
like I said, you know, all the way through the
nineteen fifties, there was still the look at the smart
highway system. In fact, there were companies that worked on
technology that would have brought this into reality even as

(10:14):
early as the late nineteen fifties if we had chosen
to pursue it. But that kind of system requires massive
buy in across multiple companies, and no company really wants
to hand over the keys to their Kingdom to some
other standard. So you don't want If I'm developing cars
and I know that my competitor is also developing cars

(10:36):
and is proposing this highway system that my cars are
going to have to conform to, I'm not going to
be really crazy about that system. We see this in
technology everywhere, not just in cars, but every kind of technology.
If I want to have an interconnected kitchen where my
refrigerator talks to my stove, I have to get them

(10:57):
from the same manufacturer, because no one wants to build
their stuff that to work with other people's stuff. It
means you can't sell more of your things. So we
never saw this smart road smart highway system take off
the way the visionaries back in the late thirties were imagining.
It just never happened. And they always seem to promise that,
you know, in twenty five years, we're gonna see this

(11:18):
as the standard, this is the way it's gonna be,
or in twenty years sometimes and even now, you know,
even now, when we see the autonomous cars that um
auties rolling out in other companies, they're's still saying it's
a decade away, it's fifteen years away, and it's always
been the case. It's been the case ever since, you know,
the nineteen thirties. Yeah, yeah, it's all well, I mean,
that's that's kind of like a running joke in twenty

(11:41):
to fifty years or in ten to fifteen years. Uh.
And then you look at the people who are suggesting,
whatever the technology is, it will be here in ten
to fifteen years, and you go back five years and
those people are saying it will be ten to fifteen years,
and you go back another Eventually you get to a
point where you realize it's always ten to fifteen years away,
and you wonder if that tend to if that's just
if that tomorrow is always going to be tomorrow and

(12:02):
never today. Um, but we're along the way. We're seeing
some really cool developments. In the sixties, we had labs
at Stanford and other facilities begin to work on robot
controlled vehicles, which weren't cars. They were vehicles meant to
go into space, like space probes, but these robot controlled
vehicles that were meant to allow a a probe to

(12:24):
continue on a pathway and make corrections on its own,
because you know, the further way you get from Earth,
the longer it takes for information to pass between the
probe and Earth. Information can only go so fast as
the speed of light, and eventually those probes go far
enough where that becomes a factor. Then you had to
have a system that can make minor corrections on its
own rather than have to relay the problem back. Then

(12:48):
you have to do all the math. Al Right, well,
we have to fix the problem not for right now,
but for forty five minutes from now, because that's when
the probe will get our response. And it's just it's
too complicated too. Yeah, No, no one wants to do
that much, especially when all you have to rely on
our slide rules. Uh. So then we see that kind

(13:08):
of technology start to filter into other areas, and uh
that's when we started to really think about what are
the elements that are necessary to let a car navigate autonomously.
This involves sensing the environment, so it has to be
able to detect where it is in relation to the road,
to other vehicles, to other possible obstacles, whether that's people

(13:30):
or animals or whatever it might be. It has to
be able to process the information that it receives so
that it has a way of making sense of all
that data. Just just picking up the data isn't enough, right,
You have to be able to say what does this
data mean? And then it has to react to it.
It has to have a way of responding to that information.
That's critical because what's going to react to it. Is

(13:51):
it going to be the driver? Is it going to
be the system itself and it is going to just
alert you with a a noise or light or is
it something that is going to take control and do
it itself exactly? And uh, and there we've seen lots
of different approaches with that. Sometimes, Uh, you know, you
could argue that the progress has mostly been going from
the most simple implementation to the more complicated implementations that

(14:14):
have become possible as technology has improved. But sometimes it's
just you don't not everyone wants a car that starts
to respond on its own because they start to feel
like they're no longer in control of their own vehicle,
which for some people is a real issue. Uh. In
the nineteen eighties, there was a guy named Ernst Dickmans
who created an autonomous driving system using a Mercedes van

(14:37):
called the VaMoRs Mercedes Van. Have you heard of this?
It's the vision guidedstem yeah, yeah, yeah, this this was
a really incredible thing to look at. So it's it
was a van that had an enormous amount of electronic
equipment inside it. And again this is we're talking about
the nineteen eighties. This is a vehicle that could autonomously

(15:00):
navigate down highway systems. Yeah. They called this a robotic van. Yeah,
and in fact, three different generations of robotics went through
this one van. They do a system, they gut the system,
they would rebuild it and do a second generation. They
did it again for a third generation, and it could
do things like maintain its distance from the vehicle that's

(15:22):
ahead of it, It could maintain its position in the lane,
it could maintain its speed and uh. It was really
a groundbreaking approach that a lot of the technology and
um and processes that were used and that have filtered
into the autonomous cars we were talking about today. Sure,
this is the beginning of what we call adaptive cruise control. Yes, yeah,

(15:44):
we'll talk about that a little bit more later too.
So super cool. And there are videos online of this
the Vamours Mercedes v A M O R s uh,
and you can actually see this thing like cruising down
the road with the guy sitting in the back of
the van looking at the electronics that again are just
taking up shelves of space in the van. So unless

(16:05):
you happen to have a van with lots of shelves
of space, that's not the best implementation. But it did
show the promise of the techno. I wonder why they
didn't do with their two seat sports car. Yeah, yeah,
just carrying behind a trailer with cables connecting to the car. Uh.
In ninety four you had the Eureka Project Prometheus. Now
the Eureka Project was out of Europe Um and they

(16:28):
had three Mercedes Benz cars with systems that allowed their
cars to make autonomous lane changes, which was a first
in vehicles. They could detect where the lanes were. They
could detect up to six other vehicles, three in front
and three behind. Essentially the car that's directly in front
of them, the car that's to the lane and the left,
the car that's to the lane in the right, and
then the ones that are behind them as well. And

(16:49):
if all the parameters were right, if none of those
cars were too close or were moving uh laterally across lanes,
then it could make an autonomous lane change on its own,
which was a big deal. That's still a big deal
now even right. I mean when you think about it,
some of the modern vehicles, that's still a big selling
feature is uh, you know, lane warning detection devices things

(17:11):
like that and uh and um blind spot detection and
you know that that was what they were using then,
just a more primitive version, yes, and so now we're
starting to see that specific type of technology find its
way into consumer vehicles today. Uh. Two thousand four was
when DARPA introduced the Grand Challenge. I love the DARPA
Grand Challenge. It is the coolest thing to me. They

(17:34):
invited a lot of different research institutions, colleges, even private
companies to participate in this challenge. The idea was to
build a vehicle that could autonomously navigate a course in
the desert, the Mojave Desert, uh, and to see if
it could get from point A to point b uh.
And they have several teams participate, but no one successfully

(17:59):
navigated of course that first year, and no prize was
awarded that first year. Yeah. I think I think one
team got eleven point seven kilometers in and that's the
furthest anyone made it I'll give you a little bit
of a spoiler. Yeah, the two thousand five five Darper Challenge,
and challenge that plays heavily into the development of the
Google car. Yes, because the two thousand five challenge had
five teams that actually did finish, including one from Stanford,

(18:22):
and the people on that Stanford team many of them
went on to work for Google. Yeah. In fact, you
know the guy that headed the team, I guess, um,
Sebastian Thrum. That's the guy that he won the two
thousand five Darker Grand Challenge and the two million dollar
prize in the US Department of Defense. But he was
also the co and this is also the guy that
was the co inventor of Google street View. Yes, so

(18:44):
he's he's got you know, some some engineering chaps. I
guess he's got he's got the credential. Yeah, that's right.
So you know, we'll talk about the Google self driving
car later. Yeah, yeah, he um. He also gave a
TED talk specifically about driverless cars and his personal uh
motivation for developing driverless cars, which was a very personal story.
As a teenager, he lost a friend in a car accident,

(19:07):
and so he said he wanted to develop systems that
could save lives, and that's really his driving motivation, not
to use a pun to create autonomous cars. So uh yeah,
the two thousand four and two thousand five DARPA challenges
kind of set the bar for autonomous cars in a
large but desert course. Two thousand seven DARPA would up

(19:28):
the antie with the Urban Challenge, which is where they
were on an I think it was an Air Force
base and the cars had to navigate a simulated town environment,
including merging into and out of traffic. I remember hearing
about some of the cars that would do. Feel like,
there's one car that just pulled itself into a parking
lot and stopped. I guess it just got overwhelmed. Some

(19:50):
of some of these are funny clips to watch. You
see them, it's interesting to see how they handle the situation. Yeah,
I think two of them got into an accident with
each other. But there were six teams that finished the
course successfully. And you know, when you think about navigating
a dynamic system like that with and they weren't told
what the route was going to be ahead of time.

(20:12):
They were told just as the challenge started. So the
idea was that the car had to be able to
autonomously do this. They couldn't program everything in pre challenge.
It had to be able to handle these situations on
its own and obey all traffic laws. So not just
merge into and out of traffic, but come to a
stop at intersections and be able to read signs. You'd
be able to read signs, be able to react to

(20:34):
traffic lights, pedestrians. These are all big challenges, right. Any
one of these is a huge challenge from an engineering standpoint.
I can't remember if they use simulated pedestrians or if
it was actual pedestrians, because that would be a dangerous
game to play in the middle of the dark urban challenge.
I would need to have a guaranteed million dollar prize
to be a pedestrian for an autonomous car. Jella guaranteed

(20:58):
milk that would do it. Yeah, well, you know, yeah.
Maybe it depends also on what if they had capped
the UH the speed limit that the cars were all
up to travel. If anybody's listening, I'll do it for
half that we're pricing each other out all my life
and limb is worth two heard of your post? Uh
And in two thousand ten, that's when Google revealed that

(21:19):
they were working on a driverless car. It had happened already.
I had a friend at Google who was joking around
that he had this huge, huge, huge thing that Google
was working on that I would just die to learn,
but he wouldn't tell me what it was. And the
week when this came out, I wrote to him and
I said, was that it? He's like, bingo you are?

(21:41):
He sat on it. I said, you realized, you know
that you can't. He found out he cannot have a
conversation with me about his work because of my work.
So we now joke about that whenever we get together.
Is you know, like, so, how's your job frustrating? Uh? Yeah,
well he lie it because he likes to wind me up.

(22:01):
He likes to you know, man, there's this Oh I
can't talk about it. I know something you don't know.
Even when he doesn't know anything. In fact, that's probably
his favorite is when he just bluffs thing or something.
But this was This was a kind of an eye
opener because not only did Google have a driverless car,
but they had been uh testing it for quite some
time without anyone being aware of it. Big big shock

(22:24):
to most of us. Right, Yeah, they had logs something
like a hundred forty thousand miles in driverless car road miles.
It's just crazy, well and relatively unnoticed. Yeah. Now, part
of the unnoticed was that they always had someone who
was sitting at the wheel, even if they didn't have
control of the vehicle at that time, because if something

(22:46):
did go wrong, they wanted the ability for a human
to intervene and stop the vehicle or or drive it
off the highway or whatever. Yeah, I think that most
of it actually was surface streets. I don't think they
were driving on the highway too much with these. In fact,
I think that they specifically said they limited the surface streets.
Either that or I've got it totally mixed up and
it's the other way around. I'm gonna gonna talk about

(23:07):
the the Google car right now, and you want to
you want to wait until later, you want to do
it right now. Let's do it right now, Scott, All right,
let's do it a vehicle. It is really cool. I mean,
it's got so many different things going on with it.
I mean, these are features that we'll talk about later,
I guess. But we mentioned, you know, the development, the
whole thing. Um. You know, it's a Toyota Prius is
the first one that we saw. I believe, right, I

(23:27):
think that they have now expanded that fleet to include
um like six Toyota Prius vehicles. UM, also an Audi
T T and I believe they have some Lexus r
XO models that they're using for quote unquote Google Cars,
because they don't really make their own car, They just
modify other manufacturer's vehicles to to work this way. Now,

(23:50):
the cost of this stuff is really really expensive still,
UM somewhere in the neighborhood of something like a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars of equipment in each vehicle in
order to this all work. And that's not even the
street price of the vehicle included. That's that's just the
equipment that makes it possible for it to navigate through
these these dynamic systems exactly right. And that includes a

(24:10):
seventy thou dollar lidar system that's light radar. I mean,
you're sure your audience knows what this is all about, UM,
but man, it's got this range finder thing that's on top.
It's probably the dead giveaway that it's Google Car. Even
that range finder, it's a sixty four bean laser that
creates a three D map of the entire surrounding environment. So, um,
I think it's like they call it inch precise in

(24:31):
the way that it works, it's it's a high definition
inch precise map of the entire region that this thing
is traveling through at any given time in real time. Yeah,
the the visualization of that data is amazing. There's some
of that and the TED talk I mentioned where they
show the and it looks almost like a heat signature
map the way they show it, and whether or not
that was an artistic choice they made for the purposes

(24:54):
of the TED talk, I don't know. But you could
see the actual landscape of the street in real time,
like there was the the camera angle of the car
moving through and then the view of this range finder
including people like pedestrians walking across the street, so that
the car new to stop and like it was making

(25:15):
a left turn and it would stop and allow pedestrians
to continue across. The pedestrians continue to walk across, which
belied a casual approach to this to the level that
I'm pretty sure they were plants because as in not
not like plants is in the life form, but rather
they had been planted there by Google, because whenever I've

(25:35):
crossed the street and the car is turning left and
is about to collide with me, I have a reaction.
And these people did not almost like Hills. Yeah, in
a way, I guess. Right now, I want to say,
you those ties into this, and this is kind of
last thing I got about the Google car really because
I'd like to get to the technology of it. But
there have been two incidents, I suppose, with Google cars.

(25:58):
And the interesting thing about both of these incidents, it's
not the fault of the system. These are human errors. Yeah,
I wasn't. I think one of them might have been
a human error of the person who was operating the
Google car. They they had taken manual control correct, and
then the other one was Google car got rear ended.
Yeah exactly, other driver exactly. So you know, there should
be zero bad press about the Google cars being in

(26:20):
an accident. Yeah, you're talking about more than a hundred
forty thousand miles logged and only two incidents, and neither
of them were due to the autonomous part. So so
none of them, none of the thousand miles had an
accident associated with them, just the miles of the human operations. Yeah,
that's right. And you know this thing is uh, it's
only authorized I guess to operate in what is it,

(26:42):
four states, right? I know that California, Nevada, California, Nevada, UM, Michigan,
and Florida, and then I believe the District of Columbia
has recently signed on as well, and Georgia might be soon,
according to according to the Laddinal Constitution, which sent out
a tweet the other day saying Georgia might pave the
way for driverless cars. And I thought, but we'll get

(27:06):
into personal feelings at the end of this episode. The
pave the Way will be the fifth state to jump
on the bandway pave the way for the for people
in Georgia for driverless cars, I guess understood. But yeah.
The one thing that is cool is Google is working
on prototype cars for autonomous driving, their own cars. These
look like tiny little smart cars. Have seen these. They're
they're nifty looking devices, but they are really I mean

(27:29):
when we say prototype, we really mean it. This is
like a proof of concept kind of thing. And they
only have a top speed of twenty five Google captain
at that. Yeah, they need some development there. Yeah, it's
mostly I think, to again test the system out, and
they don't have a steering wheel, they don't have an accelerator,
they don't have a break, there are no manual controls. It.

(27:51):
I mean that that is not a car from the
classic viewpoint of what a car should be. Right. Yeah,
there's no way for you to intervene. You have to
take full like faith that the system is gonna take
care of you. This is something just off the top
of my head here I was. I was thinking that.
You know, recently I heard somebody say something like, um,
you know the cars have only advanced. Well, really, I

(28:12):
guess maybe it's more to say cars have not advanced
enough that if Henry Ford were to come back now
from the grave, he would look at a car and say,
that's a car, and that's that's my invention that's been adapted. Right.
There hasn't been a major dramatic shift in the way
that cars have been built since cars have been built,
and and this is one. When you look at something
that has no steering wheel, no no, no, i'm accelerator,

(28:34):
no breaks, no anything like that. He might look at
that and say, like, I don't know what this is.
How how do you hook it up to another horse?
Have we gone back to horse drawn carriages? What's up with?
Is this a woodshed on wheelship that's going on? You
must you must haul stuff in that right, This must
only go downhill, which would be very useful in some
parts of San Francisco. And you still can't say yeah, yeah, exactly.

(28:56):
You just you just have to hope that when whichever
way you're hurtling down the hill, you're clear of any obstacles. Um.
When I went to C E. S and two thousand fourteen,
which the year that we're recording this, I also saw
Audi and BMW showing off driverless car technology. Again, this
is this is stuff where the companies weren't committing to

(29:17):
saying that they were going to produce a driverless car,
but rather that they were developing the technology to make
driving safer for everybody. So it's kind of like saying,
look at all the technology we've developed that makes these
cars safe, We've incorporated all of them into this one vehicle,
and it's so sophisticated that the vehicle can drive itself.

(29:38):
That was kind of the way they were presenting it,
not that the cars that you buy from us in
five years or ten years are going to be automated
and you just hit a little switch and you go
to where you want to go. But rather, this is
how safe we are, which is an interesting way of
of taking an effect. That's the way a lot of
auto manufacturers are approaching this. Not to say we're building
driverless cars, but rather we're building incredibly eight cars now

(30:01):
in two thousand sixteen, which I know is in the
future for those of you who are listening, you know,
and when we're recording this isn't But that's when Cadillac
is supposedly going to come out with a car that
could be completely automated if you wanted to, at least
in certain situations, in their two thousand seventeen line of vehicles,

(30:22):
which would have the super Cruise feature. I like that name,
super Cruise System. Yeah, and that uh from why I
understand you would initiate the super Cruise system in specific
scenarios like if you were in stop and go highway
traffic and you know it's mindless, you're you come to

(30:43):
a stop, you wait what seems to be an eternity.
This is a familiar story for anyone who drives in
Atlanta on any of the highways during rush hour certainly,
and then you wait and then there's a four ft
gap that opens between you and the car in front,
so you creep forward and then you stop again. More
than likely another car jams itself into that four ft gap. Right,

(31:04):
if you have not acted, then that certainly has happened.
So this would be a system you would activate in
those kind of situations to sort of take over the
monotony of that of that situation. Can I tell you
how I've I've heard it described, And the Supercrew System
is relatively new. They've been talking about it for about
a year now, but they've recently had a you know,
the press release that came out and said we're likely

(31:25):
to put this on a vehicle in and they'll release
in ten model and it's likely to be on a Cadillac.
That's that's probably what it's gonna be. So you'll see
it written as a Cadillac Supercrew System, but it's really
just GM Supercruise alright. So the way they describe it
is that it's a full speed range adaptive cruise control

(31:46):
and lane centering system. These as cameras and other sensors
to automatically steer and break in highway driving situations. That's
how they kind of lay it out in uh in
not so much legal turns but layman's terms. Yes, right now,
I want to make note here also that Mercedes Benz
has had a similar system for a long time. You know,
they've had something that they call um dystronic plus's dystronic. Well,

(32:12):
come on, Scott, you can be honest here. A lot
of the words we come up within the automotive industry
don't really mean anything. I know, I know, it's just
their own brand name, I guess for the same type
of system. But they've had it for a few years
and it's been on the S and E class models.
And the one difference here, and this is where the
legal stuff comes in, right, Mercedes has required drivers to

(32:36):
have their hands on the wheel even when the system
is operational. Now, that's how they get around saying that
this is an autonomous car. Now, GM calls it semi
automated driving. And they're not gonna say autonomous. They're not
gonna say that it's a self driving system. They're never
going to say that for now. They're gonna leave it
at this, this semi automated and they're gonna say that, Yeah, sure,

(32:57):
the drivers have to be in the driver's seat. They
have to be paying attention to be awake, which is
weird to say, but they have to be awake. They
can't have your feet propped up on the dashboard. You
have to be at the ready. Yeah and uh, and
likely they're gonna say that you're gonna have to have
your hands on the wheel, just as Mercedes does, because
again it comes down to legal issues. Sure, yeah, I
mean we just you know, you were mentioning just now

(33:18):
that there are only a few states that even allow
autonomous cars on the road. So if you if you
call your car that, then you have just limited where
your car can be driven legally. But if you call
it semi autonomous, and you you stress the fact that
there's no point where you can take your hands off
the wheel legally with this vehicle, that you have to

(33:38):
be in control or at least be able to be
in control at any given time, then I think you
kind of dance around that little legal issue in your
car can suddenly be sold in all the different states.
But you know what the truth is, and I've seen
this written a few different places that most of us
if we're driving relatively new vehicles. I mean's in the
last few years even Uh, most of us are probably

(34:00):
driving what you can be considered an almost autonomous car
right now. I know it's strange to think about it,
but think if you think about the technologies they're involved.
I mean, you get blind spot detection, lane change departure,
backup cameras, sensors to go along with that, cross traffic alerts,
active cruise control. Uh. You know all these systems, the
the A B s, systems that are electronic that UM,

(34:23):
electronic speed controls, You've got um stability control systems. All
that plays into what creates UM this this bigger package
that would be an autonomous vehicle. Those are the puzzle
pieces that are required to be in place before they
can call it autonomous or allow it to all work
together to be autonomous. So most of us have systems
like that. We've got the pieces there. It's like you're

(34:44):
halfway there. They're just not connected in the exact right
way that they need to be. They're connected, sure, and
they work together flawlessly really, but there's just that missing piece,
the puzzle. And that's when you give over control to
the system. You give the control over to the computers
and step and let it happen. And we're seeing tiny,
little increminal steps toward that, although uh, they tend to

(35:06):
be implemented in a way where control is still ultimately
left up to the driver, where the driver can override
anything that's been creating decided quote unquote decided by the vehicle.
So here's some examples, like adaptive cruise control we've mentioned,
so to really explain what that is. First, cruise control
as a concept is an old idea. I mean, even

(35:28):
if you go back to the earliest cars, a lot
of them had governors that allowed them to maintain a
steady rate of speed even if they were going uphill
or downhill. Yeah, we're talking even prey as early as
that this was something that was important because otherwise, you know,
you would hit a hill and suddenly your engine has
to do more work, right, and so now you're gonna

(35:49):
have to start really pressing down on the on the
accelerator in order to get this car to continue up
the hill, especially if you want to maintain the speed
that you were at when you were on a level plank.
Then you get to the peak of the hill and
it's time to go down the hill and now suddenly
your car is careening out of control. I mean, you
have to have the systems in place to help maintain
that level of speed. Cruise control itself. There was an

(36:10):
early system called speedos stat, which was invented in nine.
Uh but then and that one didn't really show up
until about nine Chrysler Imperial, so you know, it was
a decade away. So remember we were talking about this,
you'll see this in ten years. It's one case where
it did come true. Yeah, and I would say that
I think the thing that really pushed cruise control into

(36:33):
fleets of vehicles was, I mean, that really made it
a standard. Was the gas crisis in the seventies. Was
this idea that suddenly fuel economy was really important. It
hadn't been as important before. I mean, no one wants
to waste money, but now when for the A lot
of our listeners are younger, But in the seventies there

(36:54):
was a gas crisis that meant that there were there
would be enormous lines at gas stations in order to
get just a little bit of gas, and that, you know,
it was it was a really serious tough time. Well,
when you get right down to it. That's why the
e p A was formed, right, and that's why we
have a lot of the regulated or mandated materials or
materials with the electronics. I yes, uh, they're requiring cars

(37:15):
that are driving the prices up. We can we talk
about that later. Yeah, we absolutely k But that's that's
really the start of the e p A and the
National um, you know, traffic, highway, Traffic safey Administration, all
the all the government bureaus that say you have to
have this safety device, this uh, this electronic control device
in your vehicle, a lot to have onboard diagnostics in

(37:36):
order to uh, to maintain emissions. You know, you have
to be able to to to measure that and make
sure that you're within the right the allowed range. Sure
emissions in the environment are a big part of this
whole thing. So let's let's talk about that later. But
but let's move on to adaptive cruise control because that's
a a natural extension of this nine modern cruise control

(37:58):
that we saw in the the idea of setting your speed.
So let's say that, Uh, let's say I'm driving down
a highway in Atlanta, So I'm going the average speed,
which is somewhere around now eighty seven miles per hour.
That's what it feels like. Okay, that's fair. Uh yeah, no,
Atlanta is pretty crazy. So you've got your your speeds
that you set your cruise control. Now, with regular cruise control,

(38:22):
that just means that's going to maintain that speed until
you depress either the accelerator or the break and then
it puts it back into manual control and then your
you can choose whatever speed you want. Adaptive cruise control
the way it works is it has that that speed
you've set as the ideal, Right, that's the speed you
would like to go, assuming that the world allows you

(38:43):
to do so. But let's say you start to overtake
the car in front of you. Now, adapt cruise control,
as I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong,
means you have a system where it's able to identify
if there is a vehicle traveling in front of you
and you're about to overtake it, and it will automatically
decrease your speed so that you are traveling at the

(39:03):
same speed as the car in front of you. And
if that car speeds up and you're still below your
your set speed for your cruise control. It will then
start to accelerate until you hit that speed again. Correct
you You dial in a distance that you're comfortable with,
and that's how it works. I mean, it keeps a distance.
There's never ah, there's never something that encroaches on that
distance more than than what you've already said. If it does,

(39:25):
that's when it begins to break, and it breaks accordingly.
You know, with the vehicle in front of you, you
can't do anything about the person behind you. So that's
something that we'll find. You know, there's really not a
whole lot you can do about that. That's the kind
of wild card here. However, you know you can't. You
can or your vehicle can adjust for that vehicle in
front of you, just based on this. I mean, it's
a radar system uses the lasers in some cases. Sometimes

(39:48):
it's a camera system. I think Subaru uses a camera system,
so it's actually relying on optical data. That's interesting. Yeah,
that's that's what's going on there. And I think there's
probably other manufacturers that use camera systems as well. The
super is just a good example. But it's a it's
a fascinating thing and um, maybe i'll stump you with
this one. I don't know, thank you. When do you
think the first adaptive cruise control system was was in

(40:11):
place or or demonstrated? Wow? Uh, these always end up
being earlier than I had anticipated. I know that UM
was the first modern cruise control, but adaptive being able
to yikes, I'm gonna embarrass myself no matter what I said,
I'm gonna say nine. Gosh, darn it, you're perfect, right, Yeah,

(40:34):
not bad so. Twenty years ago, nineteen years ago, uh,
Mitsubishi was the first one to develop this adaptive cruise
control for a production vehicle. There was no breaking as
part of the system. It just used you know, the
throttle control and down shifting to kind of adjust the
speed accordingly as you mentioned. But again it was a
very primitive version, not like what we see today. And

(40:54):
you know the the super cruise system and you know
Audi and all the other manufacturers that are creating really
really advanced systems. Related to this are things like collision
detection and collision prevention systems where you have to have
the same sort of technology to sense that there is
a potential oncoming collision. Now, the implementation for that or

(41:14):
the the reaction of that maybe something as simple as
an alert in the car so that you as the
driver have to react and thus make sure you prevent
a collision, or and maybe something as as sophisticated as
a breaking system that initiates automatically to help you avoid
a collision. Because as we enter, as we all know,
human reaction time is uh is not immediate, right, and

(41:40):
electronics can react and a fraction of a second exactly right.
And we see this in a lot of different manufacturing
systems right now. In fact, a lot of commercials on
television right now show you exactly that happening. And of course,
the Mercedes system that we talked about, you know, the
whether you have to have the hands on the wheel,
that system uses something like this. You can slow the vehicle.
I believe the super cruise system will completely stop the

(42:02):
vehicle if necessary, which is that's pretty unusual. I mean,
that's not that's not the case in every situation. So
all of this relies on just where you kind of
get this out there. All of this relies on electronic
systems working together in the car, which wasn't possible before
when it was just a mechanical system. So you know,
you have to have electronic throttle control. You have to
have electronic brakes. You have to have UM, you know

(42:24):
for the lane departure warning systems and stuff. I'm sorry
not for that one, but UM for UM electronic stability control.
You have to have an electronic systems that can control
each other, can talk to each other and decide what's
necessary at that exact moment, and do it without driver input. Right. Yeah,
it's none of us want to have big robotic arms

(42:45):
coming out of the dashboard and holding the steering wheel
or or robotic feet that pressed the pedals down. That
that is not really an ideal implementation of the robot car. Okay,
you're you're making fun of that. I understand. I know
what you're saying that you know that sound. It's funny
that that it would happen that way. But I've got
this article here, and I okay, this is the one
that I kind of wanted to to share, and I

(43:06):
think it's a good time. This is less than twenty
years ago for this article. And when we were first
talking about this this idea for this show, I mentioned
that I had been to UM the Automated Durability Test
track in Chelsea, Michigan, for Chrysler, and this was a system.
It's a very primitive looking back system, but it was
so advanced at the time. I just can't tell you

(43:27):
how cool this thing was. But they actually used robots
that they would load into the driver's seat to drive
these vehicles on this automated durability system test track. So
what they would do is they would test vehicles on
this track in kind of an advanced way, and that
they would um an accelerated way. It's made a better
way to say it, because x number of miles on

(43:48):
this track equaled x number of miles in the real world,
So the conditions on the track were so extreme as
to be equal to a number of regular miles in
the real world. Yeah, so they would test like the
new Jeep Grand Cherokee there, and they would really really
punish it more so than than they could on a
track with a real driver, because the real driver just

(44:10):
simply couldn't take sitting in the seat for one hundred
thousand miles. But they could put a thousand miles on
this track. And I'm just gonna give these numbers for
an example. They could do it a thousand miles on
this track and then equaled a hundred thousand miles in
the real world or what a driver could take a
human driver. So they would load these robots in and
it had you know, I think the whole track was
only like one point three miles around, and it was

(44:32):
like a ten million dollar four year thing to build.
And it had wiring in the in the ground, you know,
like there were pucks that were buried in the pavement,
and uh there was a controller that was in kind
of like a almost like an aircraft controller tower, and
he would watch everything that's going on in a very
um you know, an old style looking system, you know,
to to monitor everything that's happening. And they could bring

(44:53):
vehicles in for service or just let them run all
day whenever they had to you know, had to have happened.
But it cost so much money to do this and
the infrastructure that was required just for that at one
point three miles in nine that's amazing because it's still
that was only nineteen years ago. It wasn't that long
ago when you look back. It's just incredible. But the

(45:13):
other one thing that I need to point out here
is in reading this article, in addition to just that
that strange you know, situation. I guess I read about
a test that happened in seven with with Buick. Now,
GM has been um on the autonomous vehicle thing for
a long long time since, as we heard, right alright,
so to automated buses, an automated police car, and ten

(45:40):
seven buhicles sabers were cruising driverless up and down a
seven point six mile two lane stretch of I fifteen
in San Diego. And I had no idea until I
read this article. Right, the test, I mean, they had
to bury high strength magnets in the pavement every three
to ten feet in order to make this work. In
addition to a you know again you said, a truckload

(46:03):
of equipment in the vehicles, right, These were you know,
no small no small feet, I guess for them to
to load this stuff into the vehicle. Each car carried
about one hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment in in
order to make this work. And it was just a short,
one time thing. But it's another one of those things
like we're thinking about ten years. You know, this may
be the way we do things when you look at

(46:24):
at what is required to lay out that infrastructure. I mean,
let alone like let's say that we've already developed the
technology that would allow us to have the smart highway approach.
When you look at just installing that it's such an
enormous this is this goes back to something that we
covered on tech stuff before, and Scott, you and I
have talked about it just in the in the office,

(46:44):
that solar highway idea. That the idea sounds kind of interesting,
but then when you start to really think about the implementation,
you realize it's such a monumental, gargantuan task that would
cost billions of dollars that it's not nest It doesn't
seem realistic. The same sort of thing with these smart highways.
The idea is amazing, but when you look at the

(47:08):
choosing the alternative of putting all the systems in the
car as opposed to in the road, it just seems
to make more sense. Yeah, it sure does. Yeah. So
these these systems have advanced so much now that that's
why we're seeing this rapid increases the sharp curve to
to think people thinking that maybe this is possible. Yeah,
I mean before, I mean, look at how cumbersome this

(47:29):
whole thing was just fifteen years ago, twenty years ago.
It was. It was almost the same as it was
in Yeah, and we're seeing since you know the Google
car and in two thousand nine that you know, this
is maybe something that's really possible. I mean that that
this is a self sufficient system. This is the one
that you know is self contained. Maybe that's a better
way to say it. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean that

(47:50):
we won't see cars in the future communicate with each other.
But in the past, we used to think that that
was the only way that this system would work. Right, Like,
let's say, uh, you're looking at the the Highway of tomorrow,
and all the cars are are constantly in communication with
each other to maintain the correct distance from one another
to funnel traffic appropriately so that you don't have these

(48:13):
traffic snarls, or at least they don't last as long.
That you could even have cars more cars on the
highway because you could pack them in closer together. Because
now that they're all talking to each other and they're
all uh, electronically controlled, they can react in a real
time where they don't need the you don't need to
build in the human reaction time to have a safe
driving experience. You just have to have the robotic reaction

(48:35):
time which is much shorter. That's like the the crazy
idea of the future. As it turns out, we might
be able to do that without having the cars talk
to each other or the roads at all. If the
if each car's system is sophisticated enough, it can all
be autonomous and self contained. Um. I don't know, but
I expect we'll have a combination of the two because

(48:57):
I think we'll eventually get to really complex systems where
things like traffic lights will respond in dynamic changing conditions.
So let's say that the traffic system itself is able
to sense where congestion is and react in real time,
not not on a intersection by intersection basis, but on
a system wide basis. Uh. You know, the dream of

(49:20):
the future is that you get in your car, it
drives you to work and you don't hit a single
red light the entire time. That's a big dream. You
know what Autie is making network right now and really
part of what's going on with this Audi Connect system
that they've got and it's probably one of the vehicles
that you saw at CES. Yeah, there's two things that
I want to mention here. Now. You talked about the

(49:40):
traffic lights. We'll talk about that first. I guess one
of the things that we talked about in a Car
Stuff episode about um. I think it was just kind
of my car detect the lights gonna when the light's
gonna turn green, something like that, right, I can't remember
the episode name now, but the Audi vehicle will will
sense it kind of it ties itself into the central
computer that breaks the the the lights for the entire city.

(50:03):
I don't know if you knew that or not. There
is one system that operates the lights in in most
big cities, and sometimes you know, in the case of
New York, where there's thousands and thousands of lights, it's
broken up into different groups or different divisions by one.
Sometimes it's it's controlled individually at that intersection and then
actually causes problems. Now, if they're controlled by one central system,

(50:24):
it allows traffic to flow much easier and much better.
But Audi has found a way to tap into that
system legally, they've allowed them to do that, you know,
as part of the testing. But your car will either
speed up or slow down to allow you to make
that next light. Now, it won't go to extremes, it
won't slow you down to five miles per hour in
his own where it's thirty five and it won't accelerate
to some crazy speed and and then thus break all

(50:47):
laws precisely. But it will tell you if you're going
to make that next light or not, and what you
should do, you know, slightly let off the gas and
you're gonna make it to that next light, through through
the next light, um or you may not have a chance.
Just don't worry about it. You're gonna sit here for
a minute. Not a big deal. But they said that
what's interesting is that you think something like that you're
gonna have to have, you know, everybody's gonna have to

(51:10):
be on board with us to make it work right. Otherwise,
if you if you only have one or two drivers
on this, it doesn't make any difference. Everybody else is
still going to make the system so congested that even
for those two drivers, it's not really gonna work exactly right. Well,
the surprising thing was that they said that the numbers
of of cars that have to have this system in
place in order to make it work is very, very low.

(51:30):
And I thought it was somewhere around I want to say,
it's something like that. It's it's in that neighborhood of
ten percent, so you know, that's not such a difficult
target to meet, really, I mean around here, I mean
there's a lot of Audie drivers, a lot of people
driving new Audies. Yeah, I could see this working in Atlanta,
I know, other parts of the world where you know,
that's maybe not the popular brand or whatever. But if

(51:51):
the system works its way into other vehicles, other manufacturers,
and they were able to tie into the system as well,
that might be something that really really helps traffic. And Yeah,
and the other thing that I wanted to talk about,
because Audi's big into this, really big into this. They
had at CS they had a demonstration of a self
parking car. Yes, self parking is one of those things

(52:11):
I definitely wanted to talk about because this is something
that we're starting to see in various vehicles, things that
like parallel parking assist, but now we're getting to the
point where the car itself can totally take over. Yeah,
this is interesting because imagine this. You go to the
mall and it's Christmas time, and you know how it's
you know, it's already stressing out. You had a search
for a parking right up and down the roads. You're
following people to their parkings by little creepy right alright

(52:34):
before shaking their heads because all they want to do
is put some bags in the truck and they're gonna
go right back. And said, is it worth it to
pay the seventy five dollars to valet park my car
mall or whatever it is, because it seems like seventy alright,
So you drive up to the curb and you and
you get out and you just let the car go
and park itself in the parking lot. That's incredible. And
it goes in and parks, it's shuts itself off, waits

(52:54):
for you to come back and call it, and you know,
you call it because otherwise the journey of trying to
fig out where your car parked would be very adventurous,
being pretty difficult. So the car comes back to you
and picks you up on the curb side, and you
leave and it's that simple. Now. I was wondering, okay,
I was thinking about this. What if there's no parking spots,
does it just circle the entire time that you're gone.
That would be a drag. But the other thing is

(53:16):
that there does have to be some infrastructure in place
for this to work. This this system right now, the
way it works, Uh, the parking lot has to be
wired for something like this to work right now. I
think in the future they're saying, as you know, as always,
in ten years, we may see this, yeah, where we
might even see it where the car is able to
do it all without the infrastructure being necessary. But it's

(53:38):
not a surprise to me to see this kind of
this kind of progression where you have the the you know,
you've you've kind of rigged the game, right, You've rigged
the game by defining what the playing board is, and
then your piece can move along the playing board in
a very predictable way because you've defined the playing board.
Eventually the pieces get sophisticated enough that you could play

(54:00):
on any surface and you're fine. Same sort of thing
is that the idea of the early autonomous cars really
heavily dependent upon a system that they could uh communicate
with in order for them to operate. But now we're
getting to a point where they can do so all
on their own. I think the same thing is going
to be true for the self parking systems in the future.
We'll think about this alright, so Audi offers this system

(54:22):
as an option. Right, let's just say that they do
in ten years from now, and it's it's thousand dollars
or to add this system to your vehicle. Are you
going to add that option? You're gonna check that little
box because there's that one parking lot in Cleveland where
it's gonna work. Yeah, you might want to wait until
that technology is completely self contained. All right, that's a
that's a little bit you know, extreme, I guess. But

(54:44):
but Audi is so on board with this. I mean,
there really are running gangbusters towards this autonomous vehicle. I mean,
in two thousand ten they ran a car up Pike's Peak.
I don't know if a lot of techno tech stuff
listeners are going to know that or not car stuff
listeners do. We've talked about it. But in two thousand ten,
Audi ran an autonomous t t s up Pike's Peak

(55:05):
the International Hill Climb competition course. I think it's something
like a hundred and forty four turns twelve and a
half miles. It's you know, fourteen thousand feet in the air.
It did it in like twenty seven minutes, which is
not a great time to granted, you know, the fastest
drivers do it in ten minutes, but it's pretty amazing.
They didn't have anybody behind the wheel. I mean, there's
a thousand foot cliff on one side and the other

(55:26):
side is you know, Rocky Death the other way as well. Um,
that's a little extreme. Anyway, they chose the TTS because
it has the pieces in place and and it makes
perfect sense. It has the you know, the the drive
by wire throttle, it has adaptive cruise control, It has
SMI semi automatic gearbox, which is another one we really
talked about, and lots of other electronic gadgetry like GPS.

(55:50):
To contract this vehicle within two centimeters, that's incredible two centimeters.
I remember when GPS was such that the military required
all consumer level GPS receivers to only be accurate to
maybe fifty feet. Uh. And then eventually during the Clinton
administration that got lifted so that we could have more

(56:13):
accurate GPS receivers. But it was the domain of the
military until and then I think it went down to
like ten ft and then went down to three feet. Right.
I don't know what it is now, but I mean
to track a vehicle and now you get like a
note on your on your watch saying, take a step
to your left because you know you're about to step
in a crack or something. Yeah, this is amazing stuff.
I mean, there's so much more we could talk about.

(56:34):
I mean we haven't really even talked about like lane correction,
where it takes over the steering for you and helps
adjust you back into the the middle of the lane.
You could even have You can even have cars that
keep you in the center of the lane and so
you feel a little tugging at your steering wheel when
you start to drift. Out of that sentence, Mercedes, does it? Now,
get this Mercedes, Mercedes vehicle. I just read this. If

(56:56):
another vehicle enters your lanes, they're they're drifting, your car
reacts to it, So your car starts to move all
the way. Your car will react appropriately to get out
of the way of the other vehicle that gets in
your land. So it's not just monitoring what it's doing.
It's monitoring what other cars are doing and taking invasive action.
When when we say react appropriately, does it also call
the driver bad names? That's that's not appropriate. Okay, okay,

(57:19):
all right, well you know I just I only repeat
what I see in traffic. I'm a non driver flips
the electronic bird. That's right, So you know, just again,
There's so much more we could talk about, but in
order to wrap this episode up, I have to ask you,
Scott an important question. My important question is why is

(57:39):
your personal feeling about autonomous cars? You're the car guy,
all right, So this has changed. My opinion has changed
over the last couple of years because when I first
started here, we were still in you know, talking about
the you know, the infrastructure systems that everybody had to
be on board or else it wasn't gonna happen. And
you know, that was completely different from the way it

(58:00):
is now. The stuff that I'm seeing coming out now,
I'm starting to buy into it a little bit. Don't
tell Bent, No, I won't now maybe I should. I'll
probably talk with him about this soon, but but this
is really the first I've dug into it in a while.
And honestly, some of the systems that I'm that I'm
learning about and the way that they operate, I think
that's okay. I like this, the semi control type stuff.

(58:20):
I don't think I'll ever want to completely hand over
control like you know, the the Google car that you're
mentioning with no steering wheel and no break etcetera. I
don't like that idea one bit. What I do feel
that I'm okay with is that, in certain situations and
certain conditions, if you give over I guess um partial
control to systems, I'm fine with that. I mean, I

(58:41):
understand that, you know, for safety reasons, that's fine. It
can think faster than I can think, or react faster
than I can. But I'm still I'm still one in
the in the realm of I'd like to maintain control
the car myself. Well. And you enjoy driving too, right,
I mean to you, driving is a pleasure activity. I mean,
obviously not like stop and go try pick in Atlanta
and highways, but driving is a pleasure activity and I

(59:03):
think for a lot of people that's true. And it
also represents a sense of independence and freedom, the fact
that you can get up and go to a destination
on on your own, and it very much feeds into
sort of the American identity, you know. And there are
some places in the world where this is not as
big a deal, but for us it's huge as it
really ties into our national identity. Huge expression of freedom.

(59:25):
And and the thing is, you know, I need to
clarify this. I'm talking about like my daily driver. Now,
if I were to have a car that was like
a weekend car project car, Um, you want that full manual,
I would want. I would want that just no electronics
in that thing at all, if possible. I mean, just
to be a raw experience. And I like that a lot,
I really do. And so I think that you know
that I've got two different ways to look at it.

(59:46):
But for the daily driver, yeah, sure, if I'm going
to help me in traffic and stop and go every
day because I sit in it for an hour and
a half every day each way to get to this office. Um, well,
good news, Scott, because you're sitting here with me so
light to it's not gonna be any traffic when you're
heading home tonight. So what about you, I mean, we
haven't really talked about your thoughts in this. You're not
I'm not a driver, So I am one percent on

(01:00:09):
board with the autonomous car experience. All right, I understand
that I get that. But let's just say that you know,
you've got some confidence in the person that's driving you, right,
So you have people that you know drive you here
and there wherever you need to get Your wife drives right, Yes,
she does, had no secret there. Now, would you be
comfortable with her handing over control to the computers to
let them drive you wherever you're going? I would be

(01:00:31):
my wife. Let me say this first, My wife is
an excellent driver. I make a lot of I make
a lot of jokes at my wife's expense, which she
humor is good naturedly. But I have to say she
she was late getting into driving as well. She was
not one of those people who at age sixteen got
her driver's license. She she was a latecomer to driving.

(01:00:53):
But she is an excellent driver, however, I think she does.
She's also she doesn't enjoy driving. She does it, and
she's very good at it, but it's not an experience
that she looks forward to. So I think she would
enjoy being able to hand over control too. I think
a lot of people feel that way. Yeah, I mean
I really do. There there are plenty of people who
absolutely love it, and there are plenty of people who

(01:01:15):
are like, this is a utilitarian task that I do it.
It gets me to where I need to be, and
that's all it is. It also, I think heavily depends
upon the house you grew up in the way, the
way the people around you looked at driving. Because my
parents both don't really care about driving either. It is
the way they get from point A to point B,

(01:01:36):
and so I think I inherited a lot of that
from them. Um. I also just I also know a
lot about how uh the humans have the limitations? Right,
We we do have limitations in our reaction time and
our ability to make decisions and critical moments. And even
when you make that decision, then there's the delay between

(01:01:57):
making the decision and acting upon it. And it seems
difficult to believe that machines can do this better than
we can. But you see it all the time. I
mean the the fact that that machines are communicating electronically.
That means you're they're using electricity which moves at the
speed of light. You are not getting faster than that.
Um And once you once you figure that out and

(01:02:19):
you get to the point where the system itself is
it's proven to be reliable, which is obviously key. If
you have a poorly designed system, this could be a disaster, right,
A poorly designed autonomous car could cost lives. But assuming
that it has been quality tested to you know, to

(01:02:42):
the ends of the earth and back to prove that
it in fact is able to do what it promises
to do, then I welcome it with open arms. And
even so, GM legal may still tell you that you
have to have your hands on the wheel, which means
I'm out right, I still have to go get a
driver's license to sit in my driver less car. You
know what may be my favorite part of that that
whole um paragraph that you just stated, Yeah, when you

(01:03:04):
called us the humans the humans, Yeah, it almost had me.
I realized after I said it. I thought, now it
sounds like I'm talking about a species to which I
do not belong, but I do. I'm not an alien
or a robot. Like, hey, come on, man, I don't
need to be like calling in my backup squad so
I can wipe out everyone's memory. Plus I can always

(01:03:26):
at this podcast and cut that part out if I
really wanted to a panel in the back of your head. Look,
we don't talk about my it's It's just a tattoo,
that's all. It is. A tattoo. Very clever, Scott, Thank
you so much. For being on this show. This was
a lot of fun to have this conversation. It was
a lot of fun. And I'll tell you I've got
I'm staring at five pages of notes that we didn't
even get. You threw away about about six pages of

(01:03:49):
notes after you got finished with UM. Yeah, so we've
got enough here where we could do another episode if
we wanted. Let me tell you, I really appreciate the
opportunity to to be here. So thanks for asking me. Absolutely.
And of course you can listen to Scott and Ben
on Car Stuff, an amazing podcast. Uh and uh and Scott,
I hope you are able to do an episode about
autonomous cars and drop the bomb on Ben early in

(01:04:10):
the episode, because I want to see him react when
you say I'm on board with some of these technologies. Yes,
some of them. Let's say, let's keep it in mind
that it's some now. Yeah, yeah, I'm not completely swayed yet.
It's the assist that you're looking at, not the I'm
going to completely take over this this experience as I
get older, I'm okay with a little bit of assistance,
that's all. Yeah, No, I I could use all the

(01:04:31):
assistance I can get driving and everything else. Yeah, well,
you know I welcome them. And Hey, if you guys
have jokes for me, or you have suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff, maybe there's another house Stuff or
its host that you would absolutely love to have back
on the show, or someone who's never been on before.
Let me know. You guys may be begging for Scott

(01:04:54):
to come back. Please let me know. I'll be happy
to pass those messages along as well. You can did
in touch with me with the email address tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com or drop me a
line on Twitter, Facebook or Tumbler with the handled tech
Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really
soon for more on this and bausands of other topics.

(01:05:16):
Does it have stuff works dot com