Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text stuff dot com.
Speaker 1: Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan
Speaker 1: Strickland and now today I'm joined in the podcast studio
Speaker 1: by my esteemed colleague, the co host of Car Stuff,
Speaker 1: Scott Benjamin Scott welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, and Scott, you you
Speaker 1: this is your first time on tech Stuff. It is
Speaker 1: first guest by Yeah. Ben's been on several times. Uh,
Speaker 1: he spoke highly of you, thank you, So I have
Speaker 1: I have high expectations. Uh. If you guys have not
Speaker 1: listened to Car Stuff, you definitely need to go and
Speaker 1: check that out. I know I've recommended it multiple times.
Speaker 1: When we did our transmissions episode, I was silently hoping
Speaker 1: that Scott was not sitting at his desk cringing in horror,
Speaker 1: just from psychically understanding that we were completely in mistating
Speaker 1: how they worked shocks. You're just saying, editor, I probably
Speaker 1: couldn't poke too many holes in the in the narrative. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we were. We were I think pretty consistent, uh and
Speaker 1: and more correct than not. So that was good. And
Speaker 1: I you know, we kind of were talking about what
Speaker 1: was going to be the subject, you know, I said, well,
Speaker 1: we could pick any topic you want, and we talked
Speaker 1: about autonomous cars being the subject, the idea of, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the whole history of autonomous cars, the technology
Speaker 1: that more or less is allowing autonomous cars to work,
Speaker 1: and how that technology is finding its way into cars
Speaker 1: you can drive today, and not not autonomous cars, not
Speaker 1: driverless cars, but that technology is making the cars we
Speaker 1: do use either easier or more safe. And so I
Speaker 1: thought I'd start off by saying, Scott, the first autonomous
Speaker 1: car story I could come up with was from fourteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight. Yeah, that goes way farther back than I
Speaker 1: had anticipated. Although you said it, I remembered what you're talking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean as soon as I said I thought it
Speaker 1: was really good. I I said, before we came in here,
Speaker 1: and I thought I was gonna really catch you off guard.
Speaker 1: And you said, Leonardo da Vincius, dang, Yeah, he he
Speaker 1: sketched out an idea for a driverless cart. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna stump me on Leo too often, because we talked
Speaker 1: about Leo so many times in the early days of
Speaker 1: car stuff. I think we've talked about just about every
Speaker 1: invention the guy's ever had, which again maybe not because
Speaker 1: you know thousands, it seems like it happens for thousands
Speaker 1: of things that patterns, but ideas for thousands of things, right,
Speaker 1: tons of sketches, some of which were ideas that ultimately
Speaker 1: had no way of working, and a lot of which
Speaker 1: had you know, some real, some real great thought behind it.
Speaker 1: And this is one of them. That was a pre
Speaker 1: programmed clockwork cart. So it's not autonomous in the sense
Speaker 1: let it could you could set it down on a
Speaker 1: road and it would just be able to follow the road.
Speaker 1: It would follow a predetermined pathway and it did so.
Speaker 1: It had a had a cam that you could put
Speaker 1: cam stops on, which would tell it tell essentially the
Speaker 1: steering mechanism win to turn left or right along its pathway,
Speaker 1: and a spring that you would wind inside the cart
Speaker 1: gave it the the energy needed to propel itself forward. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh so if you knew that I needed to
Speaker 1: travel forward approximately this far because approximately because you're gonna
Speaker 1: get and then turn left, you could put the camp
Speaker 1: stop in the right spot and then it would do that.
Speaker 1: But that's it. It would have to be the predetermined path.
Speaker 1: And now it's just the one you can refresh my memory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think that this was ever built in his time.
Speaker 1: I believe that some engineers created it later for a
Speaker 1: museum pieces that right, that's right, the the original one
Speaker 1: was probably never built in Leonardo's time, which is not
Speaker 1: a big surprise. A lot of his inventions were again
Speaker 1: just the realm of the sketch book. They were never
Speaker 1: actually built. But it was Mark Rossheim who made a
Speaker 1: working model of it. He also made I did an
Speaker 1: episode with Josh Clark about humanoid robots. He also made
Speaker 1: a clockwork mechanical night based on Leonardo da Vinci's design,
Speaker 1: which supposedly was built during da Vinci's time. But we
Speaker 1: just have a written account of it existing as opposed
Speaker 1: to an actual example of it. So it may that
Speaker 1: that story maybe apocryphal, but the actual design worked interesting,
Speaker 1: So it's fascinating that it would work. You know, these
Speaker 1: these drawings of his that finally came to life, you know,
Speaker 1: hundreds of years later, and and they truly do work. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have the story from I believe you said about
Speaker 1: a radio controlled full size car, not not a not
Speaker 1: a radio control car like a toy car. We're talking
Speaker 1: about a full sized car being controlled by radio. That
Speaker 1: is amazing to me. How granted that's TELA operated right. Again,
Speaker 1: it's not autonomously controlled, so a little different from a
Speaker 1: car that drives itself. A little bit different. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess so. Um, you know you said that it would
Speaker 1: be controlled by someone outside the vehicle. I guess it's
Speaker 1: you could consider it the earliest remote controlled or radio
Speaker 1: controlled full size car ever. And it was tested in
Speaker 1: a very difficult situation too. It was New York City
Speaker 1: during a traffic jam. So we're talking about driving up
Speaker 1: Broadway and down Fifth Avenue in heavy traffic in you
Speaker 1: can I measure what that was like. And that's a
Speaker 1: pretty rigorous first test. Yeah, I'm amazing to think that.
Speaker 1: You know they were doing this in n I mean,
Speaker 1: but again, look what we're look where we're at now. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we get science fiction author David H. Keller, who
Speaker 1: wrote a story called the Living Machine in the anthology
Speaker 1: Wonder Stories. Keller's story involved lots of different things, but
Speaker 1: had a description of driverless cars that took all the
Speaker 1: stress out of the commute. You just jumped in. You
Speaker 1: can put the kiddies into the into the car. It
Speaker 1: would take them to school, and you wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: worry about, you know, a chauffeur making a wrong turn.
Speaker 1: I did mention a show fair, which I thought was
Speaker 1: meant that the story must have been for a very
Speaker 1: specific audience. But uh, in nineteen thirty nine, we have
Speaker 1: the infamous World's Fair. This, this is a World's Fair.
Speaker 1: I wish I could travel back in time and visit myself.
Speaker 1: You're talking about GM's Futurama exhibit, right, this is amazing. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what I'm talking about. But this particular World's
Speaker 1: Fair had tons of science fiction a ee kind of ideas,
Speaker 1: as most of the World's Fairs did, but the ones
Speaker 1: that this one had really excite me because there was
Speaker 1: everything from robots to the these this idea of the
Speaker 1: smart highway system in the Futurama presentation. And I actually
Speaker 1: watched the film that was shown back at the nineteen
Speaker 1: nine World's Fair, and it's pretty interesting their approach. You know,
Speaker 1: they they foresaw a smart highway system in place by
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty that's what they were predicting in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: And GM has been on this in this bandwagon for
Speaker 1: a long long time. I mean probably prior to nine,
Speaker 1: to be honest with you, I mean the development of
Speaker 1: that system alone. And this is the one that showed
Speaker 1: showcased electric cars that were powered by circuits that were
Speaker 1: embedded in the roadway. So this is a an infrastructure system,
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about in this episode, but this was
Speaker 1: also a radio controlled system. Yeah. And they had there
Speaker 1: their highways were like trenches, so you would have a
Speaker 1: lane that was essentially a trench. You could not change
Speaker 1: lanes because you had these barriers on either side, individual
Speaker 1: lanes or trenches. Yeah, and the idea was that you
Speaker 1: would you would get there would be open spots where
Speaker 1: you would get into the correct lane depending upon what
Speaker 1: your destination is, but otherwise you stay on target in
Speaker 1: the death Star lane. And uh. It also had radio
Speaker 1: communication between vehicles to make sure that the vehicles were
Speaker 1: maintaining the proper distance from each other. The ideas were incredible. Now,
Speaker 1: most of this was infrastructure that was built into the
Speaker 1: road system itself. So we're talking smart roads, smart highways,
Speaker 1: and uh, we're not talking so much about smart cars, right.
Speaker 1: The cars themselves didn't have as much of that technology
Speaker 1: built into them because the the thinking at the time
Speaker 1: was that this is a system that's going to require
Speaker 1: an infrastructure to support it. It's going to be an
Speaker 1: external system that operates the vehicles that that operate within
Speaker 1: that system. I got I got it. And the cars
Speaker 1: have to be able to read the system communicate with
Speaker 1: the system that's outside the vehicle. I got it. I've
Speaker 1: got a lot to say about that in a little while,
Speaker 1: because there's some interesting things that happened mid nineteen nine
Speaker 1: or so. Yeah. Yeah, that's where some some big thinking
Speaker 1: started to kind of shift from this, because this was
Speaker 1: the predominant approach for the idea of a driver less system,
Speaker 1: or at least automated car system was that you would
Speaker 1: have the the the largest part of the system built
Speaker 1: into the landscape, not of the vehicle. The vehicle would
Speaker 1: be a receiver and the landscape would be the transmitter.
Speaker 1: And it makes sense, I guess when you think about
Speaker 1: the size of the I guess, for lack of better
Speaker 1: way to say this, you can correct me on this,
Speaker 1: but the electronics that are required the cars simply couldn't
Speaker 1: handle that big. Yeah. Yeah. The for a very long time,
Speaker 1: the the technology that would allow a vehicle to be
Speaker 1: autonomous was so huge that you couldn't put in a
Speaker 1: commercial vehicle, in a moving vehicle. Yeah, you needed to
Speaker 1: have it as something that was all along the side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with the transistor wasn't even developed till the nine So
Speaker 1: we're talking about time where you're looking at electro mechanical circuitry,
Speaker 1: vacuum tubes, actual moving parts to complete circuits. Uh, that
Speaker 1: is enormous and you would not be able to fit
Speaker 1: that and it would make a vehicle so heavy as
Speaker 1: to make it impractical. And it's so so different now
Speaker 1: because they're actually you know, those components are actually saving
Speaker 1: weight in vehicles over the versions of the technology that
Speaker 1: we used prior to that, the mechanical versions. So it's
Speaker 1: just amazing that way this thing is advanced. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: like I said, you know, all the way through the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, there was still the look at the smart
Speaker 1: highway system. In fact, there were companies that worked on
Speaker 1: technology that would have brought this into reality even as
Speaker 1: early as the late nineteen fifties if we had chosen
Speaker 1: to pursue it. But that kind of system requires massive
Speaker 1: buy in across multiple companies, and no company really wants
Speaker 1: to hand over the keys to their Kingdom to some
Speaker 1: other standard. So you don't want If I'm developing cars
Speaker 1: and I know that my competitor is also developing cars
Speaker 1: and is proposing this highway system that my cars are
Speaker 1: going to have to conform to, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be really crazy about that system. We see this in
Speaker 1: technology everywhere, not just in cars, but every kind of technology.
Speaker 1: If I want to have an interconnected kitchen where my
Speaker 1: refrigerator talks to my stove, I have to get them
Speaker 1: from the same manufacturer, because no one wants to build
Speaker 1: their stuff that to work with other people's stuff. It
Speaker 1: means you can't sell more of your things. So we
Speaker 1: never saw this smart road smart highway system take off
Speaker 1: the way the visionaries back in the late thirties were imagining.
Speaker 1: It just never happened. And they always seem to promise that,
Speaker 1: you know, in twenty five years, we're gonna see this
Speaker 1: as the standard, this is the way it's gonna be,
Speaker 1: or in twenty years sometimes and even now, you know,
Speaker 1: even now, when we see the autonomous cars that um
Speaker 1: auties rolling out in other companies, they're's still saying it's
Speaker 1: a decade away, it's fifteen years away, and it's always
Speaker 1: been the case. It's been the case ever since, you know,
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties. Yeah, yeah, it's all well, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of like a running joke in twenty
Speaker 1: to fifty years or in ten to fifteen years. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then you look at the people who are suggesting,
Speaker 1: whatever the technology is, it will be here in ten
Speaker 1: to fifteen years, and you go back five years and
Speaker 1: those people are saying it will be ten to fifteen years,
Speaker 1: and you go back another Eventually you get to a
Speaker 1: point where you realize it's always ten to fifteen years away,
Speaker 1: and you wonder if that tend to if that's just
Speaker 1: if that tomorrow is always going to be tomorrow and
Speaker 1: never today. Um, but we're along the way. We're seeing
Speaker 1: some really cool developments. In the sixties, we had labs
Speaker 1: at Stanford and other facilities begin to work on robot
Speaker 1: controlled vehicles, which weren't cars. They were vehicles meant to
Speaker 1: go into space, like space probes, but these robot controlled
Speaker 1: vehicles that were meant to allow a a probe to
Speaker 1: continue on a pathway and make corrections on its own,
Speaker 1: because you know, the further way you get from Earth,
Speaker 1: the longer it takes for information to pass between the
Speaker 1: probe and Earth. Information can only go so fast as
Speaker 1: the speed of light, and eventually those probes go far
Speaker 1: enough where that becomes a factor. Then you had to
Speaker 1: have a system that can make minor corrections on its
Speaker 1: own rather than have to relay the problem back. Then
Speaker 1: you have to do all the math. Al Right, well,
Speaker 1: we have to fix the problem not for right now,
Speaker 1: but for forty five minutes from now, because that's when
Speaker 1: the probe will get our response. And it's just it's
Speaker 1: too complicated too. Yeah, No, no one wants to do
Speaker 1: that much, especially when all you have to rely on
Speaker 1: our slide rules. Uh. So then we see that kind
Speaker 1: of technology start to filter into other areas, and uh
Speaker 1: that's when we started to really think about what are
Speaker 1: the elements that are necessary to let a car navigate autonomously.
Speaker 1: This involves sensing the environment, so it has to be
Speaker 1: able to detect where it is in relation to the road,
Speaker 1: to other vehicles, to other possible obstacles, whether that's people
Speaker 1: or animals or whatever it might be. It has to
Speaker 1: be able to process the information that it receives so
Speaker 1: that it has a way of making sense of all
Speaker 1: that data. Just just picking up the data isn't enough, right,
Speaker 1: You have to be able to say what does this
Speaker 1: data mean? And then it has to react to it.
Speaker 1: It has to have a way of responding to that information.
Speaker 1: That's critical because what's going to react to it. Is
Speaker 1: it going to be the driver? Is it going to
Speaker 1: be the system itself and it is going to just
Speaker 1: alert you with a a noise or light or is
Speaker 1: it something that is going to take control and do
Speaker 1: it itself exactly? And uh, and there we've seen lots
Speaker 1: of different approaches with that. Sometimes, Uh, you know, you
Speaker 1: could argue that the progress has mostly been going from
Speaker 1: the most simple implementation to the more complicated implementations that
Speaker 1: have become possible as technology has improved. But sometimes it's
Speaker 1: just you don't not everyone wants a car that starts
Speaker 1: to respond on its own because they start to feel
Speaker 1: like they're no longer in control of their own vehicle,
Speaker 1: which for some people is a real issue. Uh. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, there was a guy named Ernst Dickmans
Speaker 1: who created an autonomous driving system using a Mercedes van
Speaker 1: called the VaMoRs Mercedes Van. Have you heard of this?
Speaker 1: It's the vision guidedstem yeah, yeah, yeah, this this was
Speaker 1: a really incredible thing to look at. So it's it
Speaker 1: was a van that had an enormous amount of electronic
Speaker 1: equipment inside it. And again this is we're talking about
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties. This is a vehicle that could autonomously
Speaker 1: navigate down highway systems. Yeah. They called this a robotic van. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in fact, three different generations of robotics went through
Speaker 1: this one van. They do a system, they gut the system,
Speaker 1: they would rebuild it and do a second generation. They
Speaker 1: did it again for a third generation, and it could
Speaker 1: do things like maintain its distance from the vehicle that's
Speaker 1: ahead of it, It could maintain its position in the lane,
Speaker 1: it could maintain its speed and uh. It was really
Speaker 1: a groundbreaking approach that a lot of the technology and
Speaker 1: um and processes that were used and that have filtered
Speaker 1: into the autonomous cars we were talking about today. Sure,
Speaker 1: this is the beginning of what we call adaptive cruise control. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that a little bit more later too.
Speaker 1: So super cool. And there are videos online of this
Speaker 1: the Vamours Mercedes v A M O R s uh,
Speaker 1: and you can actually see this thing like cruising down
Speaker 1: the road with the guy sitting in the back of
Speaker 1: the van looking at the electronics that again are just
Speaker 1: taking up shelves of space in the van. So unless
Speaker 1: you happen to have a van with lots of shelves
Speaker 1: of space, that's not the best implementation. But it did
Speaker 1: show the promise of the techno. I wonder why they
Speaker 1: didn't do with their two seat sports car. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just carrying behind a trailer with cables connecting to the car. Uh.
Speaker 1: In ninety four you had the Eureka Project Prometheus. Now
Speaker 1: the Eureka Project was out of Europe Um and they
Speaker 1: had three Mercedes Benz cars with systems that allowed their
Speaker 1: cars to make autonomous lane changes, which was a first
Speaker 1: in vehicles. They could detect where the lanes were. They
Speaker 1: could detect up to six other vehicles, three in front
Speaker 1: and three behind. Essentially the car that's directly in front
Speaker 1: of them, the car that's to the lane and the left,
Speaker 1: the car that's to the lane in the right, and
Speaker 1: then the ones that are behind them as well. And
Speaker 1: if all the parameters were right, if none of those
Speaker 1: cars were too close or were moving uh laterally across lanes,
Speaker 1: then it could make an autonomous lane change on its own,
Speaker 1: which was a big deal. That's still a big deal
Speaker 1: now even right. I mean when you think about it,
Speaker 1: some of the modern vehicles, that's still a big selling
Speaker 1: feature is uh, you know, lane warning detection devices things
Speaker 1: like that and uh and um blind spot detection and
Speaker 1: you know that that was what they were using then,
Speaker 1: just a more primitive version, yes, and so now we're
Speaker 1: starting to see that specific type of technology find its
Speaker 1: way into consumer vehicles today. Uh. Two thousand four was
Speaker 1: when DARPA introduced the Grand Challenge. I love the DARPA
Speaker 1: Grand Challenge. It is the coolest thing to me. They
Speaker 1: invited a lot of different research institutions, colleges, even private
Speaker 1: companies to participate in this challenge. The idea was to
Speaker 1: build a vehicle that could autonomously navigate a course in
Speaker 1: the desert, the Mojave Desert, uh, and to see if
Speaker 1: it could get from point A to point b uh.
Speaker 1: And they have several teams participate, but no one successfully
Speaker 1: navigated of course that first year, and no prize was
Speaker 1: awarded that first year. Yeah. I think I think one
Speaker 1: team got eleven point seven kilometers in and that's the
Speaker 1: furthest anyone made it I'll give you a little bit
Speaker 1: of a spoiler. Yeah, the two thousand five five Darper Challenge,
Speaker 1: and challenge that plays heavily into the development of the
Speaker 1: Google car. Yes, because the two thousand five challenge had
Speaker 1: five teams that actually did finish, including one from Stanford,
Speaker 1: and the people on that Stanford team many of them
Speaker 1: went on to work for Google. Yeah. In fact, you
Speaker 1: know the guy that headed the team, I guess, um,
Speaker 1: Sebastian Thrum. That's the guy that he won the two
Speaker 1: thousand five Darker Grand Challenge and the two million dollar
Speaker 1: prize in the US Department of Defense. But he was
Speaker 1: also the co and this is also the guy that
Speaker 1: was the co inventor of Google street View. Yes, so
Speaker 1: he's he's got you know, some some engineering chaps. I
Speaker 1: guess he's got he's got the credential. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: So you know, we'll talk about the Google self driving
Speaker 1: car later. Yeah, yeah, he um. He also gave a
Speaker 1: TED talk specifically about driverless cars and his personal uh
Speaker 1: motivation for developing driverless cars, which was a very personal story.
Speaker 1: As a teenager, he lost a friend in a car accident,
Speaker 1: and so he said he wanted to develop systems that
Speaker 1: could save lives, and that's really his driving motivation, not
Speaker 1: to use a pun to create autonomous cars. So uh yeah,
Speaker 1: the two thousand four and two thousand five DARPA challenges
Speaker 1: kind of set the bar for autonomous cars in a
Speaker 1: large but desert course. Two thousand seven DARPA would up
Speaker 1: the antie with the Urban Challenge, which is where they
Speaker 1: were on an I think it was an Air Force
Speaker 1: base and the cars had to navigate a simulated town environment,
Speaker 1: including merging into and out of traffic. I remember hearing
Speaker 1: about some of the cars that would do. Feel like,
Speaker 1: there's one car that just pulled itself into a parking
Speaker 1: lot and stopped. I guess it just got overwhelmed. Some
Speaker 1: of some of these are funny clips to watch. You
Speaker 1: see them, it's interesting to see how they handle the situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think two of them got into an accident with
Speaker 1: each other. But there were six teams that finished the
Speaker 1: course successfully. And you know, when you think about navigating
Speaker 1: a dynamic system like that with and they weren't told
Speaker 1: what the route was going to be ahead of time.
Speaker 1: They were told just as the challenge started. So the
Speaker 1: idea was that the car had to be able to
Speaker 1: autonomously do this. They couldn't program everything in pre challenge.
Speaker 1: It had to be able to handle these situations on
Speaker 1: its own and obey all traffic laws. So not just
Speaker 1: merge into and out of traffic, but come to a
Speaker 1: stop at intersections and be able to read signs. You'd
Speaker 1: be able to read signs, be able to react to
Speaker 1: traffic lights, pedestrians. These are all big challenges, right. Any
Speaker 1: one of these is a huge challenge from an engineering standpoint.
Speaker 1: I can't remember if they use simulated pedestrians or if
Speaker 1: it was actual pedestrians, because that would be a dangerous
Speaker 1: game to play in the middle of the dark urban challenge.
Speaker 1: I would need to have a guaranteed million dollar prize
Speaker 1: to be a pedestrian for an autonomous car. Jella guaranteed
Speaker 1: milk that would do it. Yeah, well, you know, yeah.
Speaker 1: Maybe it depends also on what if they had capped
Speaker 1: the UH the speed limit that the cars were all
Speaker 1: up to travel. If anybody's listening, I'll do it for
Speaker 1: half that we're pricing each other out all my life
Speaker 1: and limb is worth two heard of your post? Uh
Speaker 1: And in two thousand ten, that's when Google revealed that
Speaker 1: they were working on a driverless car. It had happened already.
Speaker 1: I had a friend at Google who was joking around
Speaker 1: that he had this huge, huge, huge thing that Google
Speaker 1: was working on that I would just die to learn,
Speaker 1: but he wouldn't tell me what it was. And the
Speaker 1: week when this came out, I wrote to him and
Speaker 1: I said, was that it? He's like, bingo you are?
Speaker 1: He sat on it. I said, you realized, you know
Speaker 1: that you can't. He found out he cannot have a
Speaker 1: conversation with me about his work because of my work.
Speaker 1: So we now joke about that whenever we get together.
Speaker 1: Is you know, like, so, how's your job frustrating? Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: well he lie it because he likes to wind me up.
Speaker 1: He likes to you know, man, there's this Oh I
Speaker 1: can't talk about it. I know something you don't know.
Speaker 1: Even when he doesn't know anything. In fact, that's probably
Speaker 1: his favorite is when he just bluffs thing or something.
Speaker 1: But this was This was a kind of an eye
Speaker 1: opener because not only did Google have a driverless car,
Speaker 1: but they had been uh testing it for quite some
Speaker 1: time without anyone being aware of it. Big big shock
Speaker 1: to most of us. Right, Yeah, they had logs something
Speaker 1: like a hundred forty thousand miles in driverless car road miles.
Speaker 1: It's just crazy, well and relatively unnoticed. Yeah. Now, part
Speaker 1: of the unnoticed was that they always had someone who
Speaker 1: was sitting at the wheel, even if they didn't have
Speaker 1: control of the vehicle at that time, because if something
Speaker 1: did go wrong, they wanted the ability for a human
Speaker 1: to intervene and stop the vehicle or or drive it
Speaker 1: off the highway or whatever. Yeah, I think that most
Speaker 1: of it actually was surface streets. I don't think they
Speaker 1: were driving on the highway too much with these. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think that they specifically said they limited the surface streets.
Speaker 1: Either that or I've got it totally mixed up and
Speaker 1: it's the other way around. I'm gonna gonna talk about
Speaker 1: the the Google car right now, and you want to
Speaker 1: you want to wait until later, you want to do
Speaker 1: it right now. Let's do it right now, Scott, All right,
Speaker 1: let's do it a vehicle. It is really cool. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's got so many different things going on with it.
Speaker 1: I mean, these are features that we'll talk about later,
Speaker 1: I guess. But we mentioned, you know, the development, the
Speaker 1: whole thing. Um. You know, it's a Toyota Prius is
Speaker 1: the first one that we saw. I believe, right, I
Speaker 1: think that they have now expanded that fleet to include
Speaker 1: um like six Toyota Prius vehicles. UM, also an Audi
Speaker 1: T T and I believe they have some Lexus r
Speaker 1: XO models that they're using for quote unquote Google Cars,
Speaker 1: because they don't really make their own car, They just
Speaker 1: modify other manufacturer's vehicles to to work this way. Now,
Speaker 1: the cost of this stuff is really really expensive still,
Speaker 1: UM somewhere in the neighborhood of something like a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand dollars of equipment in each vehicle in
Speaker 1: order to this all work. And that's not even the
Speaker 1: street price of the vehicle included. That's that's just the
Speaker 1: equipment that makes it possible for it to navigate through
Speaker 1: these these dynamic systems exactly right. And that includes a
Speaker 1: seventy thou dollar lidar system that's light radar. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're sure your audience knows what this is all about, UM,
Speaker 1: but man, it's got this range finder thing that's on top.
Speaker 1: It's probably the dead giveaway that it's Google Car. Even
Speaker 1: that range finder, it's a sixty four bean laser that
Speaker 1: creates a three D map of the entire surrounding environment. So, um,
Speaker 1: I think it's like they call it inch precise in
Speaker 1: the way that it works, it's it's a high definition
Speaker 1: inch precise map of the entire region that this thing
Speaker 1: is traveling through at any given time in real time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the visualization of that data is amazing. There's some
Speaker 1: of that and the TED talk I mentioned where they
Speaker 1: show the and it looks almost like a heat signature
Speaker 1: map the way they show it, and whether or not
Speaker 1: that was an artistic choice they made for the purposes
Speaker 1: of the TED talk, I don't know. But you could
Speaker 1: see the actual landscape of the street in real time,
Speaker 1: like there was the the camera angle of the car
Speaker 1: moving through and then the view of this range finder
Speaker 1: including people like pedestrians walking across the street, so that
Speaker 1: the car new to stop and like it was making
Speaker 1: a left turn and it would stop and allow pedestrians
Speaker 1: to continue across. The pedestrians continue to walk across, which
Speaker 1: belied a casual approach to this to the level that
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure they were plants because as in not
Speaker 1: not like plants is in the life form, but rather
Speaker 1: they had been planted there by Google, because whenever I've
Speaker 1: crossed the street and the car is turning left and
Speaker 1: is about to collide with me, I have a reaction.
Speaker 1: And these people did not almost like Hills. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: a way, I guess. Right now, I want to say,
Speaker 1: you those ties into this, and this is kind of
Speaker 1: last thing I got about the Google car really because
Speaker 1: I'd like to get to the technology of it. But
Speaker 1: there have been two incidents, I suppose, with Google cars.
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing about both of these incidents, it's
Speaker 1: not the fault of the system. These are human errors. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wasn't. I think one of them might have been
Speaker 1: a human error of the person who was operating the
Speaker 1: Google car. They they had taken manual control correct, and
Speaker 1: then the other one was Google car got rear ended.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, other driver exactly. So you know, there should
Speaker 1: be zero bad press about the Google cars being in
Speaker 1: an accident. Yeah, you're talking about more than a hundred
Speaker 1: forty thousand miles logged and only two incidents, and neither
Speaker 1: of them were due to the autonomous part. So so
Speaker 1: none of them, none of the thousand miles had an
Speaker 1: accident associated with them, just the miles of the human operations. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. And you know this thing is uh, it's
Speaker 1: only authorized I guess to operate in what is it,
Speaker 1: four states, right? I know that California, Nevada, California, Nevada, UM, Michigan,
Speaker 1: and Florida, and then I believe the District of Columbia
Speaker 1: has recently signed on as well, and Georgia might be soon,
Speaker 1: according to according to the Laddinal Constitution, which sent out
Speaker 1: a tweet the other day saying Georgia might pave the
Speaker 1: way for driverless cars. And I thought, but we'll get
Speaker 1: into personal feelings at the end of this episode. The
Speaker 1: pave the Way will be the fifth state to jump
Speaker 1: on the bandway pave the way for the for people
Speaker 1: in Georgia for driverless cars, I guess understood. But yeah.
Speaker 1: The one thing that is cool is Google is working
Speaker 1: on prototype cars for autonomous driving, their own cars. These
Speaker 1: look like tiny little smart cars. Have seen these. They're
Speaker 1: they're nifty looking devices, but they are really I mean
Speaker 1: when we say prototype, we really mean it. This is
Speaker 1: like a proof of concept kind of thing. And they
Speaker 1: only have a top speed of twenty five Google captain
Speaker 1: at that. Yeah, they need some development there. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: mostly I think, to again test the system out, and
Speaker 1: they don't have a steering wheel, they don't have an accelerator,
Speaker 1: they don't have a break, there are no manual controls. It.
Speaker 1: I mean that that is not a car from the
Speaker 1: classic viewpoint of what a car should be. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no way for you to intervene. You have to
Speaker 1: take full like faith that the system is gonna take
Speaker 1: care of you. This is something just off the top
Speaker 1: of my head here I was. I was thinking that.
Speaker 1: You know, recently I heard somebody say something like, um,
Speaker 1: you know the cars have only advanced. Well, really, I
Speaker 1: guess maybe it's more to say cars have not advanced
Speaker 1: enough that if Henry Ford were to come back now
Speaker 1: from the grave, he would look at a car and say,
Speaker 1: that's a car, and that's that's my invention that's been adapted. Right.
Speaker 1: There hasn't been a major dramatic shift in the way
Speaker 1: that cars have been built since cars have been built,
Speaker 1: and and this is one. When you look at something
Speaker 1: that has no steering wheel, no no, no, i'm accelerator,
Speaker 1: no breaks, no anything like that. He might look at
Speaker 1: that and say, like, I don't know what this is.
Speaker 1: How how do you hook it up to another horse?
Speaker 1: Have we gone back to horse drawn carriages? What's up with?
Speaker 1: Is this a woodshed on wheelship that's going on? You
Speaker 1: must you must haul stuff in that right, This must
Speaker 1: only go downhill, which would be very useful in some
Speaker 1: parts of San Francisco. And you still can't say yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You just you just have to hope that when whichever
Speaker 1: way you're hurtling down the hill, you're clear of any obstacles. Um.
Speaker 1: When I went to C E. S and two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: which the year that we're recording this, I also saw
Speaker 1: Audi and BMW showing off driverless car technology. Again, this
Speaker 1: is this is stuff where the companies weren't committing to
Speaker 1: saying that they were going to produce a driverless car,
Speaker 1: but rather that they were developing the technology to make
Speaker 1: driving safer for everybody. So it's kind of like saying,
Speaker 1: look at all the technology we've developed that makes these
Speaker 1: cars safe, We've incorporated all of them into this one vehicle,
Speaker 1: and it's so sophisticated that the vehicle can drive itself.
Speaker 1: That was kind of the way they were presenting it,
Speaker 1: not that the cars that you buy from us in
Speaker 1: five years or ten years are going to be automated
Speaker 1: and you just hit a little switch and you go
Speaker 1: to where you want to go. But rather, this is
Speaker 1: how safe we are, which is an interesting way of
Speaker 1: of taking an effect. That's the way a lot of
Speaker 1: auto manufacturers are approaching this. Not to say we're building
Speaker 1: driverless cars, but rather we're building incredibly eight cars now
Speaker 1: in two thousand sixteen, which I know is in the
Speaker 1: future for those of you who are listening, you know,
Speaker 1: and when we're recording this isn't But that's when Cadillac
Speaker 1: is supposedly going to come out with a car that
Speaker 1: could be completely automated if you wanted to, at least
Speaker 1: in certain situations, in their two thousand seventeen line of vehicles,
Speaker 1: which would have the super Cruise feature. I like that name,
Speaker 1: super Cruise System. Yeah, and that uh from why I
Speaker 1: understand you would initiate the super Cruise system in specific
Speaker 1: scenarios like if you were in stop and go highway
Speaker 1: traffic and you know it's mindless, you're you come to
Speaker 1: a stop, you wait what seems to be an eternity.
Speaker 1: This is a familiar story for anyone who drives in
Speaker 1: Atlanta on any of the highways during rush hour certainly,
Speaker 1: and then you wait and then there's a four ft
Speaker 1: gap that opens between you and the car in front,
Speaker 1: so you creep forward and then you stop again. More
Speaker 1: than likely another car jams itself into that four ft gap. Right,
Speaker 1: if you have not acted, then that certainly has happened.
Speaker 1: So this would be a system you would activate in
Speaker 1: those kind of situations to sort of take over the
Speaker 1: monotony of that of that situation. Can I tell you
Speaker 1: how I've I've heard it described, And the Supercrew System
Speaker 1: is relatively new. They've been talking about it for about
Speaker 1: a year now, but they've recently had a you know,
Speaker 1: the press release that came out and said we're likely
Speaker 1: to put this on a vehicle in and they'll release
Speaker 1: in ten model and it's likely to be on a Cadillac.
Speaker 1: That's that's probably what it's gonna be. So you'll see
Speaker 1: it written as a Cadillac Supercrew System, but it's really
Speaker 1: just GM Supercruise alright. So the way they describe it
Speaker 1: is that it's a full speed range adaptive cruise control
Speaker 1: and lane centering system. These as cameras and other sensors
Speaker 1: to automatically steer and break in highway driving situations. That's
Speaker 1: how they kind of lay it out in uh in
Speaker 1: not so much legal turns but layman's terms. Yes, right now,
Speaker 1: I want to make note here also that Mercedes Benz
Speaker 1: has had a similar system for a long time. You know,
Speaker 1: they've had something that they call um dystronic plus's dystronic. Well,
Speaker 1: come on, Scott, you can be honest here. A lot
Speaker 1: of the words we come up within the automotive industry
Speaker 1: don't really mean anything. I know, I know, it's just
Speaker 1: their own brand name, I guess for the same type
Speaker 1: of system. But they've had it for a few years
Speaker 1: and it's been on the S and E class models.
Speaker 1: And the one difference here, and this is where the
Speaker 1: legal stuff comes in, right, Mercedes has required drivers to
Speaker 1: have their hands on the wheel even when the system
Speaker 1: is operational. Now, that's how they get around saying that
Speaker 1: this is an autonomous car. Now, GM calls it semi
Speaker 1: automated driving. And they're not gonna say autonomous. They're not
Speaker 1: gonna say that it's a self driving system. They're never
Speaker 1: going to say that for now. They're gonna leave it
Speaker 1: at this, this semi automated and they're gonna say that, Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: the drivers have to be in the driver's seat. They
Speaker 1: have to be paying attention to be awake, which is
Speaker 1: weird to say, but they have to be awake. They
Speaker 1: can't have your feet propped up on the dashboard. You
Speaker 1: have to be at the ready. Yeah and uh, and
Speaker 1: likely they're gonna say that you're gonna have to have
Speaker 1: your hands on the wheel, just as Mercedes does, because
Speaker 1: again it comes down to legal issues. Sure, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean we just you know, you were mentioning just now
Speaker 1: that there are only a few states that even allow
Speaker 1: autonomous cars on the road. So if you if you
Speaker 1: call your car that, then you have just limited where
Speaker 1: your car can be driven legally. But if you call
Speaker 1: it semi autonomous, and you you stress the fact that
Speaker 1: there's no point where you can take your hands off
Speaker 1: the wheel legally with this vehicle, that you have to
Speaker 1: be in control or at least be able to be
Speaker 1: in control at any given time, then I think you
Speaker 1: kind of dance around that little legal issue in your
Speaker 1: car can suddenly be sold in all the different states.
Speaker 1: But you know what the truth is, and I've seen
Speaker 1: this written a few different places that most of us
Speaker 1: if we're driving relatively new vehicles. I mean's in the
Speaker 1: last few years even Uh, most of us are probably
Speaker 1: driving what you can be considered an almost autonomous car
Speaker 1: right now. I know it's strange to think about it,
Speaker 1: but think if you think about the technologies they're involved.
Speaker 1: I mean, you get blind spot detection, lane change departure,
Speaker 1: backup cameras, sensors to go along with that, cross traffic alerts,
Speaker 1: active cruise control. Uh. You know all these systems, the
Speaker 1: the A B s, systems that are electronic that UM,
Speaker 1: electronic speed controls, You've got um stability control systems. All
Speaker 1: that plays into what creates UM this this bigger package
Speaker 1: that would be an autonomous vehicle. Those are the puzzle
Speaker 1: pieces that are required to be in place before they
Speaker 1: can call it autonomous or allow it to all work
Speaker 1: together to be autonomous. So most of us have systems
Speaker 1: like that. We've got the pieces there. It's like you're
Speaker 1: halfway there. They're just not connected in the exact right
Speaker 1: way that they need to be. They're connected, sure, and
Speaker 1: they work together flawlessly really, but there's just that missing piece,
Speaker 1: the puzzle. And that's when you give over control to
Speaker 1: the system. You give the control over to the computers
Speaker 1: and step and let it happen. And we're seeing tiny,
Speaker 1: little increminal steps toward that, although uh, they tend to
Speaker 1: be implemented in a way where control is still ultimately
Speaker 1: left up to the driver, where the driver can override
Speaker 1: anything that's been creating decided quote unquote decided by the vehicle.
Speaker 1: So here's some examples, like adaptive cruise control we've mentioned,
Speaker 1: so to really explain what that is. First, cruise control
Speaker 1: as a concept is an old idea. I mean, even
Speaker 1: if you go back to the earliest cars, a lot
Speaker 1: of them had governors that allowed them to maintain a
Speaker 1: steady rate of speed even if they were going uphill
Speaker 1: or downhill. Yeah, we're talking even prey as early as
Speaker 1: that this was something that was important because otherwise, you know,
Speaker 1: you would hit a hill and suddenly your engine has
Speaker 1: to do more work, right, and so now you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to start really pressing down on the on the
Speaker 1: accelerator in order to get this car to continue up
Speaker 1: the hill, especially if you want to maintain the speed
Speaker 1: that you were at when you were on a level plank.
Speaker 1: Then you get to the peak of the hill and
Speaker 1: it's time to go down the hill and now suddenly
Speaker 1: your car is careening out of control. I mean, you
Speaker 1: have to have the systems in place to help maintain
Speaker 1: that level of speed. Cruise control itself. There was an
Speaker 1: early system called speedos stat, which was invented in nine.
Speaker 1: Uh but then and that one didn't really show up
Speaker 1: until about nine Chrysler Imperial, so you know, it was
Speaker 1: a decade away. So remember we were talking about this,
Speaker 1: you'll see this in ten years. It's one case where
Speaker 1: it did come true. Yeah, and I would say that
Speaker 1: I think the thing that really pushed cruise control into
Speaker 1: fleets of vehicles was, I mean, that really made it
Speaker 1: a standard. Was the gas crisis in the seventies. Was
Speaker 1: this idea that suddenly fuel economy was really important. It
Speaker 1: hadn't been as important before. I mean, no one wants
Speaker 1: to waste money, but now when for the A lot
Speaker 1: of our listeners are younger, But in the seventies there
Speaker 1: was a gas crisis that meant that there were there
Speaker 1: would be enormous lines at gas stations in order to
Speaker 1: get just a little bit of gas, and that, you know,
Speaker 1: it was it was a really serious tough time. Well,
Speaker 1: when you get right down to it. That's why the
Speaker 1: e p A was formed, right, and that's why we
Speaker 1: have a lot of the regulated or mandated materials or
Speaker 1: materials with the electronics. I yes, uh, they're requiring cars
Speaker 1: that are driving the prices up. We can we talk
Speaker 1: about that later. Yeah, we absolutely k But that's that's
Speaker 1: really the start of the e p A and the
Speaker 1: National um, you know, traffic, highway, Traffic safey Administration, all
Speaker 1: the all the government bureaus that say you have to
Speaker 1: have this safety device, this uh, this electronic control device
Speaker 1: in your vehicle, a lot to have onboard diagnostics in
Speaker 1: order to uh, to maintain emissions. You know, you have
Speaker 1: to be able to to to measure that and make
Speaker 1: sure that you're within the right the allowed range. Sure
Speaker 1: emissions in the environment are a big part of this
Speaker 1: whole thing. So let's let's talk about that later. But
Speaker 1: but let's move on to adaptive cruise control because that's
Speaker 1: a a natural extension of this nine modern cruise control
Speaker 1: that we saw in the the idea of setting your speed.
Speaker 1: So let's say that, Uh, let's say I'm driving down
Speaker 1: a highway in Atlanta, So I'm going the average speed,
Speaker 1: which is somewhere around now eighty seven miles per hour.
Speaker 1: That's what it feels like. Okay, that's fair. Uh yeah, no,
Speaker 1: Atlanta is pretty crazy. So you've got your your speeds
Speaker 1: that you set your cruise control. Now, with regular cruise control,
Speaker 1: that just means that's going to maintain that speed until
Speaker 1: you depress either the accelerator or the break and then
Speaker 1: it puts it back into manual control and then your
Speaker 1: you can choose whatever speed you want. Adaptive cruise control
Speaker 1: the way it works is it has that that speed
Speaker 1: you've set as the ideal, Right, that's the speed you
Speaker 1: would like to go, assuming that the world allows you
Speaker 1: to do so. But let's say you start to overtake
Speaker 1: the car in front of you. Now, adapt cruise control,
Speaker 1: as I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: means you have a system where it's able to identify
Speaker 1: if there is a vehicle traveling in front of you
Speaker 1: and you're about to overtake it, and it will automatically
Speaker 1: decrease your speed so that you are traveling at the
Speaker 1: same speed as the car in front of you. And
Speaker 1: if that car speeds up and you're still below your
Speaker 1: your set speed for your cruise control. It will then
Speaker 1: start to accelerate until you hit that speed again. Correct
Speaker 1: you You dial in a distance that you're comfortable with,
Speaker 1: and that's how it works. I mean, it keeps a distance.
Speaker 1: There's never ah, there's never something that encroaches on that
Speaker 1: distance more than than what you've already said. If it does,
Speaker 1: that's when it begins to break, and it breaks accordingly.
Speaker 1: You know, with the vehicle in front of you, you
Speaker 1: can't do anything about the person behind you. So that's
Speaker 1: something that we'll find. You know, there's really not a
Speaker 1: whole lot you can do about that. That's the kind
Speaker 1: of wild card here. However, you know you can't. You
Speaker 1: can or your vehicle can adjust for that vehicle in
Speaker 1: front of you, just based on this. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a radar system uses the lasers in some cases. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it's a camera system. I think Subaru uses a camera system,
Speaker 1: so it's actually relying on optical data. That's interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's what's going on there. And I think there's
Speaker 1: probably other manufacturers that use camera systems as well. The
Speaker 1: super is just a good example. But it's a it's
Speaker 1: a fascinating thing and um, maybe i'll stump you with
Speaker 1: this one. I don't know, thank you. When do you
Speaker 1: think the first adaptive cruise control system was was in
Speaker 1: place or or demonstrated? Wow? Uh, these always end up
Speaker 1: being earlier than I had anticipated. I know that UM
Speaker 1: was the first modern cruise control, but adaptive being able
Speaker 1: to yikes, I'm gonna embarrass myself no matter what I said,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say nine. Gosh, darn it, you're perfect, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: not bad so. Twenty years ago, nineteen years ago, uh,
Speaker 1: Mitsubishi was the first one to develop this adaptive cruise
Speaker 1: control for a production vehicle. There was no breaking as
Speaker 1: part of the system. It just used you know, the
Speaker 1: throttle control and down shifting to kind of adjust the
Speaker 1: speed accordingly as you mentioned. But again it was a
Speaker 1: very primitive version, not like what we see today. And
Speaker 1: you know the the super cruise system and you know
Speaker 1: Audi and all the other manufacturers that are creating really
Speaker 1: really advanced systems. Related to this are things like collision
Speaker 1: detection and collision prevention systems where you have to have
Speaker 1: the same sort of technology to sense that there is
Speaker 1: a potential oncoming collision. Now, the implementation for that or
Speaker 1: the the reaction of that maybe something as simple as
Speaker 1: an alert in the car so that you as the
Speaker 1: driver have to react and thus make sure you prevent
Speaker 1: a collision, or and maybe something as as sophisticated as
Speaker 1: a breaking system that initiates automatically to help you avoid
Speaker 1: a collision. Because as we enter, as we all know,
Speaker 1: human reaction time is uh is not immediate, right, and
Speaker 1: electronics can react and a fraction of a second exactly right.
Speaker 1: And we see this in a lot of different manufacturing
Speaker 1: systems right now. In fact, a lot of commercials on
Speaker 1: television right now show you exactly that happening. And of course,
Speaker 1: the Mercedes system that we talked about, you know, the
Speaker 1: whether you have to have the hands on the wheel,
Speaker 1: that system uses something like this. You can slow the vehicle.
Speaker 1: I believe the super cruise system will completely stop the
Speaker 1: vehicle if necessary, which is that's pretty unusual. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not that's not the case in every situation. So
Speaker 1: all of this relies on just where you kind of
Speaker 1: get this out there. All of this relies on electronic
Speaker 1: systems working together in the car, which wasn't possible before
Speaker 1: when it was just a mechanical system. So you know,
Speaker 1: you have to have electronic throttle control. You have to
Speaker 1: have electronic brakes. You have to have UM, you know
Speaker 1: for the lane departure warning systems and stuff. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: not for that one, but UM for UM electronic stability control.
Speaker 1: You have to have an electronic systems that can control
Speaker 1: each other, can talk to each other and decide what's
Speaker 1: necessary at that exact moment, and do it without driver input. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's none of us want to have big robotic arms
Speaker 1: coming out of the dashboard and holding the steering wheel
Speaker 1: or or robotic feet that pressed the pedals down. That
Speaker 1: that is not really an ideal implementation of the robot car. Okay,
Speaker 1: you're you're making fun of that. I understand. I know
Speaker 1: what you're saying that you know that sound. It's funny
Speaker 1: that that it would happen that way. But I've got
Speaker 1: this article here, and I okay, this is the one
Speaker 1: that I kind of wanted to to share, and I
Speaker 1: think it's a good time. This is less than twenty
Speaker 1: years ago for this article. And when we were first
Speaker 1: talking about this this idea for this show, I mentioned
Speaker 1: that I had been to UM the Automated Durability Test
Speaker 1: track in Chelsea, Michigan, for Chrysler, and this was a system.
Speaker 1: It's a very primitive looking back system, but it was
Speaker 1: so advanced at the time. I just can't tell you
Speaker 1: how cool this thing was. But they actually used robots
Speaker 1: that they would load into the driver's seat to drive
Speaker 1: these vehicles on this automated durability system test track. So
Speaker 1: what they would do is they would test vehicles on
Speaker 1: this track in kind of an advanced way, and that
Speaker 1: they would um an accelerated way. It's made a better
Speaker 1: way to say it, because x number of miles on
Speaker 1: this track equaled x number of miles in the real world,
Speaker 1: So the conditions on the track were so extreme as
Speaker 1: to be equal to a number of regular miles in
Speaker 1: the real world. Yeah, so they would test like the
Speaker 1: new Jeep Grand Cherokee there, and they would really really
Speaker 1: punish it more so than than they could on a
Speaker 1: track with a real driver, because the real driver just
Speaker 1: simply couldn't take sitting in the seat for one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand miles. But they could put a thousand miles on
Speaker 1: this track. And I'm just gonna give these numbers for
Speaker 1: an example. They could do it a thousand miles on
Speaker 1: this track and then equaled a hundred thousand miles in
Speaker 1: the real world or what a driver could take a
Speaker 1: human driver. So they would load these robots in and
Speaker 1: it had you know, I think the whole track was
Speaker 1: only like one point three miles around, and it was
Speaker 1: like a ten million dollar four year thing to build.
Speaker 1: And it had wiring in the in the ground, you know,
Speaker 1: like there were pucks that were buried in the pavement,
Speaker 1: and uh there was a controller that was in kind
Speaker 1: of like a almost like an aircraft controller tower, and
Speaker 1: he would watch everything that's going on in a very
Speaker 1: um you know, an old style looking system, you know,
Speaker 1: to to monitor everything that's happening. And they could bring
Speaker 1: vehicles in for service or just let them run all
Speaker 1: day whenever they had to you know, had to have happened.
Speaker 1: But it cost so much money to do this and
Speaker 1: the infrastructure that was required just for that at one
Speaker 1: point three miles in nine that's amazing because it's still
Speaker 1: that was only nineteen years ago. It wasn't that long
Speaker 1: ago when you look back. It's just incredible. But the
Speaker 1: other one thing that I need to point out here
Speaker 1: is in reading this article, in addition to just that
Speaker 1: that strange you know, situation. I guess I read about
Speaker 1: a test that happened in seven with with Buick. Now,
Speaker 1: GM has been um on the autonomous vehicle thing for
Speaker 1: a long long time since, as we heard, right alright,
Speaker 1: so to automated buses, an automated police car, and ten
Speaker 1: seven buhicles sabers were cruising driverless up and down a
Speaker 1: seven point six mile two lane stretch of I fifteen
Speaker 1: in San Diego. And I had no idea until I
Speaker 1: read this article. Right, the test, I mean, they had
Speaker 1: to bury high strength magnets in the pavement every three
Speaker 1: to ten feet in order to make this work. In
Speaker 1: addition to a you know again you said, a truckload
Speaker 1: of equipment in the vehicles, right, These were you know,
Speaker 1: no small no small feet, I guess for them to
Speaker 1: to load this stuff into the vehicle. Each car carried
Speaker 1: about one hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment in in
Speaker 1: order to make this work. And it was just a short,
Speaker 1: one time thing. But it's another one of those things
Speaker 1: like we're thinking about ten years. You know, this may
Speaker 1: be the way we do things when you look at
Speaker 1: at what is required to lay out that infrastructure. I mean,
Speaker 1: let alone like let's say that we've already developed the
Speaker 1: technology that would allow us to have the smart highway approach.
Speaker 1: When you look at just installing that it's such an
Speaker 1: enormous this is this goes back to something that we
Speaker 1: covered on tech stuff before, and Scott, you and I
Speaker 1: have talked about it just in the in the office,
Speaker 1: that solar highway idea. That the idea sounds kind of interesting,
Speaker 1: but then when you start to really think about the implementation,
Speaker 1: you realize it's such a monumental, gargantuan task that would
Speaker 1: cost billions of dollars that it's not nest It doesn't
Speaker 1: seem realistic. The same sort of thing with these smart highways.
Speaker 1: The idea is amazing, but when you look at the
Speaker 1: choosing the alternative of putting all the systems in the
Speaker 1: car as opposed to in the road, it just seems
Speaker 1: to make more sense. Yeah, it sure does. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: these these systems have advanced so much now that that's
Speaker 1: why we're seeing this rapid increases the sharp curve to
Speaker 1: to think people thinking that maybe this is possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean before, I mean, look at how cumbersome this
Speaker 1: whole thing was just fifteen years ago, twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: It was. It was almost the same as it was
Speaker 1: in Yeah, and we're seeing since you know the Google
Speaker 1: car and in two thousand nine that you know, this
Speaker 1: is maybe something that's really possible. I mean that that
Speaker 1: this is a self sufficient system. This is the one
Speaker 1: that you know is self contained. Maybe that's a better
Speaker 1: way to say it. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean that
Speaker 1: we won't see cars in the future communicate with each other.
Speaker 1: But in the past, we used to think that that
Speaker 1: was the only way that this system would work. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: let's say, uh, you're looking at the the Highway of tomorrow,
Speaker 1: and all the cars are are constantly in communication with
Speaker 1: each other to maintain the correct distance from one another
Speaker 1: to funnel traffic appropriately so that you don't have these
Speaker 1: traffic snarls, or at least they don't last as long.
Speaker 1: That you could even have cars more cars on the
Speaker 1: highway because you could pack them in closer together. Because
Speaker 1: now that they're all talking to each other and they're
Speaker 1: all uh, electronically controlled, they can react in a real
Speaker 1: time where they don't need the you don't need to
Speaker 1: build in the human reaction time to have a safe
Speaker 1: driving experience. You just have to have the robotic reaction
Speaker 1: time which is much shorter. That's like the the crazy
Speaker 1: idea of the future. As it turns out, we might
Speaker 1: be able to do that without having the cars talk
Speaker 1: to each other or the roads at all. If the
Speaker 1: if each car's system is sophisticated enough, it can all
Speaker 1: be autonomous and self contained. Um. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: I expect we'll have a combination of the two because
Speaker 1: I think we'll eventually get to really complex systems where
Speaker 1: things like traffic lights will respond in dynamic changing conditions.
Speaker 1: So let's say that the traffic system itself is able
Speaker 1: to sense where congestion is and react in real time,
Speaker 1: not not on a intersection by intersection basis, but on
Speaker 1: a system wide basis. Uh. You know, the dream of
Speaker 1: the future is that you get in your car, it
Speaker 1: drives you to work and you don't hit a single
Speaker 1: red light the entire time. That's a big dream. You
Speaker 1: know what Autie is making network right now and really
Speaker 1: part of what's going on with this Audi Connect system
Speaker 1: that they've got and it's probably one of the vehicles
Speaker 1: that you saw at CES. Yeah, there's two things that
Speaker 1: I want to mention here. Now. You talked about the
Speaker 1: traffic lights. We'll talk about that first. I guess one
Speaker 1: of the things that we talked about in a Car
Speaker 1: Stuff episode about um. I think it was just kind
Speaker 1: of my car detect the lights gonna when the light's
Speaker 1: gonna turn green, something like that, right, I can't remember
Speaker 1: the episode name now, but the Audi vehicle will will
Speaker 1: sense it kind of it ties itself into the central
Speaker 1: computer that breaks the the the lights for the entire city.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you knew that or not. There
Speaker 1: is one system that operates the lights in in most
Speaker 1: big cities, and sometimes you know, in the case of
Speaker 1: New York, where there's thousands and thousands of lights, it's
Speaker 1: broken up into different groups or different divisions by one.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's it's controlled individually at that intersection and then
Speaker 1: actually causes problems. Now, if they're controlled by one central system,
Speaker 1: it allows traffic to flow much easier and much better.
Speaker 1: But Audi has found a way to tap into that
Speaker 1: system legally, they've allowed them to do that, you know,
Speaker 1: as part of the testing. But your car will either
Speaker 1: speed up or slow down to allow you to make
Speaker 1: that next light. Now, it won't go to extremes, it
Speaker 1: won't slow you down to five miles per hour in
Speaker 1: his own where it's thirty five and it won't accelerate
Speaker 1: to some crazy speed and and then thus break all
Speaker 1: laws precisely. But it will tell you if you're going
Speaker 1: to make that next light or not, and what you
Speaker 1: should do, you know, slightly let off the gas and
Speaker 1: you're gonna make it to that next light, through through
Speaker 1: the next light, um or you may not have a chance.
Speaker 1: Just don't worry about it. You're gonna sit here for
Speaker 1: a minute. Not a big deal. But they said that
Speaker 1: what's interesting is that you think something like that you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to have, you know, everybody's gonna have to
Speaker 1: be on board with us to make it work right. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: if you if you only have one or two drivers
Speaker 1: on this, it doesn't make any difference. Everybody else is
Speaker 1: still going to make the system so congested that even
Speaker 1: for those two drivers, it's not really gonna work exactly right. Well,
Speaker 1: the surprising thing was that they said that the numbers
Speaker 1: of of cars that have to have this system in
Speaker 1: place in order to make it work is very, very low.
Speaker 1: And I thought it was somewhere around I want to say,
Speaker 1: it's something like that. It's it's in that neighborhood of
Speaker 1: ten percent, so you know, that's not such a difficult
Speaker 1: target to meet, really, I mean around here, I mean
Speaker 1: there's a lot of Audie drivers, a lot of people
Speaker 1: driving new Audies. Yeah, I could see this working in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: I know, other parts of the world where you know,
Speaker 1: that's maybe not the popular brand or whatever. But if
Speaker 1: the system works its way into other vehicles, other manufacturers,
Speaker 1: and they were able to tie into the system as well,
Speaker 1: that might be something that really really helps traffic. And Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the other thing that I wanted to talk about,
Speaker 1: because Audi's big into this, really big into this. They
Speaker 1: had at CS they had a demonstration of a self
Speaker 1: parking car. Yes, self parking is one of those things
Speaker 1: I definitely wanted to talk about because this is something
Speaker 1: that we're starting to see in various vehicles, things that
Speaker 1: like parallel parking assist, but now we're getting to the
Speaker 1: point where the car itself can totally take over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is interesting because imagine this. You go to the
Speaker 1: mall and it's Christmas time, and you know how it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's already stressing out. You had a search
Speaker 1: for a parking right up and down the roads. You're
Speaker 1: following people to their parkings by little creepy right alright
Speaker 1: before shaking their heads because all they want to do
Speaker 1: is put some bags in the truck and they're gonna
Speaker 1: go right back. And said, is it worth it to
Speaker 1: pay the seventy five dollars to valet park my car
Speaker 1: mall or whatever it is, because it seems like seventy alright,
Speaker 1: So you drive up to the curb and you and
Speaker 1: you get out and you just let the car go
Speaker 1: and park itself in the parking lot. That's incredible. And
Speaker 1: it goes in and parks, it's shuts itself off, waits
Speaker 1: for you to come back and call it, and you know,
Speaker 1: you call it because otherwise the journey of trying to
Speaker 1: fig out where your car parked would be very adventurous,
Speaker 1: being pretty difficult. So the car comes back to you
Speaker 1: and picks you up on the curb side, and you
Speaker 1: leave and it's that simple. Now. I was wondering, okay,
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this. What if there's no parking spots,
Speaker 1: does it just circle the entire time that you're gone.
Speaker 1: That would be a drag. But the other thing is
Speaker 1: that there does have to be some infrastructure in place
Speaker 1: for this to work. This this system right now, the
Speaker 1: way it works, Uh, the parking lot has to be
Speaker 1: wired for something like this to work right now. I
Speaker 1: think in the future they're saying, as you know, as always,
Speaker 1: in ten years, we may see this, yeah, where we
Speaker 1: might even see it where the car is able to
Speaker 1: do it all without the infrastructure being necessary. But it's
Speaker 1: not a surprise to me to see this kind of
Speaker 1: this kind of progression where you have the the you know,
Speaker 1: you've you've kind of rigged the game, right, You've rigged
Speaker 1: the game by defining what the playing board is, and
Speaker 1: then your piece can move along the playing board in
Speaker 1: a very predictable way because you've defined the playing board.
Speaker 1: Eventually the pieces get sophisticated enough that you could play
Speaker 1: on any surface and you're fine. Same sort of thing
Speaker 1: is that the idea of the early autonomous cars really
Speaker 1: heavily dependent upon a system that they could uh communicate
Speaker 1: with in order for them to operate. But now we're
Speaker 1: getting to a point where they can do so all
Speaker 1: on their own. I think the same thing is going
Speaker 1: to be true for the self parking systems in the future.
Speaker 1: We'll think about this alright, so Audi offers this system
Speaker 1: as an option. Right, let's just say that they do
Speaker 1: in ten years from now, and it's it's thousand dollars
Speaker 1: or to add this system to your vehicle. Are you
Speaker 1: going to add that option? You're gonna check that little
Speaker 1: box because there's that one parking lot in Cleveland where
Speaker 1: it's gonna work. Yeah, you might want to wait until
Speaker 1: that technology is completely self contained. All right, that's a
Speaker 1: that's a little bit you know, extreme, I guess. But
Speaker 1: but Audi is so on board with this. I mean,
Speaker 1: there really are running gangbusters towards this autonomous vehicle. I mean,
Speaker 1: in two thousand ten they ran a car up Pike's Peak.
Speaker 1: I don't know if a lot of techno tech stuff
Speaker 1: listeners are going to know that or not car stuff
Speaker 1: listeners do. We've talked about it. But in two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: Audi ran an autonomous t t s up Pike's Peak
Speaker 1: the International Hill Climb competition course. I think it's something
Speaker 1: like a hundred and forty four turns twelve and a
Speaker 1: half miles. It's you know, fourteen thousand feet in the air.
Speaker 1: It did it in like twenty seven minutes, which is
Speaker 1: not a great time to granted, you know, the fastest
Speaker 1: drivers do it in ten minutes, but it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: They didn't have anybody behind the wheel. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a thousand foot cliff on one side and the other
Speaker 1: side is you know, Rocky Death the other way as well. Um,
Speaker 1: that's a little extreme. Anyway, they chose the TTS because
Speaker 1: it has the pieces in place and and it makes
Speaker 1: perfect sense. It has the you know, the the drive
Speaker 1: by wire throttle, it has adaptive cruise control, It has
Speaker 1: SMI semi automatic gearbox, which is another one we really
Speaker 1: talked about, and lots of other electronic gadgetry like GPS.
Speaker 1: To contract this vehicle within two centimeters, that's incredible two centimeters.
Speaker 1: I remember when GPS was such that the military required
Speaker 1: all consumer level GPS receivers to only be accurate to
Speaker 1: maybe fifty feet. Uh. And then eventually during the Clinton
Speaker 1: administration that got lifted so that we could have more
Speaker 1: accurate GPS receivers. But it was the domain of the
Speaker 1: military until and then I think it went down to
Speaker 1: like ten ft and then went down to three feet. Right.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is now, but I mean
Speaker 1: to track a vehicle and now you get like a
Speaker 1: note on your on your watch saying, take a step
Speaker 1: to your left because you know you're about to step
Speaker 1: in a crack or something. Yeah, this is amazing stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's so much more we could talk about.
Speaker 1: I mean we haven't really even talked about like lane correction,
Speaker 1: where it takes over the steering for you and helps
Speaker 1: adjust you back into the the middle of the lane.
Speaker 1: You could even have You can even have cars that
Speaker 1: keep you in the center of the lane and so
Speaker 1: you feel a little tugging at your steering wheel when
Speaker 1: you start to drift. Out of that sentence, Mercedes, does it? Now,
Speaker 1: get this Mercedes, Mercedes vehicle. I just read this. If
Speaker 1: another vehicle enters your lanes, they're they're drifting, your car
Speaker 1: reacts to it, So your car starts to move all
Speaker 1: the way. Your car will react appropriately to get out
Speaker 1: of the way of the other vehicle that gets in
Speaker 1: your land. So it's not just monitoring what it's doing.
Speaker 1: It's monitoring what other cars are doing and taking invasive action.
Speaker 1: When when we say react appropriately, does it also call
Speaker 1: the driver bad names? That's that's not appropriate. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: all right, well you know I just I only repeat
Speaker 1: what I see in traffic. I'm a non driver flips
Speaker 1: the electronic bird. That's right, So you know, just again,
Speaker 1: There's so much more we could talk about, but in
Speaker 1: order to wrap this episode up, I have to ask you,
Speaker 1: Scott an important question. My important question is why is
Speaker 1: your personal feeling about autonomous cars? You're the car guy,
Speaker 1: all right, So this has changed. My opinion has changed
Speaker 1: over the last couple of years because when I first
Speaker 1: started here, we were still in you know, talking about
Speaker 1: the you know, the infrastructure systems that everybody had to
Speaker 1: be on board or else it wasn't gonna happen. And
Speaker 1: you know, that was completely different from the way it
Speaker 1: is now. The stuff that I'm seeing coming out now,
Speaker 1: I'm starting to buy into it a little bit. Don't
Speaker 1: tell Bent, No, I won't now maybe I should. I'll
Speaker 1: probably talk with him about this soon, but but this
Speaker 1: is really the first I've dug into it in a while.
Speaker 1: And honestly, some of the systems that I'm that I'm
Speaker 1: learning about and the way that they operate, I think
Speaker 1: that's okay. I like this, the semi control type stuff.
Speaker 1: I don't think I'll ever want to completely hand over
Speaker 1: control like you know, the the Google car that you're
Speaker 1: mentioning with no steering wheel and no break etcetera. I
Speaker 1: don't like that idea one bit. What I do feel
Speaker 1: that I'm okay with is that, in certain situations and
Speaker 1: certain conditions, if you give over I guess um partial
Speaker 1: control to systems, I'm fine with that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: understand that, you know, for safety reasons, that's fine. It
Speaker 1: can think faster than I can think, or react faster
Speaker 1: than I can. But I'm still I'm still one in
Speaker 1: the in the realm of I'd like to maintain control
Speaker 1: the car myself. Well. And you enjoy driving too, right,
Speaker 1: I mean to you, driving is a pleasure activity. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously not like stop and go try pick in Atlanta
Speaker 1: and highways, but driving is a pleasure activity and I
Speaker 1: think for a lot of people that's true. And it
Speaker 1: also represents a sense of independence and freedom, the fact
Speaker 1: that you can get up and go to a destination
Speaker 1: on on your own, and it very much feeds into
Speaker 1: sort of the American identity, you know. And there are
Speaker 1: some places in the world where this is not as
Speaker 1: big a deal, but for us it's huge as it
Speaker 1: really ties into our national identity. Huge expression of freedom.
Speaker 1: And and the thing is, you know, I need to
Speaker 1: clarify this. I'm talking about like my daily driver. Now,
Speaker 1: if I were to have a car that was like
Speaker 1: a weekend car project car, Um, you want that full manual,
Speaker 1: I would want. I would want that just no electronics
Speaker 1: in that thing at all, if possible. I mean, just
Speaker 1: to be a raw experience. And I like that a lot,
Speaker 1: I really do. And so I think that you know
Speaker 1: that I've got two different ways to look at it.
Speaker 1: But for the daily driver, yeah, sure, if I'm going
Speaker 1: to help me in traffic and stop and go every
Speaker 1: day because I sit in it for an hour and
Speaker 1: a half every day each way to get to this office. Um, well,
Speaker 1: good news, Scott, because you're sitting here with me so
Speaker 1: light to it's not gonna be any traffic when you're
Speaker 1: heading home tonight. So what about you, I mean, we
Speaker 1: haven't really talked about your thoughts in this. You're not
Speaker 1: I'm not a driver, So I am one percent on
Speaker 1: board with the autonomous car experience. All right, I understand
Speaker 1: that I get that. But let's just say that you know,
Speaker 1: you've got some confidence in the person that's driving you, right,
Speaker 1: So you have people that you know drive you here
Speaker 1: and there wherever you need to get Your wife drives right, Yes,
Speaker 1: she does, had no secret there. Now, would you be
Speaker 1: comfortable with her handing over control to the computers to
Speaker 1: let them drive you wherever you're going? I would be
Speaker 1: my wife. Let me say this first, My wife is
Speaker 1: an excellent driver. I make a lot of I make
Speaker 1: a lot of jokes at my wife's expense, which she
Speaker 1: humor is good naturedly. But I have to say she
Speaker 1: she was late getting into driving as well. She was
Speaker 1: not one of those people who at age sixteen got
Speaker 1: her driver's license. She she was a latecomer to driving.
Speaker 1: But she is an excellent driver, however, I think she does.
Speaker 1: She's also she doesn't enjoy driving. She does it, and
Speaker 1: she's very good at it, but it's not an experience
Speaker 1: that she looks forward to. So I think she would
Speaker 1: enjoy being able to hand over control too. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people feel that way. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I really do. There there are plenty of people who
Speaker 1: absolutely love it, and there are plenty of people who
Speaker 1: are like, this is a utilitarian task that I do it.
Speaker 1: It gets me to where I need to be, and
Speaker 1: that's all it is. It also, I think heavily depends
Speaker 1: upon the house you grew up in the way, the
Speaker 1: way the people around you looked at driving. Because my
Speaker 1: parents both don't really care about driving either. It is
Speaker 1: the way they get from point A to point B,
Speaker 1: and so I think I inherited a lot of that
Speaker 1: from them. Um. I also just I also know a
Speaker 1: lot about how uh the humans have the limitations? Right,
Speaker 1: We we do have limitations in our reaction time and
Speaker 1: our ability to make decisions and critical moments. And even
Speaker 1: when you make that decision, then there's the delay between
Speaker 1: making the decision and acting upon it. And it seems
Speaker 1: difficult to believe that machines can do this better than
Speaker 1: we can. But you see it all the time. I
Speaker 1: mean the the fact that that machines are communicating electronically.
Speaker 1: That means you're they're using electricity which moves at the
Speaker 1: speed of light. You are not getting faster than that.
Speaker 1: Um And once you once you figure that out and
Speaker 1: you get to the point where the system itself is
Speaker 1: it's proven to be reliable, which is obviously key. If
Speaker 1: you have a poorly designed system, this could be a disaster, right,
Speaker 1: A poorly designed autonomous car could cost lives. But assuming
Speaker 1: that it has been quality tested to you know, to
Speaker 1: the ends of the earth and back to prove that
Speaker 1: it in fact is able to do what it promises
Speaker 1: to do, then I welcome it with open arms. And
Speaker 1: even so, GM legal may still tell you that you
Speaker 1: have to have your hands on the wheel, which means
Speaker 1: I'm out right, I still have to go get a
Speaker 1: driver's license to sit in my driver less car. You
Speaker 1: know what may be my favorite part of that that
Speaker 1: whole um paragraph that you just stated, Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: called us the humans the humans, Yeah, it almost had me.
Speaker 1: I realized after I said it. I thought, now it
Speaker 1: sounds like I'm talking about a species to which I
Speaker 1: do not belong, but I do. I'm not an alien
Speaker 1: or a robot. Like, hey, come on, man, I don't
Speaker 1: need to be like calling in my backup squad so
Speaker 1: I can wipe out everyone's memory. Plus I can always
Speaker 1: at this podcast and cut that part out if I
Speaker 1: really wanted to a panel in the back of your head. Look,
Speaker 1: we don't talk about my it's It's just a tattoo,
Speaker 1: that's all. It is. A tattoo. Very clever, Scott, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much. For being on this show. This was
Speaker 1: a lot of fun to have this conversation. It was
Speaker 1: a lot of fun. And I'll tell you I've got
Speaker 1: I'm staring at five pages of notes that we didn't
Speaker 1: even get. You threw away about about six pages of
Speaker 1: notes after you got finished with UM. Yeah, so we've
Speaker 1: got enough here where we could do another episode if
Speaker 1: we wanted. Let me tell you, I really appreciate the
Speaker 1: opportunity to to be here. So thanks for asking me. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: And of course you can listen to Scott and Ben
Speaker 1: on Car Stuff, an amazing podcast. Uh and uh and Scott,
Speaker 1: I hope you are able to do an episode about
Speaker 1: autonomous cars and drop the bomb on Ben early in
Speaker 1: the episode, because I want to see him react when
Speaker 1: you say I'm on board with some of these technologies. Yes,
Speaker 1: some of them. Let's say, let's keep it in mind
Speaker 1: that it's some now. Yeah, yeah, I'm not completely swayed yet.
Speaker 1: It's the assist that you're looking at, not the I'm
Speaker 1: going to completely take over this this experience as I
Speaker 1: get older, I'm okay with a little bit of assistance,
Speaker 1: that's all. Yeah, No, I I could use all the
Speaker 1: assistance I can get driving and everything else. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know I welcome them. And Hey, if you guys
Speaker 1: have jokes for me, or you have suggestions for future
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, maybe there's another house Stuff or
Speaker 1: its host that you would absolutely love to have back
Speaker 1: on the show, or someone who's never been on before.
Speaker 1: Let me know. You guys may be begging for Scott
Speaker 1: to come back. Please let me know. I'll be happy
Speaker 1: to pass those messages along as well. You can did
Speaker 1: in touch with me with the email address tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com or drop me a
Speaker 1: line on Twitter, Facebook or Tumbler with the handled tech
Speaker 1: Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really
Speaker 1: soon for more on this and bausands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Does it have stuff works dot com