Marc Hoag AI Law Pod (formerly Autonomous Cars with Marc Hoag)

So this is a big, hugely polarizing deal: Tesla has just unleashed the beta version of its so-called “full self-driving” or “FSD” for short.

Released only to an extremely small, but unknown number of so-called “early adopter program” (“EAP”) customers, this software update — 2020.40.8.10 — unleashes the full suite of long promised “self driving” features in an admittedly risky package; so risky, in fact, that the release notes warn that “[i]t may do the wrong thing at the worst time.”

And the Internet has lost its collective minds: on one side of the ever-widening rift are the usual Tesla fanatics praising Elon for this extraordinary (non-?)achievement; on the other are naysayers criticizing him for his blatant ambivalence for, and risk with, human safety.

I argue several points:

First, the data needs to speak: if in fact this proves to be safe, then it should be continue.

Second, we need to do anything we can — yes, even take more risks — if it means reducing the number of people killed every day.

Today: Cruise to start driverless testing in California; Caterpillar grows its AV division; Local Motors plans to test its new Ollie 2.0 in Toronto. All this… right now.

Driverless Cruise

I’ve been a big fan of GM’s Cruise (formerly Cruise Automation) pretty much since ever. But I didn’t agree with their announcement in 2019 that they would release to the world a true driverless car — sans steering wheel, mind — onto the chaotic streets of San Francisco by year’s end.

First, I said it was an unlikely goal to achieve, which of course they didn’t. Alternatively, even if they did achieve it… so what? What really matters is not so much the marketing hype of demonstrating to the world that you have an L5-capable vehicle, but rather that consumers are actually using it, like Waymo is doing in Arizona.

Now GM has become the fifth company in California to receive from the California Department of Motor Vehicles a driverless testing permit for their Cruise vehicle on the streets of California. But they still aren’t testing them; at least not yet. More to the point, I still say “so what” in the sense that it would be vastly cooler to get paying customers in their cars on limited roads across San Francisco.

Caterpillar’s Heavy Metal AV

While COVID-19 has obviously caused a bit of a slump in the real estate and construction sector, reflected by a sales dip in heavy metal machinery like Caterpillar’s tractors and earth movers, their AV division is seeing a marked up-tick. Have a listen to find out why.

Ollie 2.0

Local Motors has signed a deal to start testing its Ollie 2.0 autonomous shuttle pods on the streets of Toronto starting in Spring 2021. But with seating for up to 8 passengers, I question their viability during these times of COVID, and suggest that something like driverless car rides like Waymo and (eventually) Cruise are vastly more relevant immediate solution.

You've likely heard of Harry Campbell, otherwise known as "The Rideshare Guy," and chances are, if you are a driver for services like Uber or Lyft, you listen to his podcast religiously; and if you don't, well, do.

So Harry recently emailed me to invite me to an event that he's putting on next week, with the impossibly awesome name Curbivore. It's bringing together thought leaders from the intersection of the food industry and mobility tech, to discuss these unprecedented challenges imposed by COVID-19.

Curbivore is being produced with a colleague of his, Jonah Bliss. Jonah was formerly part of the original team at Turo, so suffice to say, he knows a thing or two about the mobility industry generally. Harry thought Jonah and I should have a chat about what's going on in this particular slice of the mobility space. So I agreed.

What's especially interesting about Curbivore -- and why I agreed to do this admittedly very promotional episode despite that I've received zero compensation for it of any kind; this is not a sponsored episode -- is the lineup of speakers which promises an impressive cross-section of people from the food and tech industries, and crucially, public/municipal organizations as well.

Registration is free so you should probably register: Curbivore.co

Today: We discuss the results of a study by Thatcham Research and Euro NCAP to crown Europe's safest vehicle (spoiler alert: it's not Tesla); when do we ban human driven vehicles; and we consider the path to EVs as a roadmap for AVs. All this... right now.

Europe's safest vehicle

A recent study was just published from Thatcham Research and Euro NCAP that sought to determine the safest vehicle you can buy for public roads. Somewhat surprisingly (or not?), the winner was not a Tesla. In fact, while Tesla scored highest in two categories, it scored abysmally low in one category, and the crown ultimately went to...

When do we ban human drivers?

The first question is whether we need to ban human drivers; and when you consider the appalling loss of human life around the world -- 1.25 million deaths caused by vehicle accidents, 94% of which are cause by human error -- it seems inconceivable not to ban them. But still, the question becomes when, and how do we do so.

EVs as a roadmap for AVs

The recent ban on ICE vehicles by 2035 announced by California's Governor Gavin Newsom may offer a sort of roadmap, suggests American University Professorial Lecturer Selika Josiah Talbott, closely echoing what I've often suggested as well, that EV production and market penetration will serve as an extremely meaningful proxy for AVs.

Suggested reading:

In a surprise move that came seemingly out of nowhere, Waymo has just opened up its Waymo One autonomous vehicle taxi services to the general public in its testing grounds just outside of Phoenix, Arizona; crucially however, these vehicles aren't just autonomous, they're driverless autonomous vehicles; i.e., Level 5 AVs.

Until now, Waymo had been testing its autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans with a human backup driver in a 100 square mile (160 square kilometer) region of the suburbs of Phoenix. Now, however, they've removed the human backup driver and shrunk the geofenced region to 50 square miles (80 square kilometers).

Although the plan is to eventually re-introduce backups drivers and further broaden the coverage area, the current decision to remove the driver -- while surprising -- makes perfectly good sense during this era of the COVID pandemic. As I've often argued numerous times in the past, COVID should encourage, rather than discourage, driverless autonomous vehicles if only to maximize human safety: getting in a car with no driver is going to be safer than getting into a car with a driver.

California recently announced a ban on the sale of new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in 2035. This is an incredible decision but one which has been met with a surprising -- or not -- amount of resistance. I'm going to explain why everybody who disagrees with this is wrong.

The first argument I've heard is people complaining that they should be allowed to buy ICE vehicles. This is not a ban on the sale of all ICE vehicles; only new ones.

The second argument I've heard is that this will unfairly burden low income families. First, everything in the US unfairly burdens low income families thanks to our woefully inept social safety net. Second, low income families tend to buy used cars, not new cars (never mind the fact that most people in general tend to buy used cars), so this won't actually change anything.

Third, and as a follow-up to the previous point, it needs to be pointed out that we're talking about something 15 years in the future; that's about as long as Tesla has been around (17 years), and look what it's accomplished in that time. Come 2035, not only Tesla, but countless other auto-makers will offer EVs in the $20K price range ($30K assuming 3% inflation rates); and countless used EVs will be available by then in the $10K-$20K range, if not cheaper. 

Finally, the simple fact is that this sort of change must happen; it cannot not happen. The mathematically certain risks due to climate mandate that we make such drastic changes, or the harm caused by inaction will be far greater than the secondary harm caused by action.

Have a listen to hear me ramble on in a not dispassionate way about why this ban absolutely needs to happen, and why, if you disagree with me, you're wrong.

On their research to classify cities into 5 archetypes to determine the optimal future mobility solution for each city

Hoag+Co. associate Maximilian Richter and Andreas Herrmann, researchers at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, have joined me to talk about their latest multi-year study. If you remember, an often-discussed topic on this podcast has been a 2018 study by BCG and the World Economic Forum on the impact on traffic in an autonomous vehicle future sans car sharing. Spoiler alert: it doesn't go well.

Now, a new study -- effectively the sequel -- has just been released and Maximilian and Andreas are here to talk about it. What they've done is to classify cities from around the world into five archetypes based on myriad different qualities, in an effort to understand the future mobility technology best suited to that type of city.

Simply put, there's no one shoe fits all solution for the cities of the world: a future mobility solution for Los Angeles will not work in San Francisco; what's optimal for Paris is decidedly suboptimal for, say, Cairo.

If you'd like to see the report Maximilian and Andreas produced with BCG, head over to hoagandco.com/bcg2 and you can download the PDF there to view while listening to our conversation; I highly recommend you do this as we reference graphs and figures several times during the conversation.

Austria's Magna Steyr and its imminent ICE to EV transition, and how it syncs up with an AV future

If you want to attend MOVE America on September 1-3, grab your free passes here: hoagandco.com 

I know I often say this about many guests on my show, but today’s discussion with Anna Kleissner, PhD and Michael Semmer, MS, was absolutely fascinating; easily one of my all-time favorite discussions.

It was engaging; it was at times entertaining; and it was incredibly thought provoking and educational.

To cut to the chase: it turns out that if Austria doesn’t successfully orchestrate a transition of its roughly 314,000-strong automotive sector employees from ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle production to EV production within about 10 years, it stands to suffer a whopping 5.8% reduction in GDP.

In plainer terms, Austria risks losing its entire automotive manufacturing industry if it doesn't fully embrace electric vehicles within 10 years.

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because it bears as striking similarity to what happened in the UK: in the post-war years, manufacturing (of which automotive was a considerable sector) made up some 48% of the country’s economy. By 2013, manufacturing had shrunk to a mere 13%.

Similarly, the fate of once-great American cities Pittsburgh and Detroit offer an extreme look at what can happen if a local economy doesn’t act nimbly to change with the times.

Regardless, the clock is ticking for Austria where the future of one of Europe’s largest automotive manufacturing companies, Magna Steyr, hangs precariously on the edge as it struggles to transition from an ICE to an EV future.

If Austria — or any other country, for that matter — can manage the transformation wisely, not just at a private level, but indeed at a national level, then it will not only sustain the roughly 314,000 jobs than hang in the balance, but also provide new jobs for generations to come.

A year and a half ago — January 2019 — I was invited to CES 2019 by the good folks over at HERE Technologies to moderate three days worth of talks. (Here’s the episode I did and a brief video.) Apart from getting seriously sick for those three days — a weird, hugely unpleasant thing for someone who, knock on wood, never gets sick — it was an otherwise fantastic experience.

During those several days, I had been invited to some surprisingly fun afterparties; and it was on the last night of my three-day stint in Vegas, at just such a party, that I happened to meet some of the LeddarTech team from Montréal.

It’s been far too long for me to remember now, but LinkedIn reminds me that I met with their Product Line Manager, Pier-Olivier Hamel; so you can imagine my pleasant surprise when LeddarTech reached out to me for a conversation with none other than their President & COO, Frantz Saintellemy.

What had most intrigued me about LeddarTech when I’d met with Pier-Oliver back in January 2019 was the decidedly novel approach they seemed to take in their pursuit of automotive lidar: a buffet-like platform which enabled other companies to pick and choose components to build their optimal lidar kit.

And, oh yeah, it was solid state lidar. Only. This was true then, and it’s still true today. And when I say automotive lidar, I don’t just mean, say, the hardware stack; it’s the entire end-to-end solution, hardware and software alike; sensor fusion; image recognition; the works. All of it.

I genuinely don’t know of any other company which is attempting to do this — so obviously, as always, if I’m wrong, please make the appropriate intros — so suffice to say, I was more than thrilled to have the conversation with Frantz today (well, recorded yesterday).

Besides the fact that Frantz is one of the most wonderful people I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with in this space, his robust academic and professional engineering background made for an incredibly fascinating discussion, and I think you’re going to love our chat.

Hope you’re sitting comfortably, one hour with Frantz Saintellemy, the President and COO of LeddarTech, coming at you from Québec, Canada, begins now.

If you have even a passing interest in Teslas — including and especially their recently-released Model Y, which I call “the most important vehicle since Henry Ford’s Model T some 112 years ago — then chances are you know Ryan Shaw and love his deeply informative, highly objective and sincere videos.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfv7-e6_6ZhvDL9-7Yw5OVA

I’ve come to admire Ryan because, like me, he’s undeniably a fan of Tesla and Elon Musk, while at the same time keeping his enthusiasm and support in check: while he has no reservations about gushing his praise for their vehicles and technology generally, he’s quick to enumerate all faults, critiques, and criticisms as appropriate.

Just before the COVID-mandated shut down of Tesla’s Fremont factory went into effect back in March, Ryan and I were in the queue for our respective Model Y orders; it was a patient game of waiting to see who would take delivery first, a game that he won after a clever last minute order configuration change.

Since then, he’s produced numerous videos highlighting his experiences with his Model Y — the good as well as the decidedly not-so-good — so if you haven’t yet discovered Ryan’s YouTube channel with a whopping 30,000 subscribers nearly, then you’d do well to do so.

After a few months of back-and-forth Twitter exchanges with Ryan, it occurred to me to just invite him to my podcast so we could share our thoughts and experiences on the Model Y generally, while also diving into a great conversation on Tesla’s anticipated robot-taxi fleet and all things autonomous vehicles generally.

It’s a wonderful conversation and I think you’ll enjoy it very much. Meanwhile, please be sure to check out Ryan’s YouTube channel, and follow him on Twitter at @RyanShawTech.