YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Urmson

lines on the record: 131
first: 2017-09-04
most recent: 2017-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In Europe they're much more strict at delineating what is you're allowed to do and what you're not. And so I think the law in Europe historically has been relatively protectionist. So as the European auto manufacturers get to the point where technology is ready, then the law obviously moves along with it.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So to speak. No horses. So internationally, it's interesting. So, in Europe, they're generally more conservative, and the law there, in the U.S., the law is generally permissive. If we don't say you can't do it, then do it. And if somebody gets offended, they're going to sue you.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So California, through Senator Petilla's leadership, ended up putting regulation out. Nevada actually had regulation out before them. Florida had some guidelines out early. They were very well intentioned, but what we're seeing is in some cases, a little bit of the regulation was there before we were really ready for it. And for the most part, it's not been an issue, but you look at some of it now and you say, oh, hmm.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The user, anything that's operational of the vehicle, which roads you can run it down, which speed limits you can drive at, who's appropriate to drive, that's all kind of state level.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the interest of my sanity and other people's work in this space, we wanted the federal, so there's kind of one regulation nationally.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're working hard to be. And maybe this is too nuance, but the way regulation works is at the federal level they regulate the safety of the car. And at the state level, they regulate the safe operation of the car. So the driver. And so what's fascinating about self-driving cars is you're now making a virtual driver. And so there's a little bit of a state federal power grab for who gets to make the rules around that.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The federal government set guidance last year that was basically as attractive as they could make it, I think, reasonably be expected to make it. A number of states are trying to jump in to support and kind of encourage the technology coming to their state. The challenge with that is that We don't really need them to do a whole lot. And the worst thing would be for there to be 50 different set of rules because then you're in your self-driving car and you get to the border and now it's not homologate in the new state.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is actually what makes this space so exciting, right, is the technology is really interesting and cool. The business cases are pretty exciting. And then this incredible opportunity for social good, but you have to communicate that. You have to work with the regulatory bodies, whether it be at the state, city, or federal level. Right now, I think in general, the tone is relatively optimistic.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll talk about that in the next section. And then the regulatory environment's another thing. I mean, everything, and then humanity. Humanity is one of the biggest issues. But talk about the regulatory environment first”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think it's potentially a great feature what they're developing. And Elon has a very complicated space that he's fighting in, and he needs to have feature parity with the luxury cars. And so some of what he's doing makes a ton of sense. But it's hard for me to believe that with just cameras, they're going to, anytime in the near future, get to the level of reliability you really need to launch a car where you can kind of go to sleep in it and let it take you where you want to go.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the biggest challenge with Tesla is that the approach they're taking is not maybe connected with reality on what it takes to actually make the car drive itself. And so... Meaning, I think they're underestimating the complexity of actually getting to a fully self driving car.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's kind of my thesis. So let's move then to the tech companies that are working on it, Apple, which seems to have pulled out somewhat. Google, Tesla, Uber, all of them. What's their problem? What challenges do they face?”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they're trying You see almost all of them at this point running different sets of experiments, whether it be Ford with ride-sharing bicycles around town and chariot or General Motors with lift investment and purchasing crews or VW with the experiments they're running as well. And so they're trying to make the leap and they're trying to be innovative. And I hope some of them succeed. I just think it's going to be difficult for them given how they've operated historically.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and often the metaphor they use is they don't want to beat the handset provider actually. And part of that is because what they do is complicated and valuable, and so they don't want that to be devalued.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're in the ride sharing business and you operate it effectively, you might be operating that car 16, 18 hours a day.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the part of it is the opportunity to capture the usage of the car in a way that they can't do with as a car company. So when you buy a car, you probably use it. I don't know if you own a car or not. Yeah, I do. You probably use it an hour, maybe two hours a day at most.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, not just nobody wants to drive, but there's an immense amount of value, at least on paper being created. Right. And if you look at, say, the market cap of four General Motors and Fia Chrysler, the US Big Three, and you look at the market cap of Uber, DD, and Lyft, they're They're basically the same. Well, I don't know about all of them together, it was bigger than one or two of the U.S. guys. And I think that the market cap of the ride-sharing companies is probably going to double in the next few years.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but it requires the coordination of a lot of people, and that I think is why it's so difficult. What's interesting is the car makers themselves, though seen as slow, Sort of eating into their current business. I mean, every time they can ship a Ford 150 or whatever, the trucks and things like that, there's that. Like, why would we, who's thinking of it at these car companies”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really know how to make it so that it can submerge in a salt bath and drive on your car for the next 15 years. And so there's a whole collection of tier one automotive suppliers who know how to do that part really well. And it would be silly for me to try and do that or for our team even to do that”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's car makers. It's a broader ecosystem than that. Meaning that transportation as a service, whether it be Uber, Lyft, or DD, that's going to be an important part of how this technology comes to market. The car company, you have to have a car to have a self-driving car. There's folks who actually, so I think I understand a little bit about lasers, a little bit about radar, can probably contribute to the design of those.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that we do have people who understand not nearly with the depth that the folks in the automotive space have, but respect how complicated what they do is. And at the same time, we actually pretty deeply understand the complexity of developing the self-driving car systems and how to do that and how to motivate the team and how to build the team that needs to do that. And so that's the goal for Aurora to get self-driving cars on the road as quickly as possible and do that safely and thoughtfully and do it through partnership with the folks that can help us.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, my view is that the key is to get, find a way to have a trusting and respectful relationship on both sides, where because of all of those great processes they have in place to allow them to ship cars, they're not particularly good at kind of innovative software development, right? And those processes are great for the engineering cycles they need, but they're not really compatible with kind of the top flight Silicon Valley software engineers. Right. And so, this is where we thought that Aurora could maybe fit”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comparatively, certainly in the US, right? You're going to do pretty well. And so there's so much constraints on their ecosystem that they've developed management processes and they've developed business processes that allow them to execute within those constraints. It takes $2 billion to kind of make a new car. You can imagine to launch any web apps that you had to spend $2 billion. The processes we put in place and the way we'd invest in them would be very different.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're going to disrupt them, right? And then it's very easy for the car companies to say, oh my goodness, look at those Silicon Valley guys. So seat of their pants, right? How could they actually ever do anything big and complicated? And obviously both of those statements are completely false. What you have when you look at the car companies, you have to realize they've been at this for 100 years. They work in this incredibly regulated industry, and they kind of make a miracle happen every two minutes, right? They basically put a car on the road that's going to work for the next 15 years. It's got explosions going off inside it, right? And it just works. And you're safe. If you get in a car crash, more likely than not”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think it's really important to understand the context, right? And I think the biggest thing that's lacking, honestly on both sides is mutual respect. Because I think it's very easy for Silicon Valley to look at the car companies to say, oh my goodness, they're so disrupt”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But no, I think they were very good at the self-driving technology. And there's people who are very good at making cars. And it seems clear that the right path is to marry those up or marry a few of them together. From what I can tell from the outside of this point, it seems like they're making progress with that. Seems like Fiet Chrysler and them are working well together. I read something in the press about Honda potentially or not, it's hard to say.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think that's necessarily the right path for Google to make a car. I think Google is very good at the technology side of this, as they did in Fall.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that was part of, you know, like I certainly people were very, it was very flattering that when I left there was a lot of interest in talking to me about it. But I was not convinced this was the next thing that I should be doing. It was an amazing ride to Google and it was time to like, okay, let's see what else is out there.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They weren't, in fact, and I talked to an armor car companies. I talked to, you know, I was just genuinely, hey, I've spent the last decade plus working or two.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just didn't know what I wanted to do. I talked to a couple of companies. Actually, this is hard to say. I was talking to a couple of different companies that were working on flying cars.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at the end of the day, I wasn't having as much fun, right? And we had a tremendous team, and it's an amazing company. And I owed it to the team and I owed it to the company that I was at my best. And it just didn't seem like that was where I was. And they had tremendous leaders there, Dmitry Dolgov is a very close friend of mine. And he's just fantastic. And he's stepped up and leading the technology development with John coming in. They have an experienced automotive person there. So it seemed like a good time to step aside. And honestly, when I left, I didn't know what I was going to do. It wasn't like I'm out of here. I'm going to go make a self-driving car company.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think on the one hand, you'd like to be able to be the one company doing this and pushing it forward. And on the other, it's awesome because, what is it, a rising sea? Floats all boats. And so if you think about the social values of the increased safety on the road, the better access to mobility for people, it's... We want to see this happen, right? I think it's really important for society. And so as more companies get involved, there's a broader ecosystem. There's more likelihood that one of them succeeds. And so I think that's fantastic, right? That's very desirable.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the company really wants to make a product. I believe that deeply. And there's very little value in working on technology. If you don't get it out there and helping people”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sounds great, Peter. You can find Recode Media on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We're here with Chris Ermson, who was the first CTO of the Google Car effort and now has his own self-driving car startup, Aurora. So you were Google doing these things, trying essentially to proof of concept. Would that be the right way to put it, or really you wanted to make products? You, I know, wanted to make a car on the road, correct?”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how do we, as we start to think about partnerships with car companies, how do we become a better educated partner so that as we work with them and they say something about the flux capacitor, we have some inclination about what a flux capacity is.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, it was expedient. So when we started with the Priuses, we were trying to understand whether this was even interesting or viable. And so you wanted to, we wanted to get on the road as quickly as we could, safely, of course, but quickly. And so that meant using a vehicle. We then move to the Lexus, and it was the same thing. We were augmenting the Lexuses with our sensors and getting them out in the road, but again, it was towards fully self-driving vehicles. When we started the koala car, that was just now starting more about what this looks like as a product. So we've spent a lot of time learning about the technology. We're getting closer to having it ready to deploy. What's the first vehicle we'd like where somebody might see it on the road with nobody behind the wheel?”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Successful, yeah, it kind of, it's very humbling as somebody working in this space how easy some of these tasks are for people to do and how hard they are to actually get. software and technology to solve.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To teach and understand, teach the engineering team too. It wasn't just data gathering. It was like, oh, I'd never really thought about how retroreflective signs are or how difficult it is to understand the behavior of an articulated truck. And then the thousand miles”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The crookedest street in the world. And those goals were. The two goals were slightly different. The 100,000 miles goal was really to kind of get statistical data, right? To say, you know, we're not just kind of driving anything once. It's like this is an interesting data set we can learn something from.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So driving down the Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco effectively and LA or driving all the Bay Bridges and dealing with all of the interchanges. And if you remember when 92 and 680 was all dug up. So we were driving through that at the time. Or driving through the Presidio where you have these windy roads and in fact it's one place where there's a road that's only one lane wide, but traffic goes in both directions on it. We drove Lombard Street.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the goal initially was just to show, prove to ourselves that this could actually become a technology that works. And so we had basically two milestones. One was to drive 100,000 milestone public roads, which was 10 times more than anyone had done before. And then the other was to drive 1,000 miles of really interesting roads.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The military caterpillar, we had sponsorship from General Motors. They had set up a research lab. Volkswagen had a lab out here with Stanford. But it was still in the, you know, hey, this is 20 to 30 years out kind of mindset, not kind of committed, concentrated effort that we saw at Google.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. He had been working on a lot of different things fiber, all kinds of different schemes and stuff like that. They had some barge in San Francisco Bay that they were working on. This is an area of great interest to them for some reason. I'm not sure why particularly, but they were the first. They were the first of the companies that set off the interest in it. Ed Carter U. Mellon, you were doing it mostly theoretically, correct, that the idea that who would, except for Caterpillar, I'm thinking, or the military?”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we started talking about this in 2010, it was kind of a joke. Google Students self driving cars that's effectively why are they wasting money on this? That's never going to work. But they saw this back in 2009. And they said it really came from a place of they have amazing technology. They have an incredible ability to harness engineering talent. And transportation is such an important problem to work on. It had”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the idea at the very beginning was to find out if this could actually be done. And it really did come from the top. I credit Larry and Sergei for having the vision to go and try this before anyone else. They really did.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think both of them have been long interested. And, you know, when I came out, I chatted with Sebastian, chatted with some of the early team members. And then we kind of got the, you know, decide, yeah, let's do this.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was at Stanford at the time. He was at Stanford. And then he had just sold ViewTool to Google, which is what became Street View over time. So he was now mostly at Google and partly at Stanford. And so we were talking about starting something. And at some point, it came out that the right thing to do was actually just do it at Google. And so in the beginning of 2009, I kind of went on leave for my faculty position at Carnegie Mellon and moved my family. We moved out here. My wife was incredibly understanding. We had all our kind of network of friends and relationships in Pittsburgh and things were feeling pretty good. And it was this risk.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thought it would be great to work together. We had a lot of respect for one another. The teams we led had finished one and two.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cool and scary, but yeah, so spend some time on that. And then Sebastian Thrun and I had been talking about doing something together. We had been competing against one another in the challenges.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This So, this wound up in 2007, basically 10 years ago. Yeah, 10 years ago. Almost. But early month, yeah. It was quite early. I spent a couple of years still at the university. I worked with Caterpillar, and there we were moving automating these big kind of house-sized dump trucks, which was imagined 400 tons with nobody in it 40 miles an hour. Right.”
2017-09-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT