YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Farley

lines on the record: 91
first: 2021-08-17
most recent: 2021-08-17
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

“The iCar. So I don't know. I mean, we'll see what they come up with, what they're working on. It seems like it's pivoted a lot just from what I see in the press. I don't have any privileged information. It just seems like they've pivoted a few times and I'm not sure what they're doing, but I am an Apple user. I revere their design philosophy and I think it's really incredible products they put together. If they did a custom like Apple car, I would want to use it and try it. I mean, I'm sure it would be nothing short of like pretty amazing from an industrial design perspective. So that alone I would nerd out on it for sure.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we'll see, right? We'll see how all this plays out. I mean, this is another, I mean, you're pushing on an issue that sort of big picture, the interior real estate of the vehicle, it's a huge opportunity. And we'll see where we want to play in that space. But your point is totally valid, right? It is extremely valuable real estate, especially when you're no longer driving and can be staring at a screen.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You think about making more consumer vehicles or far into the future, Ford has a big partnership with Google now Volvo uses Android Auto. All these companies are kind of headed in that direction. Is that a partnership that you foresee needing to navigate? Is that just something happening over there and you're the provider of a capability?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You picking where you want to go and showing your current location and trying to find points of interest in all of that, at least with the lift engagement, that will be through the Lyft app, the Lyft map, that will be the Lyft system. Ultimately, TRIP data gets sent to us. And yes, we do have an understanding of addresses and locations and how to navigate the vehicle. My point is that those systems, though, are kind of optimized for the driving function, the actual UI presented to the user is on the left end of things. We don't have involvement in that part of it.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do, but they aren't the types of maps that you would give to a consumer. They're maps that help the car drive. They're kind of high-resolution maps that help the vehicle figure out what location it's in, like exactly where it is within a lane, and so on. It isn't navigational. I mean, that's an element to it, right? But it's a little bit of a different use case”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a little bit in the background. The part that we concentrate on is we want to provide displays that assure the riders that the car is operating safely and correctly. So we do have a display that we build at Argo that shows the scene in and around the vehicle, the locations of the different objects around the vehicle. We'll show the upcoming trip and routes and what the next turn it's going to make, that kind of thing. In terms of the dashboard for a consumer vehicle and getting into sort of the map wars and the different companies screaming for your attention and screen time, that's not a battle that we're in the middle of right now.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't make the sort of user facing interface of the car, right? You're very focused on autonomy, tying into the car's existing systems. I'm sure with Lyft there's going to be some consumer software interface element. But one of the things I've noticed is I've talked to car companies and the CEO, the CEO Ford, the CEO of Polest They're aware that they can't just give the center stack of the car away to car play and Android Auto anymore. It's got to be good and they've got to win that back because as cars start to drive themselves. Can't just be like it's carplay, they need people to use their maps, their interface to understand how the cars operate. Where in that dynamic do you see Argo playing? Is it all in the background? Do you want an Argo interface? How does that work out”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally anonymized for us. We aren't trying to identify anybody. We're purely using the data to understand is it a vehicle, is it a person, is it a bike, a scooter? Is the pedestrian motorized as we've called it? Right, like we're trying to understand that so we can predict and understand what are the movements you're going to make to ensure safety. We are not handling the PII and that engagement.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whenever we talk about data collection, we have to talk about privacy Use the lift cars a tiny example. Lyft knows who you are, right? You sign into Lyft, you call the car, maps a route. Lyft can kind of throw that away after a while, right? Like they're running logistics business in some way, they want to know where their cars need to be for a giant machine learning data set you need to hold on to that data. So how are you anonymizing? Is that something you've had to think about?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, data is useful, but again, data on I-75 is going to be very, very different than data on Broadway. So I just think that, again, it's all about the environment. And if we want to start looking at the diversity of data, maybe that's a way to look at it, right? What is the diversity in the different environments and cases that you've seen and recorded and are testing against? And how well is the system performing against those test cases? I mean, that's ultimately what autonomous driving companies are looking at internally. It may not get published, but that's what we're looking at.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mileage is obviously a proxy for data collected, right? The sensors are reading a bunch of data. They're running machine learning algorithms. They need a vast amount of data to make those algorithms smarter. Is that data collected? Is that the right?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it isn't just because depending on where you operate, you're driving at different speeds. And so the unit of work for any given vehicle on any given day is very different, right? I could put up a huge mileage number and have it all be on highway. That's very different than driving ocean drive in Miami. So not all miles are the same. It's really an apples to oranges measurement. I do think that being clear about where you're driving and what the complexity is and what the industry terms as the operational design domain, which is just describing what are the types of streets and roads, etc. that you're driving on, I think is really important to disclose just as much as mileage if you're going to use mileage as your benchmark.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One way you can measure this competition, I don't know if I love it, but you're just going to tell me it's my job to figure it out. But we're going to try anyway. One way to measure this competition is miles driven. How many miles did our robots drive this week? And the reason I bring it up is because Waymo, which I think is a competitor of yours, loves to tout how many miles it's driven. It's billions more miles than anyone can even comprehend Waymo says it's driven. Is that the right measure? Is that a measure you use?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think it's win or take all. I think that there's, you know, I say it all the time, there's three trillion miles driven in the U.S. alone. A huge percentage of those are out there. So I think that the opportunity is enormous. I think you're going to see different companies specialize in automating different fractions and slices of those miles. And I think there's incredible businesses to be built even just within those slices.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the reasons I ask comes back to that commodification question Is there just a first mover advantage where if you happen to get to the finish line first, everyone else is going to just start buying Argo stack and deploying it? Or is there many markets are winner-take-all? Do you think self-driving is winner take all?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you follow this really closely. You have an answer. Look, I think we're in such an exciting time where a lot of good ideas are getting funded. I saw a chart in the Wall Street Journal the other day that showed just the huge enormous growth in startup capital. I think it's a really exciting time, right? And the way I look at it is this technology, whoever gets it fielded, right, and deployed, whoever makes it at the end of the day, as long as they're following the right practices and processes and view it not just as a convenience, but also a safety function, I think is going to have a huge transformative impact on the world. And it's going to mean safer, cleaner, easier transportation worldwide. That's what we're after, regardless of who my competitors are or who's going to end up deploying it. I think those that stay true to that vision and deliver on it, I think are going to be incredible, long-lasting companies.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think we all need to convene and have good discussion around it. I mean, there was a bill that was, I forget the exact stage in the process that it was in, but was close. I think it was part of the endless Frontiers Act. It at least provides for a deployment pathway and increases the cap on the number of vehicles that one company can deploy. It also clarified a number of things. That's a start, right? I mean, it at least acknowledges at the federal level that self-driving is something that we support and we want to kind of move forward with right now I think we're just stalled and I don't think it's good for our country especially when you look at Europe you look at Germany that's now passing regulation not just for the testing of cars but also the commercial deployment you see what China is doing we are falling behind and it's not good”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope that we're able to come together. I'm optimistic. I mean, I think the administration has said positive things about self-driving and acknowledging the benefits that it has in terms of safer, cleaner transportation. But now we've got to take that and use it as inspiration for getting a framework that works.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they're asking a lot of questions, and they've been asking a lot of questions over the years, right? And I think at some point we need to convene because it isn't tractable, nor is it a good thing for the consumer or for the companies building this to have 50 different rules across 50 different states, plus then city specific guidelines. It just doesn't work. It makes a really hard, complex problem, even harder”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, those are rules that I'm assuming you and Lyft have written together about how safe you want the cards to be. Another way of writing those rules is for governments and cities and states and countries to write a bunch of regulations about self-driving cars or what you want safety drivers to be doing. Also connected to public perception and fear of change. The last time we spoke, I think you said we need a unified way of thinking about this. So this actually becomes a market. Feel like again a lot has changed in the past year and a half. Have the regulators gotten antsier in your view? Have they gotten more open to it? What does that look like?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Monitoring system is not a bad thing. Like, if your car really does require a person to stay focused on the road, maybe you actually need to monitor and make sure that they are for it to be engaged or stay engaged. There's conversations here that I think are really important to be having right now because at the end of the day, the core foundational case for all of this, in my view, is safety. There's convenience element to it as well, but these are safety products at the end of the day.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understand where those steering wheels point So, this is the big question Do you think Tesla rolling out autopilot and beta, letting people do dumb things with it, constantly generating new cycles about it going sideways? There was a video the other day where it was getting confused by the moon in the sky. I don't know if you saw it, but it kept it.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mother doesn't like to use the backup camera, DLI. And I say, but it's so simple. It's right there is no, she's using her mirrors. She's just like, that confuses me. I'm like, how does it confuse me? She says there's lines on it. So the lines help you understand where those steering wheels pointed. She's like, no, no, no, that's confusing. And it's like there's a feel and thing that like, I don't know what it is. Yeah, I mean, this is education. Like, it shows you that change is actually not that easy for a consumer that isn't, you know, immersed in the tech day in and day out.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a big trust component to this, right? Take your hands off the steering wheel, put your mind away. A lot of people are not comfortable with that. Speaking of mothers, I tried to get my mom to use the adaptive cruise control in her Mercedes. And she just didn't want to use, she was like, no, I prefer to just, I don't trust this card to stay away from the car in front of me.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is it and what can it do and not do? I remember hearing his story a while back about Volvo and some pedestrian detection technology that they had, and they were running through a test for a customer and the salesperson leapt out in front of the car and got run over. Well, you know what? The car wasn't equipped with it. It turned out it was an option. That car did not have that option. So I don't know if that story is accurate or not, but we clearly are not.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you have to pay attention and keep your hands on the wheel or not? Is it hands off mind off or not? To me, that's the fundamental question, regardless of what marketing terms you use. At the end of the day, Tesla is very clear that you need to be paying attention, have your hands on the wheel, and be prepared to take over if the technology is not going to do the right thing. Certainly people are free at this moment, it would appear people are free to use that product however they want at their own risk. My view is that regardless of what marketing terms we use, we're never going to speak to the everyday consumer when we use terminology like L2, L2+, when I listen to my cell phone this show this last hour, L4. Well, you know, Ni, I'm not sure that L3, right? I can talk all day long, right? And people are just their eyes are going to glaze over. My mother was asking me this question the other day, and her eyes glazed over.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great test. But I'll just say it people do dumb things in their Teslas, which are advertised to have a thing called full self-driving or autopilot. There's a lot of confusion there. So what in your mind is beyond just can you sleep in it? What is the difference? What is the line that you can evaluate?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's unpack that a little bit for people who are listening because I feel like I have an intuitive understanding of the difference between driver assistance and full self-driving. I'm not sure it's rigorous. And I feel like the industry is doing its best to muddy the difference there.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me push on one of the other dots you threw up for us to connect. One of the things you said was it's going to be fleets first because you can get the economics right. I think the pushback there is, well, the big tech companies that operate fleets like shakier, and I take your point that they did generate some value. The other thing you said was eventually the cost will come down and it'll hit consumer vehicles and it'll be small enough and cheap enough that you can just put it in a car that you can buy. A few months ago, I interviewed Austin Russell, who's the CEO of Luminar smart guy. His point was we're not doing RoboTaxis. My whole goal is to drive that cost curve down and make small sensors and make a package and the place you want this is in a consumer car. And he was pretty adamant about it. What is the back and forth there? Is that sort of an active industry is going to sort itself out conversation or is that two companies that just aren't in the same lane?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If that car lasts on the road long enough, yes, what exactly is that horizon? I'm not in a position to give those numbers, but it's conceivable. I don't know that it's realistic in the very first generation”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we first started out, right? No, but just in that context, I understand the first car is the most expensive one as all the RD costs in it. But just from the... A really dumb Excel spreadsheet math of this is how many dollars it costs to make this car and buy all the parts and we're going to run it for however long we're going to run it in Miami and pick up customers with Lyft. Will that car pay for itself?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spoy profitable. So, I mean, in the context of all the investment that's been made to date, no, I mean, we're looking at this certainly from a revenue perspective, right? Revenue is king. That's important to get when you're first starting out, right? A profitable and break-even, and those are things that we'll talk about a few years from now.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what we talked about before was a very specific issue, which was around utilization and how much time the car sits at a charger. And the business dynamics around that. The car needs to be electrified, without question, whether it's hybrid or all electric. You need that power for the computing and sensors that are on board the vehicle. That was never up for debate. And Electric was always the pathway. But you're right. I was definitely saying in the short term, if you were to build a business and deploy it in the short term, especially in this was now a year and a half earlier, What I was looking at was hybrid still had a lot of advantages in that you can keep the car on the road for extended periods of time earning revenue. I mean, at the end of the day, everybody has to make that calculation of when do you think you're ready to launch and sort of what is the state of sort of range charging time can you fast charge it without destroying and replacing batteries all the time all of that and i think that's a moving as battery technology improves at a rapid rate i think all of that is certainly changing”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting you call that the ID buzz great name, by the way. The ID buzz is all electric. The last time we spoke, you actually mentioned that you didn't think the propulsion system of the car was important, right? And obviously the escape is a hybrid. It's got a gas engine in it. I've talked to other folks in the self-driving and related industries, and they were pretty adamant that it has to be an electrified car. You don't want the complexity of the ice engine to do all this other stuff you're doing.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the plan is to deploy in Europe. They've picked an initial city in Hamburg. We also have an office in Munich. We've started some small testing in Munich. We're launching on the ID buzz platform. They announced that. They've not shown pictures of it yet, so that will be forthcoming. I think it's going to be an outstanding.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll send it to you afterwards. But what struck me about it was we did hear all of this hype about 5G, specifically is related to self-driving cars. And that was the only pure application of the network technology to enable something that even remotely looked like 5G. And it doesn't seem like it was a great idea.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think that helps with the economics of the equation. Also, driving with any amount of latency remotely is really difficult. So there's lots of ways you can try to mitigate that, but that is not going to have the promise that we all want to see in terms of. In terms of safety and efficiency.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think, and I'm going to put self driving aside for a second, I don't understand why we don't have a set of standards that everybody has embraced where a vehicle is prevented from running a red light. To me, that is just, that's like table stakes. Like, why can't we get that done? Okay, so my view is, yes, if you want to talk about just some of the simplest applications, let's start there and get some traction on a standard and get funding to deploy this as part of our infrastructure, right? Let's start with things that everybody can understand and get around. Now, long term for self-driving, that does have a benefit in that, yeah, I mean, eventually that networked fleet is an addition. I look at it as an additional sensor that provides additional information about what's in and around the vehicle that is always helpful.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always thought this is again part of the hype cycle. I agree. I just think it was uninformed. It has its place as a value-added part of the ecosystem. It is not overnight and on its own going to fundamentally change the architecture and how we approach building a self-driving car for those reasons.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so I think the value prop was okay, all this expensive compute you have in the car, move it to the cloud, 5G is going to be this super resilient, robust network that never fails, offers a huge amount of bandwidth and extremely low latency. That was the promise, right? In reality, the latency is better. The bandwidth is improved, but it is not, it still is not infrastructure you can count on for doing like the basic decision making, like where is the pedestrian in front of my car this instant, right? So I can steer and brake appropriately.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I spent a lot of time thinking about the 5G hype cycle and how it didn't pan out, and I was made to believe that there was some sort of race to 5G that was important. And now it's here, and I have middling AT&T mid-man 5G on my phone. It's fine. One of the things we were absolutely promised about 5G was that it would be a key enabling technology for autonomous vehicles. And I have probably watched more cell carrier marketing reels where like, you know, like the Wi-Fi beams were hitting silver cars in animations. And it was just the promise. It was there. 5G is here now. It's widely deployed. Has it made a meaningful difference to your roadmaps, to your capabilities?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I mean, you have to ask them, right? I don't know that any one thing failed. If you look at the partnering that's happened, by and large, each of these teams has invested, built teams, and there's been M&A that, I mean, value was created, right? And all of these deals. So I always hesitate to call things a failure. It may not have taken the turns that everyone thought it would, but hey, it was new.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fundamental sensors we needed didn't really exist, right? At least not in any production capacity. We're now finally getting there because there's been investment across the industry to get what we need. But I never believed back then the companies that were saying, yeah, we're going to deploy in 12 months or 18 months. It was just nuts to think that.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a data point that says that most companies that got into the self-driving game in circa 2015 or whatever it was just had no idea how hard the problem was. I think as talent moves across the industry and folks get educated, I think they come around to what people like me who've been doing this for a while and have always known, which is this isn't a light switch. It's not going to happen overnight. And it's a time capital intensive thing. I mean, look, the basic supply base, you know, when I started Argo in 2016”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At some point, though, you know, these volumes will go up in these fleets. Component cost will come down over time. I can't predict when this will happen, but it will happen. And at some point, you'll be able to offer this on personally owned vehicles. And at that point, has there been major changes where the sensor footprint of the car has decreased or where it's starting to blend more with what level two systems may have become at that point? I don't know. I'm so far in the future, though, DLI that I just can't know how to put a bunch of dots on the screen for you. I have no idea how to connect them yet time-wise.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. It's a good question. I get asked this all the time. And the answer I've had for years now is it really is no clear stepping stone from basic driver assistance to full scale autonomy. You just need way more sensors, way more computing capability and so on and so forth to achieve full autonomy where no human needs to be in the loop. Now over time I think there will be a point where there's a crossover, right? But it isn't going to look like a stepping stone. It isn't going to look like a year or two from now we're going to get there. To me there's still huge advancements that would need to be made for that to be practical. I mean look just even the cost of the technology today regardless of your technical approach is going to be pretty high for fully autonomous vehicles to the point where it makes most sense to deploy those in captive fleets that are maintained, curated, clean, serviced, et cetera, and deployed on a sort of per mile per trip basis.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, we don't have involvement in Blue Crews or any of the driver assistance technology that you would maybe call level two or level two plus. Some people use that phrase now. We don't have involvement in those products today.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there will be a lot of interest in how the tech built, like what's the team that was behind this, and I think the brand, the self-driving brand, if you will, or the platform is going to be something people will want to know. Who knows? Maybe in the future, there will be a certain driving style or DNA that people associate with. They say, look, I like the Argo driver. I feel comfortable. I feel safe. I like the way it handled X, Y, and Z. And they commit to it. I don't know. We'll see where this goes. But the driver ultimately, whether it's a computer or not, I mean, has a huge impact on the consumer's experience. And so I think they're going to care.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You might be asking is it going to become commoditized, right? Because you would say that wipers and basic crews control and so on are basically commodities at this point. You work with the tier one, you get the component, put it in the car, and it's done. I guess I question, I don't know whether maybe sometime way distant in the future this is a commodity. I think there's going to be very few companies that ultimately unlock the promise of full autonomy A to B, no fixed routes can literally take you anywhere within a particular, the confines of a city. I think there's only so many companies that will come up with that.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I ask is, I think about the other pieces of a car and some of them car companies cannot help but label, right? Like the stereo in a car always has some brand that has been licensed, right? It's just a label. The label can actually change. And I always wonder if those stereo companies had anything to do with the stereo in the car beyond selling a label. But then there's stuff like standard cruise control. I have no idea who the supplier for the cruise control in my current Fort is. It's just part of Ford system. Is self driving going to be the styria with a prominent brand, or is it going to be intermittent wiper controls?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT