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

“I think they want to know. They want to know who's driving me. And how is that built and what tell me more about that company? Those are natural questions and we'll be working to answer those as part of the partnership. This initial phase is a relatively small number of cars. It's less than 100 across a few cities. And it's an opportunity for, frankly, Lyft Argo and Ford to collectively learn about the experience we're offering and what do customers want to see in future cycles of the product. And I think all three brands are going to learn a lot.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we co design with Ford the modifications to the vehicle to accept the self-driving hardware. So we work together with them on the locations of sensors and what the best way is to power them and how to take care of all the different potential failure modes. What if power goes out? What if breaks fail? What if lots of what-ifs, right? And we work with them to sort through those things and make sure we have a safe product. And then ultimately that design gets vaulted and sent ultimately to production, right? And that's where a factory will produce a base vehicle that looks very much similar to what would go to a dealer before that step. The self-driving tech is applied sort of as an upfit or an option on the vehicle. And then ultimately they come to us for deployment.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're special, they're special, but they're off the production line. They have modifications made to them. Those modifications are heavily tested before the public would ever be offered a ride in them. So the public is seen sort of very, very well tested, robust system when they ultimately would get a ride in our vehicles.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just being able to handle various corner cases, whether it be emergency vehicles doing different maneuvers or we recently added in fairly substantial updates that allow us to operate really well in areas where there's heavy construction or unmapped signage, all of those things are things that need to be handled that go beyond basic driving functionality and are the realities of the real world. So we're very much in the tail of that development.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, these will be Ford Escape Hybrid vehicles, which is a third or fourth generation of vehicles that we're on at this point from Ford, sort of an evolution of vehicles. It has all the sensors and computing hardware that you need in order to drive fully self-driving on its own. We just are not taking the drivers out yet because the product is still, frankly, being”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There will be Argo employees, or they are Argo employees, and then when they're driving folks around on the Lyft network, they're, I guess, wearing two hats, if you will, they're also lift drivers at that instant in time as well.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has some bad weather. I will say the bad weather we can handle pretty heavy rain at this point. The system was actually just operating in a really heavy rainstorm in Austin yesterday and it was remarkable how well it worked. So we're cracking that and eventually we'll get to snow and other things. Miami's just been a fantastic city for us.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think so. We looked at Miami several years ago as a really welcoming market to autonomy. The folks there have been are interested in the technology, are interested in trying new things. It has good weather, which is a good place to start. Good weather”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the whole company, right? We all try it. We all try it out, but it's also partners, it's investors. There's a lot of feedback that comes in every day. We even get people that write us to our company email address that, hey, I saw your car. Does it do this? Does it do that? There's a lot of interest. So one of the things that we announced recently is a partnership with Lyft where later this year we'll be offering rides on their network in Austin and Miami. I'm really looking forward to that because that is going to be an opportunity to get true customer feedback that will be sort of real time, if you will, as we're delivering the rides. It's going to be interesting as something that we're all looking forward to.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's the customer feedback loop here? Is it the Ford program manager for a car? Is it, you mentioned even the other people on the street? Who's the person saying this product isn't good enough, make it better?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, I focus on the customer. I think it's really easy when you're building something this complex and you're sort of immersed in the tech day in and day out. It's easy to deliver a solution that doesn't quite meet what people need, right? So you have to really be customer obsessed to steer and direct the company and the development. So I look at it through a customer's eyes. Is this the right thing to do? Is this meeting the promise that we made and the promises embedded in our core values? And that's why they're on our website, right? Safety is number one. So I use those values and I try to put myself in the customer's shoes and all the decisions we're making to guide what we do and how we do it. I think we'll build a stronger company and a stronger culture that way and hopefully be around for a long time if we continue to follow that principle.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, one more sweeping question, and then I want to talk about Argo itself. You are a unique CEO in that the decisions you make obviously you're not deploying this at scale tomorrow. We're talking years, maybe decades. How do you make decisions operating on that timeline?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, it's not so much a jump. I think it's just the natural evolution of things, but maybe I have a different perspective. I still stand by what I wrote a few years ago. Everybody said that I was not bullish enough. I was just being a realist, which was Fully autonomous cars are going to cars that don't require any operation with the no human in the loop required. It's going to be modest deployments in cities and it'll scale from there. And I think we're seeing that across the industry. At some point, we probably will look back and there will be an inflection point where we can say, wow, that was the point where it like hockey sticked in terms of growth and scale. We are not there yet. And I still predict we're a few years away from that.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think DoorDash has robots in San Francisco delivering food, so we're seeing it. But given your sweep and your experience, is this past year, is it as much of a jump as it can kind of feel like from the outside?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sidewalk robots. My brother was on campus at the University of Pittsburgh. He sent me a picture of a sidewalk robot that was delivering books. This was a bit earlier, right? And I mean. I think it's cool that we see this now. This is coming into everyday life.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to deploy millions of cars and go from literally zero self driving cars on the street to millions in a couple of years. That just doesn't, change doesn't happen that quickly. On the other hand, if you look at it from a basic compute and storage and silicon standpoint, we've made substantial progress in the 17 years I've been doing this, right? And I've now seen probably three major generations or inflection points of how we approach the autonomy problem. And in a fairly short period of time, this all depends on your frame of reference, Neil, and I guess in which headlines you're reading and believing.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whiteboard with a marker, and I'm looking at a guy that's been doing this for 15 years, and I thought to myself, is this really the starting point? That's hilarious. So yes, we have come a long way since those times. I think that the dream was always suspect if the dream was”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that that concept is new. I mean, I think it's something that we've understood over the last decade is that it isn't enough to just sort of see and understand the world. You also have to predict what it's going to do. Things are in motion. You have to operate in and among other human drivers. If you're in an overly robotic way, the car is going to be constantly starting and stopping and moving left and right in ways that an external observer would say, what the heck is this thing doing? I think we've understood that in the last many years. I will say, I mean, look, I started doing robotics in like 2004 or 2005 in that neighborhood. I do remember one of the first assignments I had, we were building a simulator, and it was kind of like, okay, we were at the whiteboard and like very little prior art existed in the application we were in. And it was like, all right, let's start making a list of all the things that we're going to encounter in the world. I'm staring as new to this industry. I'm staring at...”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I ask that is it feels like we started 10 years ago with self driving cars are going to change the world and every company and every executive I talked to working on the problem to someone naturally and I think extremely understandably developed a much more nuanced appreciation of the problem and things like all I need to do is OCR the local traffic manual you know like 15 year old kids have to learn to get their driver's license and tell a computer to do it and we're often running to oh there's a bunch of norms in various cities that we need to encode in a semantic way into the actual maps of the car that's a that's a new kind of understanding I think from the industry at the same time it feels like The dream has gotten much farther away”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's one of these unique products in that the customer is not just the rider in the car, the customer is actually the bike that's riding next to us, the pedestrian that's crossing in front of the vehicle. The customer is really, it's the environment around us in addition to whatever work the vehicle is doing at the time. It all matters for a community to be okay with having self-driving cars.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I don't immediately remember what I said in that regard. I guess you certainly need to know those rules, but our maps really encode a lot more than just what is encoded in a street sign. We make notes around what the behaviors are that you would expect at certain intersections. Is it certain peak times? It is socially acceptable in the heart of a city to block what's called blocking the box or basically pulling into the intersection in order to get all the way through. And if you don't do that, you're never going to get a turn. There's other places where if you do that, you're going to get honked at and run off the road. So we do encode certain contextual information so that we can act as kind of naturally as possible with kind of what the norms are that the traffic in that local area would expect. That is a painstaking process, but certainly something we've learned is important for people to”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First time we talked, we had this great line about how a self-driving car would perceive and react to the world around it. And you were like, it turns out the rules are encoded all around us. It's just traffic regulations. And there's signs and roads. And like, we just have to understand it. And the car will know how to drive any city that's in. I feel like, you know, it's been a winding journey. Has that proven out? Is that still how you see it? Or do you need more and better? Structured map data about the world around you to make self droughtting happen.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same, but yeah. I think that that movie, I think, is more about self-aware, a thing that has become completely freely autonomous of the world. That's not what we're talking about here, right? These vehicles follow a set of very strict rules and are highly supervised. This is not like generalized artificial intelligence.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Self driving tech is that our software stack can reason about literally thousands of objects at the same time and be tracking each individual bike, pedestrian, and car that's in a busy surface street and be able to extrapolate not just what are they doing now, but what are they going to be doing several seconds in the future. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get distracted. It's always learning and improving. And this is where the safety proposition comes from.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's sort of an amalgamation of things, so they certainly have computing that their control software operates on. We have, it almost looks like a mini data center in the car that's able to process data from sensors that are positioned all around it. So the car is able to see through sensors that we make as well as by, is able to see 360 degrees around it, 400 meters away, is able to see day, night, and is able to pick up on things that I would venture to say most human drivers don't even necessarily see or notice. And so many times a second, the car is reading in that information and making decisions about how to navigate it through the street. One of the unique aspects people ask me all the time, well, how's it any different than how a human thinks about things? Well, the difference is a human's sort of picking the top two or three things that are relevant at the time. And if they make a mistake in that judgment and they pick the wrong thing to focus on, or if they're distracted, typically that's when collisions happen, right? The advantage was...”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put a specialized computer in their car, it runs your software. Do you have any hardware demands? Or is there a set of sensors that you require? Is there stuff that you make or is it off the shelf? How does that part work?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The product is really at its core a whole lot of software that runs on some pretty specialized hardware that connects to a car in a safe way. And I would say those car companies do a lot more than just leather seats and wheels. I don't know if you're setting me up here, but I mean, they're increasingly becoming software companies in their own right. And in fact, if you look at the car as a digital device, there's actually an API and it's a really important one that we interface with to be able to control basic things like steering and braking and being able to do that in a safe and secure way is actually not trivial. So, you know, have you respect for what they do? And working in concert with the automakers. Working in a really close and collaborative way, make sure that those interfaces are done right in a secure and safe way.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ford and Volkswagen are obviously gigantic car companies. They're good at things like alloy wheels and leather seats. They make cars. You don't make cars. What is the Argo product? Where does it begin and end?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's also given us an advantage in that we have a lot of really important and valuable data in those cities now that helps us build a self-driving tech stack. Where it's all going though is it's a platform that at least today we're working on a number of vehicles with both Ford and Volkswagen. It will enable those vehicles to do real work in these major cities across the world.”
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 a name for it yet, and I think that's some more of what you'll see in the coming year as we start to get closer to launching. What we talk about today is just explaining, we do a lot of explaining around self-driving, and that's what the podcast is for. That's why we have ground truth autonomy.com. These are properties to help folks that see our cars in cities today. They want to know more. Why are you here? What are you doing? What's the benefit? That's a lot of what we focus on at the moment. But at the end of the day, what we are is a platform that enables lower cost and safer mobility and has the potential to move not just people, but also goods. And really, we've got an extensive footprint, probably larger than any other AV developer at this point. Seven cities and counting where we're really testing across some of the hardest areas, whether it be in the core of Miami, Austin, D.C., it's been a great learning experience.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You make hardware But I was just looking at your website. Your website's really interesting. It has your podcast on it. It has a bunch of values, description of how Argo works. But it doesn't, does this product have a name? Does like the Argo Tech Stack have a name that you use to describe itself?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have engineering offices here in the US as well as in Munich, Germany. We've got a fairly large workforce across our test cities that help us test and operate the vehicles, as well as obviously a sizable product development engineering workforce that builds the technology.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That A to B delivery efficiently and give them a chance to compete. Nothing I say on this podcast will ever happen overnight, but I think this is where it's going. And the fact that we can give small businesses more of an equal footing at some point, I think, is interesting.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's true. We're obviously working as quickly as we can because we know that this has real convenience, affordability, and safety benefits. But at the end of the day, it's ready when it's ready. There's a process that has to be followed. It's a safety-critical product as much as it is, I think, a fun and exciting product that folks will really want to use. It's good to know that when we are ready and when we do start scaling out, there's a real market for this. I think right now there's a lot of small businesses wondering, wait a second, how do I kind of get my piece of the e-commerce that's happening? And part of what they struggle with is how do I get my products from A to B into the customers doorstep as efficiently as some of the more kind of giant retail brands, right? I think what's cool about self-driving tech is that it has the promise to provide”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's why I wanted to start there. I have a lot of questions about Argo, and you have some news that we should discuss. But again, we've just seen so many technology products get uptake in a way that people predicted it would take five years. Zoom, right? I think is the canonical example of the pandemic. Self-driving is one of those things where it's connected to everything from future of work, right? You're going to live farther away and you'll have a self-driving car and it will tootle you into the city whenever you need to go to a city, but mostly you're going to telecommute live wherever you want to live, package liver, e-commerce, again, the cost of goods delivery is a big deal. We've heard about this in the self-driving context for years and years and years.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did not change really the direction. I mean, if anything, I think it was more urgency to just let's get this technology out there, the convenience and the ability to maybe have a private ride, have the car take you somewhere and not be with anybody else in the car seems like that would be a pretty good value proposition right now as people are getting more comfortable with being around people again. So I think goods delivery on that front, we've seen a huge uptick in change in customer habits that we knew was happening, but it seems like COVID just really accelerated it, right? I mean, it's kind of now an expectation among customers that there's a good delivery option for most retail businesses. We knew that was always the case, but it just seems like all of this has been accelerated.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For us, it didn't really change the direction. You're right, though. When I went to New York, I didn't realize that would be like my last normal pre-COVID business trip. And actually, I was back to New York last week and it was neat to see, you know, streets busy again. And in fact, it seems like people don't want to use the subway right now. So it seems like the surface streets are actually even busier than they had been.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spoke to you in February of 2020 on the Vergecast, and then like the whole world flipped over. I'm glad to have you back on Decoder. I feel like maybe the frame of our conversation is a little different, but Argo makes self-driving hardware and software for cars. And I'm curious this past year, there's been just a lot of interest in having computers do more for us. You see all the big tech companies are doing better than ever. In your corner of the tech market, did the pandemic change the velocity or direction of self-driving?”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Driving in the United States, which, as Brian points out, is actually trailing behind other countries. I wanted to talk to Brian about the partnership with Lyft and see where that's going, but I also wanted to know if the pandemic accelerated any of the investment or development of self-driving cars. After all, we've seen it in so many other industries. And the proposition of having a taxi all to yourself is pretty enticing in the COVID era. Lots of people moving away from offices to work from home might love to have a car that gets them to and from a central office in the city a couple days a week. And, of course, I had to ask about five G. The cell carriers in this country relentlessly hype self-driving as something that 5G would enable. Is that actually happening? Does Brian see 5G as a benefit in the future? His answer might surprise you, unless you are a regular listener of the show, and then it might not surprise you at all.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brian is actually one of my favorite people to talk to in the car industry. He's a podcaster himself. His show is called The No Parking Podcast, and he's unusually direct for a tech CEO about what technology can and can't do and on what timeline. For example, a little more than a year ago, Brian was on my other show, The Vergecast, and one of the first questions I asked him was when are self-driving cars going to happen? And Brian just said, it'll be ready when it's ready. You might compare that to, say, Elon Musk, who in 2019 promised a fleet of 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the streets by the end of 2020. Well, it's August 2021, and while that hasn't happened, it turns out Argo just launched a small fleet of Robotaxis in Miami and Austin in partnership with Lyft. You can open the Lyft app and summon a self-driving car to take you to your destination. Now, there are still safety drivers in the cars, but it's another small step towards self-driving.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Lipatel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Brian Celeski, the co-founder and CEO of Argo AI. That's a startup that's trying to build the tech stack for self-driving cars. Now, Argo was founded in 2016, but there are some solid foundations there. Brian and his team were veterans of Google and Uber's self-driving groups, and have major investments from Ford and Volkswagen.”
2021-08-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Meet the self-driving brains working with Ford and Volkswagen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT