Autonocast

With another year coming to a close, Alex, Kirsten and Ed look back at some of their big takeaways from 2019. Technical progress has continued, as Ed's driverless Waymo ride proved, but new technologies alone don't create viable business models or solve product-market fit. ADAS also made a comeback over the last year, with lots of OEMs announcing new plans to make up for delayed autonomy plans, but will safety considerations spoil the party? It seems that for every new opportunity, 2019 managed to create a corresponding challenge.

#164: Ed's Driverless Ride, Simulation, Trust and the NTSB's Uber Investigation

Delivery bots were one of the big topics of 2019, attracting huge amounts of hype and venture capital but also generating a good deal of backlash and mockery. Much of that backlash centered on San Francisco, which banned sidewalk-based delivery bots only to provide a single company the necessary permit to test there: the delivery company Postmates. The company's VP of Special Projects Ali Kashani joins The Autonocast to explain what makes their approach different, and what kinds of design considerations and technology went into building a bot that could be a better citizen of the sidewalk.

Dizzying progress in computer vision is one of the factors that has brought autonomous driving within reach, but as self-driving cars get closer to reality the probabilistic nature of machine learning inference is creating challenges due to the need for extremely high levels of safety. One possible approach to providing a more deterministic "safety checker" in future autonomous drive stacks comes from a company called Outsight, which is developing an active hyperspectral imaging sensor which it calls a "3D Semantic Camera" that holds the promise of (among other things) rapidly classifying objects based on spectral measurements of their material composition... without inference. Outsight co-founder Raul Bravo joins the show to explain how this sensor could be used to solve some of the trickiest perception-level challenges in autonomy, and potentially offer a powerful new tool to autonomous drive system developers.

The Autonocast is just back from LA, where they saw the future of mobility in all its forms... from the ridiculous to the sublime. First up Ed and Alex ask Kirsten for her in-person account of the infamous Tesla Cybertruck reveal, where she battled Youtube influencers for the weirdest new car launch story of the year. Then the gang discusses some of the vehicles they saw at the LA show, wrapping up with an interview Ed and Kirsten did with Ford's Mark Kaufman from the back seat of the Mustang Mach E.

When Intel bought the Israeli computer vision and ADAS company Mobileye for $15 billion, it was a message that the computing and data giant didn't want to miss automated driving the way they'd missed mobile. With over a decade of experience with camera-based automated driving, a leading position in the effort to articulate autonomous vehicle safety and contracts with some of the biggest automakers in the business, Mobileye got Intel into the ADAS and autonomy business in a big way. Intel's Senior Principle Engineer Jack Weast joins the show to explain Intel's approach to integrating the two companies, the relationship between its ADAS and autonomy businesses, the firm's growing safety philosophy and much more.

It's fun to imagine how emerging innovations might shape the future of mobility, but if you want to know how the rubber hits the road you should probably talk to someone in the insurance business. From big data and connected vehicles to managing shared mobility services and understanding autonomous vehicle safety, insurance companies have to turn "the vision thing" into models, predictions and ultimately dollars and cents. To better understand how the insurance business is managing all of these fascinating challenges Alex, Kirsten and Ed sat down with Grady Irey, the Senior Vice President of Data Science and Analytics for the insurance technology company Arity for a fascinating conversation about risk, data, and the future.

With the Autonocast gang in Tel Aviv to moderate and MC the 7th Annual Smart Mobility Summit, they check in with the woman behind the event. Chairman and Director of the Fuel Choices and Smart Mobility Initiative of the Israeli Prime Minister's Office Dr. Anat Lea Bonshtien joins the show to explain what the Smart Mobility Summit is and how it became a must-attend mobility conference.

Alex, Kirsten and Ed ran into Horace Dediu while moderating the 7th Annual Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv, and of course they got to talking. What they managed to actually record includes discussion of the "Galapagos" micromobility market in Israel, the still far-off potential of true mobility as a service, and the boundary between mobility as infrastructure and more premium markets.

With the television debut of Alex's new film APEX: The Secret Race Across America, chronicling his cross-country record-setting run and the history of such automotive insanity, the gang discusses the relevance of high-speed cross country records to emerging technologies. Then the conversation shifts to the emerging "Techlash" which now seems to be breeding enmity for autonomous vehicles, among critics of the high tech sector as well as urbanists and transit advocates. Are these critics right to be suspicious of Silicon Valley's autonomous vehicle development practices? Will AVs help or hurt the causes of urbanism and transit? These questions and many more take center stage as Alex, Kirsten and Ed take on the growing critiques of self-driving technology.

The gang dives back into the world of sensors this week, with a conversation about lidar, autonomous vehicles and surviving the "trough of disappointment" with Angus Pacala of Ouster Lidar. Unlike some other lidar companies, which are a bet on the market for autonomous vehicles, Ouster has taken a diversified approach to the business and now has hundreds of customers in a wide variety of fields. We discuss why that strategy has paid off, how Ouster is validating its sensors, why autonomous vehicles will likely always have lidar, and where the sensor business is headed.

Alex had such a good time talking about his favorite topics with Kelly Funkhouser of Consumer Reports that they almost immediately sat back down and started recording more. Here, for your listening pleasure, is that roughly half-hour of bonus conversation covering a wide range of topics related to human machine interaction in automated driving.

What is Tesla Autopilot missing? Can Driver Monitoring Systems work? What are the best and worst driver assistance systems? How can we improve the SAE automation levels? In this episode recorded live at the Pennsylvania Autonomous Vehicle Summit, Alex (and Ed, before he had to take off to promote his book) gets schooled by Kelly Funkhauser, Consumer Reports' Head of Connected & Automated Vehicles, a rare voice of reason in a sector full of "experts" spouting BS.

While some states scramble to get a handle on the sudden appearance of autonomous vehicles on their roads, Pennsylvania's had time to think about the challenge. Thanks to the Pittsburgh robotics hub around Carnegie Mellon University, robocars have been plying the Keystone State's roads since at least a 2013 demonstration drive. Recorded live at the state's annual Autonomous Vehicle Summit, Ed moderates a discussion about the lessons learned with state Secretary of Transportation Leslie Richards and Ehrlichman Group CEO and returning Autonocast guest Courtney Ehrlichman.

Recently, the entire automotive world has been obsessed with a single vehicle: Porsche's new electric sportscar, the Taycan. Alex and Kirsten were among those invited to the Taycan's official reveal, and share their thoughts on its price, positioning, performance and (most importantly) pronunciation. Meanwhile, Ed wonders if it even matters quite as much as the Tesla-dominated EV discourse makes it out to be.