Driverless Cars from 2007 to Today

spur on innovation in driver less car technology. One of the elements I didn't really talk about was how cooperative the experience was. I mentioned that there was sort of this air of cooperation, and I talked about how Dave Hall had created a lidar tool that ended up being used by lots of the teams, but it went well beyond that. Teams were eager to share their approaches and their technologies each other, the algorithms they were using for

decision making processes. There was a lot of excitement as these different, very intelligent groups of people got together and began to cross pollinate their ideas. The real goal wasn't necessarily to beat out everyone else, although of course everyone would have liked to have been on the winning team.

But really the real goal was to overcome this huge engineering challenge of developing technologies that would be necessary for a car to maneuver through an urban environment safely under its own power, following all applicable traffic laws, and integrating with human driven vehicles in that space. Some people like Sebastian Throne of Stanford Racing Team, would say that the greatest achievement to come out of the challenges wasn't winning

top prize. It was when teams would share their knowledge and their experience with one another, allowing separate lines of research and development to start to converge, and it's set

the ground for what would come next. Now, the challenges in two thousand four, two thousand five, and two thousand seven proved that autonomous cars could exist on some level, and a lot of the technology that went into making cars navigate and operate independently would go into other systems and other applications, stuff like various driver assist technologies like

lane detection or automatic breaking. And it also encouraged some big companies to continue supporting efforts to making driver lest cars a reality. So one thing to acknowledge is, even if we were to say we're never going to be at a time where truly autonomous cars, ones that could take us from any starting location to Indy, any ending

location that's connected by roads to our starting point. Even if we say that's never going to be possible, not truly rely Apple, what we can say is we've already seen numerous technologies that were spawned by these competitions that are we're not only going into cars today, but are

saving lives in the process. So that's that's already a great outcome to this DARPA challenge, even if you, you know, again agree that ultimately this was to make more more automated military ground combat vehicles, and even in that case that was intended to help save soldiers lives. So that's a noble endeavor as well. But let's talk about some of the companies and organizations that formed in the wake of these grand challenges. You had General Motors and Carnegie

Mellon University get together. They launched a research and development program called the Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab. Then you also had Volkswagen establish a similar effort with stand For University. Now, those academic research programs didn't receive nearly as much public attention as the other really big entity that got involved in the field not long after the challenges, and that would be Google, later known as Alphabet or way Mo.

So Alphabets, the parent companies, the holding company under which UH the smaller companies and smaller by smaller, I just mean hierarchically would spin off. So you have like Google, which continues to focus on the core business of the overall company, but you have these other subsidiaries that are subsidiaries of Alphabet, not of Google anyway. One of those would be a division that was specifically in research and

development in the area of autonomous cars. So in two thousand seven, Sebastian Throne took a sabbatical from being a professor at Stanford to go work at Google for a short while. Turned out to be longer than a short while, but he and a team were hired on essentially to help develop Google's street view tool. That's the tool that's integrated into various maps systems that Google does and allows you to take a street level look at different locations.

It was done by driving special cars outfitted with special cameras through all these different streets and all these different locations. They had about a year UH scheduled to try and map out all the roads they could in various major cities, and they ended up doing it in nine months, so it's pretty impressive anyway. That project has had plenty of news coverage, not just because of its utility, but also

because of concerns about privacy and security. Not everyone is super crazy about the idea of using an online tool to virtually coast down streets and take a look at different addresses, not to mention possibly spying people that you recognize in places they should not be, but that's a topic for another time. In two thousand nine, Google would go a step further and secretly began testing autonomous vehicles.

So they had been in development of that for a couple of years as well, and Sebastian Thron had worked on that. They were retrofitting Toyota Prius cars at first, and the goal was to conduct ten one hundred mile trips in those cars without interruption, So uninterrupted one mile

trips with Toyota previous is ten times. Over the course of two thousand nine, Google would rack up more autonomously driven miles than had been accumulated over all previous years of experimentation among all autonomous car programs, so in one

year they eclipsed everything that had come before it. In Sebastian Throne would officially join Google as a Google Fellow and found a secret research and development division within the company called Goal X. Now, among the many projects that division would focus on, the autonomous cars was just one would be the self driving cars, and Thron, having participated in all three of the DARPA challenges, had really deep contacts in that field, and he could call upon them

to help solve difficult problems that remained in pursuit of the goal of a truly autonomous car that could interoperate with human society. So Thron ended up hiring people from the various competing teams of the DARPA challenges to join him at Google in developing further autonomous car technologies. Technically, the company had been doing this since two thousand seven. Really, Dave Hall, the guy who suited up lidar to make it an indispensable tool, became a billionaire through his work

at Velo Dine. In the meantime, and read Whittaker over at Carnegie, Melon would continue teaching at that university, effectively training the next generation of roboticists and compute of scientists throughout the entire industry were continuing to develop machine learning strategies that would become useful in multiple applications, including teaching a car how to drive itself. There were numerous groups that thought, this is the real secret to developing a

truly autonomous car is through machine learning. Not programming a car on what to do in any given situation, but teaching a car, sort of akin to how you would teach a young driver about how to conduct him or herself in a car. By this stage, Google's tests had drawn attention from the press. The New York Times published a piece in October twenty ten titled Google Cars drive

themselves in Traffic. The article revealed that Google had been conducting tests in plain site for several months, but at that point had not commented on what those tests were all about, and the company was content with people just assuming that it was another Google street view car. There were fifteen engineers working on the project, and they had hired a dozen or so drivers whose job it was to monitor the performance of the vehicles and to take

over if necessary. The engineers testing the vehicles had three main ways that they could take control back from the car. In each test vehicle, engineers had installed a button, a nice candy like red button that was on the right hand side of the driver so they could easily hit the button and that would switch controls to manual. But you can also do it if you tapped on the brakes or if you turned the steering wheel, the car

would hand over a control to the driver. Google had a little hiccup in two thousand eleven, a public hiccup that was when one of its driver less vehicles was involved in a low speed car crash, and at the time everyone assumed this was the first uh in real world car crash with an autonomous car. However, this particular incident was only a very tiny hiccup because it soon became public that the car, the autonomous car, was actually

in manual control mode at the time. The human driver behind the wheel was responsible for the accident, not the driver lest car technology. Google's driver lest cars would maintain a perfect safety record in autonomous mode until publicly. That's assuming if you say perfect safety record in the sense that the autonomous vehicles were not found to be at fault. There were incidents where autonomous cars were involved in car accidents, but in every case until two thousand sixteen, every public

case it was determined that the other driver was at fault. Again, stress on public. I'll back to what I mean in just a few minutes. In two thousand twelve, Google began to expand its fleet of driverless cars. It added a Lexus r x f H to the mix, so it wasn't just Toyota Prius is Uh. They had a couple of others as well, and the company began to develop its own sensors and began to replace the off the

shelf kind of stuff it was buying. I mean off the shelf if you know which shelves to look at, and still pretty exclusive materials, but now the company was developing stuff in house purpose built for their own cars. Two thousand twelve was also when a few Google employees were allowed to start testing this technology on highways around Google's campus, so it was outside of just the direct

team working on the project. Now other Google employees could end up driving an autonomous car and allowing it to operate an autonomous mode in specific regions and under specific sets of circumstance answers. There are a lot of different rules in place to participate in this, so you couldn't just turn it on autonomous and sit back all the time. And two thousand twelve was when the state of Nevada made history by becoming the first state to license autonomous

cars for use on state roads. California would follow suit that same year, but the bill that Governor Jerry Brown had signed would only take effect starting in two thousand fifteen. In January two thousand thirteen, Audi and Toyota both showed off autonomous vehicle concept designs at c S, so it showed that lots of UH entities were still very much interested in driverless cars, not just Google. In two thousand and fourteen, Google unveiled a prototype electric car that had

a top speed of twenty five miles per hour. There was no steering wheel, no break, no accelerator, no controls to allow a human driver to actually take manual control of the car. Inside the car, the car did have some control, but there were buttons that would tell it when it could go and when it should stop. So these vehicles were not intended for commercial use. They were part of Google's R and D to to test out the possibility of a vehicle that doesn't even have manual controls.

It requires a lot of trust be put into the system. Now. To be fair, these were very limited in their scope. Top speed of twenty five hour suggests that you would use them on like residential streets and stuff. You wouldn't use them on a highway. They wouldn't be able to

get up to speed. In two thousand and fourteen, the state of California past legislation requiring any company operating autonomous vehicles in the state to submit reports on any accident involving a vehicle operating an autonomous mode that would result in quote damage of property or in bodily injury or death end quote. After that point, Google would report several accidents, like more than three dozen. Most of those appeared to be the fault of human drivers, not the autonomous systems.

But according to some Google executives, there were some accidents that happened between two thousand eleven and when this piece of legislation was signed in two thousand fourteen that Google chose to keep quiet, and the logic that the company used was that, well, those accidents happened before that law was passed, so it doesn't really apply to those. We don't need to talk about accidents that have already happened.

Just from this point forward, we'll talk about it. One of those accidents involved someone who had participated in two of the DARPA Grand Challenges, someone who was working for Google and who had become something of a thorn in the company's side, and that person was Anthony Lewandowski. I'll explain more in a second, but first let's take a

quick break to thank our sponsor Lewandowski. If you listen to the previous episodes, he was the guy who competed using a self balancing motorcycle in the two thousand four and two thousand five Grand Challenge competitions. The name of that motorcycle, by the way, no big surprise, was ghost Writer. He had joined Google in two thousand seven to work with Sebastian Thrun on the Google street View project, and

Lewandowski started a few companies related to autonomous cars. He had developed these technologies for ghost Writer, and then he started some startups that were focused on specific elements that he had created for a ghost Writer, including one that used spinning light AR as a sensing technology. He didn't invent that, but he did develop our start up a company that specialized in that then he pushed Google to buy the tech his other companies happened to be making,

which you might think is a little questionable. Lewandowski was in a position to market his own company's products for a project he was working on with Google, so he was in charge of hardware for autonomous cars over at Google, and then said, well, for us to outfit these cars, let's buy this tech from this these two companies. Oh, I happen to own those two companies, So I'm using the money from the company I work for to funnel into companies I own. People began to have questions about that,

but it totally worked. As people at Google learned about what had gone on, they started to get a little concerned about this and about Lewandowski. Uh. It got worse when it became known that Lewandowski was talking to some competitors, some other companies outside of Google about selling them the same technology. This was complicated because he was operating those businesses outside of Google. He was a business owner and

and those technically didn't belong to Google. But at the same time he was working for Google, so it seemed like he might be undercutting Google or helping out their competitors, which was complicated. Larry Page, the head of Google, essentially directed the company to acquire Lewandowski's businesses rather than risk

him leaving the company to oversee the businesses himself. Lewandowski had indicated that he might leave Google in pursuit of leading up these these two companies that he had founded, although his commitment to that course of action is something that people have questioned that perhaps he just said this as a way to encourage Larry Page to shell out

millions and millions of dollars to acquire these companies. According to a report in The New Yorker, several people in Project Chauffeur, which was the name the code name for the driver less vehicle program at Google, felt that it was a mistake to get so tightly connected to levindal Ski. Several of the team members questioned his commitment to Google, as well as his ethical sensibilities, and this would get pushed further after an alleged incident in two thousand eleven.

So here's how the story goes. There was a Google executive named Isaac Taylor who was working on Project Chauffeur, and he took a leave of absence from the project it was a paternity leave when he became a new father in two thousand eleven. When he got back to Google, he found out that Lewandowski had made some unauthorized changes

to the software that guided the driverless cars. So up to that point, Google had really placed some pretty tight restrictions on the routes that these driverless cars would be allowed to take an autonomous mode. This is a type of geo fencing, where you restrict the operating parameters for a vehicle. The goal was to gather data through many miles of travel, but to control that process by limiting where the cars could actually drive under a top aymous mode.

Lewandowski apparently felt this was not satisfactory, so he made changes to the code to let the autonomous cars drive on routes that previously had been forbidden. Taylor and Lewandowski had a rather spirited argument by all accounts, over at Google, and at that point Lewandowski demanded that Taylor accompany him on a ride in an autonomous car to show that

this was a good idea. So, according to the story, the two people left in a retrofitted Prius and then hit the California Rhodes now I'm going to quote the New Yorker piece directly here. This is from an article titled did Uber steal Google's intellectual Property? And it was written by Charles Duig, and it was published October twenty two, two thousand eighteen, so you can find this. It's a very recent article. And here's Charles Dwig's description of this incident.

The car went onto a freeway where it traveled past an on ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a camera. A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and laying the camera merge into traffic, but Google software wasn't prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The cameras driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder, then, apparently trying

to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left. The camera pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Lewandowski, who acted as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the camera, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries. The Prius regained control and turned a corner on the freeway, leaving the camera behind. Lewandowski and Taylor didn't know how badly

damaged the camera was. They didn't go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self driving algorithm had contributed to the accident. That's not a great story. I mean it's written very well. No offense to the New Yorker or anything like that.

I mean, it's not a great thing to have in your historical record, no matter who you are, and it's particularly bad for a company that used to have the motto don't be evil. Now Lewandowski would actually double down

on the results of this incident. Rather than saying, whoops, my bad, I done did something terrible that caused damage, impossibly injury, certainly injury to his coworker, he ended up saying that the incident actually provided proof that there was work needed on the algorithms, and that Google could learn from the mistake, and that this was kind of that Silicon Valley philosophy of failure is good because you learn

from failure, okay well. The article from The New Yorker also states that there was at least one accident that happened while a driverless car was in autonomous mode that did not get reported to to the police or to

the press. According to the article, a car nicknamed Kit after good Old Night Writer, was rear ended at an intersection when the autonomous car breaked suddenly after being unable to differentiate a yellow light from a red light, so they stopped short or stopped too suddenly, and the car behind them was unable to stop and ran into them.

As for Lewandowski, he would stay at Google until two thousand and sixteen, when he'd leave in order to go found a new company called Auto O t t O. Auto would consult with Uber for their driverless car program. Google executives would allege that Leven Owlski took proprietary information

and trade secrets with him in this move. They had proof that he had downloaded and transferred an enormous number of files, though there were questions about how valuable those files actually were, and Uber would ultimately fire Lewandowski as this case developed. The actual trial happened in early two thousand eighteen and it was marked with a lot of messy, complicated legal maneuvers on all sides. One day I may have to do a full episode just on that lawsuit

and what came out of it. But we can skip to the end. Google's Weymo, because that's what the that's what Project Chauffeur evolved into, was a subsidiary company called Weymo would have ultimately settled out of court with Uber. All right back to driverless cars in the same year that Lewandowski would leave Google. We get to that publicly acknowledged accident that was the fault of Google's autonomous technology.

So this was the first time that the public heard about a traffic accident that was quote unquote caused by Google's driverless car tech. It happened at another intersection, No big surprise there. Here's the description from the incident report with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and it goes

like this. A Google Lexus Model autonomous vehicle Google a V was traveling in autonomous mode eastbound on El Camino Real in a real I guess in mountain view in the far right hand lane, approaching the Castro Street intersection. As the Google A V approached the intersection, it signaled its intent to make a right turn on the Red onto Castro Street. The Google a V then moved to the right hand side of the lane to pass traffic in the same lane that was stopped at the intersection

and proceeding straight. However, the Google a V had to come to a stop and go around sandbags positioned around a storm drain that was blocking path. When the light turned green, traffic in the lane continued past the Google a V. After a few cars had passed, the Google a V began to proceed back into the center of

the lane to pass the sandbags. A public transit bus was approaching from behind the Google a V. Test drivers saw the bus approaching in the left side mirror, but believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the Google a V to continue. Approximately three seconds later, as the Google a V was re entering the center of the lane, it made contact with the side of the bus.

The Google a V was operating in autonomous mode and traveling at less than two miles per hour, and the bus was traveling at about fifteen miles per hour at the time of contact. The Google a V sustained body damage to the left front fender to the left front wheel,

and one of its driver's side sensors. There were no injuries reported at the scene, so, in other words, this was a pretty minor crash all things considered, and the report even managed to make it sound like while Google would not dispute that this was the fault of the driverless car, there were still some shade to cast at the bus driver, who was quote unquote expected to stop

or slow down. So publicly it sounded like driverless cars were doing really well around six though in self limited tests we weren't seeing autonomous cars sent into unfamiliar territory at this point, and assuming the New Yorker article is accurate, and I have no reason to assume otherwise, there were at least several incidents that could have changed public perception about how safe those cars really were. They were just

being kept on the hush hush. I've got more to say about Google and other companies and driverless cars in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. We'll come back to Google in a moment, but first let's chat a little bit about some of the other companies that are pursuing driverless car technology. One of them I've already mentioned a couple of times,

and that would be Uber. Now. At the two thousand fourteen re Slash Code conference the Code Conferences was known as Travis Kalenik, who is CEO and or was the CEO and the co founder of Uber, talked about autonomous cars in a pretty ominous way, I would say. He said, quote the reason Uber could be expensive is you're paying for the other dude in the car when there is no other dude in the car. The cost of taking an Uber anywhere is cheaper even on a road trip.

End quote. And by dude in the car, kalen Nick was talking about the driver. So here's a guy who is the head of a ride haling service, a company that employs thousands of drivers, say yeah, but man, can't you just imagine what the world would be like if we didn't have to pay those drivers. The message was that trips would cost less for customers. It would also mean that Uber would be able to keep more of

the money. It wouldn't have to share any cash out to any employees, at least not any drivers, and it would put the company's own drivers out of work. If such a future were to come true, it was more than a little harsh. I would say, I would call it demoralizing if I were driving for Uber and I heard that the company's leadership was saying, I can't wait to replace you with a robot. It makes me feel

not so great about my job. Klinik also put forth an idea that frequently comes along with the concept of autonomous cars, which would be the end of private car ownership. Rather than purchasing a car, at least in a densely in populated environment, you would just use a driver less

vehicle to take you places. The cost per trip could potentially be low enough that you would actually be saving money compared to purchasing your own car, plus paying insurance and all that kind of stuff, not to mention maintenance and parking and that kind of thing. All of those payments would be gone. You would just be paying on

a per trip basis. And in fact, a lot of the futures involving driverless cars, a lot of the future scenarios that various people project, assume that we're mostly going to be interacting with fleets owned by car hailing services like Uber and Lift. We won't own these driverless cars and these visions of the future, because why would we We would just use a ride hailing service. Again, this only makes sense if you're living in a fairly densely

populated area, UH city or a suburb. It makes less sense the further out from a city you live, but you could see it working at least in some scenarios. Uber's pursuit has made plenty of headline over the years, including some very grim ones. In March two thousand eighteen, a woman crossing Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona, was struck by a self driving Uber vehicle. It was actually in autonomous mode, and the woman died from her injuries. The car was a Volvo x C nine suv. There were

no passengers in the vehicle apart from the human operator. UH. The human operator was supposed to act as emergency backup, but again, the car was in self driving mode at the time of the accident. UH. Google would go on to say that the driver was distracted and that Google's system would have been able to respond appropriately in time, which maybe true, but I'm not sure as the classiest

thing to say in the wake of someone's death. Anyway, Uber would suspend all autonomous testing in Arizona as well as in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Toronto. In response, and the state of Arizona was essentially really come down on Uber and Uber would just completely pull the plug in Arizona for the time being anyway, as far as autonomous cars go. An investigation revealed that the possible cause of the accident was that the vehicle's emergency braking system had

been disabled when an autonomous mode. Again, since that accident, Uber has pulled out of Arizona. They've also laid off some of the employees who are working in the autonomous car division. UH they have petition to renew testing and other cities. But UM and they're not done, you know. Even though they had a setback, they're not out of the driverless car business. They're still working toward developing a

driverless car fleet. In fact, the company had ordered twenty four thousand self driving Volvo SUVs, which are scheduled to begin shipping in two thousand nineteen. Toyota also announced it would invest a half a billion dollars in Uber. This was an addition to a obviously existing partnership between the two companies, and that Toyota was going to incorporate Uber self driving technology into its C and M and events

for its own sort of a ride sharing fleet service. Meanwhile, Lift is also chasing after a self driving autonomous fleet. UM they made a partnership with General Motors and GM has its own initiative for a self driving fleet that one's called Cruise. That on was scheduled to launch also in two thousand nineteen. Ford also has plans for self

driving cars and a ride sharing capacity. Like I said, that seems to be the the big model is the idea that these cars would be prohibitively expensive for most consumers, so it doesn't make a whole lot of business sense to build them out for your average private car owner. It makes more sense to build them out for a ride sharing service where you will generate revenue over a long term, as opposed to trying to sell them for a profit to a single person. And uh Ford, however,

they're there, uh their timelines a little more modest. They're looking at starting in twe Then there's Tesla and it's autopilot feature, which I should add has been marketed as a driver assist feature. It has not been marketed as a truly autonomous vehicle option, or at least that's not

the official corporate messaging. Tesla can get a little cheeky with the way they message stuff out, but all the official use cases state that as a driver, you're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel at all times. You're not supposed to give up control. Uh, you can allow it to take over, but you aren't to just sit back and watch it happen, which, of course has not stopped people from doing just that thing, despite the fact that the company has said don't do that thing.

The company initially rolled out the autopilot feature as a software update, which is actually really cool. The idea of rolling out a software update and sending it out to cars and suddenly they have this autopilot feature that's really neat. That's something that you wouldn't have seen, you know, five years ago with cars. So that happened back in two thousand fifteen, so I guess you'd see it three years ago,

but not five years ago. But this semi autonomous system has been involved in at least two fatal car crashes over the last few years. The first happened in Steen when a Tesla car and autopilot mode collided with a truck that was turning across the path of traffic. The Tesla failed to detect the truck was there and was unable to stop in time. The second fatal accident happened in when a Tesla vehicle and autopilot collided with a concrete highway lane divider at high speed. Then we get

back to way MOW. That's spinoff from Google that's probably the most famous of all the autonomous vehicle projects. According to the company, it's test vehicles have driven more than ten million miles in autonomous mode, though to Lewandowski's point, some considerations should be dedicated to the fact that many of those miles were over very specific routes. So yes, millions of miles traveled, but if they are millions of

the same miles, that has limited utility. In December two thousand eighteen, Weymo is launching, or perhaps has already launched, depending on when you hear this, a self driving service available to people who have opted into the company's early writer program and the services in Phoenix, Arizona, which I assume is a delicate matter in the wake of the tragedy that happened in Tempe, Arizona in spring of with

that Uber crash. The service is called Weymo one and like other ride hailing services, customers will use an app to hail a car. They will designate where they want to be picked up where they want to be dropped off. The cost of the ride will be dependent upon actors, like what time of day it is and how far away the trip or how how much distance the trip will take. The cars are Chrysler PACIFICA minivans, and they do have some controls on the inside for passengers to

use in various situations. There's a button that can initiate essentially an emergency pull over, so you can have the car pull over at any point during the ride. UH. There's also a contact support button that will put a

passenger in UH in contact with customer support. So it sounds like two thousand nine is going to be a really big and potentially scary experiment to see if autonomous cars are really ready to enter into real service, at least in limited markets, and it may well be that the results will see will show these vehicles are more safe, reliable, and efficient than vehicles that are operated by human drivers. But if there are more accidents or evidence of companies

trying to cover up at SENS. That's gonna be a big problem. It also shows how there's a huge disconnect between that Silicon Valley philosophy of fail big, fail fast fail often, you know, making risky decisions, and Silicon Valley is considered to be a really good trait, not a bad one. Being risk averse is a bad trait in Silicon Valley. It's better to keep throwing yourself out there as hard as you can without any fear of failure, because if you do succeed, you've gotta reap incredible benefits.

And if you fail, well, you just you learn something in that process and then you just do better the next time. You know, people like Lewandowski appear to embrace that philosophy. But on the other hand, when you get to your average schmos like me, then you have the reality of the situation sync in. Because these aren't just lines of code in software. These are technologies that could dramatically change someone's life in really horrible ways if something

is wrong. See if I use an app, Let's say I'm using I don't know a pizza delivery app, and let's say something screws up and my pizza is lost in the ether like that, that order never really goes through, and I'm staying around waiting for pizza and I'm hungry. Well, that sucks, but I'm gonna live. I can order another pizza. But if an autonomous car messes up, someone could die. So failing big failing often in the in the sense of autonomous cars in the real world, is what I

would argue an irresponsible approach. And yes, we learn more through our failures than we do through our successes, but again, when it comes to human lives, you can't be too

cavalier about that. Now, this naturally leads into what will be the topic of the next episode of tech Stuff, which is a broader, more philosophical discussion about autonomous cars and ethics, not to mention realistic versus un balistic views of where we are with the technology and where we should be or where we need to be in order to have a broad rollout, so to speak, of the tech.

So in the next episode, I'm going to spend more time talking about those sort of big picture ideas, everything from the different levels of autonomy two where we are two various problems with some of these approaches even Weymo, which I would argue despite the the alleged incidents that went underreported between two thousand eleven and two thousand fourteen, it appears to be the most responsible of the the large projects I've read about again Big Picture of You,

even Weymo. Their approach has certain drawbacks that will talk about in the next episode. Things that UH mean that it may work in most situations. When you get into unusual situations, which happen all the time, uh, it doesn't work nearly as well. But that's what we'll talk about

our next episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a huge topic like driverless cars that would require multiple episodes, or something where you want to really focused episode about specific technology or a person in tech. Maybe there's someone you would like me to interview, let me know. Send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or go to our website that's tech Stuff Podcast dot com.

There you can find the different ways to contact me on social I look forward to hearing from you. Don't forget to head over to t public dot com slash tech stuff and check out our merchandise. Every purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and pathans of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com