TechStuff Classic: High Tech at High Speed

tech you're you're finding in vehicles. Keep in mind this is from things have changed, like this is before we started talking about stuff like paying a subscription feed in order to access your heated car seats. I'm sure that they would have a lot to say about that as well.

But let's sit back and enjoy this classic episode. So today we're gonna talk about a little more in depth about some of the technology that was on display at cs SEN, specifically in regards two cars, which is why I got Scott onto the show here to kind of gauge his reactions and maybe even here your insight on some of this stuff. Well, you know I've read about it. Now you were at the show. Of course, you saw

this stuff firsthand. A lot of this is just me looking at reviews of you know, what everybody else has written about this stuff. So I'm getting, you know, a different view of the whole thing. I don't get the hands on experience, but um, I'll do my best to try to keep up with you. But really the reaction maybe more of what you're going for here, because we've

got opinions both ways about this. I mean, I know that your listeners have heard us uh, I guess butt heads and a couple of contutes in the past, or at least they heard that one very special episode where I I pulled the rug out from under you. I still have nightmares. That was the one where I think, I think the question was Scott, I'm gonna give you a scenario that in like ten years it's illegal to drive a car, And then then I watched your you

just kind of wilt from that point on. Yeah. So one of the things I want to just mention right off the top before going into any specifics, is that the car industry is always played a part in CS as long as I have been going. This was my eight year going, and typically the North Hall of the convention center is where you'll find the car text stuff.

Occasionally there will be some things out in the the actual parking lots that are around the convention center to show practical demonstrations of stuff like driver assist technologies that sort of thing. But typically most of the the exhibits are inside, so their static displays, they're not you know, you're not gonna get in the car and drive around

or anything. But I've noticed that the trend has been growing year over year that that we're seeing more and more car technologies make their way into the show floor, which is kind of interesting. I mean, I get that their consumer technology, but often when I hear consumer technology, I'm thinking of smaller things, things smaller than a vehicle, right like maybe as big as like a refrigerator, But mostly I'm thinking of things in the television stereo system world,

not things that you park in a garage. Well, you know, sometimes they get around this by just bringing in maybe the cockpit, the driver cockpit and the seat that is, you know, integral to whatever they're trying to show or display, and and that's enough. But sometimes they want to bring the whole vehicle because it's a whole package. Now at this point, everything is connected to everything else, and they want to show you how it all works together and

how it feels when you're actually in there. There true to life product that they're going to be coming out with soon. And in fact, I noticed that there were a couple of a couple of early reveals that happened at this show that I just wanted to mention. They brought, well, Chevrolet brought to brand new vehicles for actually there aren't gonna be out until the end of and this is

what's really weird to me. Brought out the Chevy Bolt, which is the hatchback or the smaller version of the Chetty Volts I guess, the updated version, And uh, it's kind of it wasn't really a reveal, it sort of was. They wanted to show off the whole technology, the whole vehicle.

But later they took it to the Detroit Auto Auto Show the I guess, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, and then that's where they officially revealed that vehicle, even though everybody at c YES had already seen it had been had been shown off like a week and

a half earlier. Yeah, and similar with the Chevy Cruise hatchback, and I think that they wanted to show some of their safety technologies and some of their their advanced technologies that they were going to be bringing out in about what about a year now at this point of year

and a half something like that. Uh, so interesting how they would really reveal them to the public there and then give them the official reveal you know where they pull off, you know, they do the dramatic Yankee off of the cover or you know, I have a drive

out on stage at the Detroit show. Yeah, it's interesting to see ce S play home to that sort of announcement or non announcement almost where you do get this early look at stuff that normally would be reserved for an auto show or or even just a press event for that specific company. Um, it's kind of showing how

c e S and cars are meshing together. In fact, that's going to be a theme throughout this episode, is about how we're seeing sort of high text stuff outside of the direct control of an automobile make its way into the vehicle, and some things you wouldn't expect to see in an automobile that do make its way into that automobile. Generally it's apps and things like that should get it, but there's some hardware changes and some other

surprising things along the way to right. And the first thing I want to start off with Scott is talking about Toyota. I want to get that out of the way. So, first of all, full disclosure, I was there at c S partially uh in my role as host of Forward Thinking, which is sponsored by Toyota. This show is not sponsored by Toyota, but I just wanted to get that all the way. Uh. So they had a presentation that they were calling moving Safely into Future Mobility, and it was

all really about artificial intelligence. Now, in two thousand and fifteen, it was announced that Toyota was going to fund two, well at least to start with two different research facilities, one near Stanford, one near m i T dedicated to researching artificial intelligence, specifically in regards to automotive industry, but beyond that as well. And then it was announced that they were going to put in a billion dollars over the next five years into these two research facilities. And

they're they're actually working on two different things. So the Stanford group is working on something where you are trying to eliminate uncertainty in AI. And by that what they mean is, Scott, You're you're driving your car. You're driving down at highway speeds on a highway and there's you notice that the car in front of you, uh that it's got some barrels in the bed of a truck. And one of the barrels happens to to fly out, and you have a time to react, so you managed

to swerve all the way. You as a human being, you're able to recognize this extrapolate from past experience kind of no, because you know the car and know the road. You know sort of what you can do, what's within your abilities to do in reaction to something like that. The thing that the Stanford folks are working on is how do you program that kind of ability into artificial intelligence? Because machines are really good and reacting in a specific

way to specific scenarios. So in other words, you could program in, all right, if a bicyclist swerves into your lane, then you slow down like you have that. If this, then that, But you can't anticipate everything, so this is like a split second reaction. Uh. Everything that goes into a human split second reaction and is what they have to some kind of find some kind of way to develop for their own AI system to recognize and react the proper way so that it what Well, here's the

here's the question though. Does it react to preserve the lives of the people that are in the car. Does it react to preserve the lives of people that maybe are walking on the sidewalk? This is the classic trolley problem. Okay, well, okay, yeah, that's right. So who does who does the system protect? Does it protect the driver of the vehicle or does

it protect the people around surrounding that? And that's and that's one of the questions that has to be asked, right, like how how you know knowing that there's going to be ultimately at some point a scenario where a car will have to quote unquote decide to do something that is going to put someone in harm's way, how do you determine what how the car will will make that decision? And that's that's part of it is just this idea of you can program AI to handle the mundane situations

of driving. Really well, we we have pretty got that down right. The manufacturers are essentially doing that now, they just can't legally say that you're allowed to operate that vehicle without a driver in the driver's seat, right, So under normal operating conditions, so a normal day like in a in a temperate area, So we're not talking about whether conditions like ice or snow. We're not talking about you know, traffic system where maybe the traffic lights are

on the blank. That could obviously cause issues with a car that is designed to wait until a green light comes up, that kind of stuff, But under normal operating conditions they're very safe. The point that Toyota was making is that that's not the way the world works, and that you could argue that right now, we have a million mile safety record with autonomous cars, just because that's

the number of miles autonomous cars have traveled collectively. But they argue that we really need a trillion mile safety record to prove that autonomous cars are safe enough for us to hand over control two machines and not be

at least partially in control. Well, that's part of the reason we always see this this decade out date where they say we're gonna have this ready by or in some cases we don't even plan to have anything fully autonomous, and until fifteen years from now, but we're gonna do these these incremental steps along the way so that in

ten years we're gonna have one that's pretty good. It's nearly there, and so that's exactly what Toyota is saying that they want to have focus on driver assist systems where the AI can come in and help out if something extraordinary happens or if something happens outside of your awareness, uh, and help you avoid an accident, but it doesn't completely take over for the driver. Now check me if I'm wrong here. But I saw a just a little video clip of a display that was happening at one of

the Toyota booths. And I don't know if this is tied into with this exactly, but they had must look what looked like a fish tank. It was a big area with the table and yeah, they had a lot of miniature, you know, scale model cars. I don't know if they were previous cars or what they were, but uh, they were rolling around and I guess when they initially kind of released all these cars, maybe ten or twelve

cars into this uh this this boxes glass box. Uh, they were all bumping into each other and it was just kind of chaos and the cars were then learning how to drive around each other without colliding with it with objects that were in the display and the and other vehicles, and by the end of the demonstration, or at least when they were showing this video, clear when they were recording this clip, the cars were not colliding

at all. They weren't touching. They were you know, sensing each other and moving to make something, you know, making some kind of avoidance maneuver in a in a smart way so they didn't bump into another vehicle or another object or the wall or whatever. It was just it

was a clever way to show that. Yeah, it was neat because again they you know, Toyota had a couple of vehicles on the show floor, but this was a way of showing off this technology, uh, in a live setting that still didn't require you to actually go outside and see a bunch of Prius is kind of pirouet around each other. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about,

because I got a good look at this. So, yeah, it's sort of a grid and each car had its own route that it had to go along, and at first it was trying to go along this route, not really caring what the other cars in the in the area we're trying to do, and that's where they were having these little collisions and stuff and figuring things out that nice and when the learning algorithm kicked in, then they were able to start, you know, was pausing to let another car go in front of them before our

cross in front them before they went and uh, it became this very intricate, almost like a dance that you could watch, and they had a video streaming in the background explaining the whole process that this was a machine learning algorithm that would be applied on a much grander scale to technology that would find its in cars down the road. It's almost like a like a fish school mentality, you know, like they all move one way together and it's all fluid and there's not really much of fish

colliding all the time. You know, they all know where the other one is going. It's like maintaining that distance. Yeah, it's it seems it seems like that. It looks like that when you see it happening. Yeah, it's actually it's actually pretty cool to watch. Like I got to watch it for a really long time as we were setting up a shot and so but yeah, it was neat

seeing how these were working. And in fact, a lot of the people from Toyota said, yeah, some of our competitors were coming in to make sure that it wasn't like remote controlled vehicles that was all actually autonomous. And in fact it was autonomous. It's just like a little little bitty model cars. Yeah. You know, one thing as this that you sent me an article at least from

the New York Times. Yeah, that that mentions this, you know, Toyota investment of one billion dollars in artificial intelligence here in the United States, and it said, and I thought this was pretty interesting that artificial intelligence technologies were disappointing for decades. And I've never really thought on the disappointing. I mean, I see them incrementally growing, you know, getting better. Yeah,

but I never really saw them as being disappointing. I think part of it is that there is the the public expectation of what artificial intelligence is versus the actual definition of artificial intelligence. So if you if you look at artificial intelligence as being a very broad spectrum that encompasses a ton of stuff and on on the the simplest level, it's on the the idea of sensing a change in the environment and being able to react to it.

That's the type of artificial intelligence. And of course the far end of the spectrum is human like or superhuman intelligence, which obviously we have not really achieved. Um. But you know a lot of people think that that superhuman or human like intelligence is the definition of AI. They don't realize necessarily that artificial intelligence means lots of different stuff. Well just give you an example. I mean that this article in particular mentioned Siri as a as a tremendous

advancement in artificial intelligence. Now, I know that you've probably talked about this at length on the show, but I can kind of understand it. That's like, finally the general populace, I guess, is getting a chance to kind of kind of toy with this a little bit and see what it can do, what it's capable of. And I know it's a it's I don't know, I have trouble calling

it true artificial intelligence. Yeah. No, it's it's it's voice recognition, which is already impressive, right, And then it's it's it's pairing that with UH an ability to execute uncertain apps or do searches. But then you think about it, if you're gonna call Sirie artificial intelligence, you might as well call a Google Search artificial intelligence, because Siri is just really a new way to interface with a system that's

been in place for several years exactly now. Okay, so, but we're seeing more and more stuff like Siri implemented into automob be recognition. We'll be talking a lot about that, and to be able to control certain things in the car, which are what you're getting far more advanced than they were even last year. Um. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, the interaction,

the level of interaction. I mean, I gotta say, I've never really been all that impressed with any of these apps that you can have on your phone that maybe turn on the lights in your living room or you know, you can adjust your thermostad like you stand to get it. You say that, but until you convince your loved ones that your house is haunted because you are using the app while you're at work to turn the lights on and off, you really haven't lived. I see, I see.

So it's it's good for practical jokers too. Yeah. No, I've I've been guilty of that. I've turned the lights off on my wife while I was at work. That's pretty funny trick, you know. Honestly, like what we're going to cover here today, it goes far beyond that. I mean, because again, like I said, I'm not I haven't really been all that you know, wowed by this stuff up

until this point. And now now it seems like you can re lee talked to this thing and make it do what you really want, I mean, and there's far reaching implications with that. Yeah, I think, uh, I think it's really cool that, I mean. That was one of the really big stories this year l c ES was that this sort of connected card technology is really starting to make sense, right, it's it's gone beyond. It made me think of the way smart TVs were when they

first came out. Smart TVs when they first came out, you get a widget on your screen and it would tell you, you know, what the temperature was outside and how likely is it going to rain? And it wasn't very attractive, it wasn't very useful, and often it was difficult to navigate around these systems because it was more like, hey,

we can put internet content on a television. Let's go ahead and do that before we figure out what's the best way to incorporate it so that the experience is a positive one and I think cars have had the same thing they are getting there. Now I'll tell you because this this whole Forward Alexa, I think the years you've mentioned as this is one of the top so you wanted to talk about you mind if we go

to that right now to it all right? So Ford is kind of working with Echo and and Alexa and uh, and they're incorporating this into their already existing SINC program and I think they're at the third generation of the SINC program for their cars. How do you know SINC program is the right way to say that platform platform, it's a better way. So you can go to forward dot com and check out what SINK will do. But I'll tell you that this next level where they've taken

out of the way. They've integrated everything that SINK will do with Echo and with Alexa. So that's like the is it a personal assistant or what do they call they call them now they're calling a voice concierge voice concierge. So I was reading an article about this from Gelapnic and it's a car site and one of the things

and this impressed me. It's not just turn the lights on and or you know, set the set the temperature, it says, you know, you can you can from your car on the way home, you can say, Alexa, turn the kitchen lights on, open the Gradu door, heat the oven to four degrees, and turn on a baseball game. So when you get home, all this stuff is ready to go. It's all set to go. And and Mercedes Benz is working with with Nest to do something very similar.

So other auto manufacturers are working with different companies to do similar things. One of them is working with Microsoft and has Cortana, which is Microsoft version of a voice concierge, incorporating that. We'll get to that in a little bit too. And and you can you can set start times for your car. So here's the usual routine. You know, you've got the automatic start that you know, the manufacturer builds

into the system. That's that's one thing, right, But you still and I know this sounds kind of silly, but you still have to you don't go near the window, I guess, and look at your car and and push the button and knowing you know the previous night, you turn the heat on high and the defroster on and all that stuff and it sets or you know, some manufacturers probably has settings that automatically do that, but you have some type of physical interaction you have to do

with your car in the morning. You have to remember, I'm going to turn that on ten minutes before I go out. Clear, clear off the frost on the windshield. Make sure the car is a nice temperature before I get in exactly so about comfort. Right. So this system, this is this new forward Alexa ecosystem, will allow you to set a time like on on Monday morning, I want the car to start at five am. I want the interior temperature to be seventy five degrees um. I want,

you know, whatever you can. You could adjust that, you can turn the radio station to whatever you want. But you can program all that in days ahead of time. It's like setting a schedule for your car. My question is with that, though, what if things change and you forget to do that, then your car is running out in the driveway for you know, an hour and a half or whatever before you remember that it's actually running.

I would imagine that, assuming you're having this worked with the echo, which is essentially a speaker that has a microphone embedded in it so you can speak into it, it can talk back to you. Uh. I would imagine how fail safe would be to have the speaker chime or otherwise alert you that your car has been running but hasn't been doing anything after a certain amount of time has passed, maybe five minutes. That's that's that would

be my solution to that problem. But it's it is something that obviously you have to think about when you're trying to implement these kind of approaches into the automobile industry. I mean, this is stuff that we've seen in smart homes to some degree or another, and to see it's kind of creep into cars. You know, hopefully people are taking lessons they've learned from the other implementations and trying

to figure out the best practices when applying it to cars. Yeah. Sure, and you know, you can schedule service reminders and things like that. No, that's not anything new because cars can do that kind of on their own. You can program that in for just a date. But they can also detect if there's you know, um um something missing out of your refrigerator. So let's say that you're at the grocery store and you're in your connected car, and you've got your connected home and your device that you know

interfaces between the two of them. You're in the grocery store parking lot, though, and you don't remember if you have milk, and you can you can now check while you're in the car at the grocery store and check to see if you have milk in the fridge at home without having to have somebody there to say, yeah, pick up a galan of milk on the way home. Right, So that this does require, obviously that you have various

smart appliances to to network together. Right. Yeah, If it's just a regular old fridge or or a kegenator as as we might have back at home, it's not going to be able to chime up. But yeah, it's this interconnectivity. And in fact, that's one of the big assets that Amazon has is the Echo can work with lots of other different home automation products, not even not just once from one company, which is a huge deal. Scott, I can't tell you how big the deal this is to

have a connected home. Like in the early days, everyone was trying to make sure their approach was going to become the standard approach, which meant that there was no standard, you had a bunch of proprietary approaches that wouldn't talk to each other. So products like the Echo and some apps that I've seen are finally getting to the point where you can interface with different products from different companies, so you don't have to i in on just one

system if you happen to like one manufacturer's refrigerator. Let's say you like Whirlpool and you really want the newest smart Whirlpool fridge, which, by the way, I've seen and it's pretty sweet. If you wanted one of those, but you wanted to have your other devices from a different manufacturer, it would be difficult to have them all talking to

each other. But something like the Echo can act like a hub, and then your car becomes an extension of that hub, and that's where you can do things like check to see if like if when was the last time I bought milk? So, oh, it's two weeks ago, Like, oh, I gotta buy milk, you know. And that's the whole reason we're talking about it today, because they're adding the automobile to this whole mix that you know, you can

it's now completely mobile. You can really you can really truly control your home from your car, and you can do a lot of things in your car from home as well. I mean the things that you just wouldn't think that you would normally need. And it's it's it's all luxury. I love the idea of it to like some of it. It's definitely luck tree, but some of it is incredibly helpful for people who are both absent

minded and a little O c D. So. I don't know Scott if you've ever experienced this, but my wife and I when we go out anywhere, there will come in time, usually when we're about a mile and a half away from home, when the question was the front door locked, or did the garage door come all the way down? Or was the oven on something some variation of that will be asked, and then ultimately what has to happen is we're a turn trip home before we

ever get to our destination. And ALEXA. One of the things that can do is it can tell you and presumably at least in future or implementations, it can even correct things if they are incorrect, Like if you say, hey, is the front door locked, No, it's not, it's unlocked. Can you lock the front door for me? Yes? Click and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. Very smart. Now, I want to show you something, and

this is only your benefit, not the listeners benefits. To see this page where I have the word yes with two exclamation points, I have underlined the line that says, asking, for example, whether the gardge door is closed. Every time I leave my house, I look at the gradge door, make sure it's closed, and I say, I whispered to myself, the gardge door is closed. Yeah. And it's like a

little routine. It's a pattern I have. And if I if I ever leave without doing that, I have to return and make sure that garage door is closed because I got a lot of valuable stuff in there, my tools, I got my project car in there. Who knows what else is in there, but bicycles things like that. See, for us, not only do we have stuff that's valuable in our garage, but that's a direct route into our house and so and so it's where all our other

stuff happens. To me, Yeah and so, so you mean when you walked out the door, you didn't say the gradge door is locked. We actually say yeah. We say we say Dora is down, that is That is the That is the key phrase. And I am not joking. If we pull out of our home area and neither of us have said door is down, that won't come a point where my wife say, did the garage door

go down? And because I don't want to lie to my wife, like I want to get to where I'm going, but I never want to get to where I'm going more than I want to you know, like that that's never so great that I will lie. I'll say, I don't know. I am turned around and go look. I am sometimes ridiculed for my my whispering of the gradge door is down. It's when you say closed. When when you say it and you've you've got that, like all right, that chapter is closed. Now a new chapter can begin.

This is the journey chapter. Isn't it funny? I know people have this type of thing. It's very low level of c D. I I understand that, I get it, but I know people have this for all kinds of items in their house and their automobile. This really does

smooth out some of that. How helpful would that be if you're ten miles away and you can check to make sure that stupid gradge door is down otherwise, right, or you didn't leave the dishwasher on or something when you're gone because your fear of you know, flooding the kitchen store. And then and the best thing, Scott, absolute best thing, Alexa will never mock you for that is probably the best part of the whole thing. Scott and yours truly will talk more about high tech at high

speed after we come back from this quick break. So moving on to some of the other manufacturers that we saw, we stopped by Volkswagen and uh so, of course Volkswagen obviously still in the wake of the pr disaster that was the clean Diesel scandal, so they were they trotting out their latest diesel technology. They oddly enough left that off the show floor, an interesting move. Yeah. They instead decided to show off an electric vehicle concept design called

the Buddy. Yeah I did that. I did that on a previou A c S episode and got a lot of people saying, I know who Polly Shore is, thank you for the Polly Shore reference. Um, but yeah, the Buddy electric vehicle concept, which it's kind of funny. It relates in a way to another car that we'll talk about, the F Zero one. And I know that you and Ben covered Faraday Futures f F zero one in an episode, right we did about it, so, uh, in a similar

way to what that concept was. Volkswagen's idea was to create a sort of modular approach to designing electric vehicles, and so this was really just a representation of that idea. That being said, it kind of had this sort of quirky retro futuristic design to it, very angular, very uh odd looking. But I really dug it. Do you think it? I mean, it was it trying to play on the

old VDO microbus thing. I think so a little bit, but definitely in a way that was not like it was obviously not a a uh you know, a recreation of the microbus just with new lighting and stuff. It was the design itself had changed pretty dramatically, Okay, And you know I heard one of the one of the biggest parts of this whole thing that made it interesting was that, uh, it's not going to support any kind of It was designed without without the intent to support

any kind of internal combustion engine. So it's purely electric and they're going full on with this and saying this is the way we're gonna we're gonna build this vehicle, this platform vehicle, uh, and it's gonna be customizable. Of course, we're gonna be able to kind of change things around. But they've got an idea that right now it's gonna use. It can use up to three different types of batteries. Right, So there's three different types. There's the cylindrical, pouch and

prismatic cells. And I think right now they're only using two of those. They're using prismatic and pouch cells at this point. So they haven't um decided yet on the cylindrical, but they say it gives them the flexibility to adapt to whatever becomes the forerunner in that yield. Right. So with this approach, they can design any number of vehicle structures, like whether it's a car or a van or whatever,

they can go with that because of this module or approach. Uh. They just change out the size of the battery, the capacity of the battery essentially, and the size of the chassis obviously, but it gives them a common starting ground for lots of different vehicle types. And the the battery pack itself is flat and fits under the car, so you get this nice flat interior which made it incredibly roomy on the inside, not that we were allowed to

get in. No one was allowed to get very close to this thing, at least at the time we were there. It's surprising, isn't how much how much room that free up when it's a flat floor, Like, Yeah, it is phenomenal where it's just like you just look at it and you think, wow, I I would have so much room to stretch out, and you know, you can even have luggage in the cabinet law with passengers and it's wouldn't even get in the way. You get in and

it feels like an empty bust or something. Yeah, it's big, yeah, and it has The Buddy concept car had two motors, two electric motors, one for the front wheels, one for the back. Um supposedly had a hundred and one kilowatt hour capacity battery that would provide a driving range of three hundred seventy three miles, although when asked about it, Volkswagen essentially said, actually, that's what we're working toward, that's our goal. We're not there yet, so they packed it

down a bit. Yeah. Most people say around three hundred miles max. Nasty. I saw a different number that said when they ran it through testing based on the U S E P A cycle. So you know the way that they normally determined for these electric vehicles, the comparison miles, I guess the equivalent. They said the equivalent was going to be two D thirty three miles. But that's you know what I should even stay per gallon, that's the range. That's how long these batteries were less two or thirty three.

That's a significant drop from what they came out. Yeah, more than Yeah, so when they say three seventy three and it goes to significant. But what is interesting, and they didn't back down on this, is that they can charge of the battery capacity in about fifteen minutes. And that's pretty good. Yeah. If that if that holds, if that sticks, and that's true, that's really good. That's significant step forward. It's good. I don't know that's good enough.

Like like Tesla's idea about having not just the super fast charging stations, but also the option to switch out a battery if you are on the go. That makes a lot of sense for people who are used to being able to pull into a gas station and refill in a couple of minutes. It does, but look, I'm on gas stations. There are yeah, sure, there are four in every corner. Yeah, that's true. It's I don't mean, I don't mean to shoot you down on that idea anything.

It's quick changing things. They can be far they can be a lot fewer and far between. I suppose for for the for the battery swaps, the the supercharger stations. However, I think those have to be fairly common because a Tesla right now s the charge times. If you have a supercharger station, or I think that's what they call it, a supercharger station, it takes you about one hour to fully charge the battery, and that's the three mile range. But if you don't have a supercharger station, you're just

relying on plane old electricity from the wall plug in. Uh, you get something like twenty two miles of range for every hour of charging. So that's a significant drop in well, it's a it's an increase in the time that would get somewhere. So I mean for v W to say of battery capacity in fifteen minutes, so what's of two thirty three miles, that's pretty good. Yeah, no, it's it's

it's definitely significant. Uh. And you know. They had some other cool features on this, including a big display screens that would replace your typical dashboard, so it was like a bunch of almost like tablets style computers. Um plus just your controls, just your controls were huge with cars this year. That's that's where you don't even have to

touch the screen. You can move your hands at a certain height and camera will detect the pre stuff your hand and then interpret that as a command, so you can swipe through options or select something by typically acting like you're pushing a button in mid air. That tends

to be the like you're playing charades or something. Yeah, you know, I saw that this is an infrared system, So it's kind of a cost cutting measure on their part because there are other ways to do it as well, but this one they claim they're Gonnase infra red just to keep cost down. Again, this is not really meant to be a production model. It's strictly a show card.

It's just really to show off the technologies that that Volkswagen has been working with, many of which may find their way into production vehicles in the future, but not necessarily the Buddy itself. You're not gonna find the buddy on a on a show floor for you to purchase. It's just a rolling test bed at this point. In fact, I should say that I suspect at least a few of the vehicles on the showroom floor at CS are no more than a shell with nothing that actually makes

the thing go. I think, faaradays, like that, isn't it. I remember trying to remember back to our program, and I think that it's it's not really on a power platform at this point. It's all theoretical. Yeah. I do not know the answer to that to be able to say definitively one way or the other, but it would not surprise me. I'll tell you that's not anything brand new.

Really show cars, even at the big auto shows in the past, there have been many times when they have to be pushed out on the stage or or they have some just really low low power module underneath. It's not like what they claim is under the hood. Um, you know, it's just something just to get out on the stage for the show and that's about it. Yeah,

never never look under the hood. I know that one of the Toyota fuel cell vehicles was like that, and that the chassis they were showing off was a concept, but the car underneath it was not actually a fuel cell vehicle, whereas the fuel cell vehicle they had on display was using a modified Toyota previously existing Toyota model

as the chassis. So it's just one of those things where it's it's like we have the idea, we have the technology, we haven't gotten into production yet, so we don't have a model that actually works with the technology we're talking about fully fully formed. And that's not every case.

I mean, they've been running driving concept cars or what they called dream cars for decades, of course, you know, since the beginning, but there were always those cases where they bring out some just crazy design that doesn't really

have anything under the hood or anything. And and it was kind of a big deal again back in the late eighties and early nineties when companies started making running driving production rather prototype vehicles, um, all these concept cars, and it was kind of like this thing really drives, Like I mean, it's the I think I'm I'm not gonna say the first or anything, but I remember like hearing about the Viper Dodge Viper, and they're like listening,

actually drives, we can drive it on the Indian helps five under track, like, no, way, that thing actually has a V ten and you know they claim it did, but it really did. And the Plymouth Prowler, and you know, vehicles like that along the way that you thought and all the cars that I thought were awesome when I was younger. Yes, well that's that's when it's kind of the resurgence of like, well, this thing actually does what we say it does, is that it's not just a shell. Yeah.

There were some other cool technologies on display to stick with a connected car and just your controls. BMW showed off their eye Vision Future Interaction Platform, which again is another network car. All those commands that you would issue to the car can be done by uh, touchscreen or by voice control or again by gestures um. And the steering wheel actually, did you see the steering wheel on this thing with the lights? Okay, so there are three

different modes of driving this vehicle. There's pure drive, where the vehicle is under the control of a human driver, at least presumably a human driver. A driver could be a dog. Well you would hope it would not be. I suppose it could be at this point. Then there was assist mode, which was kind of where you have that autonomous ability to kick into gear should something go

wrong to protect the driver and the car. And then you had pure autonomous mode or auto mode, and the steering wheel would light up to indicate which mode you were in. So if you were in automode, it would be blue steering wheel like pretty much at the um, you know, the three and nine positions up would be

blue like up to the top. And then if you wanted to switch over to pure drive, the lights would start to fade down from the top to the sides so that it would be an alert saying, hey, you should probably put your hands on the wheel now because here where the blue light is so so. And then before it would switch to pure drive mode, the lights turn red to indicate, hey, seriously, take the wheel. I'm not in control anymore. All right, let me tell you something. Yeah,

I got a major problem with this car. This is kind of way you invited me here. It was one of the minutes, the moment right here, because this could be a moment. Let me tell you, all right, this is the so, this is the BMW I eight they have modified. There's no doors in this car. There's no hood on this car, I mean roof on this car. But um, but inside is where all this technologies happen. And you get it, that's what the showcases. They want you to have a clear, unobstructive view of that. So

I get it. What I almost cannot believe I'm hearing from BMW, which by the way, used to be called, uh, the ultimate driving machine, right, okay, the ultimate driving machine. Now here's what. Here's what this says. BMW's latest technology reduces the amount of driver control to a minimum in order to simplify driving, and driving can be stressful for some. And that's when it goes into the three modes. Come on. This is part of the stuff that they that they're

you know, this is their message. I get it. There's okay, and we're all going there. Some of us are are screaming. And but this company in particular, and I understand. I understand that. You know that they have to keep up, that they have to remain relevance. I get That's why they're doing it. So I'm not I'm not that old that I don't understand that. I really do. They have to remain relevant, they have to they have to sell product, right,

So that's what they're doing. I get it. But for a company that that claims to be the ultimate drive machine, and they are known for building cars that drivers really really enjoy. They pay a premium to drive a BMW because of the experience. It's a driver's car, and there's certain vehicles. You could expect that out of Porsche as well. Uh, you know, you expect a certain experience when you get behind the wheel, and this is removing all that. You're just saying, I want the I want the brand name.

I wanted to be this I eight or whatever platform they put it in, but I don't really want to do anything. I don't want to experience that anymore. I'd rather just sit back and read a book maybe while I go to work. Why not take the train it start? It sounds to me like a glorious future. But let see the problem is your listeners have come to expect this kind of rant from me, So get you on the show. But honest, really, I mean, really think about it. I mean, this is supposed to be a driver's cards.

It's it's a it's an odd move from this manufacturer. That's all on SAE well, and to be fair, I mean they do still have the pure drive mode where I think that's what they're relying on that to to continue there there kind of their slogan about the driving experience while still also investing in these technologies that if they don't really look into that, they will literally be left behind. And I understand that not every vehicle is

going to receive this type of treatment. And they've got the rest of the product line, and if you look at BMW's page, you'll see that they have a lot of different products that are in fact a lot of fun to drive. Alright, we got a little bit more to say on this topic before we get to that, though,

Let's take another quick break. Did you happen to see the demonstration of their self parking technology for for the alright, So, so BMW has shown off self parking a couple of times, like it's not like it's brand new, except that this year they showed off that they had a new way to interact with self parking because usually you would get out of your car, you might have a button on your key fob that says park and you would press it in the car would pull itself into a parking slot.

Very impressive, you know, you know, yeah, and you can even maybe with something like Alexa have voice control where you could say park the car and then jump out and it would probably a car that would be cool too. BMW decided to go the air controller route. But just your controls. You can actually just your to your car to take a to take a spot, and to to move the car while you're outside of it to go

and park. Really yeah, they actually showed off. They had journalists sit in the passenger side, no one in the driver's seat, have a BMW representative standing there gesturing to the car and to the parking space, and the car would maneuver over into the parking I got to ask you this, do you have to have those flashlights with the cones on the end to do this? You have to have them, but I think it presents a certain element of style. I absolutely would plus the giant ear

mud right exactly. You know, the BMW dengines can get loud, so you want to be able to protect your ears. But yeah, so that's that's that's a shock to me. I I'll have to seek a video of this because I've got to see somebody directing their car as if it's an airplane into a potet. I think it was. I want to say it was the Verge where I saw the video demonstration of this particular technology. I should go on to say I didn't get a chance to see this personally. This was something that I saw after

I got back. This is one of the most frustrating things about attending CES is you get to see a lot of really cool stuff. But when you come back, you see all this really cool stuff that you didn't have a chance to experience yourself. There's just no way. There's no no, there is absolutely no way. And like even if you spent every single second running from thing to thing, you would still miss stuff. Um. So next we have Kia, which normally I think I wouldn't have

even wouldn't have even registered with me. But again Kia again moving on this this same sort of autonomous car bandwagon, I guess you could call it. UM introduced its drive Wise platform. Yeah, on the Soul e V platform. Right, So, uh, you know, it's in a product that they currently build, which makes sense. It's not like they're bringing out some concept vehagle that's a you know, pie in the sky

idea that maybe will never happen. They're saying, now we're gonna put it into our actual product right here's what here, here's what we have available right now that it works in. Yeah, and so right now, it's kind of a a advanced

driver assistance system or ADS. It's one of those where again similar to what I was talking about with Toyota, with with pretty much every do you like, it's this idea of a computer assisting a driver, normally just to intervene when there's something that the driver has not noticed or has it doesn't have the time to react to him or herself. So this is a partially autonomous system,

right because they've got to release dates. Yes, this was me the earlier one, the earlier one which is scheduled to debut in and another full ten years beyond that. So when is when they're gonna come out with the fully autonomous version. That's what they're projecting right now. I think, honestly, Scott, if I have to be like, if you nailed me down, I'd have to say I think a lot of these car companies are purposefully being conservative with those guesses. I

totally agree. I think I think certain companies that are not car companies, like Google, are really pushing the envelope as far as the autonomous car technology goes to the point where there will be enough demand from the consumer, are for some of those dates to get moved up. And I just think a lot of the car companies are trying to do two things. One, they want to make sure that they give themselves enough time to really develop the technology so that the vehicles they put out

are safe. Nobody wants the autonomous car version of the clean diesel scandal, because that's a version where people will lose their lives. So obviously there's that, And I think the other one is just that there's this fear, a well founded one. I would argue that the autonomous car future is also going to be the future where fewer people own personal vehicles. Yeah, no argument for me on those points. I think that's really gonna happen. I think a lot of people are going to jump on this

and want that. And I think that manufacturers are kind of hedging their beds a little bit insane, and we're gonna be fully autonomous. But I wouldn't be surprised if that date moves up by five years. I mean a

long long way. It's kind of that under promise over delivery thing, right, I mean, you don't want to say in we're gonna have a fully autonomous line and it's going to be fantastic, and the rolls around you look back at that new story and then you, you know, kind of press Kia and say, well where the fully autonomos vehicles and they have to kind of put their you know, head down and say, well, kick quite where? Yeah,

you know, maybe in five more years. I think I think part of it is also the idea that if you'd go with the driver assist route rather than the fully autonomous route, you can keep that culture of personal car ownership going longer, right because people will be interested in driving with these kind of vehicles. It's when you go the fully autonomous route where one vehicle price gets so high that the average person starts to have trouble affording one and two. There's less need to have one

in densely populated areas. Obviously, in rural areas that's a totally different story. But but in cities where you could presume presumably get a service going with electric or not even electric, but fully autonomous vehicles, um, then there's very little reason to own your own desk. See I totally understand that there's a time and place for this tepeon thing, and really it does work in some situations. Other situations

there's just no way that it would work. There's certain people that this type of this type of idea, this car sharing idea, this uh um, even even e V cars at this point the way they are right now wouldn't work for a lot of people. But for a lot of people they do. And it's a great thing. And I get the move to autonomous and people's excitement around it, but um, I don't think it's ever gonna

go either way. Yeah, I I used to be gung ho autonomous, but I've eased off on that a little bit just because I recognize there are I'm thinking of it too narrowly, right, I'm thinking of it from my perspective, my own personal experience of using vehicles. For me, it makes perfect sense pretty much all the time. But there are plenty of outliers that you would say, all right, well, know, personal ownership is never going to completely go away, not as long as we still have people living outside of

urban areas, and presumably that's going to continue. Um. But to get back to Kia, I want to ask you this, did you happen to look at their blind control system. It's a fingerprint scanner that identifies the driver, and then as you drive the vehicle, the vehicle begins to learn your style, and it learns what temperature you like to keep the car, and what stations you tend to listen to and UH and other ways that you actually handle the vehicle while you're driving it, and it builds a

profile that's personalized to you. And then if someone else drives the car and scans their fingerprint, they get a profile. And then every time you drive the car afterward, when you scan, it knows it's you, automatically adjusts all those settings so that you get the driving experience you want and the other driver gets the driving experience it's they want. Now, there have been very analog versions of this along the way.

You can say this is this is driver one, driver to driver three and hit the button and the seat changes position, the steering wheel chages position, the temperature, controls, the radio stations, all that I get it. But this is doing it with with fingerprint technology. Um, that's pretty interesting, and you know, it's kind of reminds me of the way that the houses, as smart houses can adapt to the way, and you know, they know that at a certain time you come up from work and you want

the temperature to certain setting. You want this light on, but not that one. And then later in the evening turned that one off, turned that one on, and right it starts to learn your patterns and and things like that. I can see these two things working together. It's like, not pretty soon, you're just gonna be able to walk. You're gonna be able to walk through life without every

having to push another button or flip another switch. Yeah, I've always I've always mentioned this as uh, you know, it will come down to a conversation between you and another person about what's your reality like? Because here, here's what my reality is like, because everything is customizing itself to my convenience, my comfort, my preferences. So what's yours like? Because I bet you are a little different from me, and I'm curious what how you experience life compared to

how I experienced life. That's gonna be a real conversation in a few years. And it's strange, isn't it that you won't have that you won't have the same environment that you you share really because everything will be so as you said tailored, I guess to custom fit to you. It's gonna be so different. It's really it's really weird to think, like you you won't have to again flip the sweet. You won't if you do anything manually practically anymore.

I do think smart thermostats are gonna have to start seeking therapy for families like mine, where the preference is a matter of a couple of degrees and it's it's hotly contested territory. Yeah, I can understand that our is the switch on the side is almost worn out by the end of the season. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of the same for us. When we come back, Scott and I will end up concluding our discussion about high tech

at high speed after these messages. So we kind of mentioned Fair Day Future already, and you guys, like I said, did a full episode on it. Yeah, I mean, I've got I've got some I've got a pile of notes here on this whole thing. So you've you've seen this in person. I haven't. I've only read about it, and you know, kind of get the the idea that some people thought it was really fantastic, and other reviewers went

in and said, this is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know what they're doing bringing this car to the show because this has nothing to do with what the company is really. What the what the real messages here? Yeah? I I well it didn't in a way, but it but it wasn't a good representation of what they're gonna do, right, So the representation is similar to what we were talking

about with Volkswagen. This modular approach to building, designing and building vehicles, where you have a basic design that you can then modify for whatever purpose you need, whether it's a subcompact car, a race car, and suv, a truck, whatever it might be. You can adjust the foundation and then you have this modular battery system that allows you to add or remove batteries depending upon what vehicle it

is that you're planning on building. So subcntact compact cars don't need as much battery power, essay, a race car. I think they called it strings of batteries, didn't they. You can you can adjust the size of the string of batteries, right, Yeah, And they had a cool video that sort of showed the concept from very high level. But I like the idea a lot because it allows for rapid development and prototyping. I mean that the car that they had on display did not exist eighteen months ago.

It's a killer car, by the way. I love it. It looks like it's going fast while's sitting still. That's awesome. I really do like it. Good design. I I as soon as I'm not a Scott you know, I'm not a car guy. That's not me. I wanted to get behind the wheel of this car. When I saw it, it was just like and you would be the only one able to do that because it's a single seat car. It's so you know, to to drum up excitement, of course, brought out the race car version, Yeah, it was. It

was essentially a way of getting attention right. First of all, the brand new company. This company has not been around for very long, mostly mysterious. A lot of people had heard the name but didn't know a whole lot about it. It was getting most of its funding through China, so it's headquartered in Los Angeles, and it's going to have a manufacturing facility in Las Vegas. Uh. These were like the basic things people knew, but no one had seen anything or really knew what what was going on behind

the scenes. Found out it was this approach to making electric vehicles. That's their specialty, uh, taking this modular design so they could build any type of electrical vehicle. They have different power train, our drive train uh layouts. They can do so again depending up how what your car needs. If it doesn't need a whole lot of power, then

it's got a very simple drive train. If it's gonna need a lot of torque for something where you're gonna be hauling things or you're gonna be driving like an suv and areas. Obviously they would have a different drive train than from a subcombat car. Four motors instead of two or something like. Yeah, yeah, they had. They showed all the different variations where like there was one where it's like one motor attached to one wheel, and I was like, huh okay, they would be a little commuter car.

So they also had the ability. They said, well, our designs, one of the things we wanted to work in from the beginning was that if we wanted to make it an autonomous vehicle, we could add that on to the frame as well. So in other words, it's not automatically going to be an autonomous vehicle, but they have the option to make a any particular model, they go into production with an autonomous version of that car. Pretty simple thing in an all electric vehicle. Really yeah, so really

cool idea. Uh and the race car obviously was just a way of saying, come and take a look at what we have to show you. And it worked for me. But the problem was when they started interviewing the people that you know, brought this technology out on stage, the ones that we're conducting, you know, the press conference, when they really started drilling down and asking a lot of questions, here's here's the thing they got. They got a lot of uh, well, we don't really know the answer to

that yet, but just trust us. It's gonna work out. Everything's gonna be fine. We we know that we can achieve this as just right now, we don't have the solution that kind of answer. It's a very much an Internet startup approach, and it's an Internet startup approach to an industry that has uh, very deep roots and a very very high barrier to intrigue. In fact, I would say Faraday Future would have had zero chance of success

were it not for a little company called Tesla. Sure. Yeah, but you can look at other examples that the people immediately go to. And we've heard the smart listeners on car stuff as well. Um, you know, this looks al awful lot like something like an Elio or even if you want to go back farther, UH Tucker or Dale Dale. Dale's a different scenario because that was just complete scam all around right there. There's no way around that one.

But but the others Tucker and UH and Elio, and there's been others throughout time as well that have done this. But they bring a real product out and they show you the real product, and they say, all we need is X million number of million dollars to get the first you know, production run, first match of production out there. And then from that point, you know, we can we can you know, take them out and say self, we can sell you a dealership and you can sell these

products and then we can create more cars. And that's the way the whole thing works. But they've got to get over that initial hump and this one. Now they've got a huge backing, right, They've got a lot of money, yes,

available to them. That doesn't necessarily guarantee success. Anyone who has backed a kickstarter for any kind of technology, UH has probably had the experience at least once of backing something that never ever came to fruition, and whether it was due to someone trying to pull a scam or someone uh underestimating the challenges they would face taking an idea from the concept stage to production or whatever it may be. You always encounter things that you did not

anticipate when you first set out. Uh. A lot of people have experienced this disappointment and something that they back not actually coming out, and that's a possibility. Uh. The nice thing is it's someone else's money in the case of Faraday Future, so I'm okay with this, that's true. I mean, like in the case of Elio Motors, that's

that's the most recent one. You know that we've we've been dealing with, is that you know, people are sending in you know, hundred bucks, two hundred bucks, five hundred dollars or whatever. It's kind of a down payment deposit with the idea that that's starting the company and that you know, when they do start producing them, they're gonna get the first pick. You know, they're gonna get the

first production run. Uh. You know, they get little little things along the way, you know, Smill incentives I guess for doing that, whether it's bumper stickers or T shirt or something like that. Right, Um, but that company, the hurdle for that company is something like two hundred and fifty or three hundred million dollars and that's what it would take to get that company to start producing car is right now. Probably some other things too at this point,

because it's some time has passed. But but this one, this is all being funded by one individual and it's it's the I laugh when I see this, But it's the Chinese version of Steve Jobs. That's what the that's how he's described now he has he's the founder of uh I guess the Chinese version of Netflix over there, right, So he's got a lot of money, this guy, he's a billionaire. But he's not going to throw all of

his money behind this whole thing. Of course, he's gonna put some money behind it, but he's got deep pockets. Is this gonna make it? Because they're talking about putting a factory in it's again a billion dollar facility north of Las Vegas. They're gonna break around on that. I believe it was at the end of this month, if not next month. Um, so it's it's happening soon. Do you really see this thing going anywhere? Do you think

they're gonna do it? Are they gonna come out, you know, the week before and say like, well there's been a delay and we're gonna do it, um at the end of this year. Uh, without having seen any of the actual inner workings of the But it's really hard for me to say. I can say I want them to to succeed so badly simply because I think it could

be a truly disruptive approach to the automotive industry. And by disruptive, I don't mean like a dangerous thing or a destructive thing, but rather something that shakes stuff up enough that we start seeing crazy innovation across all manufacturers. That's what I want to see, and I want to see I want to see all boats rise. Like I

don't have a grudge against any particular company. Um. I mean, I definitely wagged my finger at Volkswagen for the clean diesel thing, but but it's you know, that's more of a a emotional reaction to that scandal. But I want to see everybody benefit, um. And I would hate to see this be an example of an Internet startup that got a lot of hype and then collapsed in on itself. Now, Steve Ben and I had a similar thought on our

show and we talked about it on Car Stuff. We said, you know, we really want we we truly do want them to succeed. This would be fantastic for development, as you said, you know it would. It would push things along considerably. But with all the examples, the history that we've had that we've we've seen, We've talked about on our show so many times, it's like, you can you can remain hopeful but be skeptical to awesome. Yes, there's good,

good reason to employ critical thinking. Sure, yeah, yeah, I mean this thing may or may not end up being kind of vaporware, but I hope not. I'm really I'm really hoping for the best in this. I want to ride and I mean the future. If you're listening, I want a ride. Well, that's that's something we didn't mention. That's that's their race car version. It's like the top ends thing that they can produce. But but the reality is their road testing a vehicle right now that no

one's seen. They They've got a secret card that's out there testing somewhere. So if you see a car go by that you don't recognize and there's no marking on it, that might be them. It could be them. So they're out there somewhere testing this platform, and you probably somewhere in California or Nevada. Yeah, it seems like those states are you know, a little more loose with their you know,

the allowances. I guess yeah, yeah, um yeah. I I would be interested to see what they're gonna come up with for the production vehicle and will it kind of be like a what's that sad trombone moment? You know when you see it, uh, versus the race car that they showed at the c S show. I mean, it's it's it's like, you know, it's good that they did that to get the excitement. They promised you this, but

they gave you this. That kind of thing. Well kind of yeah, I mean you're gonna you know, you're gonna be just a little bit disappointed, Like, oh man, I was really hoping for that single seater, the zero one concept, that car that probably would have cost around three hundred thousand dollars. It's like a batmobile or something. It's so it's pretty wicked. It is the people on the floor they were say they preferred to think of it as the car out of Minority Report. Oh yeah, okay, I

can see that a little bit. Yeah, all right, Um, you know there's another one that you wanted to mention, the last one that Sherry on top of this Sunday. Yeah, and this one leaves me with my head chacken, I I understand what this this uh, this builder does. This is WRIN Speed, Yes, Rin Speed, and the vehicle we're talking about the concept at any rate is the ets Yeah. And also we should mention the Atas is actually a BMW I eight based concept car, of course. Yeah, so

the latest greatest from BMW. But what they've done with it, I don't know. I don't know if I understand everything that they're trying to achieve with this car. But I mean, Rin Speed has done a lot of cool concepts in the past, and you know they've got sure, someone has some questionable features and things. But when I look at this one, the ETAs, Yeah, it's got a lot of questionable features. So yeah, let's talk about some of them.

For one thing, the interface that they have is is encased in two twenty one and a half inch curved four K displays four K resolution, Scott. I mean, granted, you are pretty close to those displays when you're a driver, right, I mean, it's not that far away from you. And in fact, four K resolution is insane to me because those displays would need to be enormous and you'd have to be even closer to appreciate the sharpness in that resolution. I can't believe four K is necessary when ten AD

would have sufficed. However, that's nitpicking. So let's say that you're driving this this crazy concept, this this variation on the BMW I eight. Uh, You're driving around and you're you've got this nice steering wheel, it's got its own little panel right in the middle of it, and you think I'm gonna hand over control to my car. You press a little button, the steering wheel folds in on itself, Scott, and then it ch tracks into the dashboard so it goes away. So that okay, that's That's one of the

things that left me shake in my head. Like most of these systems, even most of them, recognize the idea that there's going to be a point when human interaction

is probably gonna be necessary. And we're gonna alert you with a chime or lights, as you said on the one steering most of the again the BMW Right, Okay, most manufacturers still get that that you know there's going to be a point where you're gonna want to take control or the car will say, I don't know if I can handle this, grab the wheel, push shaws as written speed. Yeah, so you know that's I mean, I watched it happen in the video video clip and it's not a fast motion for it to come back out.

It's it's cool, it is, it's cool. It's interesting to watch. But the idea also of a folding steering wheel, that's another thing that makes me cringe just a little bit. You know, that's that's not a great design. Really. Yeah, the two if you think of a wheel, think of it, uh, divide the wheel in half, and the top half and bottom half fold down along the column, the steering column, and the whole thing where tracks back into the dashboard, so that you are freed up to read a book.

Essentially like it looks like the like the passenger side of the vehicle at that point, really it really does. And the two displays extend forward so that you can get more immersed in whatever, you know, entertainment like playing on your dashboard, you can get a lot closer to that. Four KOs appreciated a lot more when it's when when it's when it approaches you by five inches, when it's eight inches away from your eye. So uh and the other thing, now, this just kind of made me laugh

in the video. I don't know why this was was featured in here, but there's a couple of things more but um, when when they were showing the autonomous capability, Yeah, they had the car at a track in Spain, a racetrack in Spain, and they clearly had a time, you know, a lap time, a lap time from a human driver

on the screen. So it's it's got you know, an interface allows you to record lap times and it's really cool, a map of the track and everything best you know, kind of a best time with a little award, you know, a silver copper with It's almost equivalent to like a video game, except this is a real car that you're driving around a real track. Yeah. Sure, and we've seen that stuff, you know in other cars. We get that, you know, they've got stuff like that. You know, they

can measure times and speeds and all that. But this one was showing like, Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna let the autonomous UH feature take over and drive around this racetrack in Spain. And then that's when the driver decided to grab a book from the from what it looks like a bookshelf on the passenger side. That thing was always loaded with books. So while they're driving around this racetrack in Spain, the driver's reading a book. And I know that's to prove a point that he's not touched

on the wheel, that there's no interaction there. But the car, of course, best of the human driver's time was much faster, or a little bit faster anyways. But I just thought that was so odd to see him doing that, you know, like to be on a racetrack of all places I can get if you're on a boring can mute or so clearly he was trying to psych out the robot car to show how how little interest he had in

the robot car's performance. I thought, you're gonna say other drivers competing against like I'm just gonna let it take over, Like I'm just gonna I'm gonna read my cough cut here. Did you get my point though? I mean, of all places you're gonna want to see, I mean, you're just gonna want to pay attention and watch what's going on because it's exciting, it's thrilling. It's not like you're just going, you know, between downtown Atlanta and home. Sure, let's be fair,

could sometimes be exciting. Uh. It also uses Microsoft's Cortana concierge service, so this is similar to Ford and Alexa. Uh Cortana, I would argue, Well, I mean I I've used Cortana a little bit because I've got Windows ten on my computer at home and Cortana is incorporated into

Windows ten. Sound fancy. I've used it a little bit, but I'm still very much a keyboard and mouse kind of guy, so I don't tend to talk to my computer unless something has gone wrong and the words I'm saying are not words that the concierge is going to help me with. I talked to my laptop here at work all the time. And uh wait, I'm glad it can't record. That's that's a good good thing. Wait I can't, can it? I don't think so, at least unless some

malware has been put on there. But the real reason we had to add this, besides all the ridiculous autonomous car features and and the fact that uh Cortana is incorporated, is that this particular car also has a landing pad on the back of it for a d j I drone. Yeah, this was probably the biggest head scratcher for me. What is the point of that drone? Well, the drone can fly along while you're driving and take video of you

driving your really kick ass BMW I a concept car. Well, I agree, that is a cool thing to be able to do. I get it. You don't necessarily need to have a landing pad and a matching drone. I guess you could just get one at toys or Us or something, or at the local Harby Harby store. But they did show it to something that was kind of cool. Now, in the video, it's kind of a silly setup, right, I mean, it's a male female females flying the drone in some kind of looks like they're in a warehouse

or something. Yeah, it's a big circular room where there's a there's a staircase that's on the internal curved wall that goes up. So some very weird looking space where the car is parked in the center of it, but it's open to the to the air, you know, there's an open top. So the guy climbs back into the car, and the car alerts him, Hey, it's Valentine's Day. Wouldn't

you like to get some roses for your wife? And then he just says the word roses and that sends a signal to the drone that the woman is currently controlling with a with a remote control, and the drone ends up going into auto mode and flies off, sending

the woman into a fit. A fit. Yes, she is quite upset that she has lost control of this, and she she confronts her husband, who takes off his glasses, his sunglasses, puts one uh one stem of the sunglasses in his mouth and shrugs is to say, hey, what are you gonna do? Things happen, and then they go down the stairs to get into their autonomous sports car of the future. When the drone returns with a bouquet of roses that it has picked up from a delivery service.

It was like a like a messenger drone. I right it it went out and it's it's sought the nearest floors, which was, I believe on the screen it said four point one miles away, something like a long long distance, so it went out got them or no, it was four minutes away, four and a half minutes and a half minutes right. So he attaches a bouquet of roses and it brings him right back to her and everything

is just every smoothed over. At that point she gives him a hug her her one foot comes off the ground, you know, and classic hug posed. Truly, I had it. I had a tear at that point. I felt something. Um, yeah, it was. It was a it was a funny video to watch. I actually really enjoyed it. Um. I mean, I think it's ridiculous is probably too strong a word. It's certainly whimsical. Let's say whimsical. That's nice. It's it's it's worth watching. It's it's interesting to see you as

and also as proof of concept of certain technologies. It's really cool. I mean, I I agree with you. I don't think that the autonomous approach as as awesome as this automated thing where the steering calum retracts into the dashboard, as awesome, as visual as that is, I don't think it's terribly practical. For one thing, it's a couple of different points of failure in a system that doesn't need

any points of failure. Right. If anything goes wrong and then you switch to manual and something some connection has been severed as a result of this process, that's bad. But I did think that the whole thing was very fun and I like the approach, Like the forward thinking nature of the video was was really cool and forward thinking. It's like that tattoo can see in your neck, you know, that's how they track me. Um So, at any rate, this was this was a lot of fun to talk

to you about. The technology that was on displayed c Yes, obviously very different from the underlying technology that actually makes cars work. You know, we're not talking necessarily about motors or you know, transmissions or that kind of stuff. This is all add on stuff. It's like, how can I

make an app, uh, make that system better? And and again, like smart TVs, I think we're finally starting to see that idea mature to a point where it is something that could be marketable as opposed to well, we have the ability to throw this in there, let's just do it. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode from It was great having Scott on the show. Scott has moved on to other endeavors and actually a completely lost touch with him.

Hope he's doing okay, Love you buddy, but yeah. If you have suggestions for topics that I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know. You can do so by downloading the iHeart Radio app, navigate over to tech Stuff by using Little search Engine. You can then leave me a voice message. There's a little microphone icon if you click on that, you can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length, or if you prefer, you can navigate on over to

Twitter and send me a message there. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HM s W and I'll talk to you again really soon y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.