The big news this week is that Ford is joining Fiat Chrysler in discontinuing its car lineup in order to focus on trucks and SUVs. In order to understand the historical context for this major transition and what it means for the future of the industry, Alex and Ed are joined by a a second Niedermeyer! Paul Niedermeyer, founder and editor of Curbsideclassic.com and Ed's dad is our very special guest for this look at the auto industry in transition.
The Autonocast takes a time-out from mobility technology this week in order to take a look at how computer vision and machine learning are impacting auto manufacturing. Patrick Sobalvarro and Clara Vu, two of the co-founders of Veo Robotics, join the show to explain how they are making robots smarter and car factories safer. They also explain why their technology won't be replacing humans any time soon.
With Ed just back from two weeks of vacation, it was inevitable that he'd make Alex and Kirsten discuss all the latest news from Teslaland. With the NTSB investigation heating up, the gang takes a look at the some of the more popular defenses of the system and find that they still can't escape the very ambiguity about its capabilities that they seek to dispel. Plus, Mike Granoff of Maniv Mobility stops by to tell us about the Mobility Week he's helping put on in Tel Aviv next month, and which will be featured in future episodes of the show.
Did you enjoy The Hunger Games books? Swap out hunger for self-driving and you get Autonomous, a YA novel by Andy Marino that gets it all wrong, from cliched plot devices to technical errors rivaling Business Insider’s worst clickbait. Prepare for laughs as the The Autonocast’s cast of sector experts read passages from this insult to fiction and the future.
A different Ed joins us for this latest episode of The Autonocast. Kirsten and Alex sit down with May Mobility CEO Ed Olson of during a recent trip to Austin to talk about the company's micro shuttles. Alex and Kirsten pepper Ed with questions about the business, its tech, operating in the snow, and even drunk people—he handles this just fine
President Donald Trump has finally nominated someone to lead the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a position that has sat vacant for 15 months. Ed, Alex, and Kirsten take a look Heidi King's experience and weigh whether she has the proper street cred for the job.
The Autonocast crew pauses to enjoy a little Twitter theater featuring Nikola Motor and Tesla, before delving into the latest efforts by automakers to make a buck in the so-called mobility industry.
As autonomous drive technology moves closer to maturity, the emphasis is shifting from private mobility toward the movement of goods and services. Xiaodi Hou and Chuck Price of the autonomous trucking startup TuSimple joins The Autonocast to help us understand this evolution. Operating out of both China and the US, TuSimple is developing autonomous trucks with long-range camera-radar sensor suite that they hope will someday dramatically cut the cost of logistics fleet operations.
Hot on the heels of the recent Uber autonomous test car crash in Tempe, Arizona, we have yet another fatality tied to an automated driving system. The latest incident took place in Mountain View, California, where a Tesla Model X slammed into a freeway divider barrier while Autopilot was active. This makes the third such Autopilot-involved fatality on record, and Alex, Kirsten and Ed discuss the disturbing similarities between them, the problems with Tesla's approach to semi-autonomy and what the company could do to prevent further tragedy.
Driver monitoring has been an important topic here at the Autonocast for some time, and co-host Alex Roy has penned several powerful pieces elsewhere in favor of the technology. But it's easy to think of driver monitoring in overly-simplistic terms: observing and maintaining a safe level of driver awareness is about far more than simply tracking when eyes are on the road and when they are not. This week we are joined by Abdelrahman Mahmoud to help us understand a more holistic approach to driver monitoring and how the company he works for, Affectiva, is going about creating just that.