First up in our series of new year conversations with select leaders in the AV space, Austin Russell of the lidar company Luminar. In a year full of challenges, Luminar cemented its status as a major player by securing production contracts for its advanced sensors, went public using a SPAC reverse merger, and inked a major deal with Intel. Alex, Kirsten and Ed sit down with Russell, the latest AV-sector billionaire, and reflected on a wild year and the road ahead.
2020 is closing out with one of the biggest AV business stories of the year, first broken by our very own Kirsten Korosec: Aurora is buying Uber's ATG operations, ending the ride-hailing giant's tragic development effort. The gang discusses what this consolidation means for the sector, and looks back at some of the biggest AV-related trends of 2020.
David Zipper set out to understand what areas of automated driving were most in need of regulation under the new Biden administration, and his research led him to a single answer: Tesla. Zipper joins the show to discuss why Tesla's approach to automated driving is so aberrant, why it should be regulated and how the Bident could rein it in. If you want to go deeper into Zipper's popular Slate piece on this topic, you'll want to listen to this episode.
It's rare for Alex, Kirsten and Ed to agree on anything, but they're unanimous on one point: Anthony Townsend's Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car was the best AV book of 2020. This week Townsend joins the show to discuss his book, which looks at how urban, economic and political development could be transformed by autonomous drive technology. If any of these topics interest you even a little bit, you'll want to make sure to catch this episode and pick up a copy of Ghost Road.
At a time when the auto industry is seeing an influx of new startups like it hasn't seen in a century, one of the most interesting companies to watch is Magna International. Not only does Magna supply everything from an in-house EV platform and ADAS to body-in-white and drivetrains, they also provide the engineering and validation expertise to turn startup dreams into reality... and they can even contract manufacture the final result. To understand how a "full-stack" automotive startup enabler like Magna is approaching this unique moment in history, we sat down with Swamy Kotagiri, a 21-year veteran at Magna, currently serving as President and soon to be the firm's next CEO.
In the wake of the election, the gang discusses the potential implications of the newest Massachusetts "Right To Repair" law, the return of successful funding rounds to the AV space, and the rising importance of the safety case.
Tesla's deployment of a "limited beta" version of its "Full Self-Driving" software to public roads raises a number of important issues around how and why AV developers test safely on public roads. With Kirsten just getting back from vacation, Alex and Ed walk her through the most immediate concerns... plus, Alex shares what it's like to be trained as a professional AV safety driver.
With competition in autonomous trucking heating up we speak with two of the top leaders at Ike, a startup that brings a unique development approach to this exciting space. Co-founder and Chief Engineer Nancy Sun and Head of Systems Randol Aikin oversee Ike's work transforming core technology licensed from Nuro into an autonomous trucking solution, and they explain how their strategy turns some popular perceptions about AV development on their head. Learn why they see AVs as a systems engineering problem rather than an AI problem, how they get away with a tiny 6-truck test fleet, why they are sticklers about using the right language for this technology and much more.
Recently Ed had been noticing some negativity about AVs in tweets by friend of the show and brilliant technology analyst Horace Dediu. He challenged Horace to debate the prospects for autonomous drive technology, and what resulted was a fascinating conversation that proves there is more consensus about AVs than it sometimes seems. Though the resulting episode was less of a debate than originally imagined, it is still an in-depth exploration of the past and future of AVs as they struggle out of "the trough of disillusionment."