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AAH #682 - He Invented The EV Skateboard, Now What's He Up To?
AAH #682 - He Invented The EV Skateboard, Now What's He Up To?
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About this episode
Larry Burns, former head of R&D at General Motors and a pioneer of the EV skateboard concept, shares insights on the evolution of electric vehicles and the future of automotive design. He discusses the shift in consumer behavior, the impact of e-commerce on transportation needs, and the importance of integrating technology with urban planning. Burns emphasizes the need for a transition to smaller, more efficient vehicles and explores the potential of hydrogen fuel cells alongside battery technology. His optimistic vision for the future includes a focus on autonomous vehicles and innovative solutions to reduce costs and environmental impact.
Topics:
electric vehicles
ev skateboard
hydrogen fuel cells
autonomous driving
urban planning
consumer behavior
cost reduction
e-commerce impact
vehicle design innovation
sustainability
TOPIC: Evolution of Auto Tech PANEL: Larry Burns, Adviser, Author; Frank Markus, Motor Trend; Gary Vasilash, shinymetalboxes.net; John McElroy, Autoline.tv
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Gary Sean, how are we get to do another shop? We do?
So? I gotta ask you a question. It's a topical, little off
subject, but topical. Okay. So you undoubtedly watched the Super Bowl on
Sunday? I did? Okay, were you at all surprised that there was
no advertisement from one of the Detroit three. Oh? I hadn't thought of
that. There were car ads, there were car adds, but yeah,
GM was not there, Ford was not there. Right Stillantus had already announced
there they were not didn't do one of its amazing ads that it had done over the years that became so famous, the eminem ads and so on.
But you know what that also tells me they have nothing new to show.
Could be a fair place. Well, that's why you spend millions on the
Super Bowl, as you got some big product now you want to show every body. So if you don't have anything new to show, you don't spend
the money. But you know, General Motors had that Will Ferrell ad that
they did two versions of and they basically were talking about, you know, electric vehicles will be coming. It wasn't like to buy this one, so
right, Well, as you know, the whole narrative on electric cars has change changed so much. We'll get into that. But you know, we've
got Larry Burns here, and you were the one who arranged to have him come on the show. So why don't you tell the audience what Larry's all
about? All right? So, so attle of us can't even talk,
those of us here would just say, oh, and of course Larry Burns.
Everybody knows Larry Burns. But so for those of you in the audience
who are not familiar with the man, and it is hard to imagine that you wouldn't be. Perhaps most famously, Larry headed R and D at General
Motors for a number of years, and he was the carport vice president of Research and Development in Planning and strategic Planning, and from eighty eight to ninety seven he had a number of other jobs at General Motors. Then became perhaps
even more famous when he became a consultant to Google aka Waymo on the autonomous vehicle that they developed. And he's the author of a couple of books he's
consulting with a variety of companies in the automotive space and he's just an all around genius. So Larry, welcome to the show. And we should mention
Frank Marcus, our friend from Motor Trendy glad to be here. Yeah,
and with Larry and with Larry, that's right, brilliance, Will rub Off.
I'm sure it's the aura glad to be with all three of you.
So, Larry, you know, one thing that we've been promoting on about you coming on the show is you're the guy who created the first ev skateboard.
And I know you didn't do it alone. You had a great team
behind you, but just I'd love to know some of the background. How
did these ideas come together? Because no one's copied exactly what you guys did,
but they sure took that concept of a skateboard and I've run with it.
So how'd you guys come up with the idea of doing it in the first place. Yeah, it's a great story. John. When I was
named head of R and D, that was in the nineteen ninety eight timeframe.
Rick Wagner, who had been my boss for four or five years leading up to that, Rick and I sat down and just had a one on one lunch and we got talking, and Rick said, you know, Larry, if we were going to invent the automobile today rather than one hundred years ago, what do you think you would do different? And I said,
geez, Rick, I would really try to do something about human driving and safety. I'd try to do something about propulsion and the side effects of the
car. And he said, well, that's what I want you to think
about that. I don't have anyone else on my team that's going to have
the time to think about that. So Rick really gave me the freedom to
really think about a totally different approach to the car design. Had you been
thinking about that at all? I know you, John, I'd been out
of R and D for ten years at that time. I left R and
D in nineteen eighty eight and went under the operating side of GA as a program manager and all that other stuff. Worked in the plants, which was
a phenomenal experience. So I had really not been giving it a lot of
thought. So one of the people who started reporting to me when I took
on this new role as a guy named Byron McCormick. He led GM few
cell activities at that time, but before he was very involved with the initial Stabila track. Before that, he was involved with the EV one and the
batteries for EV one. Byron and I had this discussion and he said,
Larry, this is all about that little patch where the tire touches the road, and anyone who can create the software that can get control over that on all four corners of the car is going to be a winner. So we
got kicking around with that. We also had brought Chris Brony Bird into the
company and he was really fixated on this interface between technology and design. He
called that design and technology fusion. And we teamed up and said what would
we do different? And we went to work on this and we knew we
wanted to make a visual statement. With the designs who had great teamwork with
the design studio, they were instrumental in what we did and it just started to come about. But it was this corner module really that captivated us more
than anything else. What do you mean corner module? Well, really,
it's this notion of some people call that a wheel motor. I call it
a corner module because I like to integrate the steering, the braking, the suspension and the torque management all up integrated into one package. And if you
get that right, you make four three or four per vehicle, maybe two three or four per vehicle, but the scale of production is phenomenal, and you also have the tiring wheel obviously, And it was just the ability to package the car differently. If you can manage what's going on at the four
corners with the software, through the differentiation through the software, and dock a different body on top of that gate boards, you're going to get huge scale economies. And then because it was an electrically driven vehicle, you could lengthen
it and make it wider without tearing up your entire production system. And it
just sort of took on of life. So we did that and it was
funny because we came back after we showed it at the I think it was the two thousand and two North American Auto Show, you know, Rick said that was really a lot of fun and it was getting a lot of good press. He said, what's next, and I said, this is the
strategy board meeting. I said, cars that don't crash. And our chief
council said, larrily, never utter that publicly, because you're going to split the rest of your career testifying because you believe cars don't shouldn't have to crash.
Well, from my perspective, I always was fascinated by the subway system in Tokyo, and when all these trains would come in, you see people swarming in all different directions. They weren't running into each other. So I'm
saying, why do we have to take it for granted that car should run into each other? And that then kicked off this passion of leveraging on star
and trying to get down a path of eliminating the crash, and that ultimately morphed into the autonomous driving in the darker urban challenge. But that's a lot
of what was going on back then. So soilarry you slip by. You
mentioned fuel cell. Now, as I recall, the skateboard was a fuel
cell, which of course no one has certainly duplicated. I mean, there
are skateboards related to evs, and this was very early on, and even thinking in terms of fuel cells, talk about that aspect of it now.
It is interesting. I think if I could have a do over, I
probably would never have uttered the word fuel cell. I would have called it
a hydrogen battery, because so many people jumped on the fuel cell electric vehicle and the battery electric vehicle as being these radically different things, and in fact, it's really just how you store the energy. On board c electric motors.
You have power electronics, and you can architect the car very similarly because you could store the hydrogen in that skateboard platform or you could put the batteries in the skateboard. So somehow the world saw these as two very different things.
A or B batteries are fuel cells. And I've spent a long time
talking about what I call the power of land. I think it's both of
them. So we needed to make the vision of autonomy real, so we
did two other concepts, one called high Wire, one called Sequel. Sequel
actually had a battery because we had learned by then that the real extreme transient requirements of the fuel cell for every day driving, those real extreme things were compromising durability. So if we had a little bit of stored electricity and we
can merge that with these real peak requirements of the demand on the fuel cell, we were going to get a much longer life on the fuel cell.
So yet again it was hydrogen fuel cells with some energy storage which you could pick up from the region to break in and things. So Sequel was really
the embodiment of what I called the new DNA of the automobile. Didn't quite
have the autonomous yet, but that got me thinking about, no kidding, if we were going to do it all over starting with a clean sheet today.
I felt it was going to be a DNA based on autonomous driving and electric drive and connected vehicles versus the human driven combustion based one hundred year old industry. Are you all disappointed? That was like two thousand and two and
in twenty twenty four there isn't a skateboard with those individual corners we see.
Continental Schaefler and some other people have talked about having, you know, corner modules, and I think re Automotive has a skateboard that they're coming with soon, but it's mostly for delivery vehicles and so forth. Why do you suppose
that hasn't really we almost saw it also in the Lordstown Oh yeah, yeah.
I mean people do talk about unsprung masks, they talk about those characteristics of the design and engineering. I just feel, frank with these kinds of
ideas. We just need to We need to be patient. I think the
architectural benefits of going to the wheel motor will be huge. But quite honestly,
I'm not disappointed with what you get in an electric vehicle. When you
just drive two motors off the same or two wheels off the same motor too, that's not a disappointing experience. But I just feel the future of the
industry is all about design innovation, and the technology continues to advance, and we've got a world's worth of very very capable designers from all kinds of countries, and I think people will want to make a fashion statement. I still
feel we're going to get back to the fashion roots of the industry. I
think we've had this run up of the cost of the vehicle that has gotten out of control. It's just stunning to me. I used to do my
stump speech a few years ago and I said the medium price of a vehicle was thirty five thousand dollars. Now it's approaching fifty thousand dollars. And Clayton
Christensen, who is a great business writer, had this book, Innovator's Dilemma, and you can just see what's going on with the vehicles are getting way over designed and way over specified, and something's going to come in underneath that.
And I think that's where the wheel motors are going to play out, and we're going to get back to maybe cars that last a year or two, and we get back to this being a fashion based industry. And I
think the wheel motor is going to be an amazing enabler of design because you can just drop different top hats on for the different paths the latest fashion.
You can have two wheel motors, you can have four, you can have three, and you're not having to create an all new supply base or an all new platform or architecture into all The recertification of all of that keya kind of played with that that cees with the modular things that would drop onto their Yeah, I don't know that a skateboard per se. It might have been
a cab and a module back. But I want to hear more of your
ideas on taking cost out because I've just finished writing an op ed piece it hasn't been published yet that I'm saying we're at peak auto right now. Car
sales in North America, Western Europe, Japan are less than they were a decade ago. Now. COVID had a big impact on the drop in sales,
but the downward trend was already there before COVID absolutely, and we have priced the auto industry has priced millions of households out of the new car market.
And so if you look at the percentage of Americans who are buying a new car, it's at its lowest point in the last seventy years. Lowest
point the peak was in nineteen seventy eight, by the way, and if the same percentage of Americans bought a new car last year as they did in nineteen seventy eight, the sales would have been twenty three million. Wow,
twenty three million, fascinating. So that just shows you how much the only
thing that saved the industry in the US is population growth. So I think
there's only two things that can change this peak auto premise that I'm positing.
Either household incomes have got to shoot up way above where they are right now so people can afford what's out there, or the industry's got to take out costs. So what would you do to take out costs? Well, yeah,
yeah, let me put just a little bit of preamble on this, because I think it's an extremely important subject. John, if EPA has a
trends report that they put out every year. If you haven't looked at it,
I find it fascinating. And they look at like, for example,
in nineteen eighty two, all of the cars that were built and sold in the US, and they'll give you information on how much did they weigh, and how much horse part did they have, and what was their zero sixty acceleration? And if you compare nineteen eighty two to twenty twenty two, a
forty year journey, our vehicles are forty percent heavier. Okay, so that
mass means cost, John, is forty percent more material, the horse power one hundred and seventy five percent higher, And I you know what, I'm kind of in favor of that. I'm kind of a bleak time John.
The zero to sixties are fifty five percent higher. So what's happened is all
of this technology that in the early eighties was aimed at trying to get off of oil or reduce our dependence on oil is a nation and make our cars cleaner and safer. It's been translated into mass and power and speed. But
let me challenge cost and cost and cost. But I'll challenge you because we've
seen an enormous shift to trucks and suv absolutely so I think if you looked at a sedan from nineteen eighty two to a sedan of twenty twenty two, I don't think there's no question about that. But John, but the reality
is we have people doing driving in their everyday life, jumping in the car, running in the court to the corner store, and four and five thousand pound machines. And these are one hundred and fifty two hundred pound people.
And that mass combined with velocity is kinetic energy. One half mass times velocity
square is kinetic energy. And so all of that extra speed that I talked
about and extra mass has made the entire roadway system much less safe because of the kinetic energy that we have in it. And your point about peak auto,
if you really look at how people are living their daily lives, there has been something much more important than increasing speed. That's what information and communication
technology has enabled relative to accessing things things like remote work, e commerce, online health, online learning, social interactions where you don't have to travel.
So you've got this enormous run up in price, and you're right, either incomes go up or costs go down, but my premise is we're going to see a significant drop off and the need to get in a car and go somewhere to live our daily lives. One quick example, my daughter is a
chef and she has an online food planning business, and so we cook her recipes regularly, and one of her recipes that I was going to make the next day called for a spice called tandor seasoning. We didn't have it,
so I said, I'm going to jump in the car and drive three miles to Johnny Palmadora, the nearby market, and get the tandory seasoning, hoping they had it well. I decided instead to look on Amazon Prime, and
I was able to get my tandory seasoning within sixteen hours on Amazon Prime on my porch for a price less than Johnny's. And I didn't have to drive
to Johnny's, park my car, walk and walk around the store, pay for it, and come home. There's no amount of increase in speed in
my car that can media amount of time I say by not making that trip, so john people aren't going to be making the kinds of trips we made in the past. On top of this run up, so Clayton Cristmerson The
innovator's dilemma. Guy will say, something's going to come in underneath that very
simple. My first car was a nineteen sixty nine Volkswagon Beetle brand new,
fifteen hundred dollars. My mom and dad gave me as a gift to down
payment. I had to make the monthly payments. That year was peak Beetle
over three hundred thousands or sold. One out of every twenty cars sold in
the United States was a Beetle that year. John and the mass I don't
know, maybe it's two thousand pounds. Certainly it wouldn't be saved by today's
standards, but it worked just great for my accessibility. I think the biggest
threat to the auto industry an auto company is not another auto company. I
think it's this pivot to how people live their lives differently in the role that these machines play in their lives is going to change much more than even electric, connected and autonomous is going to change. But Larry, you did a
study, i think for Columbia University a few years ago, looking at the number of vehicles that a municipality would need and found far Luss could you talk to us about that a little. It was stunning. I had left GM
and Columbia recruited me and to lead their program on sustainable mobility. So I
had a twenty five percent appointment at Columbia in a twenty five percent appointment at University of Michigan as an engineering professor. And I had a great colleague,
a guy named Bill Jordan. He was a marvelous math modeler, one of
my best friends. We do things together a lot today even today, and
we got interested, you know, because uber was just coming on the scene and autonomous had some interest in it. So this was in the twenty eleven
timeframe. So we asked ourselves, what if you could take all of the
cars in Anna Arbor that sort of are inan our for the daily, everyday activities and replicate what those cars are doing with a two person electric autonomous pod that shared. How many would you need in order to have very fast response
when someone requested a trip and meet all of those travel demands. So in
two thousand and nine, the government had done a household travel survey, so we had really good date on Ann Arbor travel patterns. So he simulated it
and one hundred and twenty thousand cars in ann Arbor which were being used for these daily trips. We could do it with eighteen thousand shared pods. Fifteen
percent, He said, how could that be? It turns out even during
rush hour, the maximum percent of cars in an arbor that were on the road and rush hour was thirteen percent. You guys, people leave their cars
per ninety to ninety five percent of the time. So rush hour feels like
rush hour because in that case, fifteen percent of them are on the road.
And we replicated this from ann Arbor to Rochester, New York, to Salt Lake City to Palm Beach County to Manhattan, and over and over and over again. We got this result, and it convinced us that we could
take the out of pocket cost per mile, which triple A gives us every year from something on the order of seventy eighty cents down to something on the order of about twenty cents and plus your time value because these were autonomous vehicles, and you scale that and that was a disruption gary of four trillion dollars of the US economy when it was scaled. So that was the Columbia result,
and that was the basis of this book I did called Autonomy because it was such a profound and exciting potential. Now everybody thought I was advocating a
future that everyone would use robotaxis. No, that was just an example of
what could be possible. The real prize here is autonomous personal cars. Over
ninety percent of us own a personal car, and the real, real, big prize I think for autonomous vehicles is the personal car. And I think
the pathway there is eight ass just getting better and better. And just today
General Motors announced it's doubled the road network that supercreuws can handle. So Mary
talks about the percent is situation super CRUs can handle, and she just increased the percent of situations radically by adding all those roads in. It's one more
step toward that, and I think that's yes. I think I'm proud of
what Waimo's doing. Absolutely applaud them for the progress they've made on robottax.
That's an important segment for a lot of people. But there's a I haven't
given up one bid on fully autonomous. The first frontier is the second car.
Like a lot of people, evs are fine for second car, maybe autonomous is fine for the secondary. Absolutely I think that's how you have to
get it in terms of the consumption, you know, which is a household, And quite honestly, the definition of a household could get expanded because sharing becomes so much easier because we're all connected. So my two car household or
three car household might be and I'm making this up because my kids don't live locally, but if my daughters lived locally, it might be my two daughters and their homes and my wife and I are sharing a fleet of three cars, and if you could reposition one of those cars autonomously, it's really as convenient as having in your garage. So that's where this gets exciting to me.
I just feel like, well, the industries worked hard to pivot from combustion human driven oil energized vehicles, and that's a big, big, big change and I don't want to underplay that at all at all. It's a
hugely complex industry to pull that transition off. Again, I think there's something
bigger behind when you think about the bridge technology of the remotely piloted car.
So you've got a car, you know, a Mary borrow, maybe next step one with you know, a million miles of roads that it can do level three plus. And then to get from your house to your daughter's house,
maybe someone in a remote place using all the sensors or whatever drives the car over there. We've already got that knowing on some rental car companies.
Now I'll put one one refinement on that. Frank, I think it's absolutely
part of the solution. But I think we can use real time in historic
telematics data to know with certainty if I wanted to reposition that car with no one in it, which stretch of that trip I don't know, I don't need any help. And then maybe there's a really tough left turn coming up.
History tells me that, and I'm not one hundred percent confident I can handle that with my autonomous driver. Then maybe I have someone looking at it
through a camera at that confirm to the autonomous driving system it's okay to make the left. So again, it's this power of van. It's combining all
these different enablers to get you to a system. And I don't think level
five is the goal. I don't think we'll ever get to level five.
Just like airlines don't fly on really bad weather days, if you're driving on leveland pass in Colorado and midnight in a snowstorm, you probably don't belong there.
So to dismiss autonomous cars if it can't handle that situation, I think it's a little bit short sighted. So I think it's just going to be
this step by step. You know what engineers do for a living. We
make what's possible real and we do that through learning cycles. And that's what
Wayne has been doing. Is it been taking longer to get the degree than
everyone thought when they kicked it off. Yeah, but you know what,
they're still in the game, Larry, I want to go back to John's point about peak car and costs and what you seem to be describing. So
the three households having three cars rather than six cars, So basically what you're doing is you're taking vehicles out of production. Right, There'll be fewer vehicles,
but arguably those vehicles will be more expensive because of the technology. So
on the one hand, you have the OEMs faced with reduced production. On
either hand, you have the consumer faced with even more expensive vehicle. Yeah.
Well, first of all, we've got to shift completely away from price at the dealer's lot and focusing on cost per mile. And I think that
was maybe one of the more important contributions in that Columbia paper and to some extent in the book. When you start thinking about it as cost permile,
it's energy cost, its maintenance cost, its insurance cost, its parking costs, depreciation obviously in finance cost plus your time cost. And as I said,
ear, you're the biggest time savings of the trips I don't have to make. And then if I do make a trip in a vehicle and I
can use all of my time and how I want to don't have to drive at all, that would be great. But what if I could have ninety
percent of my time because ten percent of my attention is required to handle that tough left turn up the road. So I think a lot of companies in
this space are missing this integration of real time telematics with the capability of the autonomous driving system and then changing the situation awareness challenge from getting my attention in milliseconds or seconds to getting my attention a couple minutes in advance when I need to be prepare, like a navigation system will tell me, Larry, half mile left the road, you're going to have to turn right, and then I'll say thousand feet up the road, you're going to have to turn right.
Well, what it might be saying is larry thousand feet up the road, you need to be in the seat looking right and left to help me.
Or there's a hill coming up with a blind curve. I need you
paying attention then, but of the time I can zone out. Think about
the recreation vehicle industry as an example. What if you could get an RV
and you could go from Detroit to Denver on the Interstate with some version of super CRUs and ninety five percent of that with confidence, everybody can be asleep.
No, we're not going to be asleep. We're going to be partying
five partying five percent of the time. Maybe someone needs to be paying attention
on the interstate. Then you get to call it to Denver and you jump
in the driving seat because going up into the mountains needs more human assist Then you arrive at your campsite and it happened to be a fuel cell vehicle, and your water supply was created from the emissions of your car while you were driving from Detroit to Chicago, and the sensors you had for your aid ass system now become security set there's to sense a grizzly bear coming into your camp, and you go on and on and you start to connect these dots on what kind of experience can you now do in the boondocks? And I just
think the sky's the limit, and I think it's exciting for experienced designers to think through where these different industries can head. I'll take it to one more
step. Why does our house have to be fixed to the ground. Why
can't we just simply have our homes truly some day be more advanced mobile homes and not have to have all this fixed, utility based infrastructure. Why can't
that be part of the future. I'm not being facetious here. I mean
it's absolutely possible with what's going on in the home building industry affordable housing, and I'll begin to think through this dramatic change of how people might be living in the future. That's what the auto industry needs get to prepare for.
And what I'm talking about is not fifty The enablers already exists for what we're talking about, Larry, the shrinking car market and enthrinking cars of houses.
Okay, look, this is a perfect segue to take a quick commercial break, right now give a shout out to our sponsors and we'll pick it up right after that. How do you breach done? Tire stop shorter on what
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back. We're talking with Larry Burns and he is taking us into the future.
All right, So, Larry, So, while your book Autonomy came out in twenty eighteen is certainly famous, my favorite book that you worked on was out in twenty ten, which was called Reinventing the Automobile Personal Urban Mobility for the twenty first Century, which you wrote with the aforementioned Chris Barony Bird and the late William Mitchell. Now, in that you talk about vehicles,
but you also talk about the urban environment. And you know, you just
mentioned the possibility of having mobile houses. But in that book you talk about
how urban planners need to be involved in the transportation business. Talk to us
about that. Yeah, well, first, I'm really I'm glad you brought
that up because Bill Mitchell was just a phenomenal MIT professor, a great visionary, and as has Chris barony Bird, been a great collaborator. So I'm
sold this. Bill Mitchell is not the famous GM designer Bill. Bill Mitchell
is a famous architect urban planner at MIT, just everyone admired, and he unfortunately passed away just after the book was published. But he was a great,
great colleague to deal with. But in this I think it's real important,
especially for Americans to understand what I'm going to say next. Maybe I'll
give you guys a quiz. What percent of Americans when they get asked where
they live, say they live in an urban area? Oh? Ok yeah,
time up, I'll say forty percent. Okay, Well, the facts
are twenty five percent of Americans say they live in an urban area, fifty three percent say they live in the suburbs, and then the rest of twenty percent say the live in rural areas. So, Gary, I think the
transportation business has been overly preoccupied with urban transportation. Not that it's not important,
but not everybody he wants to live in a city with the population densities like you see in Manhattan. A lot of urban planners think the single most
important variable for sustainability is population density. I happen to love where I live
in Franklin, Michigan, in the suburbs, and I think fifty three percent of Americans are voting the same way. So I really really think personal transportation
and goods transportation has to be looked through the lens of rural and suburban every bit as importantly as urban. And I do think some of the people in
rural areas feel disenfranchised because the so called elitists are writing about things that they just can't see fitting into their life when they're out in these less population, less dense populated areas. So with that, zaid, you didn't mention another
book that I did, which may be the most interesting one, and it was my dissertation and I published it in nineteen seventy nine. Is a book,
and it was called The Transportation Temporal and Spatial Components of Accessibility. That's
a mouthful, but the important message there is when you look at how we live our lives, the activities that we participate in, Yes, there's a transportation piece. I have to move from A to B to do something.
There's also a geographical piece what's at B, and then there's a scheduling piece.
When I get it B is it available? So let me give you
a quick example. When I started at General Motors as a co op student
in nineteen sixty nine, I worked at GMR and D, and my boss would come every Friday and physically give me a check. I would get in
my car at lunchtime and go cash my check because I needed money to function and put the rest in my savings account. I get there and there's a
big line because everybody else went to the bank on Friday at noon to cash there check. I had a car. There are parently of banks. The
problem was the scheduling of the bank versus my work schedule. Then along comes
the ATM automated teller machine. Suddenly I could get cash twenty four to seven
at a whole bunch more locations, and I didn't have to make that noon trip to cash my check. I could handle that in a much different way.
I don't go to the bank anymore, Garrett, my kids, I don't even think know what a bank is, and that's what I'm talking about in terms of activity patterns, and so urban planning or I would call it community planning or generically is an extremely important piece of this. But the real
dimension that's changed considerably is the time dimension. When you look at the Internet,
there are certain things you can engage in that are scheduled on the Internet.
If I take an online course and that's being taught from two to three, I have to I can do it at home, or I can do it somewhere else, But two to three, I'm scheduled a lot of things I can do, including shopping twenty four to seven, totally freed up of any time based constraints of my life. And that's where all of this innovation
has come from since the early since the digital age, which you sort of date the digital age in nineteen eighty roughly, and that time going forward, the Internet, the iPhone, and now we're getting into the AI and all of that stuff. And that's what I think we need to understand about the
future and the role of automobiles, public transportation, flying cars, all of that stuff, recreation vehicles has to be understood in terms of how our time based and geography based constraints are changing. That's enabled by all of this digital
technology, Larry, one of the things that people worry about is all this e commerce. There's so many vans on the road all the time, and
there's a worry about is isn't this increasing congestion and pollution? But You've got
a fairly simple explanation that I'd love to hear on that. And in fact,
I think it even resounds around that Tandory spices that you were trying to buy. Yeah, so he asked the question, was I responsible deciding to
buy my Tandory seasoning on the internet and asking Amazon Prime to drop it on my porch? This thing couldn't have weighed more than four ounces, And I'm
asking a maybe a sixty five hundred pound van and it's one hundred and fifty two undred pound person to come and drop this four ounces on my porch?
Is that the right energy and environmental decision? It certainly is if that same
person stopped at my neighbor's house and their neighbor's house, because the marginal cost of just stopping off at my house if he's en route to my neighbor's house, from an energy standpoint, is virtually zero. John, and these delivery
people take a minute and a half to three minutes. I've studied this to
death, actually because I have a contract with a new town that's being built and we're puzzling over how do we get packages to our residents and that last mile solution. So there's spending a minute and a half to three minutes to
get it on my porch, plus obviously the transportation piece. I wish I've
had the time to model this, but I think as a function of population density, there's going to be a critical density above which is more environmentally responsible to have the delivery van bring it to me than have me go to the store. And certainly if I go to the store just once a week and
gather up everything I need, and I could get all of that stuff from one place, that might be a different answer. But I had an experience
just recently in our kitchen. We've got this drawer that pulls out that has
the garbage can in it, and our house is going on thirty years old, and the track for that garbage can failed. So I look at home
depot and I look at lows on the internet, and neither one of them had what I consider to be a very common hardware part in inventory. Their
response was, we can have it brought to our story and come to the store and it'll be here in three hours, or you can pay fifteen dollars and aage delivered to your house. Amazon Prime again got it to me within
about six hours for less price than either Low's or Home Depot. This e
commerce john is so disruptive, and Amazon has changed the game on all of the fundamental players, the targets, the Walmarts, ups, FedEx have all had to respond to Amazon. And we know what happened to Kmart when Kmart
had to respond to Walmart. Kmart's problem was their systems just could not compete
with the systems Walmart had in logistics and supply chains. And we're seeing that
whole thing play over again with that Amazon. So to understand the future of
the automobile, I believe you need to understand the future of consumption. And
consumption is what we do when we live our daily lives. That's not just
buying things, it's consuming experiences. And when I grew up, a lot
of the experiences I had required me to travel. So if I wanted to
engage with a girlfriend, I would get in my car and go over to her house and we would go somewhere. Today, a lot of that's being
done just by engaging without travel. And I don't know exactly where this is
going to go out. I don't know the exact timetable, but my gut
tells me it is going to reduce vehicle miles travel per year, not a tiny bit, but a meaningful bit amount. And what does that mean for
the car industry? And this is right on top of your peak auto right
at the moment where the car seem to be reaching a peak price, there's going to be this other transformation that against the question totally the role of these machines. Now, what kind of machine might be nice for me? To
have? A personal valet? It's something I can dispatch to go do something
for me. And I think personal is what it's all about. Think about
it. If ninety percent of Americans opt to own their own car. Households
have a car at eighty cents a mile, and you can drop the cost of owning a personal machine to twenty cents a mile. Which direction do you
think ownership is going to go? That's economics one O one. It's going
to go up, not down. So people are going to want to have
their own machines. It's a real question of how they fit them into their
lives and use them as as a valet of some type personal assistant. One
last story on this, and I'll embarrass myself on this one. I do
most of my daily travel on a Chevy Traverse, approaching probably over four thousand pounds. My wife does hers in an audatt She does about five thousand miles
a year. She's a hairstylist, and it hardly ever goes on the freeway.
We use my vehicle to get to our cottage. That's why it's an
SUV. I also use that to drive to the country club. From my
home to Blomfield Hills country Club, it's a fifteen minute drive on next speed limit forty miles an hour. I don't need four thousand pounds eighty miles an
hour to make that trip. I would love to make that trip in a
personalized autonomous pod, and I'd be very happy if that was at thirty five miles an hour. Didn't stop a light, because we've got a control system
that let's be weave through traffic. But what's the impediment here? It's all
of the really big vehicles on road, and that's an externality that's making me exposed to risk because other people want to have a really big car. It
sounds like secondhand smoke. It sounds like a world where people used to smoke
and take for granted that I had to accept the fact that they smoked.
And you know what, we've moved past that as a society. Maybe we
can get our arms around this mass issue and this speed issue in some way that collectively is a society. We can see a future where we're all moving
around as we need to or want to in our daily lives, and machines that have radically less mass, radically less material, and or radically safer for collisions between each other as well as interactions with it. And we really honestly
hope for any kind of government help with something like that, when the government is really how we got to these giant vehicles by saying your car, Yeah, cars have to be you know, get this gas mileage, and so if you want to tow something as well, trucks can be big. So
suddenly, yeah, surprise, everyone has a truck because they still wanted that capability. I mean, that was the reason we got where we are how
do we get out of that of the system? Great, great question,
Frank, And I've thought this through specifically, and I've retraced the history of the industry and how we arrived at this point. So a really, really
pivotal moment is when they decided to regulate trucks different than cars. And that
was an amazing moment. And that allowed the pickup trucks to remain body on
frame and then we could drive the initial SUVs off of that body on frame.
But keep the mind we were making huge scale volume underneath those pickup trucks.
That's why you can make so much money off of them. They were
skateboards in essence. And I think we've got to get off this notion of
cafe and fuelly economy regulations and we've got to, for lack of a better word, no one will like this. We've got to tax masks and we've
got to tax top speed. And I'm not saying you can't have a big
vehicle, and I'm not saying you can't have a vehicle with more power and the ability to tow and to go fast. I am saying you need to
be responsible for the externality of your kinetic energy mass times velocity squared one half mass times velocity squared and be held accountable for that to motivate people to not make every trip in such a big, fast machine when they can make it in a smaller machine. I'm hoping that could kick off a cycle of less
mass in the vehicle mix gets less mass. I'm hoping that as autonomous technology
and eight ass technology gets better, the probability of a crash, even with bigger and faster vehicles, goes down. I'm an executive advisor to a company
called Neuropropulsion Systems, and they've developed radar technology. I know you're familiar with
that, but we think we can see three to ten times farther. Explain
it a little bit very because I know about it, but I'm not sure that anybody in the This is a software defined software defined Yeah, So you take the existing hardware and radar so it could be TIS radar hardware, and it sends out signals and brings back data. So you take that same data
coming back and we run it NPS. We run it through a mathematical algorithm
that has its roots in MRIs. And people didn't like to be in the
MRI tunnel very long, so people were anxious to find a way to process the data faster so they could get a person out quicker. And this breakthrough
a curt of Caltech and MIT I think in around twenty twelve or something, and the founders of NPS thought they could apply that to autonomous driving, so they went to work on it, and they've made great progress, and with just new software using existing hardware, we've been able to prove I think definitively that we can see farther, clearer, and faster with better resolution significantly.
So now you're take and you apply that to a future world where automatic braking is regulated and pedestrian automatic breaking is regulated, and all car companies have to meet that, and they're faced with do I slam on the brakes or not?
And that decision has to be a function of are the tires worn?
Is the pressure right in the tires? How big is my load? Because
all that stuff contributes, how wet is the road? And certainly if you
could see twice as far up the road and differentiate what you're seeing better, the chances of you slamming on the brakes when you didn't have to go down considerably. So we think this is a big deal, John, does that
kill light our Well, we believe we have a chance of having light oar like performance with radar with this. I don't want to ever rule out a
technology because I believe in ant or and I think lighter will find its role.
There'll be some physics type situations. Take for example, Aurora. I
had the privileged Chris Armson invited me out to write in his truck about a month ago. I went to Houston. We rode from Houston to Palmer.
Unbelievable experience. This is a beautiful peter Bilt Class eight truck. He's got
these really cool trucking terminals the beginning and end. The truck had to maneuver
on service streets to get on the freeway. But Chris is showing increased confidence
for Aurora toical commercial and partnership with Continental in part because of what they've done with lightar. Eight pounds at seventy miles an hour is a different set of
physics than light duty vehicles. So he may need lighter. I don't know
that for a fact, John, but he may need lighter down the road given what he has to take account of and stopping those kinds of vehicles.
So I don't want to rule all light art, but even light ar could benefit from the same digital glasses. Abstally, Frank, Yeah, we think
the software has relevance for that, so he Yeah, I'm an optimistic technologist.
In terms of life experience, you guys know, I lost my hearing in the early nineties. I lived a year deaf. I hear today with
cocular implants, and the journey from the nineteen ninety three when I got my first implant to today has been one of learning by this technology, better batteries, better speech recognition software, better electrodes. And the company I get mine
from is called Cocular Corporation. They've hung with every customer and they let me
get these upgrades. And I went from not hearing music to one day hearing
the Beverly Hillbillies theme song that my kids were playing, to now appreciating zz tap and the doors and the stones. Any music I grew up with I
can enjoy because of engineers who are making what's possible real. Tell us a
little bit about that story. I mean, you just went deaf like that,
right like that. I had lost my hearing in one air when I
was twenty and then when I was in my early forties, I loved it.
Was this a disease is a genetic What they don't know? They rule
out all the scary stuff and they just said it happened. The hair cells
of my inner ears just went limp and stopped functioning. I went to bed.
I knew it was a Thursday night because we'd watched Seinfeld for some reason that sticks in my mind, and I woke up in the middle of night inausus I couldn't hear. We went to University Michigan Hospital and again they have
their usual suspects and they rule those out through testing. They tried to bring
my hearing back with high doses of steroids IV steroids. I was in the
hospital for that and one day I was laying in the hospital ben I look out this window and I see this massive dragonfly and it was the murgency Hilla got girl landing on the road. But I was elucinating and this stuff.
They couldn't bring my hearing back, and so I lived the year and General Motors was remarkable. I had a boss named Don Hackworth who just took me
under his wing and he said, we're gonna let you do your job fully.
They got me a stenographer that traveled with me and would transcribe what's going on. My administrative assistant would transcribe my voicemails. I was back in the
voicemail days, and I muddled through it, and then I got my implant.
I had to prove I was really tough before they would let me have an implant. So they needed a year of that proof. I got my
implant and they said, you know, just hang with it. Everything was
noise, John, and just listen to the AM radio. So I'm listening
to you every day. I'm not making any sense out of this. And
one day, about a month after I gotten and I hear this white Bronco and OJ, what's going on here? OJ, White Bronco. Couldn't figure
it out. I got home and turn on a TV and that was when
he was driving in the Bronco. I go, oh, oh my god.
That was the first time I connected AM radio voice and something that was really happening. I knew it was going to work. I knew it was
going to work, and there was just learning curve from there on. So
what do they beam an over the year update or how how does this cochlear implant improve over time. It is the software right now, I go to
University of Michigan Hospital. They have a clinic that's remote from the big hospital,
and they'll do a upgrade of reprogramming of it, and then periodically I'll just Medicare is pretty good about letting me get new upgrades for the hardware.
Never the wire. The wires are the same wires. So imagine this.
The wire in this era goes back to nineteen ninety three twenty two electrodes firing in some organized way with every sound. I think that the engineering that went
into those materials to allow that to still be firing away, it's just remarkable.
So you can't help but be an optimistic technologist. I know sometimes people
see me as a dreamer or they say I'm hyping something. I get that,
But you've got to put the storytelling with the world of the possible, to give people hope, to get them excited, and furthermore, to give pushback on the people with the vested interest in the old way, because they are very very good at pushing back and making people believe that this stuff isn't going to happen. And so it's just the politics of it. You learn
over the years that all these different voices are in play. You guys play
an extremely important role, especially the three of you, because of your interest in technology and your commitment to fact checking and trying to really understand and tell the story in a way that every day people can understand. You see,
this will only happen if we have collective will, So back to getting smaller vehicles and managing the safety. Collective will is only going to have and through
common understanding, and common understanding is only going to happen through your profession, and we need to we really need to hold on to that. So so,
Larry, let me ask you about your optimism in light of what we're seeing in the industry right now. Now, over the past few months,
it seems as though the vehicle manufacturers, at least those in North America, are beginning to be a little less bullish about electric vehicles. They seem to
be pulling back. Now. Do you see this as they're becoming technological pessimists
or are they seeing this as the market regular people are not ready for this technology? I mean, I mean, how do you see that? I
think it's the letter you know again, it's exciting to tell stories about all time with cars and electric vehicles, and so it's natural that the media will pick up on these stories and tell these stories. The auto industry is extremely
complicated. You're talking about vehicles with tens of thousands of parts sourced from around
the world, safety critical products, and a market that is highly differentiated, with people having a wide range of different needs in their vehicles, and somehow it tends to get oversimplified. Let's not forget the fastest growing segment in the
US has been electric vehicles. But on my stump speeches, I think I've
been pretty consistent on it. No one should be betting the farm. I
really believe plug in hybrids, and GM did pioneer that with the volt and I was still at GM on that project bubbled up and was a strong proponent of that because in our daily travel, most of the time, we don't go more than forty mine and so if you can plug in and get your forty miles off of the grid each day, you're not buying gas very often, but you got the peace of mind of not running out of electricity.
That makes all kinds of sense for transition purposes. But some of the regulators
wouldn't give companies credit for that. They wanted ZEV zero. The answer is
zero. So no matter how good this plug and hybrid could be and how
good of a fit it is, they believe it keeps fossil fuels in play.
The reality is, the amount of fossil fuel used in the world is so enormous that we're not going to get off of it in one step.
We've got to have an intelligent way to manage a transition. So I just
really think, Gary, we've got to get a lot more people grounded in reality. The technology is there, the infrastructure isn't quite there. I certainly
haven't given up on hydrogen and fuel, says, I ain't believe there's going to be a day where I get my hydrogen and a cartridge delivered by Amazon through e commerce. Wait a minute, I go into more detail. Let
me this place. I have not lost by optimism on this, but we've
got to be realistic. We can't say shut down oil and shut down natural
gas because I put seventy five hundred dollars on the nose in an EV, I go it's done. We need oil. You look at the number of
two hundred and fifty million vehicles in the United States need gasoline and we're still dependent on it. We've got to find a way to manage the transition.
And yes it's a heated debate, how much time do we have before the planet passes a critical tipping point? How urgent is all of this, But
transportation is not the only sector that's contributing to climate change. I think we're
contributing fifteen percent. There's a lot of other people have to step up to
this as well. So Gary, I believe Einstein is right. The best
design is the simplest one that works. My passion for electric vehicles, be
it battery or few, is grounded in that principle. These vehicles will have
half as many parts in them as combustion based human driven vehicles, and that's less engineering, fewer design interfaces between those parts, better quality, lower cost, and less labor. And the tension behind the eaw strikes were absolutely grounded
in that. We've got to manage the transition. And as soon as our
politicians and others wake up to that and bring some sanity back into it and get into a longer term transition plan, I think I think we'll be in good shape. Now let's go back to hydrogen. Let's go back to hydrogen.
When I was still at GM and the fuel cell program reported through me and Byron McCormick was leading it, the industry sorted down to seven hundred bar, that's ten thousand psi. Compressed hydrogen is what we would store in the
vehicle, and that would give us sufficient range to have cars do what gasline cars do today. Everybody's happy with that. Toilet has done a marvelous job
perfecting their compressed hydrogen tanks, and they're so good at that kind of stuff, and we knew that would be safe and we knew it would work.
Meanwhile, and at the time since I left GM, scientists have been working on new classes of material. One class of material is called graphene, which
is a very thin material which with a huge surface area, and they're creating ways to put hydrogen into matrixes of these materials. And the hydrogen doesn't chemically
bond to the surface. It's held in place by these forces of how atoms
interact with each other. They're called Vanderwald forces. And it looks like we
can get the same amount of hydrogen at fifty bar as we have at seven hundred bar. So that means a cartridge like the cartridge I have under my
sink to filter my water, becomes a viable to give me hydrogen. Now,
imagine if my car is sitting in my driveway and through my connectivity, Amazon knows four of my eight cartridges are empty, and they're bringing me this part from my kitchen drawer. They throw four cartridges a hydrogen in the marginal
cost of getting me my hydrogen is zero because they're coming anyhow. They swap
out my empties, put in my folds, and I'm not worrying about this one bit. And Amazon's producing the hydrogen at their fulfillment center using scaled electoralizers
and renewable energy. Do you think Amazon would like to sell energy? Yes.
Do you think it's a breakthrough to not have fixed infrastructure at corner gas stations or at recharging in parking structures. It's a breakthrough, John, So
you've got to look at this stuff with the longer term lens, and people will rule out hydrogen and fuel cells. I'll say it's not as efficient as
solar directly into your car battery. This isn't an efficiency debate, is a
capital utilization debate, and they're not factoring in something else that's very important, how much capital is going to be required of the electric grid improvement. Once
we get past about a twenty percent market share of electric vehicles in the national fleet, massive amounts of capital are going to be needed because when you two go home living on the same street, hypothetically, and you want to do a rapid recharge at the same time, your substation may not be able to handle it. So it's all the power of Vand I'm totally in favor of
batteries and electric vehicles. I'm totally in favor of hydrogen and fuel cell electrics,
which are really hydrogen batteries. We are not solving the sustainability problem putting
two thousand pounds of battery in a pickup truck to make it an ev eight thousand pound pickup trucks because they're electric that remain parked ninety to ninety five percent of the time. All you've done is taken the lithium out of the ground
and put it in a parking lot. That is not solving climate change.
And I think there's a lot of merit to what Toyota is telling us.
I can take that same amount of battery and maybe do twenty or thirty plug in hybrids and move the needle on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere a lot faster.
The regulators have got to embrace and celebrate that and not say that's not a ZEV therefore we're not going to give you a credit. So how long
does the transition take? Garry? I learned years ago to not put timetables
on things. As soon as I put a date on it, and that
date passes and it hasn't happened, they're going to say I was hyping it.
So I focus on something different. I focus on tipping points. So
the real question is when are we at a point where the value exceeds the price so people want it. So the value of a connected electrical autonomous vehicle
exceeds its price and people want it, and the price exceeds it cost, so companies want to make it. So at that point the market will naturally
scale that and that'll require a lot of capital, a lot of time to get rid of the old fleet and put in a new fleet. I think
those tipping points in all three of those runs, I think we've passed the tipping point on connected vehicles, and I think we're at the tipping point on electric vehicles, and I think autonomous vehicles could be in a five year window following this eight ass path forward plus the great progress or wear or way more making. But I can't predict that for sure, but I think from a
tipping point standpoint where everybody looks at that and says, yeah, we can do a transportation system and accessibility system, mobility system based on connector collector of autonomous that people are really going to want, They're going to pay the price that lets me get a return. I think we can have those proof points.
Certainly within five years we should be able to and you know, I think with that tipping point, that's probably the perfect way to end this show.
Larry Burns, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a fascinating hour, fascinating hour. I'm enjoyed it,
and we're going to let you go away for a while, but we're going to have you come back and we're going to empty more of that knowledge out of your brain five years and see if I've done right. But no,
I mean, it's really really hard to predict the timing because of the learning people call sometimes they call these technologies frontier technologies, and they just don't have the same investment aspects to them in terms of their uncertainty and what needs to be learned and how you find that value Suite spot I always remind myself anti log breaks. It was into our sixth generation version of ANI like breaks
in GM, where we put it standard on all Chevrolets. So we had
to go from a one model of a Cadillac as an option all the way through to every Chevrolet. What happened during that journey, each generation had lower
cost, better performance, higher volume, and convinced the developers that it was worth going to the next generation. That's how engineers make what's possible real.
And a lot of people aren't patient for that learning, and a lot of companies don't have deep enough pockets to go on that journey. But that's what
has to happen here. Well, yeah, thanks so much, Frank.
Great avenue on the show was always sure, Larry, We'll just keep our garry. We'll keep on doing this. I'll online after hours has brought to
you by Bridgestone Tires Solutions for your Journey and by Intrepid Control Systems Over the air engineering boost your game
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