AAH #795 - Affordable Cars, Made From Waste and Solar Powered. Why Not?

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Speaker 2: Everybody, Thanks for joining us on Autoline after Hours.

Speaker 3: We're going to be talking a whole lot about the whole mobility ecosystem today because we've got Chris Baroni Bird on the show. Good afternoon, Good, good afternoon, and god

of course Gary's here too.

Speaker 4: Here I am, yeah, thank you for inviting me.

Speaker 3: Yeah, So, do you have any any puzzles or oh I can get I can give you a quiz.

Speaker 5: Okay, I can give you a quiz, so okay. On

June eleventh, eighteen ninety five, there was a very famous and important patent file in the United States. Who was

it filed by and what was it for?

Speaker 2: You want to take a crack of actress.

Speaker 4: Eighteen ninety five. Was something to do with the mobility. Yeah,

so it wasn't the automobile because that was invented in Germany.

So you would think Uh, oh, what are you trying to do that?

Speaker 2: I believe it's the Selden patent.

Speaker 4: Oh, I believe you're incorrect.

Speaker 5: So Charles E. Durier received the first US patent issue

to an American inventor for a gasoline powered automobile.

Speaker 2: Okay, now how did he work that out with the Selden patent?

Speaker 4: I think it was before the Selton patent.

Speaker 2: Then how did Seldon get a patent?

Speaker 4: Maybe he bought the Duryer Motor Wagon Company.

Speaker 3: No, Selden came up with his own pat and you know, every automaker in America with the exception of the Ford Motor Company because Henry said, yes.

Speaker 5: I'm not well. But Henry didn't start building cars until

nineteen oh three. And we're talking about eighteen ninety five, sir.

Speaker 3: But Sheeldon already had his patent before Henry got involved, and.

Speaker 4: They didn't have international patents in those days.

Speaker 5: Apparently not okay, apparently nocause it could have been basically that Durier built thirteen cars the first year he was in production, so that thing maybe not didn't last very long.

Speaker 3: So yeah, maybe because I'm trying to remember Mac Truck, for example, built trucks under license from Renault. But yeah,

patent or Selden. Everybody had to pay Selden a royalty

for every automobile that they made. Henry said, this is,

you know, nonsense, And I'm trying to remember now how it all went. But I believe Henry sued Selden and

to prove in the courtroom that the patent was worthless.

He actually forced Selden to.

Speaker 2: And it didn't work.

Speaker 3: There's a very famous picture of it parked by the side of the road with about a four foot geyser of steam shooting out of the radiator, and it was very tippy.

Speaker 2: It was very dangerous to drive.

Speaker 3: But anyway, because it really didn't work, and we won the lawsuit, nobody ever paid salt in a royalty again.

Speaker 5: All right, and before we talk about his book, I'll give you another one.

Speaker 4: This is this is this.

Speaker 5: More modern? Okay, on the's at least in the twentieth century. Okay,

So this is June eleventh, nineteen twenty eight, the first model from this company was produced. And I'll even I'll

even tell you the name of the vehicle. It was

the model q.

Speaker 3: Oh Boy Well twenty company that's late in the game, you know, as it were in the Chrysler.

Speaker 2: But I that's who I would guess, Walter p.

Speaker 4: I don't know if I can give it to you or not. No, No, I started way before that, pumth

Oh interesting, all right, I'm with the show.

Speaker 3: Okay, we got Chris Bird here, so a little bit of your back, right.

Speaker 2: We know you were at Chrysler, Oh yeah, a long time ago, A long time ago, and in the R and D operations right.

Speaker 4: Kind of rice.

Speaker 6: They really didn't have an R and D organization as such like Gem and Board. It was very much an

engineering company rather than science and engineering company.

Speaker 2: Okay, but it was advanced.

Speaker 6: It was advanced technologies and engineering worked under Tom Moore, who worked under Blots and fans Walker's thing right, yeah, back in the day, and great place to work.

Speaker 3: Well and funny because you up Tom Boar's name, because there was a name I haven't heard in a long time, and I can't remember who I was talking to, but he was saying that got brilliant.

Speaker 4: He was a visionary and a great person to work with.

Four Yeah.

Speaker 7: He took a risk hiring me in with this big cowboy hat and southern drama and personality, big personnality created a great atmosphere where he worked.

Speaker 5: So what are some of the things that you worked on when you were well?

Speaker 6: I was brought over and in fact he had to get permission by Bob Lots to get to hire me because at the time Chrysler was not hiring anybody, beast of all a foreigner, which I am. So I came

over on an H one B visa and my job was really to look at what the National Lab to do.

Speaker 2: And you never went home. Should we be calling ice

on you? You belong in one of those camps for US.

Speaker 6: I do go up vacationally, but yeah, my job was really to understand what the national labs are doing because Christler didn't really have any scientists per se like GM and Board had squadrons of R and D people chryst that they didn't and they felt that they might be missing out on a gold in the National labs because the National Labs were converting from serving the Cold War towards a Cold War dividend helping US industry. GM was

making a big deal about it, and christ I felt they needed somebody to understand.

Speaker 4: So that's how I got involved in fuel cells.

Speaker 6: Because at the time, in the early nineteen nineties, the limitations of battery electric vehicles were becoming quite well known with lead acid batteries at the time, and so the Department of Energy was really thinking that the solution wasn't going to be a battery electric vehicle, it was going to be a fuel cell vehicle using hydrogen. So that's

how I got involved, And because nobody else really knew anything about fuel cells, I was able to move into a position where I was managing a vehicle program, albeit a research vehicle program, fuel cell vehicle prot So I basically evolved from being a scientist, which I was, to being a program engineer or chief engineer of a vehicle program, albeit an advanced program. But then I began to see

the limitations of fuel cells stuffing them into a car that was.

Speaker 4: Powered typically powered by an internal combustion engine.

Speaker 6: I was really thinking about how what would happen if you designed a vehicle around the technology, and so I got to thinking about shouldn't R and D be looking at enabling design, not just enabling emission standards or better manufacturing techniques or better safety, but also enabling design. This

fusion of design and technology I thought was a really interesting idea because the innovation is at the boundary between disciplines, and so I thought it was a rich area of innovation in Chrysler was known for its styling, so I thought, why not create a department that really looks at technology that could help allow styling to be even more advanced and better. But unfortunately the Diamer part of Chrysler at

the time wasn't interested in that idea. But Harry Burns

was at GM, so I moved to GM in two thousand and had a chance to basically take this idea and run with it and develop the autonomy concept.

Speaker 2: Which is really the first skateboard design.

Speaker 6: Yeah, a lot of patterns we have on that, and that was a great program to work on. And then

towards the end of my stint at GM, I had the opportunity to work on a vehicle that would address urban mobility. So instead of thinking about how you could

take advantage of technology to create new looking vehicles, it began to think more about how can we create vehicles that serve all of societal needs And there was a great opportunity for the Shanghai World Expo twenty ten, where GM had the only pavilion devoted to the automobile in the future of automobile, you know. Along with our joint

bench partner Saie So, I was given the opportunity to create a vision of the future twenty thirty, which is not that far away now, but it was twenty years into the future at that time, which is about the sweet spot for coming up with a vision. It's not

so far away into the future that anything's possible, but it's not too near that it's constrained.

Speaker 4: It's just the sweet spot.

Speaker 6: So we came up with this vision of autonomous connected electric vehicles with right sized vehicles to address not only emissions and safety and congestion and energy usage, but also parking limitations in big cities. It needed to be a

small footprint vehicle, highly maneuverable, and we came up with the Envy vehicles.

Speaker 4: Electric Network vehicles is what they were called.

Speaker 6: I would have called them ACE vehicles or for Autonomous Connected Electric but I was not given the go ahead for that one. The Chinese came up with the en

dash B name and that was a great program. But

I could see the car was becoming a smartphone on wheels.

So in twenty twelve, I left, Oh, here it is.

Here's an example. We actually built three of these. Nice

for getting the beat on.

Speaker 2: Yeah, because I was looking. We usually have it on

the shelf right here.

Speaker 4: But yeah, these are obviously toy versions of.

Speaker 5: The Yeah, we actually got here a giant.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 6: We actually did have a fifteen of these made and they were demonstrated for six months at the Shanghai World Expo, operating autonomously on stage, and they were using segway technology.

Speaker 4: You can see it.

Speaker 6: It's a segway platform, just twice as wide and twice as long, and.

Speaker 4: We created a front opening.

Speaker 6: The idea being that when you park in the street, instead of opening the door and going out onto the street and perhaps being hit by a cyclist or a car, you would park this nose in and enter onto the street directly a sidewalk sorry yeah, onto the pavement or sidewalk directly, and these vehicles would be able to turn on a dime, so you could use far less given number of vehicles. So this was a vision that was

a bit of ahead of its time, just like the autonomy concept was.

Speaker 4: But it's coming to.

Speaker 6: Fruition and I do think right sized vehicles are going to happen, and I do believe wheel mods are going to happen, So.

Speaker 4: I got to ask you that.

Speaker 5: Okay, so you know you mentioned segue in for yes, some people may remember the original, the original segue versus the seguey nine bot or whatever they are now.

Speaker 4: And so this was in the Dean came in the Earth.

It was actually yes, So what was it like?

Speaker 6: And Doug Field was actually running the team when we started working. This is in two thousand and nine, just

before we moved to Apple, right, So so I mean, so, so what was it like for.

Speaker 5: You to convince people at General Motors that they needed to have a propulsion system as well as you could you could argue that basically the steering and the chassis and the whole setup was was coming from this you know company in New Hampshire.

Speaker 6: Well, it was a tough sell because you know, it's a balancing vehicle and not only is it autonomous, which people get nervous about, but a balancing autonomous vehicle. But

it was something that you know, GM felt at the time was a really good idea and it was good for demonstrating an exciting vision and that was the point I don't think.

Speaker 4: We really seriously thought that this would be the.

Speaker 6: Two wheel balancing solution would be the right solution for mass production or for commercialization, but for generating interest at the World Expo, which is a vision of the future.

It really did a great job. I mean the fact

that it swiveled. It was like a ballet movement. It

was so graceful. But there are limitations. Not only do

you have to put in a lot of redundancy, which adds cost and weight, but you also have to have limitations on how quickly you can accelerate and decelerate. If

you think about it so sorry, too quickly it's going to pop over. Or if you go over bumps in

the road and only one wheels in contact with the ground at a time, it's a challenge.

Speaker 4: So this has real.

Speaker 6: Limitations in terms of a commercial product with two people sitting in it. And again if you have lots of

people sitting in this and have bags, the weight distribution can be quite quite broad and you have to make sure that this is always balanced no matter what. So

a lot of technical challenges is my point. But it

really served the purpose for the Shanghai World Expo. But

as we were looking at taking this concept further. We

then moved to towards something that was like a four wheeled version of this, but with wheel motors. But around

twenty twelve I moved to Qualcomm because I could see the car was becoming a smartphone on wheels, and Qualcom is in everybody's smartphone. I don't know if you we

realize that. And Qualcom had a very interesting business. They

actually did make smartphones at one point, but then they sold it and they just became a supplier of parts to the smartphone. But in China, and you'll see the

relevance to the auto mobile. Around twenty ten timeframe, a

lot of the Chinese smartphone companies were concerned that they were being left behind by LG and Samsung and so forth, and Quarcom had the technology to basically give them reference design so they could make their own smartphone. So pretty

much overnight, a whole bunch of Chinese smartphone companies emerge that were differentiating their product on the consumer facing part of the phone and the cost and the branding, and it began to be a very competitive marketplace, and over time they became successful and could invest more and more in their own technology. So this got me thinking about

whatever in the automobile. If you could create a standardized

platform like a skateboard or an ACE platform as I call it, which contained all of the autonomous, connected electric platform then allow people to basically just focus on building the body on top or the coach and customizing that and personalizing it and branding it so forth. But then

you get huge economies of scale on the platform side to bring the costs down because that's where all of the expensive technology is, and you could get generate tremendous amounts of data by selling this platform to many, many different car companies.

Speaker 2: I love the idea press. I think it's brilliant. I

don't think it's ever.

Speaker 3: Going to happen, and I'll tell you why, okay, because I'm on a big crusade right now trying to get car companies to use, reuse a lot more of the components that they've already got across their product lines, and better still take the next step, which China's already done, by the way, and commonize all the commodity components door hinges, slatches, windshield wiper motors. The list goes on and on, stuff

that the consumer doesn't really care about as long as works.

That's all they care about. They don't care anything like that.

It's not happening.

Speaker 4: It's not it is.

Speaker 3: So I know companies in town here and there's only three, so you know one and you've probably got guessed the right one. They can't even get commonization across their own

product lines. And so for you to say, why don't

we come up with a platform, like I said, it should be done, well, how do you make it.

Speaker 4: Might not be done here, it might be done in China.

Speaker 6: China has hundreds of small correct car companies, each supported by the local municipal government, right because it's a badge of honor having a car company.

Speaker 4: But they don't have scale any of these car companies.

Speaker 6: So why not create a common platform and sell it to all of these companies and then they can compete on the user experience because that's that's the competitive differentiation.

Speaker 5: Go so so in effect, this would be like the coach building of Fisher body.

Speaker 6: The customer differentiator which is not the platform. Even though

the platform contains all the expensive hardware that that can be mass produced and bring brought down really cheap and made a very very high quality in large volume and then customize the interior and the user experience. When people

in China get into a car, they're not so concerned about what's going on underneath the body the body, They're focused on that user experience, the entertainment display, how well is it connected to their lifestyle? And yeah, it's China,

but that's the way the world's going generator is.

Speaker 4: Such of people to heared you think care about anything beyond that.

Speaker 6: Yeah, I think most young people are focused on connectivity and entertainment, not so much on what type of battery is inside the vehicle or what type of motors are propelling the vehicle.

Speaker 4: That is becoming the trend.

Speaker 5: So you had you had a very cool idea when you were at qual Comm. As I recall that vehicle

to vehicle communication because everybody is walking around with well with the cell phone.

Speaker 6: The vehicle to pedestrian communications is what you mean, Yes, video the vehicle communications. GIM was one of the pioneers

of that back in the mid two thousands, using dedicated short range communications, but that's languished over the last twenty years.

As you know, Qualcom is proposing or pushing cellular v twigs and that may get more traction.

Speaker 3: Maybe because and the only reason I say maybe is it was already supposed to have happened.

Speaker 2: It was supposed to have happened years ago, you know, years like you're talking.

Speaker 3: Uh, you know, direct short range communication was on the shelf that Cadillac put it in a couple of models, I want to say in twenty seventeen.

Speaker 4: Yes they were.

Speaker 3: Yeah, but Chris, I believe V to V communication for just for vehicles, for the moments, just for argument's sake, then we can get into pedestrians.

Speaker 2: Would be the single best safety innovation since the seat belt.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree. And it's it's almost free correcte. Yeah, cheap.

Speaker 6: And I've often thought when I was at WEIMO after I left Qualcom, was chief engineer at WEIMO, I propose making all the robotaxis talk to each other b TOV, but not only talk to each other, but talk to the infrastructure. So yes, you'd be spending money on outfitting

traffic lights and intersections with maybe cameras and cellular communications that would then communicate to your robotaxi fleet so that when you're coming too an intersection you might see of a car or a pedestrian or cyclist is coming at right angles that you can't physically see them, you'd be getting a heads up.

Speaker 4: And my thought was the cost of.

Speaker 6: Rolling this out in terms of infrastructure buildout is limited because you're talking about a limited geography, not talking about the whole country. And if it allows you to get

to market sooner with a more viable, safe solution, that you can be generating a lot more data more quickly and the data flywheel effect, and it ends up saving you.

Speaker 4: Money in the long run.

Speaker 5: But if okay, if John's on a bike in yeah, you're in a robotaxi, and yeah, he's going to be he's going perpendicular to where you are, and he's got his.

Speaker 4: Phone on him.

Speaker 5: Yes, wouldn't the vehicle just automatically know where he is?

Speaker 6: He would yet, and then the vehicle would slow down if the cyclist is violating the traffic light rolls right.

Speaker 4: So that was supposed to help stev.

Speaker 2: To ax all vehicle to communications.

Speaker 4: Chinese.

Speaker 6: Again, I hate to go on about the Chinese, but they're taking this more seriously than we are, and they're putting it into place more that Baydo and others who are developing robo taxis in China are leveraging be Twix infrastructure to a much greater extent than the way moses the zookses are here and I don't know why.

Speaker 3: Well I can tell you one of the reasons why, who's going to pay for all this infrastructure?

Speaker 6: Well, I think the robotaxi companies should pay for it because they're huge companies and we're not talking about doing the whole country. They have so much data showing where

the challenging locations are. Those would be the high priority

places where you'd want additional eyes and ears, so to speak.

And you know the cost of retrofitting some senses, assuming you get city support for that, which the city could then say can benefit everybody. Traditional car companies could leverage

that same infrastructure, but the robotaxi companies have a vested interest because it would help them to accelerate their commercialization deployment of a viable service, because at the moment they're still not able to roll out at scale because of all of this long tail of challenges, which whether it's environmental issues or whether it's just driver behavior issues, or whether it's infrastructure and construction issues, that there's a long tail of challenges still stopping robotaxis from being deployed at scale,

and if you could make that happen sooner by tackling some of the safety concerns with B two x, it ends up being cost beneficial.

Speaker 2: It does.

Speaker 3: Maybe you need to plant that seed of an idea in the robotaxi company's minds.

Speaker 6: I think there's a philosophy almost like we're a software company.

You know, if you think about autonomous vehicles, that the heart is the software, and then around the software is the compute platform and the sensing. That's what you consider

the autonomy driver. And if you basically say, you know,

we're going to need some vehicle to vehicle communication, the vehicle to infraduct your communication, it's almost like an admission that you can't do everything just with sensing alone.

Speaker 4: So I think there's a little bit of.

Speaker 6: You know, pride in trying to solve this problem without relying on communications technology. But it's an expensive way to

look at solving the problem if you just rely on the vehicle by itself to figure out everything that's going on.

Speaker 2: You know.

Speaker 3: The I want to say it was the US Department of Transportation put out a video circa two thousand and seven that touted all the benefits of V to V communication.

This was on the direct short range communication SA and this was before automated braking or automated steering. You know,

it was just going to warn the driver. But and

it's a pretty extensive video. It was very well done

and nothing happened.

Speaker 6: But a lot of the robotaxi companies or the autonomous vehicle companies will touch as one of the benefits of autonomus vehicles better traffic flow. And if you don't have

a vehicle to vehicle communications between a flow of vehicles, you're not going to get as good flow. When you

use adaptive croose control, you're basically your radar sensor is sensing when the vehicle in front is moving ahead, and there's a little bit of a lag there before it senses and the vehicle accelerates. And if you had vehicle

to vehicles communicating with each other, they would move very immediately together and slow down immediately together, and the flow would be improved.

Speaker 4: So a lot of the flow can be much.

Speaker 6: More easily achieved with vehicle to vehicle communication than it can with autonomous vehicles.

Speaker 5: What wasn't one of the problems though, that the spectrum that people wanted to hang onto that it was a big fight over it, and so I think that derailed this whole thing. Yeah, less less the technology or aspect

and more of the legislative aspect.

Speaker 6: And part of it was initially who was going to see the benefit when you only have a very small penetration of vehicles that can communicate with each other. That's

why I think a robotax fleet operating in a geofenced area there's enough concentration there to make it viable. But

if you're if you're just driving a personally owned vehicle with v TOV communications, your chances of view communicating with another vehicle is pretty low at any one time.

Speaker 5: So which brings me back to the idea of Okay, if we all.

Speaker 4: Have cell phones, I mean odds are in any.

Speaker 5: Given vehicle, if there are three people, there are at least three cell phones, if not more. I mean, can't

that be used.

Speaker 4: That's an interesting idea.

Speaker 6: Yeah, the vehicle, it's phones inside the vehicle were communicating with each other as opposed to the vehicles having to communicate with each other, and it wouldn't necessarily have to be controlling the vehicle and causing you to break immediately.

It could just be information being should But again, you have to worry about cybersecurity, and one of the challenges with vehicle to vehicle communications is creating robust enough cybersecurity that this system can't be hacked. It would be much

harder to make such a system foolproof if you're relying on cell phones instead of the vehicles themselves.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Well, the issue is though that you know, in the US alone, there's what forty thousand plus people killed every year, several million injured, and V to V could dramatically reduce that.

Speaker 5: I agree, So Chrysler, General Motors, Way, MOO now Qualcom, qual Comm.

Speaker 6: Sorry, a small stint to MIT Media Lab, but then Waimo came approaching. But since I left WEIMO, which was

eight years ago. Seven years ago, I'd been a consultant

doing two things. One is a consulting for developed world companies.

I do some consulting for McKinsey and for the government's agencies and investors and so forth. But then I'm also

working on solution for the developing world, which is the solar powered EKP that I'm kind of passionate about. So

I spend my time split between those two roles. And

I joke that the work that I do for the rich people funds the work I'm doing for the poor people.

Speaker 3: But yeah, and we should split this discussion up into that bank.

Speaker 2: Because you've written a book. Yes, in all this time

you've been thinking about I.

Speaker 4: Should have brought it with me so I could show it.

Speaker 2: Yes, you should have.

Speaker 4: You should have do it in my back Okay, but yes.

Speaker 2: So one of the things that you've really been bothered by is how big and heavy cars have been calm.

Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, the car industry has embraced, or force has been forced to embrace that cars are getting smarter, you know, with a bit of prodding from Tesla and Weimo and Uber and Silicon Valley in general. So the car companies

are brought into that idea that they need to electrify the vehicles and make them autonomous and connected and so forth.

But the fundamentals of the vehicles themselves are still the bloated.

They're getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Speaker 4: If you compare a.

Speaker 6: Nineteen ninety five Ford F series pickup truck to a modern version of the same vehicle, it's like night and day.

And when I arrived in nineteen ninety two and I was looking at a nineteen ninety five pickup truck.

Speaker 4: I didn't think, this is really small vehicle.

Speaker 6: And I kind of joke that some of the reason why the vehicles got bigger is because people have got bigger.

You know, obesity is a trend, as we all know, and that contributes a small part of the reason why the vehicles are got wider, because the seats of to get wider. But then there's more safety structure in the

CID doors for better side impact protection protection, and people want more storage space in consoles and so forth.

Speaker 4: So there's a variety of reasons why the vehicles have got wider.

Speaker 6: But they've also got taller and longer, and it's a big concern because it puts more stress on the roads themselves, and it makes the vehicles less energy efficient than they would otherwise be, and it makes them less safe to other road users. And when I say other road users,

I don't just mean pedestrians and cyclists, but also people in small cars. And it's almost like an arms race,

you know. I feel like some people, when they look

at buying a new vehicle, feel that they need to buy a bigger vehicle just to be safe from other big vehicles. So they end up buying a bigger vehicle

when they really would be happy to buy a smaller vehicle because it would be cheaper and more energy efficient.

Speaker 4: So we're going in the wrong way.

Speaker 6: We're adding a lot of smart technology to a fundamentally big vehicle that's not optimized for its usage. And I

do believe that autonomy has the power to revolutionize this if it's done properly, and that is by taking the friction out of renting a car. So think about why

you buy a bigger vehicle than you really need. Most

of the time, it's because of the convenience of having something big. Yeah, you may feel safer in it as well,

but part of it is because you want that freedom to go anywhere you want, whenever you want, and to have a vehicle that's big enough to satisfy that one percent of the time you need a big vehicle.

Speaker 4: I get that that's true.

Speaker 6: Logically, you could save a lot of money by buying a smaller vehicle it's more efficient, and then just renting a bigger vehicle when you need it. But have you

ever tried renting a vehicle at the weekend, even like a U haul, it's a bit.

Speaker 4: Of a hassle. What if that vehicle comes to you,

like an uber comes to your front.

Speaker 6: Door, and you then drive it manually like you would a regular vehicle, and when you finish with it and you come back to your house, it goes away autonomously, again within a geofenced region, maybe that the dealership or a repair center or hurt rental cour agency within a few miles of your house. It goes back there and

where it's it's cleaned, it's recharged, it's calibrated, and it's all insurance is taken care of. If you take the

friction out of renting a vehicle and make it much easier to pick up and drop off a rental vehicle, some fraction of people might be persuaded because of the cost savings to do that. I'm not saying that everybody

would be motivated to do that, but a lot of people would.

Speaker 4: Be well, and that would be a very energy efficient solution.

Speaker 6: It would make it would This is why I talk about sustainable and affordable mobility. Is the two problems trying

to solve sustainable mobility for rich people. Affordable mobility for

poor people, and poor people can be anywhere in the world.

We know that it's not just in the developing world.

There are poor people in developed world as well, and there's rich people in the developing world.

Speaker 4: So it's about how do we solve those two problems.

Speaker 6: And in the rich world, people who can afford to buy a car, how can we make it more sustainable.

This may be an approach. You buy a smaller vehicle,

it's much more energy efficient, and you have to access that bigger vehicle when if you want, and it's seamless.

Speaker 3: There's already an example sort of you know, look at the success that Uber and even Left have had.

Speaker 2: You know, you could always forget hail the cab as well.

Speaker 3: When you've got a smartphone and an app that it just makes it so much easier.

Speaker 4: That's right.

Speaker 6: And that vehicle could come to you autonomously, to a front door basically, or to wherever you are, and then you just drive it like you were a regular vehicle.

So I'm not talking about a fully autonomous vehicle that can go anywhere. I'm just talking about a vehicle that

comes autonomously within a certain geofenced region close to your house and the way mos of the world, and not only solving the technical challenges of making an autonomous vehicle work reliably and safely, they're also having to solve the operational challenges in making them sure they're cleaned and recharged and ensured, and the expertise that they're needing to develop in order to stand up a business that's viable. It's

all transferable to this rental car model that I'm talking about.

So I'm optimistic that once the autonomy is solved, people will be thinking about it in this way because cars are becoming more and more unaffordable as we know.

Speaker 4: And yes, there's a certain percentage.

Speaker 6: Of population can afford to buy a big vehicle and have it not being used that way for most of the time. But there's a lot of people who are

hurting right now because they can't get that vehicle when they need it, and they can't even afford a smaller vehicle.

Speaker 4: Right.

Speaker 3: We got a time, Yeah, it's time to take a quick commercial break.

Speaker 2: We're going to be back in just a moment.

Speaker 8: We act, we grow, we transform, we protect, we rescue in moments that define the future. We are the partner

you can trust Alex Partners when it really matters.

Speaker 2: Knowing that a little rain won't slow down your day.

That's what really matters.

Speaker 5: Bridgetone torns of why attract tires confident control in wet conditions.

Speaker 3: All right, we're back and we took advantage of this little break. We've got Chris's book here. It's called Sustainable

and Affordable Mobility for All or can you buy us Chris?

Speaker 6: You can buy it on the SAE website, but you can also buy it on Amazon.

Speaker 4: Okay, there you go. I think most people are going

to buy it on Amazon.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And the subtitle of the book is putting the hot back into technology because so much of technology that we talk about today it's a dock side to it.

Speaker 4: You know, whether it's about robots.

Speaker 6: Taking you know, blue collar jobs away, or AI taking white college jobs away, or cybersecurity hacks, or privacy and security, all of this is a dock side to the benefits of autonomy and connectivity. And my book is more about

a positive vision of the future, which is around renewable energy and circular economy and jobs and self reliance instead of relying on big companies and big governments to make communities more self sufficient in developing their own mobility solutions.

Speaker 5: I want to live in your world, so I want to I want to quote you to you, and I want you to explain this.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Speaker 5: So here's what I'm wanting to voice by my own potamia possably Okay. Whereas early automotive pioneers such as Henry

Ford focused on making vehicles affordable, current automakers seem more interested in developing features such as hands free driving while still having to pay attention to the road, or trying to monetize heated seats with subscription or software updates.

Speaker 4: Okay, So these.

Speaker 6: Are all things we're seeing, and perhaps that sounds like something I wrote in my book, Yes, so I'd stand by.

I mean, the cars have become more and more expensive, and it's not just the initial purchase price of the car a sticker shop, it's.

Speaker 4: The ongoing cost.

Speaker 6: The insurance is going way up because all of this advanced technology is making cars harder to repair. So even

though they may get into fewer accidents because of aid as technology, if they do get into an accident, it's going to be a much more expensive repair. Like if

the camera is attached to the windshield and you get a chipped windshield because a stone hits it. It's like

a two thousand dollars repair now it used to be two or three hundred dollars. Or if you have a

bender bender, if another vehicle taps you in the parking lot, you might not even be able to see any damage, but it's like ten dollars worth of damage can be done.

There's lots of examples of Riban and Tesla vehicles that are so super integrated in terms of the structures that replacing one part of the vehicle is no longer an option.

You have to replace a big chunk of the vehicle.

And more and more vehicles are being totaled as a result of that, Insurance rates are going way up, and then the car companies are trying to find ways to monetize the vehicle after they sell it to you.

Speaker 4: With subscriptions, so there's an ongoing cost there.

Speaker 6: And then I don't know if you realize this, but when you want to sell your vehicle at the end of the two year or ten year life, whenever you want to sell it, the fact that it has all of this technology on it might make it harder to sell because there may be more idiot lights on saying something's not working properly, and people are averse to buying something when they're not quite sure if there's a problem, so you might get less for the vehicle than you think.

So I think there's a lot of technology being put onto cars that people either don't use properly, or they put too much trust in and it can be dangerous.

Or they might drive off after her vehicle's referred and not realize that the sensors haven't been calibrated because the shops haven't done that work. So they may be driving

a vehicle that's it's less safe than they think. So

I think there's a lot there's an opportunity for, or a requirement even that car companies offer vehicles that don't have this technology. It's very difficult to find vehicles without

this technology as an option.

Speaker 5: Well, I mean, isn't it, because they basically say, there's there's no business case to make a simple car that has no technology on it. Therefore, we're going to sell

something that's repletely loaded, and it's if one can it.

Speaker 6: If one car company was able to make an affordable vehicle and lots of people bought it, there might be a business case for it.

Speaker 3: We might have a little bit of a test case coming up at the end of the year with Slates coming out with this inexpensive electric truck that's I mean truly bare abe I we'll see what kind of demand there is.

Speaker 6: Yeah, but if you just buy a vehicle from a regular automotive company and try to buy without the ADUSK package, it's it's really hard.

Speaker 4: In many cases, they don't let you unbundle it, you know.

Speaker 6: I think a lot of ADA systems you either either misuse it, like people thinking it's great and that put too much trust in it and they don't pay attention anymore. Well,

they disuse it, you know. It's so frustrating to figure

out how to use it. Probably that they just turned

it off. Yet they've ended up paying for it many times.

All right, By and large, I do not like eight ass systems. I hate that the steering wheel fighting you

on turns, or if you're wanting to change lanes without using your turn signal.

Speaker 2: Which is fine to do when there's nobody around and it's fighting you, or there's a curve in the road and it's fighting you.

Speaker 3: And then these so called semi autonomous systems where you have the car steering itself, but you have to keep your hands on the steering wheel, which to me is beyond stupid. But I would also point out all this

eight ass stuff has really driven up warranty and recall recalls because it's so complicated.

Speaker 6: Absolutely, I think that a real demand for stripped down vehicles that are simple to operate, just like they were ten fifteen years ago, just because the cost of the vehicles are going way up. I mean, adas systems properly

executed like a semi autonomous system like GM Supergrowth, can be great on a long distance trip. I've got quite

a few friends who really think so. But there's a

lot of people who struggle with the cost of the technology and it's no option around it.

Speaker 4: That's the problem I have. So speaking of.

Speaker 5: The heart in the technology, there there's a point you make that I was not aware of, and I'm sure that many of our listeners or viewers be surprised by the twenty twenty three Mozilla Privacy Not Included report, which had a finding that one of the twenty five car brands reviewed failed basic privacy standards, collecting everything from driver location to medical and genetic data.

Speaker 4: It's going to get worse.

Speaker 6: Unfortunately, because I talk about the ADS technology being complicated.

Speaker 4: The fact that it doesn't work as it should.

Speaker 6: Do means that now you're going to have driver monitoring systems in the vehicle. So you're adding another technology to

solve the limitations of the first technology you put in, and it's going to add more cost and it's going to create more privacy concerns. Now there's a role for

all of this in the future. If you think about

autonomous vehicles and you have an elderly parent, you can't drive a car.

Speaker 4: It's great that they can get into a vehicle and it drives them.

Speaker 6: And this person, this parent might be a risk person, So you might want help monitoring inside the vehicle. You

might want EKG sensors in the seat and the cameras looking at the face and so forth, all a virtual basically an ADAS system for the inside of the vehicle that's sensing the occupants. So I understand the value proposition

in many cases for this, but the risk of this technology being misused or the data being collected and monetized in a way that you don't get any benefit from it yourself is scurry. In my mind, but that's the

direction we're likely to be going into. It's more and

more occupant sensing.

Speaker 3: We talked a lot about vehicles, big heavy, expensive vehicles for the developed world and some of your ideas, but you get a lot for the developing world.

Speaker 2: Got a lot of ideas well.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 6: My background is obviously working for rich companies in the rich world, but I've done volunteer work in many parts of the world. And even when I was working on

the Shanghai World Expo and working on cutting edge technology, I was working on in my mind solar powered mobility for subtaran Africa, where you don't have a grid that you can plug an electric car into or an electric bike into, but you have abundant sunshine.

Speaker 4: So I was thinking about a solar powered vehicle.

Speaker 6: For many, many years, and then I've evolved this idea working with different universities to a point where it's more of an eke it that can be attached to different vehicles, whether it's a tricycle or a wheelbarrow or wheel cart.

But one of the encouraging things about what I'm seeing in Africa os just a couple of months ago in Rwanda is how progressive they are with electric bikes the boat boat as they call them there, and basically these are much nicer to ride than regular motorbikes, and they're ubiquitous.

People use them for as taxis and for delivering goods because the streets are very congested and not very good quality.

So motorbikes are very common. But now they're going to

be more and more electric. And the batteries can be

swapped very easily, and when they're being swapped, they get replaced with a good battery, a fresh one and the battery that needs to be recharged can be recharged with solar powered roof and the economics of solar power becoming very compelling. If you think about a solar panel roof

on a tuck tuck, which is very common in India to tuck tucks, that size of solar panel can generate about three kilo what hours of electricity every day at the year in many parts of the world. To put

that in perspective, if you put into a forward lightning pickup truck, you'd get about five miles of range. But

if you put it into a tuck tuck, which can hold three people and move people all goods around you're getting like thirty miles of range every day of the year, and the average vehicle drives about thirty miles a day.

So pretty much all of your energy could be free in many parts of the world and even many parts of America in a sun belt, for example. And it's

because the vehicle is right sized. You know, it uses

only about one hundred wade hours to go each mile and that's the same way as a goolf cart as well.

So I think the idea I have is in cities, right sizing the vehicle is extremely important to enabling solar powered mobility. Solar panels are coming down in cost, they're

improving in energy per unit area, and they're improving in the shape flexibility, and then they no longer need to be completely rigid. It can be curved and follow the

roof of the vehicle, and it's just improving. Like battery

technology continues to improve, you know, unlike gasoline technology or even engine technology, which improves at much slower rate. The

battery and elect solar power is really coming on leaps and bounds, Chris.

Speaker 5: But what happens at night in non cloudy days, Well, the battery is when I talk about three killer what hours that's during the day, So that's average.

Speaker 6: If you do the calculations based on solar loading, you get three killo what hours of energy per day, So that would give you thirty miles a driving per day.

Speaker 5: Okay, but if I'm using thirty miles of driving on a regular day, yes, are you including are you including night in that day or is it just somety miles per twenty four hour period?

Speaker 4: Okay?

Speaker 6: Yeah, But you have to also remember that many of the miles being driven are being driven by fleets, so they have very predictable usage patterns, and they know they're not driving in the middle of night, for example, or maybe they are, but they factor that into the calculation.

Speaker 4: Maybe they don't.

Speaker 6: They just park the vehicle in the sun all day and then they're driving at night delivering goods when the roads are less crowded.

Speaker 4: Who knows.

Speaker 6: But this is a very practical solution, and the fleet is where the action is going to be in the future.

If you look at vehicle sales, private car sales, passenger car sales, it's flat roughly speaking, around the world.

Speaker 4: But the growth in last.

Speaker 6: Mile mobility goods delivery, as we all know, with the e commerce and ride hailing are growing at a much faster rate.

Speaker 4: So if you look at the city centers.

Speaker 6: Where more and more of the world's population are living, a significant fraction of those miles being driven is driven by fleets. This is where the opportunity exists, in my mind,

for more logical designs that are less egocentric, you know, more about cost per mile of economics or rational.

Speaker 3: So we're starting to see for passengers only things like Tesla's cybercab.

Speaker 2: Uh yeah, Waimos are going.

Speaker 4: To see that, John, We're still waiting. We're still waiting. No,

I get you.

Speaker 3: But you know, Ramos also got this uh yeah Zeeker platform and zooks is building its own and so it's starting to happen.

Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, again, these are fleet vehicles with well understood duty cycles. They need to meet crush safety standards. They're

coexisting with costs, which add some weight to the vehicles, but they they're purpose built or to something the purpose built, they can take costs out.

Speaker 3: I'd like to see if the Zeeker or the Zookes platform really could stand up the side impact right And isn't that part of the problem though that certainly in the developed world. We have these very stringent safety standards

that are driving a lot of the structure and costs and cars and wait especially.

Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 6: And in fact, one of the developments that I think is going to be very transformational if it happens, is banning cars from the city center, which many European cities are looking to do for a host of reasons. And

once they banned cars from the city center, then you can really think about reintroducing a new type of vehicle that doesn't have to meet the crash standards anymore because it doesn't have to co exist with cars, and you might get the same effect if you can control the speed of the cars. So let cars enter the city center,

but the speed is automatically governed to ten miles an hour or fifteen miles an hour, something that's safe instead of it being freewheeling.

Speaker 4: Risky.

Speaker 6: So you could either do this through controlling the speed of the vehicle with GPS, you can see where the vehicle is and it automatically slows the vehicle down to whatever the speed limit is, or you could actually ban cast from the city center, as many cities are thinking of doing.

Speaker 5: Chriss realized that a large portion of our audience just took their computers and throw them against the wall. Well okay,

so you know, getting back to the solar idea, so you know, yes, John rattled off three different vehicles from from companies. So far as I know, none of them

are using futtle voltaic cells. Yep, okay, we basically appter

was still waiting right which was going to be stular powered.

Speaker 6: I think it's so, I mean when it happened, though, the logic is compelling. I mean, if you if you

can add three kilo what hours of energy storage reliably every single day. And again, a rotaxive fleet operates in

a certain geography, so you know exactly what the weather's going to be.

Speaker 4: It's not like a passenger car that can go anywhere.

Speaker 6: So for a particular location, let's say in a sunny location, you know exactly how much energy you're going to be generating each day. And you can do all this with

the calculations based on the routes that the vehicle's going and the coverage of trees that might be boocking the sun.

Speaker 4: It can be done in very good detail.

Speaker 6: You can simulate exactly how much range that can be calculated to the extent where you can operate reduce the climate control inside the vehicle or reduce the size of the battery inside the vehicles for a given range the cost.

Speaker 4: There's a cost offset there on the solar panel.

Speaker 6: But my point is that the solar panel technology is improving all the time. It's not static, so the costs

are going to come down by a factor of two or three in the next five years based on scale production and technological improvements. So the trajectory is very clear,

and I think you're seeing more interest in the developing world where they may have an unreliable grid infrastructure as well as plentiful sunshine, but they may leap frog the West in the sense just like they do with telecommunications in US. So what's happening in Africa I think is

very intriguing with solar powered vehicles, and I think it's only amount of time before you see it happen more and more here, and it won't just be for image purposes like it might have been five ten years ago.

It will be because it that's a meaningful amount of range per day.

Speaker 4: It also becomes justifiable.

Speaker 3: I think cost and weight have been in one of the critical aspects. I mean, I remember years ago, Miles

I had a solar panel on its roof, on its sun roof that would circulate our air while the car is parked in the hot sun. That's all it did,

but it was extremely expensive. I added a lot of

way above the center of gravities, and I think that's one.

Speaker 2: Of the key reasons why it hasn't moved forward. But

if the price comes back, price is coming down again.

Speaker 6: These robotaxis, or if they're operating in the city streets at relatively low speeds aerodynamics, it's less of an issue having a higher CG. It is not such a show stopper,

and the very predictable demand and easy to calculate the return on investment from the solar panel itself.

Speaker 5: Going back to the skateboard that you developed, it seemed to me that one of the arguments that was made back then was that it would help with crash.

Speaker 4: Yes, so if people were to.

Speaker 5: Go to that model and perhaps not use hydrogen but use that that approach, wouldn't that mitigate some of the problems in terms of having vehicles that.

Speaker 6: And the reason it helps crash is that you don't have this rigid block in front of the passengers right now in front of the driver called the engine, and you can really optimize that front end or crash absorption.

That's that's the reason, as well as the fact that it lowered the center of gravity, which is a different type of safety.

Speaker 4: And in principle, if you had a highest seating.

Speaker 6: Position enabled by the platform, you'd be you could reinforce the side and provide better side protection. So there are

whole host of reasons why this would it could help improve safety.

Speaker 5: Absolutely, do you already solve it?

Speaker 2: So where do you see things going?

Speaker 3: You've got all these ideas that you're throwing out, you know, take us out the next five to ten years things going.

Speaker 6: I'd like to imagine the city it might have to be.

It might have to be in Europe rather.

Speaker 4: Than here a city banning cars in the city center.

But a lot of.

Speaker 3: Cities already have bank Now, I mean, it's just a little pedestrian and small area.

Speaker 4: As a starting point.

Speaker 6: But the vision I have is that this this zone, if you want to call it, that would expand in area over time as people begin to get more used to the idea that it's not going to kill business and so forth. So the vision is that you'd have

car pre city centers. You'd introduce a new type of

vehicle that would would not have to go high speeds, would not have to go long distances, it would not have to meet crash requirements.

Speaker 4: The output of that scenario is that.

Speaker 6: The vehicles could be made from a much wider variety of materials today's cars are. And so you begin to

enable tackling waste. So think about all the plastic bottles

get thrown away. What if those plastic bottles could be

used to make materials for the car. What if we

could make it out of bamboo or hemp, the natural materials.

Many cities are not that far away from farms. Nearby

farm waste could be and a precursor. So the idea

here is can we not only make the vehicles themselves far more energy efficient and use solar power for a much greater fraction of the energy used, but can we make the vehicles themselves more efficient and cleaner? And I

think there is an opportunity. And the third part of

this is can we make the vehicles ourselves instead of relying on the general motors.

Speaker 4: And the vulk fragments of the world.

Speaker 6: Could we create a micro factory in the city center that brings in waste materials, whether it's from plastics or agricultural waste, as well as the skateboard that's made mass produced by a car company that's already making them, because we don't want to generate the skateboard ourselves. Because as

economies a scale or an issue with microfactories, so focus on the rest of the vehicle. The coach would get

them economies of scale and the cost down for the platform and create good jobs in the city center designing and developing and making the coaches that sit on top, whether it's for moving goods, whether it's for municipal services like landscaping or police, or whether it's for moving people.

So you'd have different coaches maybe sitting on top of the same platform, but they would all be made locally, and you'd be more self reliant. You're tackling your own waste,

You're harnessing solar energy and not relying on oil and even big electric utilities for that matter. You're not relying

on big car companies, you're not lying on central governments.

You're becoming much more self sufficient, and I think that's an important message in.

Speaker 5: Today's world, would these vehicles be privately owned or municipally.

Speaker 6: Or municipally or fleet owned, and they'd be providing last mild mobility in the city, and they'd prefer riding goods delivery in the city as well. And this zone would

be increasing over time in area. So initially it might

be a very small zone a square mile or two, but over time you could expand that zone and the vehicles might go up in speed.

Speaker 5: Accordingly, if you talk to any car companies about this idea, I mean, I'm thinking about Toyota's wob and city seems to be somewhat of a model that you're talking about we're talking about. I think a lot of car companies

view this future and the idea of micro factories and communities building vehicles. They see it as a threat, and

in fact, I see it as an opportunity because a lot of car companies don't sell many vehicles to people who live in city centers, because a lot of people who live in city centers don't even own a car, not practically, if you live in Manhattan, for example, own a car unless you're very wealthy. So this would be

selling vehicles to fleets and government, city governments. It'd be

a deal between a city and a car company. We

don't see those deals being made very often.

Speaker 6: Right right, but the city would place an order for maybe a thousand GM skateboards. You know, car company would

be making the skateboard anyway, the mass producing it. The

city might say, I want some of those from my fleet, and I'm going to put a coach on myself in a micro factory using local materials.

Speaker 3: I wouldn't put any faith in any legacy auto maker doing any events. I'm serious, And unless it doesn't fit

their business model, it doesn't fit their way of thinking.

I know, I know, you need startups that are going to come in and break all the rules.

Speaker 6: This is I tried to tell car companies this is think of this as incremental business that you don't already get, you don't already have, and being on the right side of the future wave and working with cities. I mean,

there's so many cities around the world if you think about it, and the fleet market is going to grow a much faster rate than the passenger car market is growing.

So this is a much bigger market in the future.

So you know, you mentioned you're doing a lot of work in Africa.

Speaker 5: I mean it seems to me that if you look at the vehicles per capita there, I mean, they're like a desert for mobility. Do you see that as perhaps

a place where ideas like this might take off?

Speaker 4: Yes, I could.

Speaker 6: I could imagine a car company or even a company in Africa making the skateboard platform, and then the idea would be, you want to mass produce that platform, So that would be a big factory making a dedicated platform and then selling it to cities all across the continent or around the world even and those cities would then focus on the coach with their own micro factory people working on it. But I think I also mentioned that

when I talk about mobility, it's not just cars. It's

about better integration with public transport. And one of the

things you notice if you live in a big city is a public trans system is very dense in the city center, but when you get into the suburbs, it can sometimes be a fifteen minute or twenty minute walk to the nearest train station or bus station, and that's a challenge if the weather's bad, or if you're disabled, or what have you. So another idea I mentioned in

the book is could you summon a little robopod, not a robo tax or a rob shuttle, but think about something about the size of this. A two seater electric

vehicle that comes to your house autonomously from the nearest train station and then it drives you autonomous train station.

So it basically it's parked at the train station, and it's small footprint, and there may be a hub of a dozen of these vehicles servicing a one or two mile radius around that major terminus in the suburbs, and it would operate autonomously within that geofence region. So anybody

in that area could summon a vehicle and it would take them. And the idea is that this would encourage

people to use public transport that wouldn't otherwise use it because it's just too inconvenient to get to, and it would increase ridership on the public transport system. And it

would allow people who don't have the money or the means to afford a car to have door to door mobility almost and go from one side of the city to another because at the other end of the public transport line they could pick up another pod. And that

these train stations with their geo fenced areas would kind of overlap, so it would be like a ring a donut ring around the outskirts of the city, which is allow anybody can summon a robopod to come to their house.

Speaker 3: Well, I love what you're talking about here, Chris, of putting the heart back in technology and talking about the positive aspects of it, because we don't't to hear a lot of that these days.

Speaker 6: So this is using autonomy in a way that really helps the poorest people with mobility and helps improve public transport, which helps the cities because they spend a lot of money on public transport. And it's about using autonomy wisely

in my mind, to help people as opposed to just servicing the rich people in the city center and contributing to more congestion.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Look, we're going to have to wrap this up, but thanks so much for coming on the show. This has

been a fascinating discussion. I learned a few things along

with that here, so thanks very much.

Speaker 4: Thank you for inviting to hold the book up again.

Speaker 6: Yeah, sustainable and affordable mobility for all they didn't hop back into technology really good.

Speaker 2: I want to thank all of you for having tuned in Today.

Speaker 1: Out Online after Hours is brought to you by alex Partners.

For more than forty years, we have helped companies and their stakeholders around the world harness opportunity, overcome challenges, and achieve outsized outcomes. ALEX Partners when it really matters, and

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