Smart Driving Cars episode 397-Space X, Transportation governance, Waymo, Tesla and more

Welcome back to another edition of Smart Driving Cars.

We're glad you're here.

I'm Fred Fishkin, along with the faculty chair of autonomous vehicle engineering at Princeton

University, Alan Kornhouser.

Hi, Alan.

Hey, good afternoon, Fred.

Another semester about to begin.

Yikes.

This will be the beginning of my 54th year at Princeton and 50, I guess.

Is that some kind of record?

It's gotta be.

No, no, it's not.

Who knows?

I mean, there are many of us who somehow can't find another job and just hang on to your

life.

And, you know, it's bare subsistence.

Right.

It's actually really, never mind.

From the latest Smart Driving Car newsletter, a big week for SpaceX, Starship Flight 10 checked

off a whole bunch of boxes, it seems.

Well, I mean, we had to go through three rounds before, you know, it finally went.

To me, just how spectacular, I mean, the number of things that have to go right to be able to

accomplish that is just non-trivial and, you know, once, I guess, you know, they sort

of get a ground problem out of the way and they get the weather problem out of the

way.

I mean, it, the countdown beam, I mean, was it actually right on, essentially right on

the second of what they were shooting, the opening of the window, I mean, two.

There's not even a hiccup at T minus 40 seconds and boom.

And to have the, I mean, to have it work that well, actually, you know, the fact

that they lost one of the engines on the way up on the booster actually, you know, made

the thing perform even better because the redundancy that they have there, no problem.

And to bring it around so that the Bowie camera is right there, you know, after watching,

you know, part of the sheet metal flow away and get eaten up.

I mean, the controllability and, of course, the ability to forecast the trajectory, to

be able to put it and keep it on the right trajectory, such that, except for maybe the

wave action cost the camera to quite miss, at least part of that, I mean, you know, wow.

I'm done by a private company with largely their own money.

I guess, you know, there's, you know, some things get subsidized or whatever by the

government, whatever bit.

Ooh.

I mean, that it's just fundamentally impressive.

And the way they're able to capture the images and stream the video, I mean, whatever, I mean,

whatever and do all that, well, they, I mean, the really valuable piece, I think, of SpaceX

is Starlink, you know, I mean, they put up dummy satellites there because, of course,

you know, it was on a suborbital trajectory and needed another, you know, thousand kilometer

per hour speed to actually hit orbital, but, you know, to put them out there, to actually

deploy them.

The next time they do, they'll deploy real ones and these things, because of their size,

increases the bandwidth and I don't know, 10 years from now, do we even have cell towers

anymore?

I don't know.

I kind of looked like a giant Pez dispenser.

Yeah, well, that's what they call it.

They call it a Pez dispenser, which it is, I mean, a dispenser, look, I mean, why not

use somebody else's idea?

I mean, you don't have to go out and, and, and why fold them and unfold them

more than you have to and why not just boom, boom, boom?

And, and so I would imagine on the first orbital one, they will probably put good ones

in there, why not get some value on, you know, some real value out that put us a bunch of

those guys out there and then the bandwidth that you're creating in the end, the latency

because you just have to send the signal up and then around and then down the latency in

the communications of, and well, it's always been the theory of low earth orbiting satellites.

Why it's great.

It's, it's, it's essentially the same as, you know, going up to a tower and putting

it in the cable and taking it under the, under the ocean and, you know, getting

it over to wherever.

Well, now, you know, and it seems like when we talk to people in, in China or Europe or

whatever that, you know, there isn't any latency, even though it's coming, you know,

through under at the bottom of the, of the ocean, but the path length of the, of

the communications is about the same as to do, they do that and they have, you know,

there's a lot of sky up there to put a lot of these things out there so that it's not

really bandwidth constrained and the power requirement, a little bit more to be able

to send your signal up to that.

But it may very well be that, you know, that's not even a problem.

Now all of a sudden you're sitting there with your, you don't need cell

tires. Well, in Princeton, we didn't build any cell tires because of course

they wouldn't be beautiful, you know, or I guess, you know, so there's, we

really have no cell community and very, I mean, well, we might as well be in the

certain, it's not quite that bad, but it isn't good.

But all of a sudden, any place in the world, everybody talk about equality

of bandwidth and what that does to society and what that does to everybody

and what that does to the economy and what that does and what that's

going to mean to NVIDIA in terms of the number of chips that they have to build

in the data centers to be able to handle all the communications and the

information and all the whatever that, and because of the affordability and

the scalability of all this, which is, you know, still following Moore's law.

Communications, across and all that's going to zero.

I don't know, seems like a bright future for I can't wait to talk to the

children about it starting next week and we can, you know, because it's

going to be their lives and whatever, you know, I'm done, I'm gone, but whatever.

So it is, hey, it's at least some good news out there and in the world,

which it's tough to find these days.

Right.

Well, you highlight in the newsletter a report by Professor Steven Polzen,

if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, at Arizona State University's

Enos Center for Transportation.

It's titled as transportation changes so as travel changes, so much

transportation governance and he explores travel safety and and

transportation funding here.

Right.

And then I think he wrote it, you know, sort of in as a basically to try

to do some influence as to where they're the reauthorization of, you know,

how one is funding the highway system and it funds the most of

mobility in the United States and really through gas taxes is where

the money comes from.

And in the end, it's been mostly about infrastructure because that's

been sort of where the public sector has really played the role as

providing out there the infrastructure for everybody to use so that

we can get to the places and so on to get that we'd like to get to, you

know, it's on us to buy the cars or the means, but at least, you know,

the public sector has been out there providing the way, what we're

going to use to get between it, you know, that's broad generalization,

but that's where most of the money goes.

And of course, you know, the construction industry and it funds

that, you know, everybody's kind of really happy about it.

But then, you know, this safety question seems to be looming or continues

to loom over transportation.

I mean, it is kind of unfortunate that every day we basically a

plain load of people die, you know, because of the wonderful mobility

that most of us have and most of that wonderful mobility is

through the automobile and the invention and the creation of the

automobile, which is just a fantastic mode of mobility, you know,

does have some drawbacks and whatever and whether or not it, you know,

how much it hurts the environment by its use of either gasoline or

electricity and so on as part of it.

The other sort of big part of it is the extent to which, you know,

it causes harm, it crashes and of course, the deaths and of course,

you know, one sits around and says, my goodness, if, you know,

if a plane crashed every day and killed 100 people, give or take,

the airport airline industry would be in deep caca, as one might say.

Yikes, it would be in big trouble.

And but the airline industry just doesn't provide that personal

value contribution that the automobile does in terms of not only

its logistics and moving and putting food on our tables and

allowing us to put food on our tables, but all it does to get

us to work, get us to school, get us to go on vacation.

Go on vacation. I mean, it's just the value proposition isn't enormous.

As a society, we're willing to, let's say, eat and say, OK, yes,

you know, plain old deaths a day.

We'd like to, we of course would like to have vision zero,

which it goes to zero, but you know, it's that.

And I think one of the things that I most appreciate about

the way Steve presented it is sort of been my angle on this whole

thing for a while is that is that the safety challenge associated

with automobile mobility, which is.

Which is essentially the 90 plus percent of the way people get around.

If you look at, you know, the 1.1 billion person trips a day

that are taken in something other than by walking or by by an airplane.

You know, those strips are taken one way or another with an automobile.

And so since it's so valuable in allowing us to

get the value associated with that 1.1 billion trips every day,

get to work, get to school, get to the dentist,

you know, go pick up milk, you know, whatever that it is, go shoot pool.

Who knows, go shoot hoops.

As a society, we decide that value is just overwhelms the 100.

Deaths and all who knows how many crashes per day

and all the fixing you have to do with that.

And so, you know, the risk reward, the reward is so great that we we accept the risk.

We'd like to we'd like it.

Of course, everybody wants to go to zero.

We'd like to get it to go to zero.

We'd like to reduce it.

But I think one of the things that's that Steve points out,

which I like to point out all the time, is that is that if you look

at at at the what what is a player in in those crashes,

those deaths, those fender benders, those whatever,

it's who overwhelmingly it's the human in the loop there.

And it's just not just your your really good driver

and or your nominal driver or even your poor driver.

It's the misbehaving driver.

It's it's it's so overwhelming.

It's it's just the misbehavior associated with consuming this form

of mobility that provides so much value to us.

It's really the thing that should be pointed to as as as a as the thing

that needs to be fixed.

We just need to behave better.

You know, but we're human or at least, you know, I'm sure, Fred,

you you you never misbehave.

I know I always misbehave.

I'm just a terrible driver, you know, you know, there's just

there's just way too much tailgating, which is misbehaving.

There's too much running red lights.

It's misbehaving.

There's too much overconsumption of of alcohol that's misbehaving.

There's too much of, you know,

there's really way too much text.

That's misbehaving, you know.

Those those are misbehaviors.

There's too much of, oh, I got to go fast.

The the wind through my hair and my convertible is I'm exceeding

the speed limit by who knows what the rush, you know, this isn't,

you know, Six Flags great adventure.

You know, Joy Ride.

This is your, you know, you're out on New Jersey Turnpike

or or Nassau Street or Cleveland Lane out here.

I mean, really, must you misbehave?

Must you completely disregard our speed limit signs in Princeton?

I want us to put up signs that say

if you can't obey, please find another way.

You know, why are you in here speeding on our roads?

You know, go speed on somebody else's road.

They're going to tell you the same things.

Hey, when they speed on your road, you're probably going to tell them the same thing, too.

But why are you exceeding the 25 mile an hour speed limit?

I mean, is it? Oh, just got to get there.

OK, well, you know.

So then the question is, is if it really is misbehavior?

OK, I would like you to take my assumption that it is misbehavior.

How do you deal with misbehavior?

How do you tell Apple?

How do you tell Apple that when I'm in the car, it says it asks me if I'm driving

and I can answer no and my phone comes alive

because I've told it I'm not driving

when it has a camera looking at me here.

It has a camera looking out there there.

It knows the steering wheel is here.

It probably sees my hand on the steering wheel.

It sees me moving.

It knows I'm driving.

Why does it set me up to lie?

So I can just do this.

Actually, I love lying.

And so I just hit that and get all kinds of pleasure.

Oh, I fold it.

I fold it. I'm so great.

I could fool my phone into telling it.

And so now I get all this, oh, boom.

I drop it on the floor and reach down, boom, and I kill people.

How is that permitted?

How can Apple sell a phone?

How can they put that in their app?

Sorry.

So I think what Steve is really hopefully trying to do here is say,

and if I can't build another lane of freeway, that's going to solve that problem.

I can't, you know, smooth out some surface.

It's going to it's not the irregular surface that's causing these crashes.

It's not the fact that we don't have enough capacity.

It's not the fact that, you know, there's too much up and down.

It's not it's not an infrastructure problem.

It's a human in the loop problem.

Now, of course, you could say, hey, best thing to do is

let's have all the vehicles be automated.

And therefore we've we've we've we solve it by taking the human out of the loop

or there's an end to driving in which, oh, my goodness,

nobody, nobody gets nobody is allowed to drive.

You know who the last people are that are going to give up driving?

The people that get the thrill out of going fast out of, you know,

running up my behind, you know, when I'm there out of, you know,

whatever, going through a red light.

Don't be the last ones.

So we've got to be successful all the way until the end

before we start capturing the value that we were we were trying to capture

in the first place.

What so automated vehicles aren't the solution to this?

I don't think.

I fortunately at this point, I don't have a solution.

I have no idea to solve this one.

I'm ill equipped to solve it.

I never took a sociology course.

I never took a course in human behavior or whatever or whatever.

Took a bunch of math courses.

But in fact, it would be nice if somehow we took some of the

unfortunately infrastructure money and said, hey.

Not all of it, but, you know, reasonable chunk and said.

You know, it's on leech people like Steve and others who might

have the capability to focus on this misbehavior issue, really

focus on we've known we've known that it's misbehavior free.

I mean, they've done say, you know, they've.

But but but I don't think there's been the effort.

I don't think the research has been has been respected by

us deemed academicians.

We've got to figure out how to, you know.

I was other junk.

Anyway, whatever.

Sorry, but I threw I'm one.

I just I just I was just I just loved it.

I that Steve put that in there.

I'm glad I saw it.

I read it and found it.

Just thought maybe everybody else should take a look.

I think it's important.

And the link is in the newsletter for encouraging.

Yeah, to click it.

I think drivers in New York City, Alan, got some local TV coverage

for their call for the governor to stop Waymo's driverless cars

in the city.

Former Mayor de Blasio chimed in to I saw online and calling

it a really bad idea.

And you had some comments.

Well, I don't have any comment.

I just I just I don't I don't understand why they're

there.

I just it's not my mentality, but whatever.

Great.

It's kind of a shame.

One would hope one would go.

Well, one would hope one would go where somebody really

wants you were where somebody says, Hey, you know,

you're going to provide a lot of good here.

We'd love to have you.

You know, I looked for some other articles that that

you know, that some other TV stations are, you know, for the

I guess this is the sort of left wing TV.

I tried to look maybe right wing TV was saying, Oh, we love

these guys.

I couldn't find it.

But hey, maybe I'm my I am not very good at search.

So, you know, my bad.

Somebody send me some and I'll I'll be glad to put it in next

I couldn't find any.

Tesla Roddy, meanwhile, is reporting that Waymo has confirmed

a massive fleet expansion in the Bay Area, at least 875

vehicles there, apparently.

Yeah, great.

I hope I hope that you know, I'm assuming that there are

people in the Bay Area and say, Why isn't it 8000?

Why isn't it 80,000?

Why isn't it 800,000?

I mean, you would one would think that at the beginning, the

opportunities, the value proposition is so great that that

that the demand for it is so great that it's supply

constrained.

And maybe it is.

Okay.

And maybe, you know, in a week, they'll announce that it's

not 800, it's going to be 8000 and and and six months

from now, it's going to be 80,000 and so on.

And again, great, wonderful, wonderful that it's expanding.

No, seriously, it's wonderful that it's expanding.

Well, Fortune magazine has this headline, Tesla self

driving cars are being tested in boring company tunnels.

Boring is another of Elon's companies, by the way, for

those who don't know that they're doing that in Las

Vegas.

It's boring.

This or it's boring.

Yeah, I think that's a boring.

But go ahead.

Yeah, full autonomy.

They say it's still a ways up.

This would seem like a pretty easy way to implement

FS, full self driving and no brainer.

I mean, you know, 50 years ago, we were proposing

PRT and in Vegas.

You know, the automation, the safety was no problem as long

as you but you need an exclusive guide way and we had

this wonderful designs, you know, that was like individual

like pause, personal rapid transit and it run from

from from casino to casino and you know, mobility and

the goofy part of our ideas that of course we were

going to make the rides free and then people would

ask, well, how now are you going to make it free?

You know, where are you going to get the money?

You know, I said, oh, we're going to do this.

It's just like at the airport, we'll put slot machines

in there and we'll let them play the slots while

they're riding and they've revenue that we're going

to make on the slots.

It's easily going to pay for them.

I mean, if the revenue isn't in Las Vegas to

pay for it, where is the.

Yeah, plus, yeah, plus your provider.

I mean, it was just it was just beautiful.

I mean, and and you were ahead of your time again.

And trust me, we were so stupid.

We didn't even know that that we had no chance.

Okay.

For two reasons.

One was where it's a taxi cab companies.

If you take away their meat and potatoes, they're

not happy campers about this.

Okay.

And the number, but the real number two thing is,

is we thought that the problem in Las Vegas was mobility.

It's not.

Okay.

Because we thought, oh my goodness, you just put

the station right there right next to the

gaming areas and whatever in each of the hotels

and your whatever the hotels.

Once they have you in there in their gaming area,

they don't want you out there until you have nothing left.

And then they just throw you out the back door.

I mean, oh my, the goal is immobility.

The goal is immobility.

They don't want you leaving.

I mean, you have no idea what time it is.

You can't find the door.

Okay.

Until you don't have any money left and somebody

just throws you out.

I mean, so, so I mean, it was, it was where you are.

I was so naive.

I can't believe I'm naive.

We were on naive and here now.

And it's really tough if you put it up in the air.

Here, the beauty of what the boring company has done in Las

Vegas is said, my goodness, we apparently have this,

we have this machine that can easily make the holes.

My goodness, instead of getting between the places above

ground where it's, you know, it's tough to make it beautiful.

And so one and everything and whatever it's up there and

do, do, do, do, do.

Geez, let's just put it underground and they've done it.

And I've written in it.

And geez, if your automated system can't do that.

Whoa, I mean, because there, there's no kids chasing

balls down there.

There's, there's, there's, there's actually nothing to run

into.

Really.

And they argue, oh my goodness, the, the, the, the light,

the light show as you're driving through there might

screw up the sensors.

Well, change the light show.

You really need that light show.

Actually, why do you even have windows you can see

through? Why not just, you know, encase it and put whatever

screens inside and do whatever light show.

And the whole darn thing be dark, white, whatever, whatever

the best lighting condition possible for the automated

system.

Whatever.

What are people thinking?

Never mind.

Nobody wants to talk to me anyway because I'm crazy guy.

About what?

I don't know.

I mean, I'm here all alone.

But I got my children coming.

We can classes start on Tuesday.

So looking forward to it.

From electric.

Tesla kept its promise not to settle it may cost the

company an extra $183 million.

It seems the publication is pretty consistent in going

after Tesla these days.

Whatever.

I mean, I guess why I mean, look, it's not over until

it's over.

There's going to be an appeal.

I don't even want to comment on that.

Okay.

From Tesla Roddy.

Tesla makes a big change to encourage full self

driving purchases.

And the push is being made on Tesla's online design

studio.

They're really highlighting it and getting trying to

get potential.

Yeah, I just, I just thought, you know, I thought

we should provide if somebody's going to be anti

Tesla, we got to put somebody, you know, you know,

pro Tesla and let, let, let the readers decide

which, you know, which camp they're in and

whatever.

It's the politicizing of the media's, you know, a

lot of people today complain about it.

It is.

It's, I don't know.

One.

And maybe somebody will want to claim that, you

know, smart driving cars is politicized.

I guess I'm, trust me.

Fred, how much revenue we gotten out of this zero

how much, how much, whatever, zero.

I mean, where Fred has been struggling through.

And, and, and of course I'm, I'm wearing shorts

today because I, I, I can't afford long pants.

So, you know, we're, we're, we're, you know,

whatever.

I don't, I don't know.

I don't think folks are going to buy this, Alan.

I don't know.

You're crying.

They're not going to buy that one.

They're not going to buy the poor, poor Alan.

Yeah.

I keep trying the poor Alan thing.

I, you know, whatever.

No, I'm hate.

I couldn't be happier in terms of my personal

situation.

So.

Well, you include this as well.

The office of the defects investigation at

NHTSA came out with a report saying that Tesla

hadn't been submitting incident reports within the

required timeframe, but it says it was an issue with

Tesla's data collection, which has now been fixed

according to the company.

So.

So, you know, I mean, I guess NHTSA doesn't have

anything to do that it's doing that.

But, but then the question is, what about the other

cars that crashed that have, you know,

that fall under this sort of order to,

uh, because it has whatever, like, like the

Mercedes dystronic system, I think fits under that.

Um, they don't even have the data collection as to,

to know that these things crashed.

You know, I mean, the amount of, they have their

heads and their head is in the sand.

I mean, I guess Tesla's problem is, is that they

have this, this over the air updating thing and

so on.

And they end up knowing this.

And then therefore, you know, they better get their

data system because if you know it, you better

tell it.

What are the other folks doing?

Just general waters.

No, when everyone of their cars crashes and what

that car has in it and whether or not they should

be reporting it within five days to NHTSA and

this NHTSA asked them, my car with dystronics

when it was on hit a deer.

Okay.

Of course it had no chance to respond.

I mean, came out of nowhere.

Okay.

Did Mercedes report that to Tesla?

No, to Tesla, to NHTSA.

Maybe.

Mercedes, please tell me you did.

You never told me that you knew.

I don't know.

Maybe you have a back door into my car to know,

you know, every time I pick my nose in there,

I'm great.

You know, whatever.

And so if they don't know, then where's the

investigation of these car companies to them to

say, why don't you know?

Maybe we should do a recall and make you put

in all these cars so that you know if NHTSA

really wants you.

What are you doing, NHTSA?

NHTSA.

At the end of the newsletter, Alan, there's a

little update and I mean a little once again on

the on hand drive update.

Yeah, I don't know.

We're, you know, we're building a book of business

and soft launch on September 8th.

So see what happens.

Exciting.

More to come.

So that will do it for this episode, Alan.

You can always find us at smartdrivingcar.com.

My tech reports are at textination.com.

Thank you for spending time with us for watching

more listening and continue to say stay safe

and have a great Labor Day weekend.

Have a great Labor Day weekend.

Celebrate the summer of 2025 and here we go

into a new academic year and go tigers

and go stillers.

Thank you.

Smart Driving Cars episode 397-Space X, Transportation governance, Waymo, Tesla and more

Renault Wind

About this episode

Original notes