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Smart Driving Cars episode 406- driverless safety hearing in DC

Smart Driving Cars episode 406- driverless safety hearing in DC

Smart Driving Cars Podcast Feb 05, 2026 32 min
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About this episode

A deep dive into the recent congressional hearing on self-driving car safety, featuring insights from Tesla and Waymo executives alongside safety experts. The discussion highlighted the importance of safety in autonomous vehicles while also addressing the societal benefits and challenges of this technology. Hosts Fred Fischkin and Alan Kornhauser praised the serious nature of the testimonies and the lack of grandstanding, emphasizing the need for practical solutions and legislation. They also touched on the potential for autonomous vehicles to improve mobility for those lacking transportation options.

Topics: self-driving car safety congressional hearing autonomous vehicle legislation mobility solutions societal benefits safety challenges
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Welcome back to the Smart Driving Cars podcast. We are glad you are with us. I'm Fred Fischken,
along with the faculty chair of autonomous vehicle engineering at Princeton University,
Alan Kornhauser. Hi, Alan. Hey, good morning, Fred. Got that sweater on staying warm. Well,
yeah, I know. Unfortunately, it's hobbit colors, but you know, the only thing I could put on today,
never mind. On top in the latest Smart Driving Car newsletter, let's get right to it. Tesla
Waymo executives joined safety experts in testifying on the future of self-driving cars in
Congress. Some words of praise, Alan, for Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Princeton alum, and
Brian Walker Smith. So this was pretty impressive, I guess, overall. Well, absolutely. You know,
I guess it started yesterday at 10 o'clock in the morning or so down in Washington. Of course,
I had to be in class, so I couldn't. We were in class, but after class, luckily,
PBS had, or I guess others, had taped it and it was available for download. So I sat
yesterday afternoon after class just absolutely enjoying the whole thing.
Absolutely. We were some of the takeaways from it for you.
Just, boy, at least in the committee in the Senate, I think they're interested in actually
doing something for at least safety. And we'll comment a little bit about what was missing,
but then, of course, hey, you know, if we're going to be proper journalists, you have to
get both sides, right? But anyway, it was just really good. The opening statement by Ted Cruz
was, I think, just spot-on. At times, it's tough for some of us to find anything good
coming out of Washington or something like that. I don't want to be cynical or whatever,
but it was just really good. And then the testimonies were just really good.
And then as opposed to what tends to be reported in the media and so on and
whatever, it just was spot-on. And I think one should spend the time to watch it. And then
what was really most encouraging was in the question and answer period that went on,
it was just really serious discussion and very little grandstanding by one side or the other.
It was just really good in my humble opinion, whatever the hell that means.
Really refreshing because there's so much out there on social media and other articles that
are just clickbait that really tell the story. Right. And become exceedingly frustrated,
the two of us, I said, we don't even want to do these things anymore to report on them. So I said,
it seems like almost everything we've been without reporting on them in the recent past has been
about clickbait here, clickbait there, and just tired of it all. I mean, this is a serious
opportunity as with everything in life. There's positives and negatives. And all we want to do
is at least find something that is at least a little bit better than all the negatives,
as opposed to the other way around. Of course not. But it doesn't have to be,
nothing has zero negatives. Nothing doesn't cost something. Nothing, at least, well,
I don't know of anything. And if the objective is going to be zero perfect safety,
we've said a long time on this podcast, look, we're playing golf or we're doing something else.
We're not going to pursue this. It's just unachievable. But I think the practical
discussion of the opportunities and challenges that took place in the exchange,
that I just thought was a marvelous politics, marvelous policymaking.
And Ariel Wolfe was sitting in the background a little bit on a couple of them. He looked really
good too. But this just focused on safety and it'd be nice to have another hearing talking about
the value proposition that we're always talking about. Yeah, right. And this was focused on safety.
My only slight takeaway is that it said actually nothing about the value proposition
that we tend to, let's say, promote here. We have to call it a motion or that it's our bend of
the real value, at least in our perspective, of the societal value, especially to those who
who don't have very good mobility options. It's one thing to do something that has 15
different ways to get to New York Airport. Now, this is going to be a 16th big deal.
But as I was giving rides a couple of days ago down in Trenton, I mean,
I'll shovel their sidewalks. So therefore, even, you know, how many days after the heavy snow that
we had, it's essentially impossible to walk to school. You have to do it in the street.
For which, you know, I know in places like Minneapolis and places where they get a lot of
snow, they have all the capabilities to not only push it out of the way while it's while it's dropping,
but also pick it up and get rid of it someplace. Because otherwise, it fills up parking places.
It gets thrown on top of sidewalks. And I guess, you know, in Trenton,
even in Princeton here, we don't have much capability to do that. And so guess what?
Now that maybe two lanes that you've created on the way, not only do I have to serve for both
ways for the cars to go, but also for the people who don't happen to have a car to be able to get
to where they're going because they're walking. They're walking on the street. Well, where else
can they walk? And it was just so nice giving some rides to some people there, you know,
really need a ride. So at least, you know. That's part of the update on happy rides, I guess.
Well, you know, it's part of it. But it's just so fun. And the ability to give rides to people
who really need a ride is sort of, you know, what we tend to repeat over and over here,
the latent demand that exists out there. And it's non-small. It's not trivial.
It's greater than, then the demand is greater than that served today by all mass transit.
You know, they serve 2% of the trips. There must be at least 10% of the trips out there that
aren't made simply because one doesn't have a good option because their only option is to walk.
Is the ride a bike? Good luck. Now, we're to have somebody that's nice enough to them to
give them a ride. And the opportunity that this form of mobility has to really give people rides
at not just a price this low, because you can make the price low if you subsidize the hell up.
Sure, great. You have a sugar daddy out there that pays for it. Wonderful.
Unfortunately, you know, sugar daddies, whatever you want to call it, a public sector or
heavily subsidized mass transit entities, if you want a more academic name. And all of a sudden,
you know, the real, at least we see as the real value of this mobility is that
now you have a machine that can do it. And that scale, that machine, the cost of that machine
goes to zero or close to zero. And my goodness, just, I don't know, seems intuitively obvious
to the most casual observer. Let's do it. Yes, there's some drawbacks. And I think
those try to write here also. This is a new value proposition provided
to our neighbors, to our residents, to the people of this country. It's a new opportunity
for those that haven't had this opportunity. So it's not taking anything away.
It's not taking any jobs in the way. It's new on top. Somebody said, well, you know,
there's going to be more congestions. Not necessarily. If we do it well, it doesn't have to be that.
We do it poorly, of course. There are opportunities to do this well.
And it's really nice to have heard discussions, you know, serious discussions that went on
during that hearing, addressed with how to do it well. We've got to be able to deal with cyber
security. It's a Senator Kim of New Jersey. Absolutely. We don't want somebody going on
whatever and doing bad things. But we also, I think, have to expect that those for whom we get
rides are in fact going to behave. And, you know, I can't fly on the United Airlines flight
if I'm going to spend my time in my seat, figuring out how I crash the plane. Oh,
can it do this? Can it do that? Oh, maybe it'll stop right here.
And so, you know, some of the things that one has to be able to put up with in doing this is
the adversarial, my adversarial from somebody coming out of the serial from the person coming in.
I mean, you know, some of the some of the videos you see out there, oh,
you know, I'm I have a white hat. I tried to crash it.
What? Okay, that's good in the test environment, which we're trying to figure out how to fix this
thing. But in an operating environment, you know, every time I get on the United Airlines flight,
they tell me, you know, you don't pay attention to the rules, we're escorting you out.
And so, of course, that is going to have to be put on here. Because, of course, it's trivial to
jump over. And if there happens to be a steering wheel in there to take over the steering wheel,
or there's not a steering wheel in the darn thing, because it is a real
autonomous taxi, robo taxi, whatever you want to call it. But somebody, oh, there's really a
joystick under this thing, because really, even elevators, you know, have a little box,
you can open it up so that the emergency personnel can open up and fix the stuck elevator in case
it's stuck between floors. If I'm stuck between floors, don't ask me to open up. I mean, you know,
I'm not going to know what to do. But I shouldn't be in an elevator trying to stick it between floors.
I'm just trying to get up or get down. And so, you know, that's, again, I can't go on and on on this
thing. But I just encourage people to, you know, watch this one, listen to this. Hopefully, you
know, these folks are going to put together legislation that will basically, you know,
put appropriate hurdles on those that are making these automated drivers so that they actually
do work. They don't need to work as we've discussed here everywhere at all times.
How about just a lot of places, a lot of times, not 365.25 days a year. How about,
how about 330?
Oh, I mean, you know, perfection on this thing. It's just, again, that we've got to get started.
Right now, we have nothing. We have some opportunities. And it was just, I don't know, I
couldn't be happier with the performance of all the elected officials and all the people that
testified there, the openness of the discussion, the addressing of really, I mean, serious as opposed
to acute problems and challenges. Probably we wouldn't get that many, many clicks. Okay. Because,
you know, this was not clickbait. And the behavior on both sides was not clickbait. It wasn't,
you know, grandstanding. It wasn't, you know, whatever it was. We have a serious opportunity
that has some serious challenges to make it really good. And let's roll up our sleeves and let's work
on it. That's what I got out of it. And maybe get a hearing on the societal benefits as well.
Yeah, well, that would just come. Look, if they don't do it, we're going to do it.
I mean, you know, period. We'll do it.
Brian Walker Smith, who was there, testifying. Brian was terrific, terrific. And, you know,
in his testimony, the steps that he put are, you know, what, terrific.
Well, he and Sven Biker wrote a piece on Business Insider and it's on AOL as well. You can find it
there. They wrote this piece after riding in driverless robotaxies in China. You get some comments
about that. Yeah, you know, unfortunately, I haven't, you know, I mean, you know, I've gotten
on a plane, gone over there and taken the time to go, you know, I dog eat my homework on that one.
Okay, probably should and whatever. But my goodness, to have them go there and actually
basically tell us what's going on really, you know, who, who does have and when do they have,
you know, an attendant in the vehicle. Okay. And why do they have an attendant in the vehicle?
I mean, if the person who's riding in there requires an attendant during the ride,
then there has to be an attendant in the vehicle. Period. But if the, but at least then you don't
need two attendants, one driving, one attending to the person. Okay. Trying to get it to a point
where, where either the, the only or the second person you don't need, you don't have to,
that's the thing that leads to the affordability.
Okay. And so it's a new sector. It doesn't exist out there yet. So a lot of people are still
getting mad for our original argument, still stuck at home, not, not benefiting from going to
get their hair done. I don't know. Of course, go to a doctor, go to work, get to work on time,
all that traditional, really good things. But what about just the normal quality of life,
things that we all get because we happen to have outside our kitchen door or flee the car,
boom, go at any time. We don't care. You know,
some folks, unfortunately, and we said their non-trivial number that don't happen to have
all the things that I have to make my life so damn good.
Garnet is, this is a neat, easy way to at least let them get to places where they'd like to go
when they want to go. But that gets back to the original argument. But what was nice back on
topic here is that they reported what's real and what's still imagined or done with smoking mirrors
in China. I don't think it's clickbait.
Well done. Well, they've done Sven and Brian have done great.
They're respectable people in this field. I think they're struggling with trying to do good here.
Okay.
Alan from SpaceX, super heavy testing begins, putting it back on track after the B-18
disaster? Yeah. Well, actually, really more. That's sort of just some things that I've been
talking with my class about as to the implications on their future lives, their next 25 years after
Princeton productivity and what they're going to be able to do and what's been happening lately as
again, one of these things are changing here on a daily basis. I mean, for SpaceX to come out and
now talk about thousands, hundreds of thousands of satellites in orbit.
I mean, thousands, single digit thousands is an eye opener. Okay. You know, triple digit
thousands is, whoa, what's going on? That on a fundamental basis, you know, putting into orbit,
these guys that face the sun and just grab energy, free energy, free. Well, you had to build it, put
it up there. So after you have it up there, operational free, and then putting the processors
on this axis so that now the photons don't bend. It just goes straight, at least up there. I mean,
they've been through our ionosphere, but there's no ionosphere up there. So they don't impact this.
They go to, I mean, the stuff here is that I don't know, three degrees Kelvin.
Apparently all this stuff that like Jensen wind those and all these folks and actually do the chips.
Well, if you put them in, if you put them real cold, they really work real well. Otherwise, you've
got to go. I think you're alluding to much wanting to put the AI data centers in space.
Yeah. I mean, that's news. And of course, that was another headline that SpaceX now owns XAI.
Well, whatever, who doesn't matter, you know, that's a footnote. Okay. I mean,
and you know, if you want to put them up there, you got to do it as cheaply as possible. So short
reuse. It's bad enough. I mean, and you can launch maybe because it's big, you know, 20 of these
suckers are, you know, in order of magnitude of these guys. So you don't need three zeros of thousands,
three digits of thousands of launches, maybe only two digits a lot. I mean, that's still like launches.
When I used to watch Vanguard on TV, go think about the globe,
poor Vanguard, whatever. I mean, it's just amazing where we've come in my lifetime.
And just even conceive of it. And then in fact, you know, with light beam, whatever
communications between these that has, you know, those folks have figured out bandwidth on those
things. Like, whoa. Again, another one of these things that to me seems intuitively
obvious to the most casual server. Whoa.
If you do that, then what does that do? That just makes computation,
scales computation to a level that I don't know. Nobody dreamed of. I don't know. I don't know if
anybody dreamed of. First day of class, I actually brought in the class, my little bag, took out my
little bag. I don't have it here if we're doing this mile. I took out my slide rule.
I told them when I was out there at a state school, not a La Liga school,
we used our school textbooks to do computations. And then I brought out my little chemical
rubber table and I said, we needed a cosine. We looked it up, got three digits and put it into
our slide rule or something. Maybe there was a pocket detector back then. Oh, no. Yeah,
of course, I didn't know. No, I mean, then I said, I don't have, I don't have, I wish I did,
like my two boxes of cards that I took to the ready room to get one turn around a day overnight.
On my algorithm that I was designing.
Look at what you have now and look at what you're going to have.
What are you going to achieve? Unbelievable. This is an enormous opportunity. It's not to make you do.
We haven't even begun achieving stuff.
And even look at how far you went in, you know, in my career that's lasted, what, five years,
whatever, maybe there's another, we're not counting zeros.
Well, only one zero at it.
Luckily, I mean, you think, can you imagine how decrepit I would be if one had me? Oh,
my goodness, whatever. Anyway, so, you know, so the children in the room are inspired.
And this is just going to give them that. And on this past Monday, we had Chonkabooie,
my favorite futurist, as I call him in the class. And we just, we just had the wildest of time.
Because, because, you know, this is Moore's law just continuing on.
And maybe we don't make, we don't do it by finer, whatever, on engraving on the chip.
We just put a lot of those guys out there that basically have, have, have energy that it's just
bypassing the earth anyway.
You want a force? Whoa.
What? That scales that.
Availability to everybody. What do you do with that?
I guess they'll get to see, I'm going to be long gone, whatever. But, you know, it's just kind of,
it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of, it's a nice time to be here, a nice place to be.
And we have things to do. Doesn't mean we're just going to be able to go to the basement of our
parents' home and play video games. No. Just like, you know, we're still, we're at the beginning,
we're still at the beginning of this industrialized revolution.
You look at what that did to re, to, to leverage human brain and labor
and create what it did and what the first part of Moore's law has done
in terms of leveraging again human labor and brain power.
You know, we have twice as many people in the U.S. or give or take as we had at the start.
And our unemployment rate is less. So this then eliminate jobs, eliminate opportunities,
gave me opportunity out of nothing from nowhere. Immigrant period. Cut it out.
I don't know. Just a way I choose to look at it. I'm sure there are other ways to look at the problem
or challenge or opportunity. That is, that is a great way, Alan, to wrap up the episode on
that inspirational note. And we want to remind people too that you can find us these days
on the Transportation Channel. They've got apps out there now and they're on all the streaming
devices and a lot of potential there for people to be watching, not only us, but all of their
great content. So let me add on to that. As I've been speculating, when I, when Dick
Mudge first told me about the creation of the Transportation Channel and, and my process,
you know, over the past two or three years trying to get my nose under that tent for which
I happily have gotten my nose under that tent. It was not long after the career and what I had
hypothesized was that it was not long after the creation of the Weather Channel that I sort of
put out to one of my classes. I think it was a sophomore class at the time for a final project.
Hey kids, who wants a great idea for a final project in this class? You can do it and, you
know, you can have your own. But look, there's this, I just tripped over this Weather Channel,
kind of, you know, trying to tell us what all about the weather. What we need is a Transportation
Channel and, you know, that does that. And, you know, you can have the crash of the day to
later. I mean, I've probably said something screwball-y like that in the class and, and, and,
and, and I always thought that it was Jonathan Sills who put his hand up in the back and,
yeah, Professor Coronado said, I'll do that. Guess what? It was.
Because I finally, I finally asked him about that and he said, yeah. And he said, he said,
he said that apparently his parents had put in a box all of his homework assignments from
grade school on up or something like that, so that he could have, you know, we do that as parents
for our kids. And then what they do, proceed the throw in the trash, because they've moved on from
all those things. He claims he hasn't. Wow. I hope, I hope it's not all marked up with,
must be all marked up with my grades. I hope I didn't completely hose them. Anyway, I didn't.
So he said, he says, he's got the box on place and he's going to look for it.
Wow. If we do that, we're going to, we're going to do a little episode for, for the transportation
channel at least, not the whatever, but it's, it's sort of been obvious to me for a long time,
that if, if, if the world can benefit from a, from a weather channel,
it seems to me a good benefit from a transportation channel. It's nice that some people are actually
putting this thing together to sort of assemble the, all the content in this sector of the economy
that is, you know, really so valuable to our quality of life. I mean, there should be a health
channel too. And there should be a housing channel. I mean, there are housing channels,
all sort of the, most of the TV we watch are all these home improvement folks. I mean,
they've done a great job of, you know, holy, I want to move to some of those communities,
and it's so inexpensive to improve your house and get it fixed up. Man, here in Princeton,
holy, whatever. I can't afford it. You got, you got all the content, everything from tiny houses
to mansions. Yeah. I mean, it's really great. We enjoyed watching this. So hopefully the,
the transportation channel is going to also put together content that, that for those of us that
are sort of transportation geeks can sit there and, you know, when we're home and, you know,
enjoy watching as opposed to, you know, the other, as opposed to just CAD videos. I enjoy CAD videos
too. So just to let everybody know that I'm not against, you know, clickbait CAD videos.
Does Peggy like them? Well, Peggy's one. Peggy watches some of them. That's my dog.
Yeah. Anyway, thanks for. Well, again, you can search for the transportation channel and install
the apps as well. You can always find us with the, with the latest newsletter at smart driving car
dot com. My tech reports are at textination dot com. Thank you for taking the time with us today
and stay safe. And again, have a great day and look, it looks like Washington may actually,
you know, do something really good here. Wow.

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