Google’s A.I. Bonanza + Driverless Car Talk With Cruise C.E.O. Kyle Vogt

26:12Which band did not originate in the Bay Area? Lynyrd Skynyrd, Green Day, or Jefferson Airpoint? Obviously Lynyrd Skynyrd. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sweet Home Alabama. Yeah. It's funny, like, within 30 seconds of entering the car, you were like, I no longer care about the driverless car that I'm in. With no driver, I want to play trivia. Okay, every time I've been in one of these before, I think, as with you, there has been a safety driver in the front seat, and there is something a little spooky about just watching the steering wheel turn itself. Yes. Like, it sort of feels like you're at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, you know?

26:41Or like watching a player piano. Yes, exactly. Okay, so we're going downhill now, coming to a stop sign at the bottom of the hill. So we're turning right. We're waiting for a pedestrian to cross the crosswalk. And this person probably has no idea that this car is driving itself. There's a man walking a dog. Oh, please don't hit the dog. Don't hit the dog. Oh, okay. Oh, wow. That dog just looked the car straight in the eye. I think on some level it knew. We're not getting as many weird looks from pedestrians as I thought we might. Well, here's what, because these cars have been driving around the city for years at this point.

27:19And I think, you know, I don't blink when I see one anymore either. Although it is true that, you know, often they do have a driver in the front seat and this one doesn't. Yeah. Oh, God, we're crossing the double yellow line. That was super interesting. Okay, so we were sort of driving straight, and the car just sort of veered into the left lane for no apparent reason. Yeah. So that was a surprise. Going very slowly, and we did not hit anything, but that was a... It was like the kind of move you do when you're stuck in traffic, and you want to peek out to see how much traffic is ahead of you. Like, it kind of felt like that.

27:49Yep, yep, yep. Or like a pothole that you're trying to avoid. But, like, look at... Do you see the steering wheel is, like, rotated all the way to the left for some reason? It is strange, though, that they have the steering wheel. Like, technically, like, in a fully self-driving car, you don't need a steering wheel. Unless, can these things maybe be, like, remotely taken over by customer support? Like, could, like, the CEO of Cruise take over the wheel if he wanted to? Oh, God. Oh, God. We, like, actually just almost got driven into a sign. This thing just made the most erratic sort of leftward squiggle into a, like, median, basically, and then quickly corrected.

28:27but it definitely made no sense whatsoever. Oh, uh... Yep. This is a self-driving taxi. I know, I know. Did you see that what happened, right? Yeah, how it swerved to the left. Yeah. Yeah, so you probably want to report that thing. We're going to. We're going to bring this to justice. Yeah, deal for me, okay? Yeah, okay. Thank you. That was a close one. This guy's on to us. I gotta say, he had his kid next to him like in the passenger seat and the kid just looked really jealous. He's so jealous. He wanted to be in the car. How excited are you as a parent to, like, never have to drive your kid to soccer practice in five years?

29:02Honestly, I'm like, I don't know if my kid is going to ever drive. Like, he's young enough now. Like, you know, I would bet that he never gets a driver's license. Or that if he does, it's like a novelty. It's like doing, you know, equestrian or something. Right. Well, frankly, that's for the best. I heard he just got into a huge tricycle accident, so I'm not sure I trust him on the road.

29:24you seem much more relaxed than i am right now i i'm i'm like finding it hard to just sit back and enjoy the ride i mean i will say like this feels like the future to me it just seems so obvious to me that within a couple of years like people are going to be taking these taxis they're never going to think twice about the fact that the car is driving itself they're just gonna be on their phones they're gonna be playing trivia playing the radio yeah i think for a lot of people they sort of gave up on driverless cars or at least i did like i I, you know, several years ago, it was like all you could hear was like, these things are coming.

29:55They're going to be everywhere. And then they didn't. And a lot of the companies that had invested billions of dollars into developing self-driving cars sort of retrenched on those efforts. Like Uber sold off its self-driving car division. Lyft sort of closed down its self-driving car project. Ford had a big investment in self-driving cars that it sort of shuttered. And so Cruise and Waymo, which is the thing that spun out of Google, they're really the sort of last two standing in San Francisco, at least. Well, I never gave up on self-driving cars for one main reason, which is I just always saw them everywhere in San Francisco.

30:31In my neighborhood, I see a self-driving car every single day, endlessly cruising around, gathering data. And I just always believed at some point this is going to turn into a taxi. and indeed here we are we're in a taxi yep that's true it's going very slowly due to traffic yeah we're in we should say we're in rush hour yeah we're in rush hour in san francisco so things are crawling now do you have any way of telling banana slug to floor it yeah you know i'm gonna say if i went if i'm if i'm getting this as a taxi i want it to be going the speed limit and maybe even two to three miles faster not six miles no i'm fine with this i really that that Honestly, the experience we had a couple blocks ago of almost getting plowed into the median, that I'm fine with us going as slow as Banana Slug needs to go.

31:19Do you think it heard that guy and was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to... Wait, why is it like... Oh, it's a turning? Okay. We're turning. Right. We must be getting close to coffee. Oh, it slows down for the speed bump. That's kind of impressive, actually. Really? It feels like that would be easy to see. I love how this thing that we both had never experienced until 10 minutes ago And now you're like, I'm over it Okay, now we're making a left at a four-way stop sign And once again Oh, we're doing a little game of like footsie with the other car It's extremely cautious at the stop signs, which I guess is what you want And we did just get like a horrified glare from the person who just saw that There's no one driving this car So it's saying it's arriving soon Okay, we're here We're here I'm impressed, are you impressed?

32:13I'm impressed Let's see if it lets us out Banana slug, let us go Please Says you have to solve a puzzle before I'll let you Answer me these questions three

32:31Okay Okay. Arrived at our drop-off spot. Here we are. All right. Okay, now it wants a rating. How would you rate that one to five stars? Three. Three? No. Really? It would have been much easier and faster to take an Uber. You know, I'm going to overrule you. I'm going to give that a five-star review. Okay. Wow. I mean, we're safely at our destination, and maybe I have low expectations, but that's sort of all I could hope for. True. Okay, let's go get some coffee. We're hearing you guys. Yeah. I've seen those things around here or in their training. We're making a podcast. Can I interview you about this?

33:10Okay. So what's your name? My name is Glenn. Glenn. And Glenn is a nice man sitting next to us here at the coffee shop. And Glenn, you were just saying something about self-driving cars. Yeah. I used to be a taxi driver. Oh, really? Yeah. So I wonder how those are going to affect taxi drivers because they're already under enough pressure from Uber and Lyft. For sure. For years. I know when I was driving cab, they really cut into our business. And, you know, it was hard to make a living. Do you get, like, what do you feel when you see a self-driving car on the street? Suspicion. You know, in terms of safety factor.

33:47You know, I've been driving cars for, like, 50 years. And the other day I was over by my apartment and I was crossing the street and I saw one of these cars going to make a turn onto the street. So I thought, you know, I'm going to stand in front of this thing. You actually stood in front of the car? Yeah. To stop it from making the turn? Yeah. Why is that? I wanted to see if it would stop. I left myself enough room to, if it didn't, to get the hell out of the way. But it did stop. Oh, good. That's why you're here. That's why you're here with us today. Yeah, exactly. So I was impressed with that.

34:25Well, we're about to interview the CEO of the company whose self-driving car that was, Cruise. So what should we ask him from a former San Francisco cab driver? One, what's the expected impact on cab drivers in terms of making a living? Two, how is it going to impact the Lyft and Uber drivers? And many of those people depend on that income. for a living. And I wonder how they intend to address that. And also, how are they going to set the rates? So I'm real curious about that. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, interesting to me to think that like sort of first Uber and Lyft came along and disrupted folks like yourself who are driving cabs.

35:09But now it seems like the self-driving cars are going to come along and disrupt all the people who are driving these Ubers. I know. It seems like it's going to disrupt the cab industry, it's going to disrupt Lyft, and it's going to disrupt Uber. I remember talking with the president of Lyft, John Zimmer, about this many years ago, because I sort of asked this, like I said, like, what happens to all the drivers when the cars just drive themselves? And he says, well, they can be, you know, they can be, they can do other things. Like maybe there's a self-driving restaurant and they can be servers in the self-driving restaurant that sort of like help you get your food as you're driving along the street.

35:43So he had other ideas. I think that's ridiculous. I don't buy that. That does not. Oh, look, there's Ren. There's another self-driving car. They're all over the place. Sometimes I feel like they hear us talking about them, and they like to swing over and, you know, check it out. So that's basically my feelings about the whole situation. So we'll see how it shakes. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I'm not diametrically opposed to it, but at the same time there's some serious economic impacts on other people who drive for a living. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. We'll ask him about that. That's great.

36:19Thank you. What a stroke of fortune we bumped into you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

36:42We'll be right back.

37:02This is our podcast studio, and this is Casey. Hi. Hey, good morning. How's it going? Nice to see you. Kyle Vogt, welcome to Hard Fork. Hey, thanks for having me. So we wanted to talk to you because Cruise has just recently announced that you are operating 24-7 in San Francisco. And we actually just this morning took a ride in one of your cars named Banana Slug. I don't know if you know that one, but one of those are a good one. I've seen Banana Slug out there on the roads. Yeah. What was the naming convention? How did you decide on the names for the cars? I mean, one of our interns named one of the early AVs for fun.

37:35I think the theme then was bird names and that stuck. And so we really leaned into it and let people suggest names. And I have no idea where Banana Slug came from, but it's not the weirdest one that's out there. What's the weirdest one that's out there? I'd have to come up with a list, but people have a very emotional attachment to the first AV that they rode in. Like Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, her first car was Tostada. And every time she comes to San Francisco, she's like, how's Tostada doing? Actually, it's been a rough few months in the shop for repairs. We don't like to talk about it. Sensitive subject.

38:07So Casey, what were your impressions of the ride? Well, Well, I mean, overall, it's super fun. This was the first ride that we had taken in self-driving cars where there was not a safety driver. You know, we've each probably taken a half a dozen or so rides in self-driving cars in the past, but there's always been a human. And there is something amazing about just seeing the steering wheel turn itself. You know, Kevin was sort of likening it to a player piano, you know, sort of watching that for the first time. You know, at the same time, it made some herky-jerky movements, and it drove like six miles per hour slower than the speed limit.

38:38So we do have some questions. Yeah, and it did almost swerve us into a median at one point, which led the human driver on the other side of us to roll down his window and say, you guys should report that thing. So here we are reporting it. Yeah, you guys are hilarious. You are moving through San Francisco in a technical marvel that took you across the city with no one behind the seat, probably half an hour or more. And you found like three relatively small things. This is what I told Casey because he wanted to give it three stars at the end of the ride. And I was like, we got safely to our destination during rush hour in a car with no driver.

39:14That's a five-star review. I'm just trying to help them improve. But you're right. It is a technical marvel. Yeah. Yeah, we want to talk about that. So first of all, I want to ask, what does it mean that you're operating 24-7 in San Francisco now? Because as we discovered when we were trying to set up this ride, it's actually like not everyone can just whip out their phones and start hailing autonomous drives. Yeah, so we've been rolling things out in phases. Our approach is, we call it envelope expansion, where we operate in a small area. We basically have done the analysis. We believe it's ready.

39:43And then we operate there. We check all the indicators. When everything is green, we expand it. And so this can refer to the area, whether it's the full city or a part of the city. It could refer to the hours of the day or the number of people that we allow on it. So right now, we're operating 24-7. There are a small number of cars that are out there all the time available to employees. and then over the next few weeks or months, we'll open that up to everyone else. And how do prices compare right now to what people might be used to paying for like an Uber? Pretty similar. And in fact, if for whatever reason the AV takes a longer route, we charge you for what the route should have been.

40:17Got it. Today though, we're pricing it at parity with ride chair as it exists. And we expect that, well, ride chair right now, it's already about as cheap as it's gonna get. Like, you know, these companies have optimized it and they've found that basically the minimum amount of money they can pay the drivers to keep drivers on the road. But that's limited by the cost of a human wage. Self-driving cars don't have the human. So as we drop the cost of the technology and the cost of operating these cars and increase the size of the fleet so it gets more efficient, we can get way, way, way below the cost of what exists today.

40:49And we also know from the data that people who use ride share are very price sensitive. They want to save a buck on that ride. What that means is when you drop the cost a little bit, the number of people using ride share as their primary mode of transportation is going to go up, which we're excited about because I think it helps with congestion and traffic in cities. So the last time I really paid attention, close attention to the self-driving car market was in 2017, 2018. At the time, there was a huge wave of sort of hype and excitement about driverless cars. Uber was investing tons of money into it.

41:23Lyft was telling people that rolling restaurants, you know, self-driving hospitality vehicles were just a couple years away. You know, and Casey and I both went on a number of rides at that time. And the line that we got then was like, yes, they only work on a predetermined route during certain hours now, but just wait a couple years, they'll be everywhere. So we waited a couple years and, you know, with the exception of a couple cities, they're not everywhere. So what happened between, let's say, five years ago and now to make you convinced that these vehicles are ready for prime time? Is it some like technical breakthrough that made them safer and more reliable?

41:59Or is it just that you've had more time to kind of work out some of the kinks? I want to answer that in two ways. First of all, they are scaling up rapidly and appearing in more cities now. Like that's starting to happen. And so we're on the verge of that rapid scale. You know, we launched two new cities last year. There's going to be a lot more big announcements and news on expansion this year. So why did that just happen now instead of five years ago? Two things. First of all, when you have a person behind the wheel and they're in charge of taking over and all those tricky edge cases, you know, the last 1 % of the problem where the system isn't ready, 99 % of the time it feels like it's done.

42:35And so you can take an investor or a potential partner or someone on those rides and they're like, oh, this is here. We need to invest now, like throw all the money at it. And that went crazy. It was like a gold rush. It was like maybe like crypto a couple of years ago, or probably like AI and large language models right now. Maybe people are a little more excited about that than they should be. And then the rest of the time between then and now was the hard work to continuously grind away at those edge cases, that last 1 % of the problem until you can safely remove that human out of the car. And that's just what it took.

43:05So it really was mostly a data collection issue then. Data collection was a piece of it, but there's just a lot of engineering challenges that go into things like, what if someone leaves the car door open after they get dropped off? Or what happens if the lane markers have been repainted and there's a police officer waving around traffic? What's the car supposed to do? These things that don't happen that often, but when they do, the car just can't sit there. You actually have to find a way through it. So wait, what does happen if somebody doesn't close the door at the end of a ride? We just launched this last week.

43:32We have auto-closing doors. Nice. The doors will just like, someone logs in with a camera. You know, when the vehicle says, hey, my door is open, they check that the coast is clear, and then the door will slam shut. What other things did you see in your testing? What other edge cases have you seen that maybe threw you for a loop or caught you by surprise? Yeah, so, I mean, there's a lot of things that are weird, like situations. You know, we see sideshows in San Francisco when people block down an intersection and just do donuts in the middle of an intersection. Didn't have that in our test cases early on, right?

44:02Had to think through that. A lot of stuff with, you know, swarms of people rollerblading in the street or Segways or bikes. But that stuff in a way is kind of expected. Like you'd expect a large city to have a diversity of stuff, including some weird things. What I didn't see coming is that a lot of people would essentially risk their lives and try jumping in front of a moving car to see if it's going to stop. We literally talked to someone today who did this. Yes, we were at a coffee shop and there was this guy there who heard us talking about self-driving cars. And he says, oh, I'm a retired cab driver in San Francisco and starts telling us about how he once jumped in front of a self-driving car to see if it would stop.

44:42And great news, it stopped. Yeah, I mean, it's terrifying to me because like we want to improve road safety, not create situations where people are, you know, creating new opportunities for themselves to get hurt. So I hope that this is a short-lived thing, and that we all understand that these cars are going to stop and don't need to be, you know, being reckless like that. Have you ever thought about just, like, putting, like, some sort of device that, like, shoots a beanbag at people if they're— We thought about water guns. Maybe those, like, exploding ink things if you try to, like— Like if you're trying to rob a bank.

45:11I tell you, if that happened to you, that'd be the last time you ever mess with a cruise robo-taxi. I want to ask a series of questions about safety because I think this is first and foremost on people's minds. And in San Francisco, most of the rides, maybe the vast majority of rides, go off without a hitch, but there have been some incidents. Earlier this year, officials in San Francisco sent letters to state regulators asking them to either halt or slow the expansion of Cruise and Waymo because some of the cars had blocked traffic or gotten in the way of emergency vehicles. How do these incidents affect public support for driverless cars?

45:46You know, when there aren't that many driverless cars, and the only thing you hear about are these relatively rare incidents. Remember, we've gotten almost 2 million driverless miles at this point. You know, on a typical night, we'll do 1 ,000 rides for people. There's a lot of stuff happening without incident. You know, when we do have a stumble or a misstep, you know, we'll apologize for that. Or if appropriate, we'll do a recall and inform members of the public about what we changed to improve these systems. And so, you know, if that's the only thing you hear about, I think that's going to slow things back.

46:15But on the other hand, at this point, we have tens of thousands of people who have ridden in this and are starting to question, okay, is this what's happening all the time? Or is this, you know, sort of the rare events that get sensationalized and picked up and get lots of coverage? And our view is that over time, I think people will, you know, start to see more that these things do happen, but they're rare. And I think more importantly, we're starting to see evidence that the presence of these vehicles on the road actually is having a positive impact on road safety. And that's priority number one for us.

46:41These cars, not on our ride, thankfully, but in some cases, they are making very high-stakes decisions. Like, do you swerve out of the way of an oncoming car if it means swerving into another car? If it means choosing between hurting one passenger or maybe the driver of a different car? So this is the classic trolley problem where you have to decide who to run over in a hypothetical trolley. But you're actually dealing with a real version of this with your car. So is there any programming in your cars that has to sort of make decisions about which humans to protect in the event of an accident and which not to?

47:19How are you approaching these more philosophical debates that you actually have to then build into real products? So fair question. It's not one we've seen yet in 2 million miles of driverless operation or in the several million that we did in testing before we went driverless. But I accept that it is a possibility. Right now, we program based on trying to minimize injury on the road. And so that generally means we want to give more space to pedestrians and vulnerable road users, even if that means getting closer to a vehicle. And that's because occupants in a vehicle generally have better protection mechanisms like airbags and seatbelts and other things than people on the road.

47:54So that's a good starting point. And that generally has led to good performance and good decision making. We have not, because there hasn't been a need to engage in sort of these ethical, philosophical debates on like, you know, if you are in a situation where it's equally, you know, necessary to go one way or the other, which one are you going to do? Which lever are you going to pull? Because the reality is in almost all the situations we've come across so far, there's a clear choice that you can make that minimizes, you know, risk of injury. And it hasn't really been a choice that we need to make.

48:22But what I think people should know is that we're using all the best research that exists to try to make these cars as safe as they can be on the road, recognizing that there are situations where there will be collisions and it's unavoidable. One of the things that I've been struggling with is figuring out what our societal fault tolerance is for self-driving cars. I think if you had asked me 10 years ago, you know, when will society accept self-driving cars? I think I would have said, you know, they just need to be safer on average than human drivers, right? If they cause a few fewer crashes or fatalities every year, then society will say that's a good thing.

49:02It seems like from the evidence we have so far, like it's actually got to be much better than a human for society to say, okay, I want to get into that thing. How do you think about society's sort of fault tolerance for driverless cars? And, you know, does a self-driving car need to be a hundred times safer than a human driver before we will feel safe all riding them every day? Yeah, look, I think it's a really interesting philosophical debate. And I'll tell you, there's a bunch of different lenses to try to look through to come up with an answer. One is, what do our federal safety regulators look at?

49:33And when it comes to any new technology, they're looking for unreasonable risk and aggregate improvement on road safety. Even our Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, was out there saying exactly the problem you highlighted. Like, even if robots do result in far fewer people dying on our roadways, even a small number of them is going to have people go nuts. And I guess the last way to look at it is if you forget the fact that there's no person in the car, but think about it like, you know, segmenting different groups of the population, old drivers from young drivers or other things. Like, you know, if old drivers are 50 % worse than the new drivers, like, you know, how do we feel about that?

50:11You know, and I think the same could be said for just a different category or grouping of drivers. So I think where we're going to land on this is that we want safer roads, and it's a really interesting thing to talk about now when humans and robots are maybe relatively close in performance. But over the next couple of years, given the rate of improvement that these systems have had, talking about five years ago, they weren't ready yet, now they're out there and scaling, I think this is going to be a conversation that's in the rearview mirror because they're going to be so much better than humans, and we're not even going to have this debate.

50:41And when do you say rear view mirror, is that kind of a self-driving car joke? That was a good automotive part. I have too many that's programmed into my head right now. Kevin, I have to say, I disagree with you because I think that the minute that Kyle can get me across town for$3, I'm not looking up the safety report for a cruise. I'm saying that is the cheapest way to get from point A to point B, and if the thing shows up with three wheels, I'm still getting inside because it'll probably be fine. Don't you think most people are going to be that way? I don't know. if you got on a plane and it was, there was no pilot in the cockpit, even if you knew intellectually that that plane is just as safe as a human, you know, sitting in the cockpit.

51:20Yeah. I think you're still thinking twice about getting on that plane. I think it is. Well, and look, it is different for me because I have been driving in these things for like seven years. Now, admittedly, only a handful of times, but because it's gone back so far in my mind now that it weirdly has lost the novelty of it, which as you sort of alluded to earlier is an incredible moment, right? Just in like the history of technology that a thing that is driving itself feels a little bit boring. But I truly think that after you take your first self-driving car taxi and it's basically fine, you're just going to take them a lot more.

51:51You don't think that's true? I don't think so. I think humans are not perfect risk assessors, right? Like that's why, you know, we should all be a lot more scared to drive than fly because flying is much safer statistically, but a lot more people have fears of being in an airplane. So I just think you're working on a problem that is as much about psychology and human sort of comfort as it is about technology. Would you agree or disagree with that? Yeah. I mean, we, you know, there will be an interesting test for society to see what happens the first time that a driverless car gets into an incident and someone gets hurt, severely hurt.

52:26It's not a question of if, but when. And, you know, even with all the data showing evidence of positive safety impact and other things, we as a society will have a choice at that moment to decide whether we ban something that could potentially save tens of thousands of lives per year, you know, over the next several years. Or we decide that this is, you know, this is a horrible situation and something awful, but this is something that we need and we're going to learn from this and keep moving forward. And I don't think that's really something that I can say as a CEO of a company in this space.

53:00It's really going to be up to our society and our regulators and our government decide what we do in that moment. When we were riding in Banana Slug today, I had the strong feeling that Banana Slug has been told, please be more cautious than the average car. Is my sense accurate? Yeah, it's easier to drive cautiously and slow than really fast and assertive while also maintaining safety. And so as the performance of these systems improve, you'll see them start to drive in more human-like ways in terms of assertiveness. There are moments when cruise AVs already are at that point. And there are moments when they're around, you know, a mid-block crosswalk or, you know, a narrow street with lots of parked cars where it's hard to see around the corner, that they'll go slower than a human.

53:43We're working on that, but, you know, we're not going to move faster than we're comfortable. You mentioned a second ago that you're seeing evidence that your driverless cars are having a positive impact on road safety. Can you just flesh that out a little bit? Like, are your vehicles safer on average than a human driver, or are they less safe or about the same? Well, I'll start by saying it's a hard question to answer. Like, what exactly is human driving and under what circumstances? What we have done is partnered with VTTI and UMTRI, which are these transportation research institutes, and tried to produce an estimate of how well the human drivers drive in San Francisco, specifically.

54:20Horrible. I mean, actually, yes, because, you know, the commonly cited national statistic on collisions is off by a factor of 10 to 20 compared to what we see in San Francisco. And so what we have seen so far, and this is still early, it's only across, you know, we analyze our first million miles of driving. So that's a lot, but also not a lot, is that the AVs are getting involved in far fewer crashes, 50 % as many crashes compared to what we observe humans doing in a similar driving environment. What's more exciting, though, is the more severe crashes that would be more likely to lead to injury.

54:53The AVs are doing significantly better at avoiding those. I think something like 70 % fewer. I think you could probably drive way safer than a human just by, like, never going 70 miles an hour. Right, and never checking your phone while you're driving. I mean, that was my main thought about San Francisco, why it has worse drivers than most cities, because everyone's constantly checking for new blue sky invite codes or whatever. That really should be your whole marketing campaign. It's like, cruise, robo, taxi, check your phone all you want. Right. There it is. There it is. I mean, is that, that's sort of a joke, but that's sort of not, like, I feel like a killer moment for the AV industry is when you can actually just watch Netflix in the car.

55:25Yep. Like, while you drive to work. Is that something that you're thinking about? Are you putting, I mean, we saw the trivia system in Banana Slug today. Which we crushed, I crushed it at, I have to say. It's pretty hard, if you did notice. So anyway, are you doing more with entertainment inside the cars? Yeah, I mean, so the new car we're building, it's a six seater, the seats face each other, it's more of this living room on wheels configuration, we're testing that in Austin right now. And that really makes it clear that okay, if you don't need the front seat, and the seats facing forward and the ghost steering wheel that's moving, this becomes a really social space.

55:59And I think that is time that we get to reclaim. And whether you want to watch Netflix or do work or talk to your friend, whatever it is, I think that's pretty compelling because like, you know, these days, so many people and companies are competing for our attention and our time and sucking it away from us. And I think the notion of giving that back to people is really exciting. Kyle, I want to ask you about the other big question in addition to safety that I think is on people's minds when it comes to autonomous vehicles, which is jobs and job displacement. Millions of people drive for a living, whether it's Uber drivers or cab drivers or delivery drivers, truck drivers.

56:34How do you think about the effect that autonomous vehicles could have on those people? I mean, I think with any new technology like this, you're going to see a shift in the distribution of jobs that people have. And I think actually one of the nice things about self-driving cars as compared to maybe like LLMs or chat GPT, that happened very fast and very suddenly and could be very disruptive in a very short period of time. I think with self-driving cars, you know, almost a nice side effect of the fact that five years ago we thought they were right around the corner and it took longer than people hoped.

57:07is a lot of people know this is coming. And so, you know, anecdotally, when I talked to an Uber Lyft driver in San Francisco, no one is saying this is my long-term career. This is the thing I'm doing now. When the self-driving cars are here, I'll do something else. I think for maybe truck drivers and other things, it's maybe a bit more work to, you know, enter a different job or, you know, change the distribution of jobs. But on the other hand, like, I think we do have to take a step back as a society and say, do we wish the industrial revolution never happened? Or do we wish that, you know, computers didn't come out and displace a whole bunch of manual data entry jobs?

57:36I can't say that we do. And so, you know, I think each one of these things looks scary at the beginning, but on the other side, it makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I remember talking with one of the co-founders of Lyft many years ago about this, and he was saying, well, you know, yeah, people won't be driving the cars, but you'll have, you know, rolling restaurants and rolling gyms, and you'll need people to staff all of that. And so he was sort of, he did seem to feel some responsibility for making sure that the people who are currently driving for a living and may get displaced by this technology actually found other work.

58:09Do you feel a similar sense of responsibility for the people who are currently driving for a living to find them new work or to create new work for them? I think we have to contribute to it, for sure. You know, I think, and that could take the form of, you know, to the extent we're able providing training programs or alternate jobs for people. But more than that, I think it's, you know, interacting with our government and our regulators and letting them know this is coming when and how and giving them some notice so we can plan ahead a little bit. There are a lot of things that can be done if people or states or the federal government makes this a priority to ensure that this is a smooth transition.

58:44But some of that's beyond the reach of any one individual company. Can you say more about these rolling gyms? This is like a box truck with a Peloton in it, and it's driving itself? Yeah, I guess. I don't know. I didn't really ask for more details. Kyle, I would maybe move that one down lower on your product roadmap. I don't know if that's where the consumer demand is at the moment. How do showers work for that? That's what I want to know. Like, are they fresh towels? Yeah, you hit a bomb. All of a sudden, the weight plate is crushing you. I want to do some future casting, but first I want to ask about the business model of self-driving cars.

59:19So, Cruise, your company, is a subsidiary of General Motors. Last quarter, Cruise reportedly lost$561 million, or about$6 million a day in the last quarter. It's a lot of money. A lot of self-driving cars companies have lost billions of dollars over the years. So how long do you think you can sustain those kind of losses? And when do you expect to be profitable, if ever? Well, definitely not ever. Definitely ever. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it's happening. So it is a lot of money. And I think this is a really unique situation because you have typically like an independently funded startup would not be able to go after a capital intensive initiative like this.

1:00:02And so what we've seen is that the only companies out there who are willing to invest the necessary capital, kind of the activation energy to make this new technology exist, are a company like the major tech companies who can afford to invest in something on a longer time horizon, or an automotive company that understands that this is the future and wants to be on the right side of history when things inevitably shift to people being driven by their cars rather than driving them. On the other hand, we do feel a really strong sense of, I guess, gratitude towards General Motors to getting us to where we are.

1:00:37And we want to return that capital and make sure that GM is wildly successful financially for making this bet. So we do have an eye towards profitability. And one of the key factors there is driving down the cost of the vehicles, which we're doing through investments like building our own chips and machine learning accelerators to take costs out of the vehicle. And then also increasing the scale, which actually makes the cost per ride much, much less. And so if it is the case that this is really hard to do well, only a couple companies crack it, and you have that opportunity to go after that market just in the US, that's worth a big investment up front, I think, if you have conviction that we can get there.

1:01:12I mean, my pitch is like, I probably was never going to buy a GM car, not because I have anything against GM, but just like, I don't want to buy a car in general. It's annoying to have a car in the city. But if you guys come up with some sort of subscription program for like, I don't know, a couple hundred bucks a month, and you give me 40 miles of rides, you're going to make$200 a month off me for the rest of my life. So, I mean, to me, it just seems obvious that there's a lot of money in it. It's just insanely expensive to get there. I think a lot of people are going to say, why do we even bother owning a car?

1:01:39As long as it's there when I need it and it can do everything I want to do with a car, I'm not going to own a car. At least I won't have so many cars in my driveway. I think one thing that we're sort of very bad at as people who, you know, write and think about tech for a living is thinking about sort of like second order consequences, right? Like, the car was invented, and we didn't know it at the time, but it was going to sort of invent the suburb and change the entire fabric of American civic life. What are some changes that you think this era, if you are correct, and autonomous vehicles are coming to cities all over the country, what other effects do you think that could have beyond sort of the obvious, like, it'll change the way you get to work?

1:02:22Well, I think from a city planning perspective, there's a lot of things that I think if you had a clean slate, we would do differently than what we did decades ago when most of our city plans were laid out. I don't think we'd have as much space for parking cars, like inventory or garage inventory on the streets for people. I think we'd do a lot more public transit and walking paths and biking paths as a general matter. And I think that AVs will make us a little bit easier for us to do that in the future. If cities do decide that certain parts are AV only, just like on the streets in Europe that don't allow cars, walking only, if there's certain streets that are AV only, what that will let you do is get a lot more throughput for a lot less square feet of city space.

1:03:05If you have roads that are only AVs, they can travel in caravans, like maybe just three feet apart going at high speed. You can fit maybe three of them in every two lanes of city traffic that you use today. And so I think we'll be able to reclaim a lot of that space for other purposes while still being able to move a large number of people through our cities per square foot of road area that we allocate. So you think there'll be some highways or something where it's like, this is the robot only highway. You can't go on that if you're driving the car. Yeah, it depends. If a goal of a city is to optimize the efficiency of its transportation system, the benefits of AVs is that they can sort of go at high speed on these AV only highways, but they can go point to point.

1:03:43They can show up at your doorstep, which a bus system won't do and mass transit won't do. So it's a pretty powerful tool if we design cities in the right ways. And one final question that I always like to ask CEOs, which is, if five years from now, we call you up and things have not gone according to your plan. If, you know, Cruz was never able to reach mass adoption, if GM has shut you down to save money, you know, if none of this comes to pass, why will that have been in your best estimate? Is it because regulators didn't make concessions to the industry? Is it because the hardware costs just never come down?

1:04:21If you fail, what do you think the reasons for that will be? Well, I'm very confident in the cost coming down. I'm confident in the capabilities of the technology improving. I'm confident in how attractive and preferential this is going to be in terms of a ride experience compared to the status quo. And I'm confident in the safety performance. And so if it doesn't get there, it would be for something that is valid, but maybe not, you know, in the best interest of society. Like maybe we do struggle with how to rationalize collisions caused by robots instead of humans, even though there are fewer of them.

1:04:58Like that could cause delays or cause like a shift of this deployment to going to other countries first. In particular, if you look at China, they're wide open. The government gets it. They're going full speed. I think that that is a risk to the U.S. economy, you know, if we're caught, you know, a decade behind on that. Or it could be, if not for that, then maybe one of these other forms of transportation, like electric vertical takeoff and landing plane comes in and we're not really talking about cars anymore. But I mean, you tell me like this, it really seems like at this point we're like we're past the critical gate.

1:05:26We've gone from R &D to these products scaling out there in the field. And it just seems it just seems very obvious that this is the way the world is going. And it's a matter of time. And I think, you know, from a pure sort of system of constraints standpoint, unless we as a society do something to block this or slow it down, I think it's going to happen really soon. And I think we're all going to benefit. I think that could be true. I mean, I also felt that way six or seven years ago, so maybe I was just too eager. But when I have friends come in from out of town or colleagues from other cities, one of the most reliable things they say about San Francisco is like, oh, my God, there are so many self-driving cars.

1:06:04I didn't realize these things were so ubiquitous in San Francisco. Also, like the only thing that prevented your enthusiasm from becoming a reality was just that the technology hadn't caught up, which I think happens to tech reporters all the time. We are constantly seeing stuff that is just not ready to be deployed. But now it actually is being deployed. And I don't know. I think the minute that people can take these taxis and they're cheap, they're going to do it. I think the minute you can own a self-driving car, that becomes such a status symbol. Think of all of the people who are going to be thrilled to be like, oh, you're still driving your car?

1:06:39sucks for you. So the market is ready. You just got to get more of these things on the road, Kyle. On it. All right. Kyvo, thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me.

1:07:07Thank you.

1:07:49Hey, before we go, we wanted to say thank you to everyone who has sent in voice memos for our segment, Hard Questions. This, of course, is our segment where we hear your tech dilemmas related to ethics and technology, points in your life where you're struggling to decide what to do with respect to tech. We've gotten a lot of great submissions already, and we're eager to hear more. If you have one, you can send it to us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyan. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

1:08:30Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Mel Galogli, Kate Lopresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. And if you see us in a self-driving car, say hi.

1:09:06Thank you.