The Global Expansion of Self-Driving Vehicles

14:55Ming Maa:This is an interesting kind of new path for an AV company. I would say we're seeing some version of this on the military side and some of the autonomous vehicles companies that we're working with because they're going into kind of austere environments. They're going into terrain that they don't necessarily have the ability to previously map. And so they want the capability to really, you know, land a vehicle and go, if you will. And so although a lot of the companies, again, that we've historically worked with definitely operate with trained data, the fact that there's a company, you know, kind of aspiring to do something like this on public roads.

15:36Ming Maa:It's not entirely new, but it definitely will be something that we'll be watching. I would say, again, from an edge case perspective, our point of view would be, you still have to make sure it's safe, whatever that system is. You still have to prove that, you know, you're approaching autonomy slightly different, but you still have to think about how you demonstrate that the system is going to perform the way you expect it to perform?

15:59Jason Calacanis:I think just to add on to Nathan's comments, it's very, very challenging to get from two nines of reliability to five nines of reliability. And covering all of those different corner cases city by city is one of the biggest challenges for autonomy. So for example, the color of the streetlights are slightly different for different cities. They're at slightly different heights depending on the cities that you're in. When you're driving on the left-hand side of the road versus the right-hand side of the road, The conditions are very different. When you look at the curbs in different cities, some curbs are fairly tall, some curbs are fairly short.

16:35Jason Calacanis:And so all of that influences how you think about pickups and drop-offs and navigations throughout the city. You also remember there's also an auditory component to this. So Waymos understand when there's a first responder coming by the sound of the siren. So if there's an ambulance or a fire truck coming by, they'll know to pull that vehicle aside and let that first responder go through first. But those sounds, as you can probably imagine, vary a little bit, slightly, you know, city by city. And so really capturing all of those little nuances is what makes it five nines of reliability.

17:10Nathan Parker:To get from zero nines to two nines and then from two nines to five nines, is it like, you know, 20 % of the work to get to two nines and then 80 % to get to five nines? or am I inverting the amount of work per nine in terms of reliability?

17:23Jason Calacanis:And what we're finding is we're finding new ways to make the system more and more robust every single mile that they drive. So we talked about weather as one of the key things to really understand. Some cities in hot climates, for example, there's a lot of dust in the air. And being able to really model and calibrate the sensors to detect and really understand dust and find particles is an important component. once autonomy reaches the snowy cities in the north, being able to really understand snow and how that affects the sensor stack is going to be very important as well. So I think all of this is really coming together now to make really Waymo the world's safest driver.

18:06Nathan Parker:I came into this conversation incredibly excited about the quick pace of progress in self-driving, and now I'm discovering it's a little bit more piecemeal than I thought. How has reliability of autonomous cars improved through the eyes of Auto Lane because you're dealing with them in the real world. So do you see improvements in how they drive and do these edge cases that take you from two nines to five, do they show up in your interactions with them as a company?

18:33Ben Seidl:The company that we're most integrated with is actually Tesla. And I drive a hardware for Tesla every day, 100 % on FSD. So I can mostly speak to that. I've taken a lot of Waymo rides and we orchestrate Waymos on private property at some of the centers that we support. But, you know, the Waymo capabilities, because you can really only learn about them, at least we can, by riding in them, that's harder. So it's all about the amount of time you have in the vehicles. But with Tesla, you know, we have a fleet at Autoline of Tesla's hardware four. and we're driving them all day, every day. So every time that there's a point release for FSD, that's being tested across our organization and myself on a daily basis.

19:27Ben Seidl:And I came up with the idea for Autolane in August 2024 because I bought a brand new Tesla and was astounded by how good the FSD quality was even at that point. and kind of had the epiphany that if this technology continues at the rate that it's improving, then this is clearly a general purpose technology that's going to change the world. And if that's true, then what we need to see is pretty significant and steady progress, similar to the world of LLMs, in order for this epiphany to become true. And so we've bet a pretty big asymmetric bet at Autolane on the idea that autonomy is not only going to improve at a consistent rate, but that it will eventually come to personally owned vehicles as well.

20:20Ben Seidl:So I can say over the last 18 months of building Autolane, if you looked at FSD as an example from August 2024 until today, it's significantly better. I would even maybe say twice as good. I mean, it used to do, even in August 2024, it would do things that weren't safe, things that would make you not want to use it again. And unless you were kind of an intrepid early adopter, you probably gave up on it. But I could kind of see through the fog and understand that if they keep improving at this rate, then these things are going to go away, as Ming's pointing out, step by step. And we've seen that happen every single quarter, if not every single month for the last 18 months.

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22:01Ben Seidl:From my vantage point and a CEO of Autolane and working with these different and testing, when I've tested WeRide, I've tested Zoox, I've tested Wave, I've tested obviously Tesla, Waymo. So almost all of them. And, you know, they're all really good. They're all really good and they're all pretty close to each other. So I'm very bullish on the progress that will continue to be made here. And, you know, hopefully that can be disseminated across all AV companies.

22:33Nathan Parker:Yeah, we're going to come back to you in a second, Ben, because we have an audience question about autonomous commerce that I want to get to. But Nathan, from the edge case perspective, have you guys seen the types of improvements in the cars that you help safety check similar to what Ben just described in how FSD has improved? I know you can't talk about individual customers and clients, but have you seen a similar rate of them getting better at avoiding the sorts of issues that you need to flag?

22:59Ming Maa:The short answer is yes. So you start to see some of their metrics like interventions per mile, some of those industry standard things. I think the thing that's also interesting is the problems they're looking to solve. Like if you talk to some of the AV players, like what are some of their biggest problems? three to five years ago is some foundational engineering problem. Now they're solving like ecosystem problems or how do I scale? How do I work with customers? How do I build the commercialization engine to support the deployments that are coming? So I think it signals to us that they're definitely getting very close to launch and several have because they're solving different problems now.

23:41Ming Maa:They're solving very much a commercialization go-to-market problem. Of course, there's still safety cases that have to be pulled together and some fundamental engineering work that has to be done. But the aperture has been opened on the problem set.

23:55Nathan Parker:So do you eventually fix yourself out of a job at EdgeCase once you've solved the EdgeCases? Because there's only so many cities. There's only so many ODDs, to use your term. Does EdgeCase eventually get out of this business once it's solved? The true answer is no. Oh, I'm surprised to hear you say that. Yeah.

24:16Ming Maa:So one of the other, and this is back to some of our background, part of the challenge is getting the system to market. What we also think is the bigger challenge is going to be keeping the fleets operational and keeping them performing to the safety standard. So you can imagine in the future, a lot of the dev fleets, they're five to call it 50 vehicles. The problems, parts are going to go obsolete. You're going to have things that change in the configuration of these platforms all the time. So you have to not only now understand the safety profile of a single vehicle, you have to understand the safety profile of 1 ,000, 10 ,000, 100 ,000, a million with precision to understand, much like the airlines, right?

25:04Ming Maa:a grounding of a fleet. What is the autonomous vehicle community going to do when they have an incident? So that's part of what we've been building around our platform is that real-time monitoring, real-time observability to understand, are all of the vehicles in the fleet still performing to the safety standard that was set out way back when the engineers were building?

25:26Nathan Parker:Okay, Ming, we have to bring you in here because this is very fascinating. When I think of fleet management. In the back of my head, I'm imagining some high school kids parking cars in a back lot and then picking them up again and driving them out. Clearly, that's not the case based on what Nathan just told us. So how hard is it to keep the sensors clean and calibrated and to ensure that, you know, cross generations of different Waymos that all the technology is working? And how do you test to ensure that the cars that are being used, that you're helping to manage, are at exactly 100 % readiness to take people just as we expect airlines to have their planes, you know, knocking on wood, always ready to go?

26:01Jason Calacanis:It's a great question. And I think the first mental model is to understand that managing an AV fleet is 100 % completely different from managing a traditional fleet. When you think about the goal of a traditional fleet manager, it's really just BIS. It's butts in seats. So you spend a lot of energy looking for drivers. And then when you find a driver, you want to get that car out of your parking lot as soon as possible. And then you completely forget about that car until it comes back for servicing. So you're completely hands off. That's traditional fleet management. Managing an AV fleet is almost the exact opposite in every single motion.

26:44Jason Calacanis:So we spend 0 % of our time thinking about filling seats. Instead, we spend a lot of our time, to Nathan's point, thinking about the motions around recording every single vehicle when it comes back into the facility. How do we ensure that it meets the safety standards that our riders deserve? And so having that traceability every time we balance or repair a tire, how to ensure that the torque values are recorded for every single nut before it leaves the facility. And that process, that motion is much more akin to a airline level of safety than it is to a traditional fleet company. Now, we also think a lot about the demand curve for ride sharing.

27:32Jason Calacanis:So very different from traditional fleet companies, we think a lot about how does the rider demand change throughout the day? And then how do I match the supply curve to that demand curve as best as possible? Now, companies like Wayne have invested a tremendous amount of engineering to develop very sophisticated tools for managing these supply and demand curves. But we find that every city is very different in certain small little ways. And so what I like to think about is how do we help them fine tune the system for every city, to borrow that analogy from AI.

28:08Nathan Parker:You guys raised a bunch of money last year. And it sounds like you're doing all of the tricky and difficult and hard work, but not getting as much of the praise. And I presume not the entire economics of self-driving. So, Ming, have you considered rolling your own self-driving car as well? Because I feel like you have the muscle and sinew required to do it. So I'm curious why not go up stack, if you will.

28:33Jason Calacanis:Our expertise is around operations and really helping the AV companies go to market in the most efficient and the most sustainable way possible. So I think ultimately why companies like Waymo choose to partner with us is because we accelerate the commercial scaling of their ambitions into cities on a faster timeline and in a more economic way. So what that means, if you take a very concrete view on this, is first of all, we develop all the infrastructure needed to bring Waymo to a city. And there's really three types of infrastructure that we work on. The first is charging locations where we service the vehicles, we prepare them for ride-sharing services.

29:15Jason Calacanis:Second, we also set up the service facilities that's needed to perform maintenance and repair. Again, to Nathan's point, ensure that every vehicle is as safe as possible and as roadworthy as possible. And then the third is we do have really parking infrastructure for situations when we have to defleet the fleet due to either bad weather events or other issues. San Francisco losing power, for example. Exactly. Perfect example. And then I think any market that we operate in, we most likely have multiple facilities for each of these three archetypes. And the real challenge for a fleet operator is in orchestrating this very distributed footprint of facilities to make sure that the overall fleet works as efficiently as possible.

30:07Jason Calacanis:So that's really on the infrastructure side. The second thing that we do is all the operations needed to ready the vehicles for ride sharing. And the objective to Nathan's point is really to ensure, first of all, our P0 is safety, that all vehicles are as safe and clean as possible for passengers while we maximize the total utilization of the entire fleet. So when you step back, we're not going to go up stack, if you will, into the R &D and the AV development. But the mental model that I would leave you with is we help Waymo to really open up a new market, light up a new market, without having a single person from Waymo needing to step foot into those markets themselves.

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32:09Nathan Parker:I want to double click on one thing you said, which is having multiple facilities to maintain self-driving fleets right now on a per market basis. Given that we're usually talking about double digits or triple digits numbers of cars in an individual market from an individual provider, I'm a little surprised you need that much square footage on the ground. Does that make it harder to aggressively roll out AVs because the maintenance and care and parking and so forth takes up that much space?

32:41Jason Calacanis:It's absolutely one of the rate limiters to growing fleet in any particular market. And I think one of the biggest challenges is how do you provision the right amount of power into these facilities, either for charging or for other purposes? So you're looking at these are facilities with, I would say, anywhere from 3, 5, 10 megawatts of power. And getting that provision from the local utilities can take anywhere from 12, 18 plus months, depending on the city. So as you think about the rate limiters of growth in autonomy, the infrastructure, provisioning the power, getting the right locations, locations that are close to end demand, that is absolutely one of the key challenges for autonomy.

33:28Nathan Parker:Ben, a couple of questions from the audience about what you're building. Seems that the consumers watching the show are very curious about when all the stuff we're talking about is going to impact their daily life. So first question, a little bit generic, but roll with me here. When will we be able to order coffees from AVs, just general commerce on the road? Super excited about this and trying to help build it. So talk to the people.

33:49Ben Seidl:The first thing I'll say is autonomous commerce and Autolane helping to build this platform. This is not the first time this has been tried or piloted. So even last year, DoorDash and Waymo worked together in Phoenix on some things. Before that, we had Nuro. Nuro built an entire multi-billion dollar business, making purpose-built delivery vehicles, partnering with people like, or companies like Kroger and Walmart and others. You know, so there's been iterations of this, of course, for quite some time. And the cleanest thing to point to right now is the sidewalk bots. You know, these are a form of autonomous commerce that are happening every day in many major cities in the United States, Miami, you know, Los Angeles and others.

34:42Ben Seidl:So, you know, autonomous commerce is not a brand new idea necessarily, but the way in which we think about it is, I think, different. It's more akin to the Uber strategy, which is to say we believe that robotics and largely speaking, autonomous vehicles are going to be the next delivery form factor. And I don't know if that's necessarily even debatable. it's not going to be a hundred percent of all delivery demand but it's going to be i think the majority uh over time and so what does that look like well i i believe absolutely that it's going to be multimodal so you're talking about drones you're seeing drones drone delivery ramping up quite fast with zipline and wing yeah i just talked to the ceo of zipline that was a very

35:29Nathan Parker:enthusiastic conversation actually made me quite um optimistic that's going to happen sooner than

35:34Ben Seidl:me think finally yeah yeah but you know that that that form factor has its significant limitations as well and so do the sidewalk bots and so do purpose-built vehicles like uh i don't know if you you've seen the doordash dot um that they've created that they just launched in fremont uh last week i believe but that's a purpose-built autonomous commerce delivery vehicle uh you know that's faster than a sidewalk bot that can go on roads, but also smaller than a car, um, and not flying. Here's what it looks like, by the way, because everyone wants to see it.

36:10Nathan Parker:Just imagine a meatball with stroller wheels and, uh, a terrible Honda civic spoiler all put together. Yeah.

36:19Ben Seidl:It's, uh, it's definitely interesting. And I think, you know, we're starting to see all these form factors. I don't know if you've also seen, there's a company called River that's doing doorstop autonomous delivery with these wheeled sidewalk bots, basically, that are like half robot dog, half sidewalk bot, and they can wheel up staircases and things like that. So you've got all of these form factors happening, which I believe encompasses a new type of commerce called autonomous commerce. Yeah, exactly those. And those are live in a couple of cities as well. So I think it remains to be seen which form factor is going to be dominant, but Autolane's purpose here is to orchestrate autonomous commerce.

37:08Ben Seidl:So we aren't necessarily making, we aren't making a bet on one form factor or another. We are simply stating that all of these form factors and others that we can't yet imagine on this call today will come to fruition and will create an ecosystem of delivery options that all function in a very similar way, meaning they don't have drivers. None of those that I just mentioned, they're all autonomous. They're all driving with nobody inside of them. You can't really take them over easily. And so these are autonomous delivery mechanisms that if, let's just say, imagine a world in three years where all of those form factors I mentioned show up to a Walmart.

37:50Ben Seidl:And I didn't even mention the other one, which is autonomous trucks. That's also taking off.

37:54Nathan Parker:Right.

37:55Ben Seidl:So you've got all this happening.

37:57Nathan Parker:Why is it called auto lane then? Why isn't it called multimodal lane? So I feel like it's some pretty false advertising because I, you know, I've always thought of you most as a place where self-driven cars can arrive to pick up people, drop off things, essentially, you know, creating the, I guess orchestration is the word of the year, the orchestration for that. But it sounds much more like you're thinking about pretty much an all the above strategy for what gets delivered.

38:22Ben Seidl:I certainly think that autonomous vehicles, cars are the form factor that's going to win amongst all of these. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that there isn't a use case for every single one of the form factors that I mentioned previously. I think it's more of an ecosystem of solutions. And depending on the need for the delivery, you're going to get one of these options. But absolutely, you kind of need to work backwards from the actual retailer itself and say, put yourself in the shoes of Walmart and then say, I've got three drone companies coming in. I've got two autonomous trucks coming in.

38:58Ben Seidl:I've got two autonomous passenger cars, Tesla and Waymo. then I've got maybe humanoids and robot dogs and all the sidewalk bots all coming to get different Walmart orders. That is either going to equate to 12 different distinct deep integrations with 12 different companies, or it's going to result in some type of universal orchestration layer. And that's what AutoLane is. And so when I think of the word AutoLane, I actually think of auto representing autonomous.

39:31Nathan Parker:Oh, that, okay.

39:33Ben Seidl:That's very reasonable. But yeah, I think for sure the focus that we have is absolutely on autonomous passenger cars, Tesla's namely, because if you look at all of those, I'll just kind of finish my thoughts here on these form factors. but each one of those has significant drawbacks, either regulatory-wise in the case of drones, operational-wise in the case of sidewalk plots, in my opinion. So you've got significant drawbacks that equate to none of those options serving everybody. What is the form factor that hypothetically could serve everybody? It's a passenger car. Why? That already happens today.

40:20Ben Seidl:That's how we serve everybody on DoorDash and OverEats and Amazon is with passenger cars and trucks. So my take on it is that is the form factor that's going to take the lion's share of autonomous commerce deliveries. And that's what we're absolutely focused on. But understanding that, you know, it's not a binary industry. Yeah.

40:43Nathan Parker:Nathan, we talked about your company and helping people de-risk the AV world. Do you guys also work with smaller self-driven vehicles like we're discussing here, or is it only on the robo taxi-ish side of things?

40:58Ming Maa:Yeah, historically and currently, we typically work with passenger vehicle companies, autonomous trucking companies, and then we have a very large defense business. So we spend a lot of time on the defense side working with how they're thinking about deploying autonomous systems at scale.

41:18Nathan Parker:Which is, I'm sure, a pretty big topic, just given the expansion of autonomous warfare in both Europe and the Middle East. Probably not a topic for today, but I take it EdgeCase is a little bit busy on that front.

41:30Ming Maa:Yeah, we have a lot of pressing needs by our customers, and we're happy to support them.

41:38Nathan Parker:I'm just I'm curious about how we're going to have all these different autonomous systems integrate because we're talking about the number of different providers on the robo taxi side, you know, everywhere from people in China to Europe, the United States, lots of companies, lots of ideas, lots of different foreign factors. Ben just told us about the different smaller devices that are also gonna be kind of at play here. Do we have like the right standards built, like, I don't know, car to car Bluetooth or whatever it's supposed to be, to ensure that these technologies can interact with one another and therefore not have a large AV truck stomp my DoorDash dot robot that has my lunch in it?

42:15Nathan Parker:Because to me, like, I feel like people are building individual things, but maybe not mesh them together, Nathan, as much as they should be.

42:22Ming Maa:Yeah, you said two things that are really interesting. One was the standards comment, and then the other was how the autonomous systems will interact with one another. On the standards, we actually worked with one of our passenger vehicle partners doing a standards assessment, thinking through like, what are all of the standards out there that they need to make sure they're in compliance to? And there's like over 200. and so then the question is okay how many of those need to inform their design and then eventually in operations and so um that is um that is all part of the work that we do with our partners to think through like how how should you be thinking about standards so historic i won't i won't bore you to death with a bunch of standards but like iso you can't bore me i love this okay so iso 21448 it's safety of the intended function that's a pretty common one you have ul 4600 and 26262.

43:16Those are kind of the exemplars, the primary standards that a lot of autonomous

43:22Ming Maa:vehicle companies use and talk through. As far as how the autonomous systems will interact with one another, it's an interesting problem. Candidly, I haven't thought a ton about it. My expectation would be is that the perception system will see that as an object and it will detect the object and it will perform based on how the perception system trains the system perform for a small dot robot that's either in the middle of a road in a crosswalk or on the side of a street.

43:55Jason Calacanis:I think there is a very good argument that you do not want AVs to directly talk to other AVs on the road because when they start talking to each other, that creates a dependency. and the more dependencies there are, the less reliable the overall system could become.

44:15Nathan Parker:Can I interrogate that? Because that to me sounds like saying having a backup parachute is a bad idea because it builds dependencies. Like, I mean, what's wrong with having a back channel as a last ditch, say?

44:29Jason Calacanis:Ideally, you want every vehicle to be completely self-sufficient and able to sense and understand the world around itself in as complete a manner. I think over time, there may be, you know, AV to AV communications, but that shouldn't be a reliant or a condition, if you will, when you think about safety.

44:48Nathan Parker:Ben, just one more question for you on the autonomous commerce side of things. I can track how quickly Waymo is growing because they release numbers, paid trips per week, and they're shooting for a million this year by the end of the year. I have a much smaller aperture or visibility into what's going on with autonomous commerce. Can you describe the state of the market for us? Demand, number of companies involved, consumer attraction, just kind of define that for us and let us know how quickly it's growing. I'm very curious.

45:18Ben Seidl:That's a good question. I've actually admittedly not looked into kind of the aggregate because each one of these industries has a couple of startups, namely in the drone space, you've got Wing and Zipline and you'd have to cobble together each one of their private reporting information, which is all at different timelines. So almost all these companies in autonomous commerce are private. I think besides Serve Robotics is probably the only publicly traded one. And so I think it's really early days for that reason. It's not something that you can just, you know, together public information from, you know, annual reports or 10 Ks and figure out what's going on.

46:04Ben Seidl:You have to have kind of deep in industry insider connections to kind of just get a grasp on who's doing what, you know, and so any information I have on that is not something I would want to share in public, but, you know, but I think you can, you can get a good sense of what's happening by looking at those individual companies. You know, Coco and the sidewalk book world and serve. And, you know, if you follow each one of them, you get a taste of what they're up to. And I would say the overall summary for the industry would be all of them are growing, all of them are expanding, all of them are increasing their ambitions.

46:49Ben Seidl:And so there's progress being made in each one of these small privately held companies, uh, startups. But, but I think in aggregate, it's still a very, very small industry, arguably, uh, you know, almost doesn't exist. It's not, it's not taking, uh, any kind of notable market share from Uber eats or DoorDash, I believe.

47:11Nathan Parker:So yeah, I read serve robotics earnings every quarter because they're public and it's always like, we're going from 50 to a hundred. And I'm like, you get them. And then I look at their market cabinets like$48, but I love that they're public. I get to see what's going on. Not everyone needs to be, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're fantastic operators,

47:29Ben Seidl:but, but I do think, uh, I do think we're incredibly early days on the commerce side. The ride hailing side is of course quite mature. I mean, you can get those numbers. As you said, there's also something called robotaxitracker.com, which is run by a really sharp kid out of UT, Austin, and his name is Ethan McKenna. And he's actually got a nice RoboTaxi internship that he announced on X the other day. So he'll be joining Tesla. But we work with him and he's kind of producing the, I would say, industry tracker for all of what's going on. So you can see how many Tesla robotaxis are out there amongst Austin and SF Bay area.

48:16Ben Seidl:You can see Waymo growth. You can see the ODDs, as we talked about earlier, the geofenced service areas. Everything you want to know about the industry on autonomous ride hailing is pretty much on that website.

48:29Nathan Parker:Or if you want, you can go look and see what everyone's betting on. Yeah, I'm tracking this because I would like to see the Waymo Tesla competition be as hardcore as possible because that'll lead to lower prices, faster rollout and so forth. But people are really bummed out about the chances of Tesla actually expanding into Cali the first half of this year. And I don't know. I was surprised by this level of pessimism. I thought they were going to be able to go faster. And that's a relatively small market over a polling market. But I just thought they would be already kind of trying to take away the Waymo crown in San Francisco, Ben.

49:04Ben Seidl:And yet. Yeah, so did I, actually.

49:11Ben Seidl:But when I put myself in the shoes of the executive team there, especially the team working on Robotaxi, you're talking about the introduction of a technology that's going to completely transform the world, the economy and society. So if you hold such a powerful technology in your pocket that you're internally testing, and in some cases, limited publicly testing in Austin, it makes total sense to me why the rollout is slower than anticipated. I do think they should be matching their comms to those internal desires because clearly they don't actually intend to, or they're hitting some type of roadblock.

49:56Ben Seidl:They don't intend to go as fast as what their public statements have laid out. But if you were to nitpick that and say, well, this is disappointing, and I feel it's a little bit disappointing as well. But if you put yourself in their shoes, I mean, this is not something to take lightly. And if you look back on the cruise thing, all of us on this call on the operator side would be dramatically set back if Tesla were to have any significant issue when it comes to autonomy in particular. Waymo is well. Except for Nathan.

50:35Nathan Parker:Wouldn't Nathan then get like 10 times as much business?

50:37Ben Seidl:No. No. The industry would be paused for a very significant time and it would be a winter for this industry. So when I look at it -

50:48Nathan Parker:One cruise level crisis could do that still today, even with all the momentum. I thought things were much less fragile than they were back then, just because -

50:55Ben Seidl:I'll let Ming answer that. But I would say if Tesla had one cruise level incident, it would be a winter for 12 to 18 months.

51:05Nathan Parker:Ming, what's your take on that estimate?

51:08Jason Calacanis:Let's hope that never happens. I think the good thing in this industry is we have players that are very conservative about how they approach the regulators and how they approach the public. And so I think we are in that public trust building phase of the industry.

51:27Nathan Parker:That blows my mind. Have you ever driven on a road with other people like humans? Have you seen what they do? i just don't understand why we hold robo taxis to the standard of they have to be literally jesus christ behind the wheel it's that or it's your 15 year old cousin with a permit like i mean i

51:44Ben Seidl:completely agree but but but you gotta i mean you once you start looking at this from a societal level which is what has to be done in this industry now because we're not talking about does this technology work or do people want to use it both of those answers are yes very loudly yes then the the the next question to answer is well how is society going to adopt this adapt to this uh those are really complicated questions that even us on this call are not able to kind of parse because every city if you've been tracking kind of the response of a place like boston or a place like new york or a place like seattle portland oregon very anti yeah automation anti-ai anti-autonomous vehicles, anti-big tech.

52:32Ben Seidl:So we're about to enter into this kind of societal phase, I would call it, where it's less about, does this technology work? Is it safe? Do people want to use it? Is it cheaper? Is it a good technology? Of course, those things are all yes, but whether or not people, humans, want this at scale at this moment in time is a huge question mark. And it's not a resounding yes across the country. And it's not a resounding yes, even across major metropolitan areas in the United States. So that part of it to me is like the crux of how fast this industry is going to move or not is public acceptance and public perception.

53:15Ben Seidl:And so if you look at what's going on, if you look at the congressional testimony that the Waymo safety lead had to give and talked about the remote operators and all the flack that they caught for that. And politicians who are against this and citizens who are against this are looking for any small slip-up that they can point to to can this. And I don't know if you ever, you saw the, I'm forgetting the name of this cat, but a cat got hit by Waymo.

53:49Nathan Parker:Oh yeah, we covered that on the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

53:51Ben Seidl:I mean, like San Francisco tried to ban Waymo's over that. There was like an entire army of people. There was an army of people. In one part of the mission. But those people banded together and did a whole PR campaign, political campaign to try to get this. And it got enough news that like that's just a cat. Like RIP to the cat.

54:09Nathan Parker:It was called Kit Kat.

54:10Ben Seidl:Kit Kat. But if you take that as a flashpoint and as an example of how hot button this topic is, one cat can change the entire perception of this technology, which is wild to me.

54:28Nathan Parker:Here's the local coverage from Mission Local. I used to drink right around that area, so I'm pretty familiar with it. RIP KitKat. And if anyone has a pet, they know how much this matters. I don't mean to make a light of it. either do i but i just rank i just rank cats below humans and so when we're talking about overall safety that's where my my focus is ming you were at grab um during what what we might call like the late uh ride hailing boom years if that makes sense you were there from like 16 through 20 2023 i think yeah that's about right it certainly did not feel like the tail but uh certainly it was well on its way yeah well because i i i covered uber um i i'm not trying to say that i'm cool but i got to go to like the uber launch party in chicago in like 2009 or something so i was early to seeing this happen thank you um it was fun to be young let me say uh but it seemed that the the level of pushback to ride hailing here in the states at least, was much more vocal and virulent than what we're seeing with autonomous vehicles and self-driving.

55:36Nathan Parker:I'm just curious if you could give kind of your more global perspective, given that Grab is based in Asia, about how the autonomous vehicle pushback from people compares to what we saw with ride hailing in the preceding kind of generation of this area of technology.

55:55Jason Calacanis:So it is a very interesting question. And I think I might step back before we even talk about pushback and autonomy. I think one of the conundrums that we all faced with ride sharing is that, you know, on the one hand, it's absolutely created a tremendous amount of value, a tremendous amount of good around the world, no question about it. better accessibility, affordability, mobility. On the other hand, though, the fundamental CVP for ride sharing hasn't evolved. The customer value proposition hasn't changed. I would argue the experience of opening up an app, ordering a car, is largely exactly the same as it was five years ago.

56:40Jason Calacanis:There's more categories of cars, but by and large, it's the exact same experience. The only thing that has changed is pricing. arguably it's one of the few sectors in technology that's been priced inflationary because of rising labor costs. And you compare that, of course, with most sectors of technology, which becomes lower costs, more efficient over time. So at Grab, we looked at autonomy as a way to fundamentally change that CVP. And of course, Singapore, as you mentioned, is a great market for autonomy. Everyone follows the rules. Trip pricing is sufficiently robust. to cover the cost of the vehicles.

57:23Jason Calacanis:And so everything does make a lot of sense. Where we, and back to the safety point, prior to Waymos, I would drive my kids to afterschool activities probably four or five times a week. Now I send my kids to the high school in the Waymo. You live in the Bay Area for context. Yes, in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto. and so now my kids are a little bit uh find a little bit cringe you know coming up to school in a waymo but i feel fundamentally safer having my kids in a waymo whoa whoa you can't drop

58:00Nathan Parker:cultural pop culture knowledge like that and not tell us about that did you just say that

58:04Jason Calacanis:waymos are cringe no my kids feel a little bit cringe i know but kids kids are the future this

58:12Nathan Parker:The four of us are the past tense. Why is it? I would have thought arriving at school without your parents would be fundamentally cooler. Because I remember my mom dropping me off and wanting to die. So what am I missing here, Ming?

58:26Jason Calacanis:The first time they took a ride in Waymo, I think they were a little bit self-conscious and a little bit just self-conscious about the experience. Now, though, they're more than happy. They take Waymos to and from school all the time. So I think the adoption and the acceptance is very, very high. And for me, it saved at least four or five trips during the weekdays. So I do think autonomy is fundamentally changing the value proposition that consumers are experiencing, whether it's better safety, whether it's better privacy. And that will have an impact on how the regulators think about the adoption for AVs versus for ride sharing.

59:08Nathan Parker:All right. Before we let you find gentlemen go, we've been really talking about mostly the United States here from a safety perspective, from a company perspective, from a self-favorite provider perspective. Nathan, what can you tell us about safety testing for AVs around the world? Ben has scared me with this idea that we are one crisis away from losing a whole year's progress in the industry. Is that something that would happen globally or are the safety standards that you're helping to get people to here in the United States as stringent in markets like MENA, Europe, all across Asia? Because self-driving is popping up pretty much everywhere there's developed economy.

59:43Ming Maa:Yeah, what we see is a lot of the standards in Europe are certainly pretty well defined and continuing to evolve. we from our vantage point a lot of the development a lot of the progress is happening in the United States and some of the other markets are watching what's going on I we don't spend a ton of time in the Asian market so my bias is probably somewhat of where we're playing so

1:00:17Ming Maa:we'll have to see I don't necessarily have a strong opinion on the standards and how how companies in Asia are testing their platforms today.

1:00:26Nathan Parker:Leave me with a little nugget about other places looking at the US. How far ahead of other markets are we? And is there something that we're doing particularly well that other markets are struggling to replicate or best?

1:00:39Ming Maa:So we talked a little bit about the regulatory environment and how it's a bit of a patchwork across the States. I would say in some other markets, they don't even have that. So even though a lot of the ecosystem, I think, would prefer to have a federal kind of guidance on how these systems should be defined safe and what's acceptable, the fact that there is state laws that define that, I think, is a plus. So I think it's like over 40 states currently allow operation and testing on public roads, which allows these companies that we've all been talking about to really put their platforms in play.

1:01:21Ming Maa:So it's not just, you know, you're at a test range spending countless hours. They're actually operating in a meaningful way in the markets they're trying to pursue. So there's, I think that in and of itself provides a real advantage for the companies that are operating in the U.S.

1:01:38Nathan Parker:Speaking about Congress, there's been some movement towards doing something similar to AI legislation by saying at the federal level, we'll set a standard and then states cannot supersede or get in the way of the federal national standard. Do you think that's the right way to approach autonomous vehicle regulation? Or are you content with states and the federal government each getting to play a role?

1:02:04Ming Maa:I think it's interesting on how it impacts the different verticals. So if you think about robo taxis, they could probably get away state by state in some capacity. If you think about over-the-road trucking, that's going to be problematic because the trucks are going to go state to state. Interstate commerce. Exactly. You pull interstate commerce into play. So at the federal level, it's not just a nice to have. It's actually something that's going to be required. Now, where a lot of the autonomous trucking companies are operating, it's in the Sun Belt. A lot of those states have kind of put consistent regulations in place.

1:02:35Ming Maa:But I mean, I think it makes sense to have some type of federal guidance that's consistent for something as impactful as the technology we're talking about.

1:02:45Nathan Parker:All right, Ben, really quickly, same question to you. State level AV regs or federal standard? And then also, are the U.S. regulations holding back startups like Autolane from expanding?

1:02:58Ben Seidl:I mean, federal regulation is absolutely necessary. There's no way this industry can move forward in the way that it currently is situated. So with the NHTSA meetings earlier this week, I think that was a really good demonstration of sincerity from the federal government to do something on this front. So we're really hoping for some type of federal preemption or some type of federal regulation that we can build against. And I think every other AV company is also hoping for that. So I actually think, strangely enough, that even though it's patchwork and even though it's a little bit herky-jerky for the industry today and has been for the last couple of years, it's still a better regulatory environment and a more open and innovative regulatory environment than most other countries.

1:03:53Ben Seidl:So more work to do, but we're not super far behind other markets. If you look at Europe and even if you look at China, the way that they do their licensing and data collection of autonomous vehicles, and then you look at what Europe's done, which is essentially very little outside of the UK just this year, has started to kind of make some progress on that. The U.S. is obviously the kind of leader here in pushing regulation to allow this type of innovation to occur. And I think this week's NHTSA event really shines light on that effort. So I'm proud of the work that we've done as a country on this front and hope it continues because that's what allows this technology to blossom.

1:04:41Ben Seidl:We have to have more acceptance of it being okay to do and then comparing that to standards that are set and that everyone has the same rules and we can move faster.

1:04:50Nathan Parker:So yeah, maybe if we had the federal standards, then we wouldn't be risking a 12 to 18 month winter in self-driving if there is a crisis because we would have already put in place the rules for it. All right, Ming, last question of the day goes to you. I'm very curious about the expansion rate of fleets. I was a little surprised to learn how few cars are part of these autonomous fleets in different cities. So two questions. One, after an operator opens up in a city, say Austin, how quickly does their fleet grow? And by the end of this year, how many self-driving cars are operating in the United States?

1:05:20Jason Calacanis:I wish I had a crystal ball. I think rather than talking about the growth, I would talk about the rate limiters to growth. And I think the largest rate limiter today is the number of vehicles that are available for autonomy. And so we're seeing the supply chains become much more mature, both for EV batteries as well as other components that are quite critical. The maturity of that supply chain will only get better as volumes continue to increase. And as scale manufacturing gets larger and larger, you'll see the economics become much better over time. So ultimately, we're waiting for the vehicles to get into market.

1:06:04Jason Calacanis:And then the second rate limiter is around the infrastructure and being able to work with the regulators, with the utilities in order to provision the amount of power to light up every city that we operate in.

1:06:16Nathan Parker:Who makes more money in a fully developed and mature self-driving market, the fleet operator or the company that designed the software that powers the self-driving?

1:06:26Jason Calacanis:Another great question. What I would do is I might step back a little bit. So when you think about the unit economics for ride sharing, typically that's very focused on a per ride. per ride, how much do you make and how much do you spend on incentives versus the right value. For autonomy, we think about it very differently. We think about a five-year total cost to serve. So assuming that Navy can provide services for five years, what is the total cost of owning, operating, and providing services to the public? And that's very unique if you think about it from how traditional ride sharing is analyzed.

1:07:09Jason Calacanis:So with autonomy, the key to understand is that when you look over the total five years, the cost of the vehicle is roughly somewhere between 30 to 40 % of that total pie. The remaining 60 to 70 % is everything that's required to get the vehicle onto the road. So think about all of the infrastructure costs, the insurance costs, maintenance, charging, cleaning. Now, the cost for the vehicles, of course, will decline over time as we get scale economies. But what the industry really needs to focus on is really laser honing on that 60 to 70 percent of the total TCS in order to make AVs commercially successful.

1:07:56Jason Calacanis:TCS is total cost of service? Total cost is served. That's right.

1:08:01Nathan Parker:All right. Well, that's a really polite way of saying you're not going to answer the question. I'm going to go ahead and say that you're going to make as much money as Waymo because I bet you there's a lot of work that you're going to do that has nice margins attached to it. Anyways, my friends, this has been so much fun. I have to let you go. I could pest you with questions all day long, but Ben from Auto Lane, thank you. Ming from Move, Nathan from Edgecase. You guys have been real sports. I appreciate it. Just quickly, where can people find your companies online? And is there a job you're looking to hire for that you want to shout out into the audience here.

1:08:28Nathan Parker:And we'll go around here. So Nathan, you're first.

1:08:31Ming Maa:Yeah, edgecase.ai. We're building out our platform and looking for four deployed engineers. So anyone that wants to get close to customers and build out the platform to help solve their problems, reach out.

1:08:45Ben Seidl:Awesome, thank you. Ben, you're next. Yeah, our website is goautolane.com and we're hiring for all roles at this point. So if you're talented and want to be a part of building autonomous commerce, hit me up either on LinkedIn or ben at goautilane.com. Thank you.

1:08:59Nathan Parker:And Ming, last plug goes to you, my friend.

1:09:02Jason Calacanis:Thank you. Move.io, two O's. We're hiring across the board in almost every single function. So if you love operations and scaling autonomy, then please hit us up.

1:09:14Nathan Parker:All right, everybody. This has been Twist. We're back on Friday. We'll see you then. Bye.