MC: I feel low-level anxiety. I usually ride my bike so I give them a very wide parking lot, I don’t exactly trust them yet.
LG: Mm-hmm. Sometimes I see people texting or Snapchatting while they’re driving, and I think, yes, let’s bring autonomous vehicles. But I’m also curious, how long will it take for that to happen.
MC: Oh, a decade at least. People love to drive their cars, it will take some time.
LG: Well, we got a little more insight into this from our guest on today’s podcast.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
LG: Hi everybody. Welcome to Utility Lab. I’m Lauren Goode, I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: And I’m Michael Calore, I’m a senior editor at WIRED.
LG: And today we also have writer Aarian Marshall, staff member of WIRED. Hey, Aarian.
Aarian Marshall: Hi.
LG: It’s been a while, and it’s nice to have you back.
TO BE: Nice to be here.
LG: So today we are talking about self-driving cars or self-driving cars. Now, Aarian, you include all the shipping elements for us here at WIRED. And recently during CES, the big annual consumer electronics festival, you spoke with Jody Kelman, Lyft’s head of autonomous driving, and you also spoke with Aubrey Donnellan, co-founder. and executive director at Bear Flag Robotics. A lot of people have probably heard of Lyft, perhaps not so many Bear Flags, but what you should know about Bear Flag Robotics is that they are now owned by John Deere.
So both of them paint pretty brilliant pictures of how autonomous vehicles could change everything from cities to farming, but actually implementing the technology is complex, like we reported on WIRED. They also talked a little bit about how they initially envisioned certain use cases for their AV technology, and how it ended up being implemented in different ways, which I think is what we’re looking for. We’re struggling more widely in technology. Aarian, before we go into the interview, let us first tell you a little bit about how these two companies are approaching autonomous transportation and the different markets they serve.
TO BE: Yes. So the companies are quite different and serve quite different markets. Lyft is an interesting case because they actually have their own team of engineers in Palo Alto working on self-driving technology, and then last year they sold that part of the business to Toyota. So now all they do about autonomous vehicles is work with other companies that are building the technology, to eventually deploy it in their ride-hailing network. So people like Jody out there are facing product questions about who’s going to use autonomous vehicles? How will they want to use them? Will there be some likes and dislikes? Align marketing questions around AV.
And then the people at Bear Flag Robotics are working with very different people, they deal with farmers, they deal with agricultural workers. And in those kinds of contexts and in a lot of industry, manufacturing, factory-related things, AV is really going out and doing small tasks, revolutionized tasks, not demanding. ask the kind of complex thinking that drives a car. So John Deere, actually at CES unveiled a new tractor that is more self-propelled and it can do a lot of things in fields right now.
