Smarter Cars

Today we're talking with Ghassan Haddad, Lime's Head of Public Policy and Communications for Europe, Middle East and Africa. We discuss Lime's operations in European cities, policy differences between European and US cities, Lime's expansion into new form factors including the addition of Jump bikes and now e-mopeds, safety and durability improvements in kick scooters and what the next year or so may look like for scooters in Europe. 

Today we're talking with Alex Nesic, co-founder and Chief Business Officer at Drover. Drover provides an advanced IoT module for micromobility vehicles that is capable of granular infrastructure distinction in real time without the need for ground truth information or precise GPS. Drover helps shared fleet providers improve operational efficiency, regulatory compliance and safety. Drover's product can identify sidewalks, streets, and bike lanes and provide geofencing even in GPS-challenged areas along with an array of vehicle control or user notification capabilities. You can find more about Drover here: https://www.drover.ai

We interview Carl Vernersson, Chief Commercial Officer of Voi, a micromobility company based in Sweden. We discuss Voi's latest scooter and technology, including turn signals, sidewalk detection, and swappable batteries. We also discuss the operational and regulatory challenges in European markets, safety considerations for scooters and Voi's expansion into new cities.

In this episode, we talk with Felix Petersen, Head of Europe for Spin, about Spin's expansion into Europe, the approach to regulation in different European countries, the operational and infrastructure challenges and opportunities in Europe, and the future of various form factors for micromobility. 

In this Season 5 finale, we're talking with Sam Kansara, a senior product manager at Waymo who is scaling the Waymo One driverless ride service and Waymo Via for trucking and local delivery. Waymo has been the leader in developing autonomous driving technology and the first ride service to remove the safety driver for a portion of the rides it offers in the Phoenix area. We discuss Waymo’s ride service, how Waymo thinks about safety and deployment, Waymo’s Via delivery service and the user experience and expectations around offering fully driverless rides.

Today we're talking with Jewel Li, the COO of AutoX, a company making an autonomous driving system for cars, delivery vehicles and long haul trucks. AutoX recently was the third company to receive a permit to test autonomous vehicles in California without a driver in the car.  We discuss AutoX's technology and business model, the driverless permit process in California, the testing that AutoX is doing in China, the differences in testing, regulation and infrastructure between China and the US, and AutoX's partnerships and ride service pilots. 

In this episode, we talk with Graham Gullans, VP of Business and Corporate Development at Superpedestrian, a company that makes intelligent electric scooters and bikes and now operates a shared micromobility service called Link. We discuss the use of vehicle intelligence to improve safety, reliability and compliance for shared scooters and how Superpedestrian is taking on some of the biggest challenges that shared micromobility operators face.

In this episode, we talk with Dmitry Shevelenko, CEO and founder of Tortoise, a company providing remote repositioning services for lightweight electric vehicles such as scooters and delivery robots. We discuss the challenges facing the shared scooter industry, and how Tortoise can help solve operational cost and revenue issues by using tele-operation to remotely reposition scooters to prevent clutter, make scooters more available to find and rent, recharge scooters and provide on-demand rental capability. We discuss Tortoise’s current operations in Peachtree Georgia, and its future plans for deployment in both the scooter and delivery markets.

In this episode, we talk with Matthew Johnson-Roberson, the CEO and co-founder of RefractionAI, a company that builds and deploys robotic platforms to provide safe and scalable last mile goods delivery in urban areas. We discuss Refraction’s current business model, providing delivery services to restaurants and grocery stores in Ann Arbor, Michigan, its custom delivery pod that drives autonomously in the bike lane with tele-operation back up, and its future plans for expanding into other sectors and geographies to become the Stripe/Square of last mile logistics and delivery.

In this episode, we talk with Warren Logan, the Policy Director of Mobility and Interagency Relations for the Mayor’s Office of Oakland, California. Warren works closely with the City’s Department of Transportation, Public Works Department and other Bay Area public agencies to develop strategies that advance the city’s vision for safe and sustainable transportation for everyone. Warren joins us to discuss racism in transportation, including how it affects freedom of movement for black people, the impact of policing and enforcement in public spaces, the reaction in black communities to quick build projects, bike lanes and slow streets, how community engagement and building diverse teams can help serve communities historically left out of urban planning, and how cities and companies need to get out of their silos to address the intersectional issues of transportation, housing, jobs, policing and criminal justice.

In this episode, we talk with Jason Stinson, CTO and co-founder of Renovo. We discuss Renovo’s origin story going back to 2010 - from its original electric supercar The Coupe, to working with Stanford on Marty, to developing an automotive software platform to help companies manage data from autonomous driving and assisted driving systems. Jason’s a car guy and a tech guy so we also discuss his thoughts on the future of autonomy, whether there will ever be a Level 3 car, and what it will take to get autonomous vehicles deployed at scale.

Welcome to Season 5 of the Smarter Cars podcast. In this episode, we talk with Jody Kelman, Director of Product Management, Lyft’s Self-Driving Platform. We discuss Lyft’s two-pronged approach to autonomous vehicles, including its partnerships with Aptiv in Las Vegas and Waymo in Arizona, as well as its own development of an autonomous driving system through its Level 5 division. We also cover the challenges of operating self-driving fleets on a ride hail platform, and policies to promote multi-modal trips and better traffic flow in cities.

In the final episode of Season 4, we interview Sam Baker, co-founder and COO of Wunder Mobility, a company which provides technology to build and scale shared mobility services worldwide. We discuss Wunder Mobility’s business in Europe, its expansion to the US, the role of cities in encouraging multi-modal transport and how Wunder is like the AWS of mobility, providing solutions out of the box for companies looking to digitize assets and provide shared mobility services from car sharing to ride sharing to micromobility. 

Today we talk with Jeffrey Tumlin, the new head of San Francisco's transportation agency, the SFMTA, about the challenges of managing city transportation needs as the city grows and the streets don't get any bigger. We discuss managing the streets for the public good, reducing traffic with better road geometry, how to improve public transit for riders, ways to increase safety with better infrastructure for micromobility and active modes, uses of the curb and the declining role of street parking, and how to use policy levers to promote equity. 

In this episode, we talk with Michael Granoff, Managing Partner at Maniv Mobility, for a year-end wrap on the transportation landscape from a venture capital perspective. We discuss his firm’s investments and focus, the future of transportation in cities, the iteration of micromobility form factors and the need for cities to include all modes in their planning, from public transit to ride hail to micromobility solutions.

Today we're talking with Drew Gray, CTO at Voyage, to do a deep dive on the state of deep learning in autonomous vehicle development and to discuss Deepdrive, a new Voyage project to advance research into the use of reinforcement and end to end learning for AVs.

In this episode, we interview Jordan Coleman, General Counsel of Kodiak Robotics, about Kodiak’s autonomous trucking business, the key issues around safety and autonomy, and policy/regulatory challenges the industry faces. Kodiak believes long-haul trucking is primed for autonomous technology. Highway driving is more structured and predictable than urban driving. This means there are fewer decisions for drivers to make and a better fit for autonomous vehicles. Kodiak is building an autonomous trucking business and began road testing and making commercial deliveries in Texas in 2019.

Today we interview SF Supervisor Matt Haney. He is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, representing District 6 (Tenderloin, Civic Center, Mid-Market, SOMA, Yerba Buena, Rincon Hill, South Beach, Mission Bay, Treasure Island). Supervisor Haney is a past Commissioner and past President and Vice President of the San Francisco Board of Education. 

We have a wide-ranging discussion about transportation issues facing cities, including the challenges of incorporating new mobility services and making room on our streets for multi-modal transportation. We talk about allocation of space for street parking versus other curb uses such as drop off and pick up zones, the creation of new protected lanes for micromobility, the scooter permit program and the need for greater numbers of bikes and scooters in the city, and San Francisco’s transit system. Supervisor Haney is a thought leader in the transportation space and his district is ground zero for managing the challenges and benefits of new mobility services in cities.

Today we’re talking about how to manage the curb and parking in this age of ridehailing services, micromobility, Amazon and food deliveries, and autonomous vehicles. Our guest is Hank Willson, Policy Manager, in Parking and Curb Management for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. We discuss all the ways that cities can manage available space in the right of way, how to measure curb productivity and make space for new modes of travel including TNC pick ups/drop offs, local food delivery services, freight delivery, and electric bikes and scooters. The SFMTA has faced these issues earlier than many cities as SF is ground zero for innovation in new transportation modes. 

In this episode, we talk with Chris Blumenberg, co-founder and CTO of rideOS. We discuss the rideOS platform which provides a broad set of products and services that can be used as building blocks for developing on-demand services, including both autonomous and human driven vehicles. The rideOS products operate in real-time through the cloud and include autonomous vehicle routing, estimated time of arrival calculations, dispatch, supply positioning, multi-rider trip planning and dashboards. We discuss the complex computer science problems involved in ride routing algorithms, the policy issues around minimizing traffic for TNC trips in cities, and how the issues might differ for autonomous vehicles and for pooled trips.

The curb is in high demand with TNCs picking up and dropping off passengers, delivery companies pulling over to deliver food, groceries and e-commerce items, and micromobility companies looking to park scooters and bikes. In this episode, we talk with Coord cofounder and CTO Jacob Baskin about how the company is mapping all of the curbs in cities to provide a digital database and API to help cities and companies better utilize curb space. Coord collects data about each section of curb and the regulations and use restrictions that define each curb so cities can create and enforce rules and companies can better understand where and how they can use the curb.

In this episode, we talk with Sam Anthony, the CTO and co-founder of Perceptive Automata, a company that makes software to help autonomous vehicles understand human behavior. We discuss why it is such a hard problem for autonomous vehicles to understand human intention and behavior, safety standards and testing for autonomous vehicles, Perceptive Automata’s business, how Perceptive Automata’s software works in ADAS and AV systems, how the algorithms are trained, and the state of autonomous vehicle development. 

Today we’re discussing Lidar and perception systems with Blair LaCorte, President of Aeye. We discuss Aeye’s technology and business, how Aeye created its products to mimic human perception, and how its products fuse 2D cameras with 3D Lidar to create a different approach to perception sensors for autonomous vehicles. 

In this episode, we interview Forrest Iandola, the CEO of DeepScale, about vision and perception software using deep neural nets. We discuss DeepScale’s business, how it works with the rest of the autonomous vehicle technology stack, the state of autonomous vehicle software today and the challenges ahead. 

Today we're talking about micromobility with local startup founder Hong Quan of Karmic Bikes. We discuss electric bikes, scooters and other form factors, the definition of micromobility, use cases and business models and city infrastructure.

We discuss autonomous trucking with Robert Brown, Director of Public Affairs at TuSimple. We cover the technology used by TuSimple in its autonomous trucks, its current operations which include hauling loads for paying customers in Arizona, and some of the policy issues facing the autonomous trucking industry. 

Today on the podcast we have Reilly Brennan, a founding general partner of Trucks VC, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on transportation. He also holds a teaching appointment at Stanford University and is the author of the Future of Transportation newsletter.

Our guest is Nico Larco from the University of Oregon, and we discuss the secondary impacts of autonomous vehicles on cities, including potential effects on parking, transit, street design, land use, urban planning, sprawl and real estate valuation.

In this episode, we talk with Regina Clewlow, a leading transportation researcher on shared mobility and autonomous vehicles. She recently published a UC Davis study regarding the adoption and impact of shared mobility services on cities.  We discuss the findings of her study and possible implications for autonomous vehicles, public transit and city policies.

In this episode, we interview Quin Garcia, a Managing Director at Autotech Ventures. Autotech Ventures is a venture firm in Silicon Valley focused exclusively on funding ground transport companies, including companies involved in connected, shared and automated vehicles and the ecosystems/supply chains around them. We discuss with Quin his views on successful business models for autonomous vehicles and likely market outcomes and consolidation in the space. 

In this episode, we interview Lucy Yu, who is Head of Innovation and New Mobility Services at the U.K.'s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.  We discuss the UK's approach to promoting research and development of autonomous vehicles and to regulating testing and deployment.  

In this episode, we talk with Tarin Ziyaee, Director of AI and co-founder at Voyage, which is working to make autonomous taxis.  We discuss the engineering challenges still facing autonomous vehicles, in both hardware and software.

In this episode, we talk with Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners about autonomous vehicle business models, the impact of AVs on consumers, the auto industry and rideshare companies, and the value proposition in big data.

In this episode, we talk with Darton Ito of SFMTA about the role of cities in determining how autonomous vehicles will be tested and deployed. We discuss safety, testing, pricing of access to city streets, disengagement reporting and other aspects of how autonomous vehicles may be regulated in California.

In this episode of Smarter Cars, we talk with Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital. We discuss the potential business models for deployment of autonomous vehicles, Lux Capital’s investment in Zoox and its plans to create a robo-taxi service, his views on the per-vehicle model versus the per-mile service model for autonomous vehicles, how to think about when AVs will be safe enough to deploy, and other thoughts about the state of the industry.

In this episode of Smarter Cars, we discuss with Adam Thierer the role of government in regulating autonomous vehicles. Should regulators allow “permissionless innovation” or enact rules that require government pre-approval before cars can be deployed? What role should NHTSA play when the technology is still developing and it’s not clear what the right rules will be? How might voluntary guidance from NHTSA work in practice? Adam shares his views on how government can protect public safety while also permitting a nascent industry to develop without stifling innovation.

Adam is a Senior Research Fellow with the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. His writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the