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Buckle up, because we’re diving into the untold stories of the mobility world.
From monitoring the policies influencing how we move to tracking down stolen cars, we’re bringing you inside the busy, high-stakes world of transportation - including everything from autonomous vehicles and micro-mobility to public transportation and air travel.
Brought to you by the American Car Rental Association, each episode tackles the big issues driving the future of mobility: autonomous vehicles, data rights, new business models, and the laws that could flip the industry on its head.
With jaw-dropping stories, bold opinions, and no holds barred, we’re here to challenge the status quo and get you thinking about the future of how we move, whether by car, bike, plane, or train, and why it matters to everyone.
[00:00:00] Ariel Wolf: If we get rid of car crashes and we don’t have to read about the local events where someone’s kid or whatever was killed and that disappears, that alone is good enough. And I think that’s why I think it’s so compelling to move forward with the technology. If it results in other great things, that’s fine too.
[00:00:35] Don Lefeve: Well, welcome everybody. It’s our distinct pleasure to welcome our guest today, Ariel Wolf. Ariel’s a partner at the law firm, Venable, where he leads their mobility and transportation technology team. If you follow the legal and regulatory landscape in our industry, you know Ariel’s name is synonymous with the future of how we move. Before his time in private practice, he served as a senior official in the Department of Transportation and previously worked in the United States Senate. So please help me welcome Ariel Wolf.
[00:01:08] Ariel Wolf: Wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:10] Don Lefeve: Well, thanks, Ariel, for joining us. Really appreciate it. Let me ask you to give the listeners just a little bit of context on where we are with autonomous vehicles, where we kind of come from and where you think we’re going.
[00:01:23] Ariel Wolf: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me on. This is a great opportunity and it’s wonderful to be speaking with you. This subject is of tremendous salience to the public right now. And if you’re in any number of cities, you may have even already taken an autonomous vehicle, an autonomous robo taxi. Hundreds of thousands of trips being paid trips being done per week, and there’s more to come. And it’s not just that, but also in the trucking side. So where are we? This is the kind of thing that started to take off. I remember 14 years ago, 16 years ago, depending on where you count it. And it’s a situation that may be unique, maybe not in technology and regulation in our country where we’re at the point where the technology has matured to a place where you can have these rides, you can have the vehicles on the road, but the regulations and the policy has not caught up.
[00:02:15] Ariel Wolf: We have a problematic federal and state dynamic where there’s lack of clarity. And so you have confusion there. Businesses are looking to scale the autonomous vehicle technology and there’s uncertainty over how to do it. You have global competition. But on the positive side, I’ll just say this, 2026, having been in this space for a long time in both private sector as well as in the government, 2026 is going to be and already has become a key inflection point for the deployment and the commercialization of autonomous vehicles and autonomous trucking. And it’s very exciting in that regard. There’s certainly, as I noted, some potential pitfalls and other kinds of barriers, but as an industry, I know companies, we’re very excited about what we’re seeing ahead.
[00:03:03] Don Lefeve: Ariel, transportation policy comes up for renewal every couple of years. We’re in one of those years right now. So what are the issues, besides what you kind of just mentioned, what are the other issues that are emerging that you’re seeing?
[00:03:20] Ariel Wolf: Yeah. And as I said, Don, it’s usually structured every five years. All of the, they call surface transportation authorities at the federal level are set to expire. And this is a action forcing mechanism to have Congress take another look at updating how it works. It’s formula funding for highways. It’s all of the authorities around the way infrastructure is built and developed and designed. It can include, and it does include other kinds of things related to motor vehicle regulation, transportation, infrastructure.
[00:03:49] Sharky Laguana: Are you this regulation? Is this rules or is this law?
[00:03:53] Ariel Wolf: It’s law. So Congress deliberately sunsets the surface transportation package that controls all of the agencies that do all the work and push out the money. They sunset that every five years to force themselves to then update the laws. And you see this in a couple of areas. The other big one that people might know about is in defense. You see how the National Defense Authorization Act, they do that every year. So every year, because it’s so important to keep looking at that. Some things you can think about as not needing to do that, but this is the way they approach transportation infrastructure work. And so they usually give it a name or it’s referred to as something you might have heard of the IJA, the DeFazio bill, and then there’s the FAST Act is something that people refer to, the MAP21. They give it these … It’s like anything, sort of bad acronyms.
[00:04:43] Ariel Wolf: But the bottom line is we’re due for that. All of that stuff expires on September 30th of this year. And what that means is that all of this staff in Congress and members have been working for many months to develop a package that they can then enact for the next five years. And directly on point to the question here is, think of where we were five years ago on autonomous vehicles and on policy. In that regard, now we’ve got, it’s a very different picture.
[00:05:12] Sharky Laguana: Huge modernization opportunity.
[00:05:14] Ariel Wolf: Exactly. And so the question is, now what happens? And negotiations are underway and actively we have to see where that leads.
[00:05:24] Sharky Laguana: Is this going to put car rental out of business?
[00:05:26] Ariel Wolf: Oh, I don’t think so at all. I think there’s a tremendous upside and potential for the car rental industry. There’s so much expertise and knowledge and infrastructure that is part of that industry that goes back so many decades. It’s a huge opportunity to not just find a way to coexist or a symbiosis, but actually to inject a lot of that expertise and knowledge and assets and maybe capital expenditure into this autonomous industry that’s looking to scale, that doesn’t have, frankly, doesn’t have that expertise and how do you build depots? How do you maintain vehicles? How do you scale and operate?That stuff, you have to learn from scratch.
[00:06:11] Sharky Laguana: Right. And so you’ve been in this space for a long time. It would shock me if you’ve been thinking about car rental at all, but to the extent that you have, what do you think an opportunity might be for like a smaller operator as they think about the rise of AV cars? We’re still probably a couple years away, but I mean, maybe not. People have Teslas in their fleets as we speak and those have autopilot. But what do you think this looks like over the next few years? And what does that also look like with respect to this authorization act? What should the little guys be thinking about and pushing for?
[00:06:51] Ariel Wolf: Well, I think it’s time to really look at where does someone fit in to the commercialization of this technology. I’ll say this, go back 10, 12 years, even whatever, maybe 10 years. And when the fervor of autonomous vehicles really started to take off, you had all this talk about the disruption that was going to occur across the economy when millions of these vehicles were … We were talking about parking spaces and commercial real estate not being needed and all sorts of changes. Okay. Then you had what is typically in a hype cycle, so this disillusionment period, maybe combined with COVID. But where we are now is, okay, it’s being commercialized. So now it’s time to return back to that question. As this starts to get built out, what does that actually look like? So on the robotaxi side, you have a fleet of vehicles for a company.
[00:07:40] Ariel Wolf: They made the autonomous system that’s the car, but where do these vehicles go at the end of the day? How do they get maintained? How do they get serviced? How do they get deployed again? And how do you manage the real estate? Is there charging infrastructure that needs to be put in? So for any entity in the rental space or adjacent to it, to do an analysis, where does your expertise lay and what’s your location? Are you located in a city, an area where it’s been publicly reported or you have information otherwise there’s going to be a push to deploy these vehicles? And if so, that’s a great combo space to be in. Should be reaching out to the industry saying, “How can I get plugged into this space?” And then the other part of it is the trucking side. There’s a lot of overlap, but it’s not coextensive.
[00:08:29] Ariel Wolf: There’s a ton that happens on the trucking side that if they’re one of the smaller players, again, is in that niche space or has nexus with trucking, get involved because this is starting to scale. And again, in a sense it’s about five, six years ago, every AV company said, “We’re going to do all of our simulation in- house. So we’re going to hire 150 engineers and do it. “ And then pretty quickly they realized there’s probably simulation experts, AI simulation experts that we can run this stuff through as a third party and come back. It’s time for the rental car companies and others in the space to sort of help the industry understand they have something to offer there. That would be my thought.
[00:09:09] Don Lefeve: Talk to me a little bit about and help people understand what the safety case is and how that impacts the deployment.
[00:09:18] Ariel Wolf: The basic notion, and it’s just been proven over and over and over again, sadly for many, many years, decades even, that human error is the predominant cause of car crashes and collisions and fatalities in the driving space. And so it’s not just drunk driving, which is horrible, it’s drugged driving, and then it’s distracted, which is the epidemic that we’ve seen. It’s anecdotal, but it’s also universal. You stop at a red light, look to your right and left, everyone’s on their phone. It’s clearly a problem and the numbers have not gone down by any measurable amount. And people talk about fatalities, by the way, which is a terrible number, 40,000 roughly a year, 38, 39,000 a year, but that’s fatalities. What about the people whose lives are ruined because there are other attendant effects. So life altering injuries and things like that, it’s just abundantly clear that human error is removing that and replacing it with autonomous vehicles that are validated and go through a tremendous process to remove that from the equation.
[00:10:24] Ariel Wolf: They can see 360 degrees, they can make decisions in ways that humans don’t. That’s the overwhelming case for autonomous vehicles. And you’re already starting to see the data bear that out as we get more and more miles from autonomous vehicles. There’s other benefits as well with mobility, people with disabilities, older Americans and others, in addition to supply chain and logistics that really speak for themselves, but that’s really the case. And generationally, you’re starting to see younger folks embrace this technology.
[00:10:54] Sharky Laguana: I’ll tell you, here in San Francisco, I’ve written Waymo’s and a few of the other AV companies many times. It’s funny, the parallels between this and AI, which is, I don’t think there’s any question in my mind at least that AV cars are dramatically safer. I mean, I’ve been terrified in an Uber on more than one occasion, and I have not had that feeling in a Waymo, but it’s super interesting. And the parallel between this and AI is it’ll be brilliant, absolutely more brilliant, a thousand times more reliable than a human. And then it will do the most insanely dumb thing that no human would ever do. The one that happened to me, I had some people visiting on business, and so I thought I would impress them and order a Waymo because they’re from Indiana, they’ve only seen them. And I was like, “No, we’ll take it to the restaurant.
[00:11:52] Sharky Laguana: It’d be great.” We get to the restaurant and it just keeps circling around the block. It just cannot … And on the third loop, I’m like, “Oh my God, are we ever going to get out of here?” And then we did eventually. Then at the end of the meal, it was like, “Okay, well, should we risk it? Should we do it again?” And everybody was like, “Yeah, let’s try it one more time.” Holy shit, we get back to the office and we’re on sort of like a busy industrial street and there’s a driveway you can kind of pull into, but there’s also a gate. And so the gate was closed and it did not want to pull into that driveway. So now we start doing loops around the office. And on the third loop, I had to call emergency service and be like, “You got to help us get out of here.
[00:12:42] Sharky Laguana: It’s not letting us stop.” One thought I have about, and I’m curious what you’re seeing with respect to the authorization bill, certainly it seems to me like there’s some national security implications here, right? What if a foreign state hacked into these systems you may have seen in the news here in San Francisco, there was a massive power outage on the west side of the city, and all of the Waymos came to a stop in intersections. So huge parts of the city were locked in gridlock because there was hundreds of Waymos just all clumped together in the middle of an intersection, just not sure what to do because there was no traffic lights. I don’t know what it was about the lack of electricity that made them stop working, but they stopped working. I don’t know what the actual policy choices that would flow from that.
[00:13:41] Sharky Laguana: Certainly there’s a number of elected officials examining that, but at a national level, certainly one can conceive that there’s some security implications here and there’s also some commerce and strategic implications. What are you hearing? What’s your sense of like, where are we at right now as we’re at the five-year mark? How much of that are we trying to tackle?
[00:14:04] Ariel Wolf: Yeah. Really important point. And it’s timely because of the geopolitics that’s predominant in every conversation we’re having. And in DC, in Congress and in the agencies, it’s ever present, the conversation about the innovation in motor vehicles. I think the place to start, Sharky, is motor vehicles, as you know, have become more software driven or software defined as they say. Computers on wheels is the term is used. There was a demonstration in 2015, I think it was, that a couple of white hat hackers were able to hack into a off the shelf vehicle and do acceleration and deceleration that was not autonomous. So the broader picture is, and then you’re right to bring it up because it does come up in these conversations in the AV space and the San Francisco incident, but we start from a notion that this is applicable to all motor vehicles as you have, as they’re software defined, and pushing updates and things like that.
[00:15:07] Ariel Wolf: So one interesting idea there is that the autonomous vehicle industry is designed really from the ground up. In a way, you could make the argument that it could be more cyber secure than vehicles today, which are patched up sort of over time. Even if it’s sort of even, the reality is it’s a huge issue that everyone’s talking about. There’s a number of regulations and authorities that have been put forward by Congress. The Department of Commerce stood up a new office called ICTS Information and Communication Technology Services. They set it up. If you remember the telecom fight from seven, eight years ago in Huawei and the backend stuff, they’re now working … They issued a connected vehicle rule, which gets at this issue of China and other foreign adversaries embedding their technology into vehicles. And that’s something that very much at the law firm, we’re counseling companies and clients on how to comply with that rule, which once again, timely, it takes effect … One of the key provisions takes effect on March 23rd, just a week.
[00:16:13] Ariel Wolf: And so there’s a lot of frantic behavior. But look, this is supply chain stuff. As you know, you can’t move the motor vehicle industry, automotive industry and say like, “All right, everyone take their China stuff out. “ I mean, it just doesn’t work like that. You got to plan that years ahead. So addressing the risk, but acknowledging the reality of the automotive supply chain has been the top discussion point among the top discussion points in DC and in the policy space for the past few years. There’s no easy answer.
[00:16:41] Don Lefeve: One of the things that I’ve always seen is from the opponents of AVs is kind of what Sharky had talked about, “Oh, well, it didn’t do this perfectly or it didn’t do that perfectly, so we should never have them.” That’s always kind of struck me as being odd because I think if you asked any American today, you got 40,000 people who are dying, not to mention the severe accidents you had mentioned. If you could implement this technology and it reduces it to 20 and reduces the severity of accidents, why aren’t we adopting this faster? Talk to me about your time when you were at the department and I think you handled some of this.
[00:17:21] Ariel Wolf: Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly the way to frame it. It’s inconvenience versus fatality in a sense. And in some respect, I actually don’t think that there’s a lot of examples of inconvenience. Shark, your anecdote is something, it happens. I’ve heard about stuff like that. I’ve had really great experiences, but I’ve heard people get in different kinds of AVs. And again, it’s like, oh no, I was supposed to get out here and took me down there. I’d have to walk in the rain or something. And then you hear about someone who’s high on whatever and hasn’t slept in three days driving a big rig and just smashes into a family of seven in a minivan. And I’ll take the walk in the rain. And of course, everyone would when you present it that way. But I think there’s a human psychological aspect to this or however you want to think about it.
[00:18:10] Ariel Wolf: We’ve all grew up watching Terminator two and we have all the different kind of biases in that regard. And I do think, as I noted a few minutes ago, I think some of it’s generational. And I’ll say this, Don, maybe to your point and bring it up, there was a hearing in the United States Senate just a few weeks ago about autonomous vehicles, the Senate Commerce Committee and Chairman Ted Cruz was there and Maria Cantwell from Washington State was the ranking member and a lot of folks came on the committee to participate. I wouldn’t say this having looked at this space and really been president for the past dozen years or so, for the first time I felt a vibe shift in a positive way for the AV industry. You typically had over the years, some folks were in favor of it and then others would say, “This is unproven technology, et cetera, et cetera.” They really didn’t have anyone who was up there saying, “I don’t think this should happen.” There were important, tough questions about how, but it wasn’t weather.
[00:19:10] Ariel Wolf: And I think some of that is sensing folks are taking these rides across San Francisco, across Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix, and elsewhere, and we have to get it right, but it’s happening. There’s an inevitability to it now that wasn’t present a few years ago. And that I think is going to inform a lot of how we approach it going forward, which is, I think, appropriate. I mean, it’s got to be done right, but you can’t unring the bell. It’s happening. And frankly, if we don’t do it, then the world will be dominated by Chinese autonomous vehicles. That is literally the question in front of us.
[00:19:44] Sharky Laguana: It’s interesting that you frame it like that and some of the problems that you articulate because one thing that I’ve observed under the prior administration, I was appointed to the US Federal EV Working Group. One thing I’ve kind of bemoaned, just listening to you talk about it, I don’t know that AV per se has ever been outright politicized as being particularly right or left. It’s just been people who, like you said, perhaps it’s generational people who find the whole thing kind of creepy and other people who are sort of intrigued and find the promise of less accidents to be important. But the conversation around EV cars had or did become politicized, although in really weird ways, right? I mean, Elon is not exactly somebody who I think anybody on the left would claim as their own, and he’s the number one car seller in the world of EVs.
[00:20:48] Sharky Laguana: So I guess Jeanie may have just recently claimed the spot. It’s interesting to think about an alternate universe where EVs were not politicized because I think what you just said about if we don’t do it, China will, and they’ll take the top spot. That’s literally what’s happening with EV cars. That’s literally what just happened between Tesla and Jomi. I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing it right. It’s the first time I’ve ever even said it out loud. But one question I have is, I mean, you’ve been in this space, you’ve been in this space for a while, presumably, and sometime previously you were also talking about or thinking about EV cars. And I imagine, although their role is greatly diminished, it still must be some part of the conversation on this reauthorization bill. Are you hearing anything? Is there a vibe shift around the bend there or are we headed for more of the same?
[00:21:44] Ariel Wolf: That issue has become just a hundred percent political football right now. I think even just yesterday, US DOT and NHTSA sued California over this issue, California’s EV mandate. So it continues to be front and center in the politics of it. Whether one thinks that that’s why or how that came to be, if there are excesses that need to be curbed and if there’s federal, state issues and all of that stuff, regardless, Sharkey, the outcome is lamentably what you said, which is that as all that happened, China did move forward with integrating vertical supply chains, battery technology, and EVs. There were some out there who were warning about that in the US as a national security matter, but we are where we are and I think it’s going to be difficult to get there. What that does though is it presents a very stark cautionary tale for AVs because where we are right now is that we, I think it is fair to say the US, as best we know, has the lead in AV technology.
[00:22:53] Ariel Wolf: We still have a great headstart. We’ve got so much engineering talent. We have commercially deployed technology out there. China is rapidly catching up. Maybe they’re neck and neck with us, maybe they’re a little behind. I don’t think they’re ahead, but if we get it wrong again, we’ll be in a worse spot. And so as we work on in DC, one of the things I’m doing all day long, including today, is on calls to try and get a federal framework, both USDOT and at Congress to get a bill hashed out. You got a lot of stakeholders to make the sausage, that’s the process we have. But it is tough to get folks to the table who have economic interests and otherwise that might get adjusted in these things and to try and get to the finish line. But if we don’t do it, we can’t have the system we have right now because every state kind of does random things and there’s not a lot of clarity.
[00:23:46] Ariel Wolf: Kudos to this current NHTSA, which just put out today, the federal register, some new items that will clear things up on a few of the issues, but we need a lot more to be done and we need Congress to step forward.
[00:23:57] Sharky Laguana: Talk to us about those items. What has momentum right now? Where’s the energy going?
[00:24:02] Ariel Wolf: The big thing is that they’re focused on us trying to get these purpose-built vehicles, right? You mentioned in the Waymo and just a phenomenal company that’s been able to get these robotaxis out, but notice you’re sitting there watching a steering wheel turn itself. You’re like, “What’s that all about? “ Just take that out. Well, you can’t under federal law, right? So federal motor vehicle safety standards require equipment in vehicles that intended for the human driver that now are no longer necessary. So the stuff today was the start of it. It dealt with the transmission interlock sequenced display to the human driver that no longer under the proposed rule will no longer be necessary as long as that information is communicated to the automated driving system, right? Duh. But unfortunately, even though it’s been duh for like a decade, it’s taken this long. Yeah.
[00:24:50] Sharky Laguana: Around San Francisco, there’s a company called Zoox. I haven’t ridden in it yet, but I feel like watching it drive by, there’s no steering
[00:24:59] Ariel Wolf: Wheel. Yeah. You’re right on the money. They
[00:25:02] Don Lefeve: Filed a position to get rid of the steering wheel, didn’t they?
[00:25:05] Ariel Wolf: So that was one of the announcements this week that
[00:25:08] Don Lefeve: Zoox
[00:25:08] Ariel Wolf: Is going to go through an exemption process for all the other stuff. That was an agreement they had with NHTSA. So there was a huge event that NHTSA convened with Secretary Duffy and the White House came and 500 people were there, CEOs this week on March 11th, where some of these things were announced, including the Zoox piece. It’s a longer conversation, kind of a very wonky legal approach that Zoox took to build that vehicle that they took an approach of how to comply with these things, but that’s sort of the point. The point is, some companies tried to do it this way, others waited to get clarity from NHTSA. It was a mess. And they’re in the process of cleaning it up. We have to get to the point where, okay, so it was interlock, it was also defrosting and defogging things and windshield wipers, that’s only for the human observers.
[00:25:57] Ariel Wolf: So those are getting cleaned up. You get the brake pedal, steering wheel, you can start to do the design features that will make this really open up for commercial scale. That’s going to be exciting. And I think we do have some momentum now on that.
[00:26:10] Don Lefeve: And how do you see that? I mean, do you think that it’s like one set of rules for human driven cars versus another set of rules for AVs?
[00:26:18] Ariel Wolf: Yeah. If you’re involved in the manufacturing design of level four autonomy, right? So quick primer on that, fully autonomous vehicles, level four, where there’s no expectation at any point for a human to perform the driving task or any aspect of the driving task. There should be a set of rules where the vehicle design standards that any of those that are specifically and exclusively intended for the benefit of the human driver would not apply. As long as you have a substitute where that information that otherwise we as drivers need to have that same information or an equivalent is communicated to the automated driving system that’s performing the task, right? There’ll need the windshield wipers, but it needs to be able to see and perform in the rain. You don’t need to clear a windshield for that. You need the sensors to be able to detect what needs to be done to effectuate the task.
[00:27:16] Sharky Laguana: I’ll give you something, and that kind of raises up an interesting question. So this is yesterday, I’m driving to work. Let’s see if you can see this. This is a highway on ramp, and this Waymo is trying to get to this lane that’s way over here, and it just straight up pulled right in front of everybody, and then just came to a complete stop sideways to traffic. If I went through this green light, I’d run into them. And so eventually they moved, they did eventually move, but I thought, well, geez, this is an interesting question because my experience of AV is that it doesn’t make a lot of mistakes in the sense that it’s really good about not running into things. There was a famous story here in the city about a cat supposedly got hit, not killed, but hit. And a local elected official tried to go to town on that, which of course is just ridiculous when we’ve had numerous pedestrian fatalities involving human drivers just within the past year.
[00:28:20] Don Lefeve: That’s the thing. There’s always that double standard out there.
[00:28:24] Sharky Laguana: No, it’s bonkers, but the point that I’ll concede, because I just saw it with my own eyes two days ago, this Waymo’s pulling in front of us, I guess is technically not doing anything wrong. It had a green light when it pulled into this road, but then it just kind of parked there in front of everybody and somebody zooming down the road could potentially T-bone them. There’s this sort of nebulous area around liability, which is, okay, if a car, for instance, rear end somebody, well, we know the car that was responsible for rear ending to them, it’s going to get 100% of the liability every time. I do not worry about AV cars ever making that mistake, maybe once in a billion years, but that’s just not something they’re going to do. But behaving in ways that are not human, doing things that are not common sense, I have seen multiple instances of that with my own two eyes, right?
[00:29:30] Sharky Laguana: So a car not behaving in a human way could lead a human driver to not anticipate what they’re going to do, and then now the human driver makes mistake. I’m wondering what the current state of play is on how we’re thinking about these liability issues. And maybe that’s a problem for the legislative branch and not the executive branch, but is that part of the conversation around this authorization bill? Are they wrestling with some of these second order, third order liability questions at all or Or is it all just strictly about here’s the technology we’re going to enable and here’s where we’re going to let them drive and we’ll let the courts figure it out?
[00:30:09] Ariel Wolf: A great question. It’s front and center liability questions. At the federal level, federal law and the federal role in motor vehicles focuses on design, construction and performance and not so much in the operation. But at the state level, we’re involved all over the place for the past nine years plus. And there’s legislation. States regulate the operation of motor vehicles through traffic law, through insurance, entitling and registration. And there’s no desire or push by the industry to change that at the federal level for autonomous vehicles. So states will retain that oversight and that includes state liability for violation of traffic law. Liability comes up a lot, Sharkey. And I think those questions are important for folks to ask. I take the approach, having thought about it for a long time, that while I understand the impulse to think of it as complicated, it’s not. There’s concepts, the longstanding concepts of negligence that remain applicable.
[00:31:14] Ariel Wolf: The courts are well equipped to incorporate those concepts into issues involving autonomous vehicles. I mean, that’s the reality. To the extent it involves the actual product, it becomes product liability, to the extent that there’s other kinds of basic negligence. What of course we’re seeing is that to the extent there are incidents and collisions that involve AVs, overwhelmingly it’s the human driver who is looking at their phone or something that rear ends the AV because the AV comes to a complete stop at the stop sign and the person bumps into them. But that’s not exclusively that. There are things you’re talking about which have to get reckoned with, but it’s, is there injury involved? And is there something that’s cognizable from that judicial perspective? So there should be cases. And you go back a little bit, right? We didn’t ask that question when all of our cars started having cruise control and adaptive cruise control and AEB.
[00:32:07] Ariel Wolf: I mean, my car on occasion, won’t say which one, will have a false positive for automatic emergency braking. They’ll start beeping and we’ll go, “What the hell’s going on here?” That actually performs a drive part of the driving task. It’s like my car slams on the brakes. Now it doesn’t happen at 70 miles an hour on the highway. That would be pretty bad.
[00:32:27] Sharky Laguana: That’s not a Toyota Lexus RX 350H by any chance, is it?
[00:32:32] Ariel Wolf: It’s not. I will not say another word after that, but it is not. But the point is, right?
[00:32:38] Sharky Laguana: That sounds remarkably familiar. I’m just saying.
[00:32:42] Ariel Wolf: Right. All the more reason why we didn’t have a crisis, a liability crisis when we started having the cars perform this stuff. I haven’t done the survey research, but I’m sure there are cases out there where something happened, they sued and the litigants had to then do discovery on the vehicle and the manufacturer. The manufacturer said, “It’s not our thing. You did something wrong, you didn’t maintain your vehicle.” All that stuff gets sorted out. The case law gets developed and that should happen with AVs as well. I don’t see the liability question. And folks, I’ll go a little bit farther controversial and say folks with an interest in this tend to get involved and over complicated by introducing concepts like strict liability saying no matter what happens, the AV company is responsible. You can imagine why they would want that. Ridiculous. And so it’s more of a political sort of self-interested type of motivation rather than an actual problem with liability.That’s my take on it.
[00:33:38] Ariel Wolf: And I remain always open to being convinced otherwise, but I have not heard a good argument.
[00:33:42] Don Lefeve: Well, let me ask this. So let’s back out for a little bit. We talked about removing steering wheels and pedals and other things that are now required on cars, but with AVs, frankly, it helps saves cost. Do you think there’s something in the American spirit that’s going to really want to get into a car that doesn’t have a steering wheel?
[00:34:06] Ariel Wolf: So the American driver-
[00:34:08] Don Lefeve: The American driver, because we love our cars, right?
[00:34:11] Ariel Wolf: I think there’ll be cars driven by humans for a long time and folks who want to do that will do that. I don’t think it’s like going from horses to cars. I think it’ll be human driven cars for a long time, but the extension of that would be people still ride horses for recreation, for fun, for whatever it is. We didn’t ban that or it didn’t disappear. It’s just if there’s a system that’s safer, more efficient, quicker … So that’s the answer. There’s sort of use cases that are starting to emerge. I’ve got four daughters and three of them are heading into their teenage years. And you hear this a lot. Actually, Chairman Cruz brought it up at the Senate hearing himself about his own daughters. Getting kids from school or their afterschool activities at like the two o’clock, three o’clock hour, it’s just a fricking mess.
[00:35:01] Ariel Wolf: It’s a nightmare. Who’s taken off work to do stuff like that? And frankly, there’s been incidents involving sexual assault with ride house stuff that are concerning. And so parents who can put their kids into driverless robotaxis, not a six-year-old, like a 14-year-old or 17-year-old to get them around for frankly pennies in the dollar because the labor costs aren’t there, eventually that’s going to be the case.What an amazing thing to open up. And so are people going to want to get in their car and drive around and across country? Yeah, people might still want to do that, but the logistical benefits just in that one use case, for example, is so profound that society moves forward and finds better ways to solve things. I mean, right now it is really complicated for me and my wife to deal with that.
[00:35:51] Don Lefeve: Yeah. Well, then you also start looking at things like the accordion effect with drivers. If anybody has ever traveled on I- 95 during a rush hour in any major city, you’ve got that kind of stop and go, stop and go. Well, with connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles, that should help smooth out a lot of that problem. So now you’re home quicker, better quality of life. I mean, there’s lots of advantages, but …
[00:36:18] Ariel Wolf: The more the fleet moves to autonomous, you eventually, and probably not for another 10 years or so, eventually you get to a point where you can start to up the speed because they’re all behaving in a way that sort of makes sense to each other. And that’s the ultimate goal. I think we’re a ways off in there because it’s going to be a mixed fleet for a very long time, but ultimately you can see where this is heading, where it’s a super quick way to get around. Just in time for the vertical and takeoff and landing stuff to just start flying us around anyways.
[00:36:51] Sharky Laguana: Can’t
[00:36:51] Don Lefeve: Wait.
[00:36:52] Sharky Laguana: We just had a demo of air taxi here. You may have seen that here in the city. The company’s called Joby. It’s basically a giant drone. They’re claiming they’ll be able to get somebody from San Francisco to Napa, which is typically about an hour drive. They’ll be able to get you there for about the same price as an Uber, which would be around like 150, which it’s an hour drive. If there’s no traffic, it can be a three hour drive. If it’s a beautiful day and everybody wants to go to Napa, that could be an attractive service. How
[00:37:26] Ariel Wolf: Long are they saying it would take?
[00:37:28] Sharky Laguana: 45 minutes, I think is what they said. A little faster driving or about the same.
[00:37:33] Ariel Wolf: Right. I think the near term and medium term future of EV tall is going to be just these kind of dedicated fixed point routes, right? Driving out to Dulles Airport from DC sometimes is okay. Sometimes it’s just an absolute nightmare and just going sort of like the tip of Manhattan, Wall Street to some of these places. So these choke points and these fixed routes, that makes perfect sense. The idea of people flying around these things, that’s just not happening anytime soon. But yeah, I mean, why not? Innovation is profound and we’re finally hitting our stride in a weird way other than maybe since the iPhone, what profound technological changes have really occurred in society that have really transformed things? There’s obviously been innovation, but we’re, I think on the cusp of something major that would change the way we live and the way we get around.
[00:38:28] Ariel Wolf: And that’s exciting.
[00:38:29] Sharky Laguana: Or it could be the Chinese curse and just be interesting.
[00:38:32] Ariel Wolf: Right, exactly. We live in interesting times. I tend to think because we start from the very clear understanding and knowledge of a problem that’s existing with the fatalities, by removing or reducing that significantly, you’ve already had a profoundly positive effect. Beyond that, like this transformative thing where everyone … I think of that joke that I think Conan O’Brien told at the commencement address at Harvard in 2000, if you’ve ever seen that speech where he’s talking about how when he graduated in the 80s, he predicted certain things. He predicted the rise of the internet and he was like, “I predicted then that there’ll be a series of interconnected computers that together, which will help humanity finally get rid of idle chit-chat and pornography.” And so if we all don’t have to drive anymore, we like to think we’ll be sitting in the back reading Euripides or whatever.
[00:39:30] Ariel Wolf: Instead, it’ll be on checking Twitter. But if we get rid of car crashes and we don’t have to read about the local events where someone’s kid or whatever was killed and that disappears, that alone is good enough. And I think that’s why I think it’s so compelling to move forward with the technology. If it results in other great things, that’s fine too.
[00:39:49] Don Lefeve: Well, Ariel, thank you very much for being on. Really appreciate your time. Sharky, anything before we go? No,
[00:39:55] Sharky Laguana: You’ve given me a lot to think about. Now it’s like every week has turned into like a two year long … The pace of technology now is absolutely bonkers. I’ll say something that’s interesting and relevant to this conversation and maybe we can close on this. So Anthropic who makes Cloud, which is one of the major AI chats and AI technology, they put out an economic report and they were trying to, with this report, trying to show what industries were going and what sectors and what jobs were going to be the most impacted by AI. As you might imagine, a computer programmer pretty seriously impacted job, right? And you’re seeing it in the schools, right? Computer science majors are enrollments dropping, job placement is dropping dramatically, like dramatically just over the past two to three years. But what was really interesting is what’s safe, maybe the second or third most safest thing was transportation.
[00:41:03] Sharky Laguana: No matter how smart AI is, you still need machines to get you from place to place and you have to move your body and move atoms. But you know what the safest job was, bartender.
[00:41:14] Don Lefeve: Bartender.
[00:41:14] Sharky Laguana: That’s the safest job in America right now.
[00:41:19] Don Lefeve: Don’t tell Boston dynamics that. They may be creating- Yeah, then they have that thing. Yeah.
[00:41:23] Sharky Laguana: Yeah. Well, good luck. I don’t know anybody who’s going to be wanting to talk to the AI agent bartender at their local watering holes, so we’ll see.
[00:41:31] Ariel Wolf: Exactly right. Well, it’s a good point. And physical AI I think is where people should be looking for opportunity and autonomous vehicles is really the prime instance of that.
[00:41:43] Sharky Laguana: Yeah. All right. Well, good stuff. Ariel, thanks for joining us on our inaugural podcast here and looking forward to hearing more in the future and keeping an eye on what you’re up to.
[00:41:54] Ariel Wolf: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure. And next time we talk, we’ll all be AVs everywhere.
[00:42:02] Don Lefeve: Thanks, Ariel.
[00:42:04] Ariel Wolf: See you.