There are two near futures for self driving cars…
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I’ll admit it. I’d gotten cynical about self driving cars. It feels like every 3 years, we’re told they’ll be here in another 3 years. Recently though, I saw a video that shocked me: Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise, called for a taxi and a driverless car arrived. He was just one of hundreds of people across San Francisco who are getting into their ride and finding no one else inside.
So… are self-driving cars finally here?
I took a deep dive into that question over the last few months, trying to piece together all the other self-driving stuff I’ve heard about to get the full picture. I ended up in San Francisco, interviewing Kyle himself!
The answer I found to whether self-driving is here is: YES. Just not like I thought. It’s not the sci-fi version I was expecting. Instead, it’s actually two kinds of autonomous vehicles, battling it out on the roads right now. And our lives are about to look very different depending on who wins.
Chapters:
00:00 Self driving cars are finally here
02:15 Levels of self driving, explained
03:32 Where are we now on self driving cars?
05:07 Thank you Masterworks!
06:10 The big fight for the future of driverless cars
07:04 Interviewing Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise
08:20 Robotaxi meets world (and police)
10:00 The two near futures of self driving
11:52 The long term future of driving
Important note (because I never want you to be confused about whether something is sponsored): The only sponsor in this video is Masterworks, which means they got to approve their ad section beforehand, but didn’t get a say in the rest of the video. Cruise did not pay me for being part of this video. I did an interview with the Cruise CEO and Cruise let me see their Bolt car, for which I’m very grateful!
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Bio:
Cleo Abram is an Emmy-nominated independent video journalist. On her show, Huge If True, Cleo explores complex technology topics with rigor and optimism, helping her audience understand the world around them and see positive futures they can help build. Before going independent, Cleo was a video producer for Vox. She wrote and directed the Coding and Diamonds episodes of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. She produced videos for Vox’s popular YouTube channel, was the host and senior producer of Vox’s first ever daily show, Answered, and was co-host and producer of Vox’s YouTube Originals show, Glad You Asked.
Vox: https://www.vox.com/authors/cleo-abram
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10108242/
Additional reading and watching:
– “My first fully driverless pickup!” Cruise https://youtu.be/dmvZBiWYkFQ
– “Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now,” Veritasium https://youtu.be/yjztvddhZmI
– “From 1956: A future vision of driverless cars,” CBS https://youtu.be/F2iRDYnzwtk
– “Self-Driving Big Rigs Are Coming. Is America Ready?” Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/self-driving-big-rigs-are-coming-is-america-ready-11655524823
– “Beyond Tesla: Driverless Startups Promise Next-Level Autonomous Vehicles,” Wall Street Journal Video https://youtu.be/UdOxt11ofjQ
– “Are Driverless Trucks The Future Of Shipping? Inside Waymo’s New Test Program,” NBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lon1vRv2wQ8&t=1s&ab_channel=NBCNews
– “75 Minutes of Autonomous Driving with Kyle Vogt and Sam Altman,” Cruise https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8
– “3 Generations of Driverless Delivery Vehicles,” WIRED https://youtu.be/j9C3eebCQX0
– “Tesla Autopilot For 24 Hours Straight!” Ryan Trahan https://youtu.be/ckib1ABJ_sM
Gear I use:
Camera: Sony A7SIII
Lens: Sony 16–35 mm F2.8 GM
Audio: Sennheiser SK AVX and Zoom H4N Pro
Music: Musicbed
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Welcome to the joke down low:
What has 10 letters and starts with G-A-S?
Automobile.
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Love the video, great job on the presentation and editing. Though I'm against using an autonomous vehicle myself, I do find the technology itself interesting.
Hi Cleo, interesting video! There’s a great book called „Hello World“ by Hannah Fry. She’s an amazing statistician and writer and hosts a podcast with deepmind. In the unlikely case you aren’t aware of this book I highly recommend it as it has a very interesting chapter about the impact and challenges of autonomous systems in society. It’s a great read.
people will do anything BUT BUILD TRAINS?!?!?!?!?
No mention of tesla….. Something not right in this video….I'm just saying
This was a very interesting video. I feel like the Cruise car without a steering wheel is just trying to reinvent public transit. Wouldn't it just be better to put bus lanes, or train/tram/light rail in and around cities? Make the cities more people friendly and also not have the need for large parking lots everywhere.
This is very good understading of what this topic is actually about. Thanks so much for the amazing research and content you do!
Enjoyed and very informative! There is kinda crickets with respect to Tesla though here
Started off great, but the video ended somewhat abruptly without too much insight. But then, that might be where we're at in the self-driving car roadmap.
Why didnt you talk about Tesla's FSD Beta? The latest versions are very impressive
Great work
The "a hundred guys with shovels are not an excavator" analogy doesn't hold up for me. It's still individual trucks that are the same size, just with different operating constraints. It's just a hundred robots with shovels. The excavator is rail freight.
I believe Tesla is the Google of self-driving, their neural-net focused, approach, massive data collection, and super computer will make these other self-driving companies look like Yahoo and Bing in the next 3 to 5 years.
I love your work so so much
Good episode. I don’t think the future is so utopian though, technology may make things more convenient but there are more philosophical concerns about meaning, purpose, and void of which is being filled with religion and extremist ideologies. Ted Kazsinski writes a good book about the problems with technology. So does a Brave New World.
Good video, I work in this industry. Subscribed 🙂
We drive death machines, we eat animals… people in the future won't believe what we used to do! 💚
Think this is a great overview of the areas "full self driving" will likely touch general people's individual lives, but while It was briefly skirted over, there's a similarly interesting fight in the Level 3+ space from Tesla's Autopilot, to Comma.ai's Openpilot, to Chevy's Supercruise etc of bringing self-driving features to people's individual cars. In some ways while that's further from "fully autonomous", it's almost more likely to directly impact someone's wellbeing in the interim while they are still having to commute etc and make that process less onerous.
I love the idea of driverless cars because it will hopefully put an and to private cars. We'll have less cars, less dangerous people driving them (because of negligence, sleepness, drunkness), less heat put into the world, and maybe a more collective idea of things.
I think cloud based solutions, where you try for a centralized computing approach, and essentially add cameras, and other spatial sensors to traffic lights, street lamps and telephone poles makes the most sense. As long as self driving is available along major thoroughfares, it covers 95% of driver miles. If you have a lot of different angles for major thoroughfares, the sensors can be relatively cheap. Rather than equip every car with $10,000 worth of sensors and software, add simple sensors to cars, and road infrastructure, then have one computer render the entire roadway, and send that info to cars.
Can't wait to then move from driverless cars to public transit
One caveat, that is if industry continues pour billions of dollars into R&D, then we will continue to make our way to level 5. Time and lots of money makes any technical challenge surmountable.
another fake stun unfortunely
Well, nice way to start to dig deep into this)
this is to reduce traffic but when it comes to trucks is to save money also that trucks don't need to take breaks
Cleo, hope you get a guy as ambitious as you
Westworld.
this channel is criminally underrated
This is a really really good episode: you're not trying to be funny, the cutaways to movie clips make sense in the context of the video, and you explain things really well, using graphics in your favor with little text and easy to understand pictures. Be really proud of this one!
I wish you organized the coming driverless car/truck revolution in the different approaches companies are taking to engineer driverless cars. I.E. Tesla taking data from all their cars on the road to map self-driving (capable of putting the car anywhere and it self-driving) and how other companies like Cruise are programming their cars for an area of a city to perform on those specific streets (take the car off its digital track and it’s functionless). The method Tesla is taking is a much more arduous task (self-driving trucks are going for the same capability). When you broke your video into two methodologies, I thought you were going to take your video in this direction but instead focused on trucking vs city use and its impact. I was left wanting a lot more from this video.
12:27 or just don't be so reliant on cars in the first place
Lane assist tried to swerve me into an ambulance last week so I'm a little wary! Admittedly pulling over onto the side of the road to allow an ambulance to pass while on a single lane regional road is probably classed as one of those messy situations
Awesome as always! Love this guy's vision too. Made me think – we're going to think it IS VERY barbaric we allowed kids in a machine on their own, just like we thought of so many other unsafe things from 100 years ago are now.