HIBT Lab! Cruise: Kyle Vogt

Most of us are familiar with rideshare apps at this point. We tap a few buttons on a phone and...voila! A vehicle arrives to take you virtually anywhere you want to go. But what if these vehicles could operate entirely without a human driver? Will we one day live in a world where most cars drive themselves? Kyle Vogt believes that autonomous vehicles will fundamentally change how we get from place to place, and soon! After being part of the team that launched the video game streaming platform Twitch, Kyle charted a new course in 2013 by founding Cruise, which was acquired by General Motors just three years later. This week on How I Built This Lab, Kyle talks with Guy about the process of building a fleet of fully driverless ‘robo taxis’—which are now available for service in San Francisco and coming to more cities across the U. S.. Plus, the two discuss the potential of autonomous vehicles to reduce the alarming number of vehicle-related fatalities and injuries experienced every year. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So a few weeks ago, I had a chance to go for a ride in a driverless car. And I don't mean the hands-free driving on a highway like what's available in a Tesla or in a bunch of other new cars right now. I mean, I got into the backseat of a car, and there was no one in the front seat. The car drove completely by itself. And this wasn't on some closed course. This was right in the middle of the city of San Francisco with other cars on the road and pedestrians, cyclists, and all the distractions that any human driver might face. And it was actually amazing. The car was an electric Chevy Bolt, and the company behind it is called Cruise.

• 5:55Guy Raz?

  And right now, they have a whole fleet of fully autonomous Chevy Bolts giving rides to people around San Francisco every night. Cruise was founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt. And before working on Cruise, he dropped out of MIT to help start Justin TV, the company that eventually became the streaming platform Twitch. Cruise was acquired by General Motors in 2016. And since then, the company has gone full steam ahead with building and deploying cars that can drive themselves, with Kyle in the driver's seat having stepped back into the CEO role earlier this year. Kyle has always had a love for robots and self-driving machines.

• 6:38Guy Raz?

  In fact, in college, back in 2004, Kyle was involved in a competition that was a pioneering event in the history of autonomous vehicles.

• 6:49Guy Raz?

  While at MIT, you got involved in something called the DARPA Grand Challenge. And this actually, I think, is widely considered to be like a kind of a pivotal moment, or maybe really important moment in the history of autonomous vehicles. What was that Grand Challenge in 2004?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was put on by DARPA. And their goal was, I believe, to accelerate, you know, essentially autonomous vehicles, like create the industry, get it going. I guess there's a bunch of different, separate research projects going on in different universities. But it wasn't moving as fast as maybe it could. And so the government put up a prize pool, $1 million, which anyone could go after, any of these colleges or private companies. And it was a challenge to see if you could build a vehicle that could drive about 70 miles through the desert, following these kind of windy, rocky roads, you know, and get to a GPS destination. And at the time, this was state of the art. You know, people had done this with small robots on pretty limited terrain or smooth terrain.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  But, you know, having a large vehicle navigating on roads at speed was kind of at the edge of what was possible then in 2004.

• 7:58Guy Raz?

  So you guys got, from what I understand, the Ford F-150 was donated to you. And your task was to turn that into an autonomous vehicle?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  That's right. So that meant the main pieces are a computer. So we put a rack of servers in the cab of this pickup truck. Then another element is the sensors. So we had LiDARs and cameras on this vehicle and wired those into the computer. And the last piece is the actuation. So some way for the computer to actually make the vehicle move. And so this is a motor we attached to where the steering wheel used to be and an electronic actuator that could move the gas and brake pedals.

• 8:36Guy Raz?

  Wow, and did it work?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  No. No, so we, of course, being, this was an undergrad-led team. And so we were, you know, we had no real funding or support from the university at the time. And so we had exactly one electric motor to turn the steering wheel. And of course, the morning of the qualifying rounds for the competition, that one steering motor that we had burnt out and we were unable to compete.

• 9:01Guy Raz?

  Wow. Okay, so that was your kind of first foray into autonomous vehicles. But you move on, you continue your studies at MIT. And I know that you Interned at like iRobot, that makes the Roomba. And your goal while you were a student was to eventually do something in robotics. Probably you're thinking by the time you're in your third year at MIT, you're going to join one of these companies and become an engineer.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I wasn't sure, but it seemed like the default path. Either that or go get a job at Apple or Google. But you know, I always had this idea of doing robotics in the back of my head. Just hadn't found the path yet.

• 9:40Guy Raz?

  During your junior year, you heard about these guys at Yale, Emmett Shear, Justin Kahn, and Michael Seibel. They had sold something like a calendar software through eBay. You hear about these guys and you think, oh, that sounds interesting. And what you just like email them and say, hey, can I meet you? What's the story?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Well, kind of. There was a, there's an infamous mailing list, email mailing list at MIT called the Jobs List that was run by a faculty member in the computer science department. And it ended up being a place where Harvard and Yale Business School students would basically send out a request for some engineer at MIT to kind of build their app or product for them. And so most of those were sort of, you know, a half-baked attempt to, frankly, to get some kid at MIT to do the work for them. But when I saw the note come across from Emmett and Justin and then Google them, I was impressed because they seemed to have, you know, some actual experience building and selling companies. And so I was intrigued enough, especially by what they were wanting to do,

• 10:45Speaker 01

  which was to build this reality TV show that would stream 24/7 to the internet, that I reached out just to figure out, you know, what they were up to.

• 10:56Guy Raz?

  And the idea was we're going to have a reality show, live streaming reality show about

• 11:03Guy Raz?

  This guy, Justin, this guy right here, is that what they told you?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they'd said, look, we have all sorts of really interesting, wacky conversations, and we kind of wish that people could experience this or participate somehow. And so why don't we just, you know, take that to the extreme and put his whole life on the internet and see what happens? And that was, that was pretty much the extent of it from a business standpoint, you know, see what happens.

• 11:26Guy Raz?

  This became Justin TV. Again, the story, we tell the story in an episode of the show with Emmett Shear. You can find it, it was just a couple of episodes back, so well worth listening to. What were you intrigued about with this idea? I mean, you were a software engineer, robotics guy. I mean, you don't strike me as somebody who'd be interested in a reality TV show about just some random person.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Well, what was interesting to me was there's an interesting piece of technology that had to be built at the time. This is before iPhone, so there was no, you know, streaming from your phone to the internet like that's pretty easy to do today.

• 12:01Guy Raz?

  Now, of course, it's easy. You just stick on Instagram Live or whatever you want to do and you can broadcast to the world. But, but in 2007, you actually had to build the technology to be able to film yourself and stream that live 24 hours a day. The technology just didn't exist.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, it ended up being a backpack that had all this equipment, you know, a video encoder that would encode a video stream and digitize it. And then some software that ran on a small Linux computer that would take that video stream and dynamically allocate, you know, the bandwidth across three different cellular modems. So basically like see three different cell phones that were in this backpack. And the idea was, you know, maybe if you're having poor service with Verizon, maybe AT&T will have better signal there. And so you use as many cellular networks, as many connections as you can and hope that you have enough. Bandwidth to stream live video, even if you're in the basement of a building

• 12:58Speaker 01

  or walking outside. No matter where he went, we wanted that stream to stay on and remain high quality. And that was a key part of building this always on life casting experience that Justin wanted to create.

• 13:13Guy Raz?

  Your intention was to just kind of join these guys for a couple of weeks, but you you to join them during a break, a school break at MIT, but you would never go back. That was it. You kind of, once you were in in this project, Justin TV, that was it. The the whole team eventually moved to San Francisco and you, of course, moved out with them.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, Michael Seibel slyly bought me a one way ticket and said, don't worry about it. You know, after a month, we'll get you a ticket to go back. Of course, I never, never ended up doing that. And I had a blast out there trying to build something with this team. And, you know, the hardest part about that was, you know, talking to my parents about my decision to defer my return to MIT. I grew up in Kansas in the Midwest and, you know, getting a college education was a high priority thing. And so as, as the months turned into many months, some anxiety started to build there.

• 14:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 14:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I imagine, I mean, on the one hand, yes, you were building really cool technology and that, that was what got you excited. But the consumer facing part of this, Justin TV, probably got your parents thinking, what is, what is he working on? Like, he's, he's not going back to school to do a reality show about this guy who's filming himself all the time?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, my dad at the time worked in a bank and so in the Midwest. And so he's, you know, very basic questions for a business. What's your revenue? Who are your customers? What do your margins look like? And the answer was like, well, nothing yet, but maybe soon.

• 14:39Guy Raz?

  Right. Fair questions. Right?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 14:42Guy Raz?

  But it did really, I mean, you guys got into Y Combinator and that famous accelerator program, which would be part of again with Cruz several years later. But, but really, What of course happened with Justin TV was it eventually became two other products. One was Twitch and one was SocialCam. And you you end up sort of focusing on Twitch. And Twitch, as most people know today, is a platform for video gamers to sort of livestream their gaming and so on. Was that appealing to you? Were you or are you like a video gamer? And is that something that got you really excited?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  No, not at all, which is why Emmett was a good leader for Twitch. And, you know, I was happy working on the video streaming technology and making it so that, you know, when you have your Xbox plugged into your into your computer, we can stream that video. It can hit the data centers and then be rebroadcasted, you know, to millions of watchers in real time reliably and for a really low cost. And so that was the technical problem that I was really engaged in, especially in the early years of Twitch, when, you know, it was just pretty hard to do that.

• 15:52Guy Raz?

  So, all right, you decide to leave Twitch in, I think in 2013. And why? What was the reason? Well, I mean, it was really starting to do very well. And of course, we know what happened with Twitch. But why did you decide that it was time for you to to try something different?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Well, we got the technology working really well. We had this globally distributed live video network. And as I said before, I'm not really a gamer. And so I kind of lost interest. There was there was not much more there for me to do. And Emmett was doing a great job running the business. And so I was kind of searching for the next thing.

• 16:28Guy Raz?

  And so what were you thinking about?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Well, I had, you know, after going through Justin TV and Twitch, which at that point for me was an eight-year-long adventure and pretty grueling, that was most of my 20s, was cutting my teeth on building a company, especially going through some rough economic times. It was difficult. And I realized if I want to do this again, do another startup, and I did, I wanted to build something new. It better be something that I really care about. And to me, that meant, you know, that the success is driven by the quality of the technology. I also wanted something that had a high positive impact on society. And I wanted something that I felt I could commit, you know, a decade to because in my experience

• 17:12Speaker 01

  and from what I've seen, it really takes a long-term commitment, something on the order of a decade, to build something, you know, meaningful.

• 17:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  And, and out of that filter that, you know, on potential ideas, I landed on self-driving cars after it, you know, I became reminded of what I had done back at MIT.

• 17:31Guy Raz?

  And the DARPA grand, grand challenge and, and that, so you were thinking about a bunch of different possible things to do. You land on self-driving cars is a, an enormously challenging problem, but this is something that you thought, okay, it's 2013, I'm going to put at least 10 years of my life into building this thing. And what was the sort of the product or the technology that you wanted to commercialize?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I guess as I started thinking about self-driving cars, the first question that popped into my head was why? Or, or, you know, is this worth doing? And it doesn't take long. If you poke around at statistics, you know, even today, there's 40,000 people that die each year in car accidents, you know, a million people injured in the US. And almost all of those accidents, there's some form of human error involved. And so going back to this notion of automating the sort of repetitive or mundane tasks, like, you know, if we can chip away at that, that's a really big deal and a problem worth working on. And just thinking about the time we all spend driving, it is a catastrophic tax on society and productivity, the amount of time we sit and spend, you know, sitting

• 18:41Speaker 01

  behind the wheel. So anyways, I thought that was worth, that was definitely worth doing. There's clear benefit to society. I also knew though, that Google had been working on this for a while, you know, after the DARPA grand challenge and rumor had it, they had spent something like a hundred million dollars, you know, to date, and they didn't have a product yet. And so I thought if I'm going to go after this, I can't. Do exactly what they've done. I don't have that kind of resources. I don't have, you know, an army of brilliant engineers from Google. So I thought, you know, maybe that, what's the simplest form of this that people would be willing to pay for that I could build? And I ended up settling on essentially designing a system that could drive for you when you're on the highway.

• 19:21Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  And, and that sort of narrow version of this problem, basically keeping the car between two lane lines, seemed much more tractable and also something that would provide immediate value to people.

• 19:32Guy Raz?

  So you started working on this, this project in 2014. I mean, now so many new cars have a version of, of this kind of technology that keeps you in between lanes. If you have a Tesla, there's the autopilot system, which essentially you gotta drives the car, you gotta keep your hand on the wheel. There are other cars that now have this technology, which is, and, and it makes sense. I mean, the idea that you had was you would build a, a kit, I guess, that you could, in theory, you'd be able to buy and then add on to your car and then it would turn your car into like an autopilot on the highway.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  That's right. And, and we went from, you know, nothing to a working prototype that could drive from San Francisco to Palo Alto, you know, the highway stretch of that in about three months, you know, just with a, with a scrappy team working in a garage. And that was kind of our first proof point that we could make this technology work and do it, you know, at a much lower cost than people thought was possible at the time.

• 20:25Guy Raz?

  And how did you, how did you raise the money to get started? I mean, just the, the capital costs of this thing from the beginning were going to be huge. You, you wouldn't be able to do this with like two or $5 million. You had to raise tens of millions. Was that challenging or, or were you able to do it on the strength of what you'd already done at Twitch and Justin TV?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Well, a little bit of both. So any big, bold idea that carries a lot of risk, especially technical risk, you usually have to fundraise in stages. And so you take the, the, the biggest, scariest, you know, most formidable technical challenges and prove that you can solve those on a small scale. And that enables, you know, that builds some confidence with potential investors that, hey, if a small team can solve, you know, a big part of this problem in a short period of time, that gives me a lot more confidence that with, you know, a larger amount of funding and potentially a larger team, they could actually go after the full problem. And that was our philosophy.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  If we could build this proof of concept that showed highway driving, you know, really quickly with a small team, then that would enable us to raise the funding to go for something more ambitious, like, you know, what we ultimately ended up doing, which is full driverless robo taxis.

• 21:42Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Kyle Vogt, the co-founder of Justin TV, Twitch, and now the driverless car company Cruise. Back in a moment, you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 25:36Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Kyle Vogt, one of the co-founders of the streaming platforms JustinTV and Twitch. After leaving those companies in 2013, Kyle went looking for the next big problem he wanted to solve, and he landed on driverless cars. So, all right, you start working on this in 2014, and that year, you start taking pre-orders for this RP1 kit, this highway autopilot system. It turns out that you never ended up making these kits at all, because I guess, soon after you announced it, you abandoned it, and you kind of decided to focus on fully autonomous

• 26:20Guy Raz?

  vehicles for urban environments, not these sort of highway autopilot cars. Why is that?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Well, two things happened. One is, you know, our eyes got a little wider as we started looking at the complexities from a legal and engineering standpoint to build these kits that would work on lots and lots of different cars. And so we thought that was doable, but it was going to be a long slog, and we'd spend a lot more time on adding support for new vehicles than we would actually making the self-driving technology better. So that was one thing. It was going to be a tough business to make it work. On the other hand, what had been happening in parallel is these ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft had exploded in popularity. And if you look at the economics of those businesses, the vast majority of the revenue that comes in goes right back out to the driver.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And so it became obvious to us that there's a massive and growing market for fleets of vehicles that, you know, have a lower cost than what it would cost to employ a human driver. And we thought that was enough evidence of market demand that we could do a pivot, a big, bold move to basically abandon the business we had started building and recruited engineers for and raised money for, and do something completely different, which was to build robotaxis.

• 27:36Guy Raz?

  So the idea was, at this point, let's build... Autonomous taxis or start that way and deploy them in cities. And that will be the focus of what we do.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And you know, the reason taxis made sense versus cars that you can go out and buy at a dealership is, you know, with the taxis, it'd be a fleet of vehicles that we would own and maintain. We could limit, you know, where they operated and they operate, they could operate, you know, 20, 22 hours a day. And so because they have that much potential to earn revenue, the vehicle itself can cost a little more than, you know, a vehicle that you would sell to someone at a dealership. And that made sense because at the time, a lot of the technology we wanted to rely on was still very expensive. The computer systems, the sensors, all that kind of stuff. And so it didn't pencil for something that you would go out and buy,

• 28:29Speaker 01

  but it did make sense economically as part of a robotaxi fleet.

• 28:34Guy Raz?

  So as you're developing this technology, you're focusing on a number of things to make these cars operate and to make them operate safely. So there's cameras, of course, on these cars. You use LiDAR, which is like a laser beam that is basically bouncing off the environment, feeding information and data to the car. There's radar, which does the same things, same thing with radio waves and there's GPS. I mean, tell me a little bit about the technology you started to deploy into these cars to make them see, like, you know, without a human driver.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I mean, the building blocks are the same, you know, even how we started it a few years before. You've got a set of sensors. You have a computer that makes sense of the sensor data. And then, once it's done that, it sends signals to some sort of actuators that move the vehicle. You know, and our view early on was that this is a really hard problem. What we're trying to do

• 29:32Speaker 01

  With a driverless car has never been done before in the field of AI. There's, there's three big, big, big, big challenges. The first is just the complexity of driving in an urban environment. You've got, you know, people driving on the wrong side of the road, pedestrians running onto the street, trash cans falling over, like leaves in the street, debris.

• 29:52Guy Raz?

  Cyclists.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Cyclists, like, construction workers directing people with their hands. It's a very unstructured, complex scene. And if you think about what AI systems have done well on in the past, a few decades ago, computers beat humans at chess for the first time. And a few years ago, computers beat the best video game players, you know, for some of these strategy games. But to this date, no one has really cracked a task as complicated as driving. So there's the AI challenge.

• 30:22Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  The second one is the fact that this is real time. You know, when you're driving at speed, this system literally has about the blink of an eye, a couple hundred milliseconds, to process all that sensor data, this complex AI problem, make sense of it all, and then send a signal to the vehicle. And so that real time piece means you're on the edge of what is possible with today's compute technology. And the last piece is that it's safety critical. There's, there's really, you know, no margin for error here.

• 30:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  People are entrusting this kind of system with their lives. And so a lot more engineering has to go into making it safe. Because unlike your phone or your laptop, it can't just crash. You know, it's actually have to handle every kind of potential failure or issue gracefully to keep the passengers safe. So you put all those three things together, this is a really challenging problem.

• 31:14Guy Raz?

  All right, so it's 2014. That, that summer, Amazon acquires Twitch for almost a billion dollars. You were no longer at Twitch, but of course you had a stake in that business as somebody who had co-founded it. And, and you're now working on this business.

• 31:33Guy Raz?

  And something like a year and a half later, GM acquires Cruise. First of all, what was the, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but from your perspective, what did GM acquiring Cruise get you? I mean, because oftentimes a big company buys a small company like yours and then just, you know, shudders it. I mean, Google has acquired hundreds of companies that no longer exist. And there are many, many examples. I'm sure GM has acquired companies that no longer exist. So, I mean, when GM approached you for the acquisition, obviously, I'm sure there were a lot of things about it that were attractive, the money, the resources that GM would bring. But also, there was potential for this to be the end of Cruise.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the track record of large companies buying small startups, you know, is not very good. You know, they don't typically turn out well. But where we were is we had, at this point, we had built, maybe like 30 or 40 people. We had built a prototype robo taxi that could drive around the streets of San Francisco. It obeyed traffic lights, it changed lanes, it made turns, all those kind of things. It still needed a human safety driver, but, you know, from the outside, from the appearance, it looked like it was getting close to something that could be commercialized. So, we were talking to General Motors. We had been talking to them for a while. And they saw that, you know, the future of their business could be fundamentally disrupted by this kind of technology.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And it's one of those things where you either like try to fight it and try to put off something that's an inevitable, or you embrace it and try to figure out, you know, how you can be a part of that, that future. And in our conversations, you know, originally, we, Dan Kahn and I, my co-founder, we were hesitant to do anything that would limit our optionality to work with other automakers. Like, doing a deal with General Motors might mean we couldn't work with Honda or Ford or something like that.

• 33:28Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  But as we talked to them more, we started reflecting on our business and realized a few things. The first is that, as you said, this was going to be extremely capital intensive. And there wasn't a huge appetite for fundraising. In this space yet, there wasn't a frenzy of activity for people funding autonomous driving startups because there was no prior M and A activity, no acquisitions, and there was no, there weren't any current products on the market. And so we knew it would be hard to raise the capital we needed. And so that was, that was a big question mark for us. Would we be able to do that? Or would we essentially run out of money? And the other angle was, you know, Dan Ammon, who was the president of General Motors

• 34:12Speaker 01

  at the time, came and said, basically, look, you know, maybe you guys can go out and raise that money. Maybe you can build robotaxis by yourself. But if you really care about making this happen and attacking those car accidents and, you know, accelerating the safety benefits of this and other things, wouldn't you agree that with the resources and power of General Motors behind you, you could do it a little faster? And I thought that was a pretty compelling argument. I mean, we slept on it for a few nights and ultimately came back and said, absolutely. I mean, that makes sense. Let's do it.

• 34:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, GM is, is depending on how you measure, the fifth or the sixth biggest car company in the world. And now with Cruise as part of the GM family, what did that mean? I mean, did it sort of supercharge your ability to, you know, to develop this technology at a faster pace and at a bigger scale?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Well, we got access to, first of all, the Chevrolet Bolt platform, which at the time was one of the really only the, one of the few viable EV platforms that you could use for something like this. And that was helpful because EVs obviously have, you know, the battery capacity to run all of the computer and sensing systems we wanted. We also had access to, you know, essentially the funding we needed to build a larger team, to do a lot of the hardware development and other things that were very capital intensive. So it did kind of take a lot of the restrictions off and let us accelerate the development. And we did a pretty good job, all things considered, making sure we could actually unlock that speed and not become kind of swallowed by the parent company.

• 35:45Guy Raz?

  I imagine that in the first few years after the GM acquisition, it was a lot of, as you mentioned, deploying these vehicles on the streets of San Francisco, which is where you're based, and with a driver actually sitting in the car. And there were probably a lot of moments where the driver had to deploy the steering wheel or had to slam on the brakes, and that's probably normal. At what point were you able to test out a vehicle with nobody inside, with no safety driver sitting in the driver's seat?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Our first time doing that was about two years ago. So I guess that'd be, I think, around the end of 2020.

• 36:24Guy Raz?

  So it was in the middle of the pandemic?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah. We did our first driverless drive around a quiet part of San Francisco at night with no one behind the wheel, and that was a rush for all of us, for sure.

• 36:37Guy Raz?

  And to get to that point, right, I mean, obviously, you had to prove that it was safe, and there are regulatory rules. You needed the, presumably, the state of California to give you the green light to let you do that. I'm sure at a certain point in the development of the technology, you felt, or your team felt like, we're ready to go, but that was probably a year, maybe two years, before you were given the permission to do it. Is that right?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Well, in this case, there are regulators, especially the California DMV, who want to make sure that we followed best practices and taken obvious steps to make sure that we can be in communication with the vehicle and we put it through the necessary or appropriate tests, given how we intend to operate it. But that's not sufficient by itself. We went a lot further, and safety has to be our top priority, and it is. And so at that point, with our testing that we had done with the system running on the road, but someone sitting behind the wheel just in case, we had collected millions of miles of data, and from that data, we have extracted hundreds of thousands of situations,

• 37:46Speaker 01

  like close calls, or human drivers doing weird things, or all these strange... And they call them corner cases, things that don't happen very often, but the this autonomous vehicle still has to handle them properly. And turned those into simulations where we could, each time we make a change to the software that drives these cars, we could run it through hundreds of thousands of scenarios, almost like, you know, going, taking a driving test, but, you know, times a thousand, to make sure that, you know, no matter what kind of situation the AV is in, we understand how it's going to behave and what risk it may be encountering. And then we can make a much more educated decision about whether this is ready for prime time.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  And that's, that's what we had done.

• 38:32Guy Raz?

  And the car is constantly learning, essentially learning and getting better every time.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing, there's this sort of a, you know, a chicken and the egg situation here, because the more these are deployed in the field, the more examples you find of, of weird human behavior or other strange situations. And those can be fed back into, you know, the development loop to make the system even better. And so that's to me, you can't do that with a human driver, you know, the, the average quality of drivers on the road today is just the average quality of a human driver. But with these systems, they, you know, they're already good, the ones we have today are safe. But there's no reason to me why we can't see them become 10 times better or 100 times better than human drivers.

• 39:17Guy Raz?

  In 2021, the state of California gave, I think in June, gave you permission to start conducting a pilot program in San Francisco without a safety driver in the car. But it was, it was really a sort of a, it was going to begin as this very kind of small pilot program. But earlier this year, in 2022, you got permission to open it up to, to the public in a limited form, beta form. And, and I should say, I've been in one, as you know, I've been in one of these cars, and it's actually amazing. It, it operates like an Uber or Lyft, you got an app and. And you can order the car and it will come and get you and you unlock the car and there's no one in there and it will take you to where you're going.

• 40:02Guy Raz?

  Before we get into the details of how this works, how did you land on this concept of a taxi service? Why does that make most sense rather than trying to basically turn this into a consumer product right away?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good question and there's several reasons for that. The first, as I mentioned, is cost. If a vehicle is operating 20 hours a day earning revenue, we can afford to pay a little more upfront than you would for a car that you out and buy, but it probably sits in your driveway 90% of the time. It's not providing value 24/7 like these vehicles can. The other is that we think there's a benefit to getting this technology out there soon, as soon as it can provide a safety benefit to the community, but before it could necessarily work everywhere all the time. So for example, we can deploy in cities and have these drive in San Francisco at say 20 to 30 miles an hour max speed, even though that technology is not ready to go 80 miles

• 40:59Speaker 01

  an hour on the freeway or drive through a blizzard. And we'll get there eventually, but we can start getting some of those benefits right now, given the state of the technology. And then lastly, I guess the other piece is keeping these vehicles in really good shape. The vehicle we're building called the Origin is designed to last 1 million miles, which is four or five times as long as the average car will. And so when this vehicle drives you and it's responsible for your safety, you want to know that every sensor has been inspected, that the vehicle is in good working order and that it's in great shape generally. And so we take on that responsibility and manage this fleet so you know every time you get in one of those cars, it's safe and ready to go.

• 41:43Guy Raz?

  And I should just mention, the Origin is like the, it's sort of like a little bus, a little van and there are seats on that face each other inside and that essentially will be designed as sort of a rideshare vehicle, almost like a bus, but a bus that is sort of... Comes to you.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's in many ways kind of feels like you're using public transit like a train or a bus, but it's door to door. And that's really important for people that are elderly or, you know, disabled or have mobility challenges. Being able to be picked up and dropped off right in front of your house is really the only viable solution, you know, even if you would normally use public transit or other options. And so I think it's just a great solution to have that convenience and that and provide that freedom of mobility to people who really need it.

• 42:33Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another short break, but we'll have more from Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt on the future of self-driving cars in just a moment. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 44:30Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Kyle Vought, co-founder and CEO of the self-driving car company, Cruise. When I told people I was in one of these cars, the first, and you've heard this, the first thing they say is, "Were you scared?" And what's remarkable is, in the first 20 seconds, you're like, "Whoa, this is wild." You're sitting in the back of this car. And within 20 seconds, it's no different than sitting in the back of an Uber. You just don't notice it. You're like on your iPhone or whatever. You're just doing your thing. Or, you know, you're just zoned out. It's taking you to where you need to go. But as you know, and as probably lots of people listening know, there have been mishaps, right?

• 45:10Guy Raz?

  And this is normal with any new technology, but there's been a big focus and emphasis on mishaps. A car that was, you know, the San Francisco police tried to pull a car over and it kept driving. You know, another one-

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Oh, it did pull over. It pulled over.

• 45:24Guy Raz?

  It did pull over, okay. A group of cars that blocked the intersection for some time. There's a lot of attention that gets paid to those mishaps. First of all, what's your reaction to that? I mean, do you get frustrated? Are you like, "God, no one's seeing the good side of this"? Or do you understand why people sometimes focus on those things that cause disruption?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Well, look, I think these vehicles are very clearly, you know, autonomous vehicles. They have sensors on the roof. They say Cruise on the side. And there's no one in them. So they draw a lot of attention. And anytime they do anything that perhaps, you know, if it were a human driver, you would not even really notice, it makes the news. And that's to be expected. But what I think is really important is that we not lose sight of the fact that, you know, we have a real problem today with car accidents. You know, I have a four-year-old son that's on my mind all the time. I have a grandfather I never met from a car accident. And I think as a society, our goal should be progress, and we've fallen behind.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  And I think that self-driving cars are the only thing that I've really seen as a potential solution to car accidents, because humans are always going to be human. They're always going to make mistakes. That's part of being human. These AVs, autonomous vehicles, you know, they're safe. Our track record for safety is excellent. But then, you know, they won't make zero mistakes. And I think they'll make far fewer than we as humans do collectively. And so I think there's a distinction between things that look kind of odd that AVs might do versus the real safety impact that they can have currently and over the long run. And so even these rare things that the people have seen or have popped

• 47:11Speaker 01

  up in the media, they're very rare.

• 47:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Cruises driven 400,000 driverless miles and only there's been a few handfuls of these types of things pop up and nothing, nothing serious when it comes to safety, which is the thing that's most important.

• 47:28Guy Raz?

  But essentially what you're saying is there's, it's impossible to say that there will never be a single incident, even, even once the, the technology is close to perfect. There, there will be incidents, maybe even accidents in the future.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  I think the, the goal here is to make something that's much safer than humans are and ever will be.

• 47:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  And, and that's what we need. That's, that's what we are in dire need of.

• 47:52Guy Raz?

  Tell me a little about what's happening in San Francisco right now. I guess basically between the hours of sort of 10, 10:30 at night and five or 5:30 in the morning, there are what roughly 100 driverless cars driving through the streets of San Francisco waiting to, to get an order or somebody to, to order one to, to get a ride?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So the hours are limited now. I think in a few months it'll be dramatically different. It could even be 24/7. But yeah, it's on the order of 100 cars and in the evening, they all start off in parking lots powered off. A couple of people run around, flip the switch, turn all of them on. And then within minutes, one after the other, they shoot out of this parking lot completely empty and they start scattering around the city, getting ready to pick people up and take them on rides.

• 48:38Guy Raz?

  And why did you guys decide to start in San Francisco? Because you're based there? Or because there, there are other reasons that you want the cars to, to be in that city?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Well, both. The first thing to realize is that we're operating a fleet of vehicles and to actually turn this into a business, which is our goal here ultimately, I mean, we can't provide this, this benefit to communities for free. We have to, have to be able to earn some revenue from it to pay for operations. And you want to fish where the fish are. And so San Francisco is among a handful of major markets in the US where there's existing demand and willingness to pay for ride hail services. So it's one of the obvious first places to start. It's also a really difficult driving environment. It is a major city. It has high pedestrian and cyclist density. It also has hills and fog and many other things that make it challenging for a self-driving

• 49:30Speaker 01

  system to do really well. And so our attitude was, you know, if we want this system to improve at the fastest rate and be ready to go in other cities as quickly as possible, we should subject it to the most challenging environment so that, you know, we know if it works here, the path to unlock other cities and deploy it in other cities is going to be pretty straightforward.

• 49:52Guy Raz?

  Your vehicles use radar and LiDAR and GPS and cameras. And Tesla, for example, which of course is working on its own autonomous vehicles and has a version of it, the full self-driving car, which is in beta and many Tesla users have access to it, they only use cameras. And their argument is that LiDAR is unnecessary, that it's expensive and that actually it can't tell the difference between a floating plastic bag and a speed bump or, you know, or a dog running across the road. And what do you make of that argument?

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good question, and I think a lot of attention gets put on this debate around LiDAR. But if you don't mind, I want to take a step back. I think it's kind of the wrong way to look at it. So our philosophy is, in our business, is we operate robotaxis. And so it only works if they don't have a driver. And so we have optimized for vehicles that are well-equipped, they have all the sensors they need to do that job, like literally no driver, which is a very hard task. And that's where we start for our business model. Our goal, which I believe is also, you know, the goal of Tesla and other companies, is to eventually get this to be low-cost, you know, works everywhere and doesn't need a driver. And if you look at the business model of Tesla, they're just starting from the other

• 51:10Speaker 01

  side, which is these vehicles aren't well-equipped and they don't yet work everywhere and they still need a driver, but they're, but they're starting on a lower cost point. And they're hoping that, you know, maybe they'll build software in the future that will actually let you take the driver out of the car. Similar for us, we already have the drivers out of the car, but we're hoping in the future we can make it cost much, much less. And so it could eventually be on a car that you could go out and buy. And so for LiDAR and cameras, it really just comes down to cost. Does your business model? Enable you to put certain types of sensors on the vehicle. For us, we can do that. And I think in the future, you know, the cost of LiDAR is coming down to the point where they

• 51:52Speaker 01

  basically cost the same as a camera. And so I wouldn't be surprised if in the future you see Teslas with very low cost LiDARs and you might see cruise vehicles with very few, if any, LiDARs. And I think that's just the natural evolution as we all work towards these low cost vehicles that work anywhere and don't need a driver.

• 52:11Guy Raz?

  One of the things that Tesla says about its vehicles is that it has so much data already because there are so many Teslas on the roads all over the United States that they have this neural network that enables their vehicles to be, to have better information. Is that, in your view, a fair point, given how many of those vehicles are deployed on the roads?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  If you're using machine learning in these systems, which most of us are, there's definitely a benefit to having diverse and large data sets. But, you know, the data itself isn't enough to make these systems better. It's actually the ability to analyze that data, extract insights from it, and then use it to improve the product. And so you've got Tesla that maybe has a large amount of low quality data. It's just camera data from a bunch of vehicles. And then you have Cruise and others that have a lot of very high resolution, high quality data from these LiDARs and Radars and other sensors. And we found that we're not really limited by the data we have, even though we've

• 53:13Speaker 01

  driven maybe a tiny fraction of what Tesla has. It's really the ability to turn that data into insights and improvements in the product.

• 53:21Guy Raz?

  Kyle, there are lots of companies working on this technology. I mean, is this sort of a race to victory? Or are all of these companies going to, you know, going to carve out their? You know, they're part of the market in some form. And are you going to be, do you think in the future you're going to, you're going to be seeing Waymo technology and Cruise technology and all these other companies and their technologies deployed in a similar way? Or do you think there's going to be one or two winners?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  It's hard for me to say. What I will say is we've seen already that the quality of the driving experience and the end to end experience, you know, from when you pull out your phone to when the car shows up, has a very large influence on, you know, whether you use that service again. And, um, you know, doing that well, every, every touch point with the customer, whether it's, you know, the, the way, the text that you put in the apps, the way that you communicate with them when, when, uh, they want to change their destination or whatever it is. There's a lot of nuance to getting that, that experience right. You know, outside of the, the core driving, um, quality of the vehicle. It's not the case that all self-driving cars, um, will feel equal when you're inside of them. I think people are going to have a natural preference.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Our view is that, um, you know, the handful of companies that, uh, you know, do this first and start these cycles of iteration and learning are probably going to end up with the best products. And, and it's likely that it becomes harder and harder, um, to catch up as these other companies reach scale. So I don't think this will become a commodity, but I also can't say that it will be one company. I think likely, um, a few will make it, you know, and end up building a product that is competitive with the others on the market at the time, priced appropriately and delivers a really great experience.

• 55:04Guy Raz?

  But you, I guess you would argue that one of your competitive advantages is that you, you can mass produce these cars because GM can mass produce these, these bolts with the autonomous technology built onto it, right? And they can do that from the factory floor.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, that's, that's where the General Motors thing comes in is General Motors is really good at the things that Cruise as a company is not, which is, um, you know, the, the 100 years of institutional knowledge on manufacturing vehicles at scale. But it's more than just building a lot of vehicles. It's also building vehicles that last a really long time.

• 55:40Guy Raz?

  So tell me where this is headed now. Now you're in San Francisco and you're about to expand to Austin and Phoenix. And anyone can download the app, right? And then you can get on the waiting list to get a chance to use it. On average, how long does it take to get off the waiting list?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  We have a lot of demand right now. Demand far outstrips supply, so it can be a while. But for the longest time, for seven or eight years, our focus was just getting the first vehicles to operate as robotaxis without drivers and doing all the work to make these products safe and handle any kind of thing that could go wrong and literally anything. There's a lot of work that goes into that, whether it's a sensor malfunctioning or a computer crashing or even someone damaging the car from the outside. No matter what it is, the vehicle has to behave responsibly in those situations. Now we're at the point where we have the robotaxis out there in a city like San Francisco. And so the technical problems, the software and AI problems are no longer the biggest bottleneck.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Now we're turning our attention back to manufacturing and scaling and building out charging and cleaning and maintenance infrastructure in cities. And so you're going to see us pop up in multiple cities and with more cars and more service area pretty rapidly over the next year or two.

• 56:53Guy Raz?

  So now it's going to Austin and Phoenix. And you can operate like an Uber or Lyft now without a driver in almost anywhere. What is the holdup? Is it getting government regulators to kind of open the floodgates and allow this to happen? Is that the main holdup at this point?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Well, to be frank, there aren't a lot of holdups now, which is good news. In California, we've had to get six permits from a number of different regulatory agencies to do what we're doing now. And we'll need even more to expand. In other jurisdictions and other states, there aren't as many requirements. In some states, there's none at all. And so like I said, we're turning our attention now to spinning up manufacturing, which is something that, it's not something that carries great risk in terms of the timing for that. It just takes a little time to spin up. So I'm pretty optimistic about the plans for expansion. And we don't see huge bottlenecks in the process now that we've built the core technology, started to build up a really good track record around safety.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  You know, and operated in a really major, in a major US city, there are fewer and fewer barriers that stand in front of us at this point.

• 58:07Guy Raz?

  So if you're looking now ahead, right? Let's say 50 years from now. Do you think it's fair to say that every GM car produced in 50 years from now will have autonomous technology on it that will essentially enable every single one of those cars to drive on their own?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And beyond that, I'll say in 50 years' time, a couple of things will have become apparent and likely have occurred. The first is, is that I have very little doubt that self-driving cars will be many, many, many, many times safer than human drivers, to the point where it starts to look a little reckless to let humans drive cars in places where there might be pedestrians and cyclists. I also think for that same reason, we'll look back at today, this time period as being, you know, essentially a dark age where we, as a society, somehow turned a blind eye to the carnage caused by people driving cars in the US.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  We take it for granted today and we kind of ignore it because there's no viable alternative. You can't, you know, just not take your kid to school or not go to the grocery store or not go to work. You have to do these things. And as a society, we're taking on a great deal of risk by putting humans behind the wheels. And so I think 50 years from now, we're going to look back and say, what were we thinking?

• 59:29Guy Raz?

  Kyle, thanks so much.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 59:34Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. You can follow How I Built This on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. The next episode is available right now, or you can binge all of our episodes ad-free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. If you want to follow us on socials, we're at How I Built This on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at Guy Raz on Twitter and at Guy.Raz on Instagram.

• 1:00:04Guy Raz?

  This episode was produced by Catherine Seifer with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Chris Messina, Elaine Coats, Josh Lash, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Kerry Thompson. Our intern is Susanna Brown. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

• 1:00:53Guy Raz?

  I hate driving. I can't wait. I want to, like, put a bed in the back and just sleep.