Google’s A.I. Bonanza + Driverless Car Talk With Cruise C.E.O. Kyle Vogt

At its biggest event of the year, Google announced an avalanche of A. I. product releases: A. I. in search, A. I. that writes emails and A. I. that generates slides. Is Google pulling ahead in the A. I. arms race? And, after years of hype, self-driving cars are finally hitting the streets of American cities. Kevin and Casey take a ride through San Francisco in Banana Slug — an autonomous vehicle from the self-driving car company Cruise. After their ride, they sit down with Cruise’s chief executive, Kyle Vogt, to discuss the role he thinks self-driving cars will play in the future of transportation.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:34Kevin Roose?

  Our Uber is going to get here in four minutes.

• 0:37Casey Newton?

  Perfect.

• 0:38Kevin Roose?

  And that will be my second Uber of the day.

• 0:40Casey Newton?

  Did you Uber here from your house?

• 0:42Kevin Roose?

  To the place where I catch the self-driving car, yes.

• 0:46Kevin Roose?

  Do you want to share our ride and save $3? I personally don't.

• 0:49Casey Newton?

  Can you imagine? You're trying to get to work and two guys get in your car and they're like, we're making a podcast. You would jump out of that car so fast and you'd probably sue Uber.

• 1:00Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that's like the cursed version of Cash Cab.

• 1:08Kevin Roose?

  I thought I was saving $3, but I actually.

• 1:11Casey Newton?

  You're in the Cast Cab.

• 1:14Kevin Roose?

  The Cast Cab.

• 1:15Casey Newton?

  You're in Cast Cab.

• 1:17Kevin Roose?

  Oh, God. Someone is pitching that to Netflix at this speed.

• 1:20Casey Newton?

  Yep, it's happening.

• 1:26Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And you're listening to Hard Fork. This week, Casey reports from Google's AI bonanza. Then we hit the streets of San Francisco in a fully self-driving car. And finally, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt stops by to tell us why the autonomous vehicle revolution is taking so damn long.

• 2:02Kevin Roose?

  Casey, where are you?

• 2:04Casey Newton?

  I am in a booth in the press area at Google I/O at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View.

• 2:11Kevin Roose?

  And what's going on there?

• 2:13Casey Newton?

  I mean, what isn't going on, Kevin? Did you even watch the keynote?

• 2:16Kevin Roose?

  I didn't. I had a conflict. How was it?

• 2:19Casey Newton?

  Well, people are milling around. It's a few hours after Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and recent hard-fort guest.

• 2:28Kevin Roose?

  Friend of the pod.

• 2:28Casey Newton?

  Spoke along with his colleagues for about two hours and laid out everything that the company has been working on over the past year or so. Google I/O is their annual developer conference, where they show off what they've been cooking. And as you might expect, most of what they showed off today had a lot to do with artificial intelligence and how they're going to try to use that in their products going forward. So compared to other years, this felt more eventful.

• 2:58Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I've missed this year's, but I've been to previous Google I/Os. And it's sort of like a combination product reveal and like party. Can you just like describe the pageantry of Google I/O? Because it is like a pretty big budget involved event.

• 3:14Casey Newton?

  Oh, yes. It's quite a spectacle. They've taken over the Shoreline Amphitheater, which is an outdoor concert venue here in Mountain View. They've filled it up with colorful tents and drawings. I wish I could tell you that there were like fire dancers or sword swallows. But it's, it's, it is a tech conference at the end of the day.

• 3:38Kevin Roose?

  This is still a corporate conference.

• 3:39Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 3:40Kevin Roose?

  So then I imagine, as, as happens at most of the things, a series of executives come onto stage and make their presentations about the thing that they are announcing that day. So what were the big announcements from Google I/O?

• 3:54Casey Newton?

  Well, I think the biggest one is just that generative AI results are coming to Google. So things that you might have been using ChatGPT for up until now, you're going to be able to start using in Google itself. So one of the examples they showed off was asking of two national parks, which one would be better for a family with children and a dog? And that's not something that you would normally ask Google, because, you know, the core Google search engine isn't good at parsing that many different variables. But this generative AI model that they have is able to say, well, of these two parks, you might want to go with this one because that one, uh, dogs actually aren't allowed.

• 4:38Kevin Roose?

  Got it. So this is coming to Google search when and for how many people? And like, how drastically do you think it will change what people see when they go to google.com?

• 4:48Casey Newton?

  So they're starting small. It is going to be in the United States first, and it is going to be rolling out in the coming weeks. They're keeping some of the details vague. I think because they want to give themselves the flexibility to slow it way down if something goes disastrously wrong. But my expectation is that I will probably be able to use it within the next few weeks, and I bet you will too.

• 5:15Kevin Roose?

  Wow. Yeah, what could go wrong? Okay, we've got this Google change to updated search results to have more generative AI answers. What else did they announce today?

• 5:27Casey Newton?

  Well, I have to tell you about the thing that I thought was the coolest, because I did have a moment where I, I basically wrote down curse words in my journal because I was, I was so taken aback. Have you ever heard of Project Starline?

• 5:41Kevin Roose?

  No.

• 5:42Casey Newton?

  So this is essentially the fanciest Zoom you have ever seen in your entire life.

• 5:48Kevin Roose?

  I'm intrigued. Go on.

• 5:50Casey Newton?

  Okay. Do you remember the metaverse?

• 5:52Kevin Roose?

  I have a vague recollection that in the year 2022, people were talking about something called the metaverse. Yes.

• 5:58Casey Newton?

  Right. And, and you know, one of the big ideas was what they called telepresence. The idea that people in your life, you would be able to interact with them in a way that felt very realistic. And the main thing about this vision, which was, you know, mostly being advanced by Meta, was that you had to wear a giant helmet on your head. You remember this?

• 6:16Kevin Roose?

  Yes. We in fact did an episode where we actually wore these clunky VR headsets on our heads and did a podcast in the metaverse.

• 6:24Casey Newton?

  You can actually go back in the archives and hear the episode where we have headsets. Okay. Here, here's what I meant to tell you about Project Starline. Imagine if you could have an experience that was 100 times better and you didn't have to wear a headset.

• 6:37Kevin Roose?

  I'm sold. Tell me more.

• 6:39Casey Newton?

  Okay. So I go into this demo and you sit down in front of what looks like a TV, like a big screen TV. Okay. And it has little speakers on the sides and like something on the top that's like clearly some cameras. And right before I had gone into this booth, I had met this man who works on Project Starline for Google and saw him in the flesh. And he's like, I'm just going to go into my booth and you're going to go into your booth and we'll start talking. I was like, great. I go and I sit down and then this man shows up on the screen. And I am not kidding when I say he, the resolution of his face is as high as if he were standing in front of me. Okay. So that was the first thing that was cool. The second thing he does, Kevin, he reaches through the screen and gives me a fist bump.

• 7:23Kevin Roose?

  No, come on.

• 7:24Casey Newton?

  Yes. There is something 3D about this technology. And so you can, it looks like you're reaching through the screen.

• 7:32Kevin Roose?

  No, no, no. I've seen the ring. I don't want anything coming through my screen.

• 7:37Casey Newton?

  The horror movie potential is high. Uh, you know, after he did that, he had an apple. He reaches through the screen and he shows me an apple. He starts turning the apple around and I'm moving my head around and I can like see different sides of the apple. I am not kidding. I have not seen a tech demo that I think was this cool in a super long time. I'm all in.

• 7:59Kevin Roose?

  It, uh, it's amazing. And it also reminds me of like, Do you remember the stories from when like motion pictures first came out and like people would run screaming from the theater because they thought the train was gonna jump out of the screen and like hit them?

• 8:11Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 8:12Kevin Roose?

  You were the person in the theater running from the train.

• 8:15Casey Newton?

  Completely, completely. If you put a horror movie on this thing, you're gonna traumatize people. It was so amazing. So, look, I mean, the technology, of course, I'm asking, I'm like, how expensive is one of these rigs? Well, you'll never believe it, but they don't want to talk about it. But, you know, I was asking around afterwards and they told me that the number one issue with getting this thing into more people's hands is the cost. So let's just assume it's like some astronomical amount to get one of these setups.

• 8:44Kevin Roose?

  Your $5 million fancy Zoom call is maybe not coming to an office near you.

• 8:49Casey Newton?

  But they told me that they have given some of these to Salesforce, T-Mobile and WeWork, and they are testing them at Google. And they told me that right now they're just trying to figure out basically what they're good for. And I'm like, bro, they're good for everything. Like, put it in my house now. This is how I want to talk to my family now and my friend. Like, I'm not even kidding when I say like, you could have like a beer with a friend on a Friday evening and you would truly feel like you hung out with them instead of having a Zoom call. It was, anyway, this thing was amazing.

• 9:19Kevin Roose?

  I gotta try this. I mean, between the fully self-driving car and the $5 million fancy Zoom, I feel like we are really living in the future this week.

• 9:27Casey Newton?

  Truly, we've gotten a glimpse at some of the happier parts of the future, which is, you know, nice to do every once in a while.

• 9:33Kevin Roose?

  But as fun as your fancy Zoom was, it is not, strictly speaking, an example of generative AI. So, bring us, bring us back to generative AI, which was the sort of focal point of this. What else did Google show off that it has been working on in some of those areas?

• 9:52Casey Newton?

  Sure. So they have something called Help Me Write in Gmail. It's exactly what you think it is. You give it a few keywords of what you want to do. It's gonna write your email for you. I think within a year, lots of people are going to be using this to draft lots of emails.

• 10:06Kevin Roose?

  So. And it happens right in the Gmail window itself? Or do you have to like go to an app and write and then copy and paste it into Gmail?

• 10:15Casey Newton?

  It happens right in Gmail. And then on the dorkier side, they showed off this presentation that consisted only of slides. And they took the slides and they said, write speaker notes for the slides. So essentially write the presentation based on the slides, snap your fingers. And it showed off a bunch of things. So think of how lazy you can be as an office worker now who has to deliver presents. You don't even have to write your own speaker notes anymore.

• 10:44Kevin Roose?

  Right. I mean, I can see how this is all potentially very exciting and lucrative for Google. At the same time, some of these features have already existed in Microsoft products now. Is this Google playing catch up with what Microsoft has done with its products and generative AI? Or were there things that happened today that struck you as like, oh, man, they actually are like breaking new ground here?

• 11:07Casey Newton?

  Look, you're absolutely right. Microsoft has been rolling out similar features in their office products. They call their set of features Copilot. Google is calling its features Duets. And there is a lot of tit for tat that's happening here. But the honest answer to your question is that like my life is in Google products, not Microsoft products. And so this stuff is just hitting me harder because I look at this stuff and I already know how I'm going to use it.

• 11:32Kevin Roose?

  Another issue that we talked about, actually with Sundar Pichai, is like Bard just didn't feel very powerful when it was released. You know, by comparison to ChatGPT, it just, it wasn't giving people the kinds of answers and, and problem solving abilities and coding abilities that, that ChatGPT and other generative AI products were. So did they talk about Bard at all at this event today? Are they making it smarter? Is it changing in any way? And do you think it's actually going to be competitive with ChatGPT?

• 12:03Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so a couple of things. Number one, they have added buttons, or I should say, they are adding buttons to this that lets you export the output to Sheets and Docs. And I know what you're thinking, you're like, Casey, that is the most boring thing you've ever said on this podcast, but I'm telling you, like, this is the actual secret sauce of what is going to make this successful. The past six months have just been a lollapalooza of copying and pasting, right? Everybody's going to ChatGPT and they're generating text and they're bringing it over to some other app. And the smart and obvious thing that Google did was said, hey, come use our thing and click one button and we will pre-populate a Google Sheet for you, a Google Doc for you.

• 12:44Casey Newton?

  The second thing that they're doing is they're upgrading the language model that powers it called Palm. And so Palm has now gone from Palm to Palm 2. Now, can I tell you on a query by query basis what that's going to mean for what you're saying? No, but in recent weeks, Google has said a lot about how much better they think BARN now is at coding challenges, at mathematics, which we've talked about in the past, as these models being really bad at doing. So it is improving over time. They are positioning that as a major upgrade.

• 13:15Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 13:16Casey Newton?

  Wait, can I, can I, I want to make a point.

• 13:18Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Casey Newton?

  Kevin, I read a super interesting story today in the information about where Microsoft is at with Bing. And there's a research firm called Yipit Data, and they told the information that Bing's share of global search has grown 0.25% since it launched the new Bing.

• 13:38Kevin Roose?

  That's it?

• 13:39Casey Newton?

  That's it. Meanwhile, the OpenAI Chatbot, which launched six months ago, already draws more visitors on desktop devices than Bing does, and Bing is 14 years old.

• 13:51Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 13:51Casey Newton?

  Now, why am I bringing this up? This is Google's advantage, right, is you're already using Google's products. And so as the... AI starts to creep into it. I think they're just gonna have this tailwind that Microsoft doesn't because people aren't used to using Bing, right? And so to the extent you want to think about this as a horse race, this is where Google really could not just catch up, I think, but pull ahead is that they just have the stuff that everyone's already using.

• 14:19Kevin Roose?

  Huh. It's basically like this idea that where AI is is just as important as how good it is, right? Maybe more important. You know, I was of the mind when these chatbots first came out that all that mattered was the quality of the AI model, that people were really gonna, you know, only use the state of the art thing that they had access to and that, you know, you would want the most powerful AI. But I think there's a convenience trade off too, where like if I'm asking about something that's sort of the kind of question that you don't actually need the state of the art for, you're probably just gonna use the AI that is closest to you, right? The one that is in your Gmail already, or your docs already, or your Microsoft Word already.

• 15:04Kevin Roose?

  And you're not necessarily gonna go shopping for like the most powerful model that can maybe, you know, refactor a code base, but maybe that's not what you're doing anyway.

• 15:13Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. I think the most natural home for all of this stuff is inside the tools and operating system that you're already using. And I think Google realizes that too, and they're moving full speed ahead.

• 15:24Kevin Roose?

  So one recurring theme that we've talked about on this show now for several months is this sense of panic inside Google about the generative AI arms race and the fact that they are, you know, by many accounts, behind OpenAI and Microsoft when it comes to getting these tools into people's hands. You know, obviously they had their code red last year. But I also read a story this week based on a leaked internal Google document that was written by a Google employee and it was called "We Have No Moat." And it was basically an argument that despite all of the progress that Google is making,

• 16:07Kevin Roose?

  despite the fact that they've invented a lot of this fundamental AI technology that's going into these products, this person, this Google employee in this leaked document was basically sounding the alarm and saying, We don't actually have an advantage here and neither does OpenAI because there's this third threat that we don't have a strategy for and that is the open source AI movement. That basically there are these open source models like the ones that have been coming out from stable diffusion for images, more recently like the ones that have come out of Meta, the Llama models and the spin offs of that. And that basically these tools that people are downloading and running on their own

• 16:51Kevin Roose?

  computers, their own hardware are rapidly catching up with the state of the art AI models from Google and OpenAI and other labs. And ultimately that Google is not in a position to stay competitive in a world where everyone can just download AI models and run them on their laptops. So how are you thinking about that threat, the open source threat after listening to this Google event today?

• 17:13Casey Newton?

  Well, so that memo is super interesting and people should check it out, but I just fundamentally disagree with the person who wrote it. Kevin, are you familiar with Linux?

• 17:22Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 17:23Casey Newton?

  Linux is an open source operating system. You could probably install it on your computer right now, except you wouldn't. And you want to know why? Because it's a huge pain in the ass. And then after you install it, you spend the rest of your life wondering, can I install that on Linux? Is there a Linux version of that? That is the open source world, okay? So, you know, for the same reasons that I don't think Linux poses a threat to Microsoft Windows or iOS, I don't think that these open source models pose a threat to Google, at least not in the way that we're talking about, right? For all the reasons that I just said, the underlying technology piece is a huge part of the problem that needs to be solved. We're seeing a lot of progress there. But there's also a product problem.

• 18:08Casey Newton?

  You have to make something that is easy to use, that is pleasant to use, right? And Google, by the nature of the fact that it makes these tools used by billions of people, just has a huge advantage there. Now, look, could someone come along and take a bunch of open source components and make an incredible new company that winds up challenging an incumbent? Yes, absolutely. And Meta in particular has released a bunch of open source stuff, which I think it thinks is going to benefit them hugely by just essentially helping people create a bunch of content that is going to populate Facebook apps. But does the existence of a bunch of open source models running around on phones and laptops mean that people are less likely to use Google search with generative AI? I don't think so.

• 18:51Kevin Roose?

  Right. And what about this other threat that people inside Google have been sounding the alarm on for months now, which is the threat of releasing generative AI to the world before it's safe and harmless? What did Google say today about the safety of its AI tools? And were you reassured that they've actually done what they need to do to make sure these things are safe?

• 19:15Casey Newton?

  Uh, yes and no. Yes, they did talk about it. They talked about their responsible AI principles. It came up several times during the keynote. I was briefed on a few of these things before the event, and everyone I talked to made sure to talk to me about how responsibly they've developed everything. But I do feel like on some fundamental level, nobody really knows if it's safe or not. You know, they've done their tests, they've done their red team exercises, they've tried to identify obvious misuses and to mitigate those. But at the same time, I think that they know that once you give these tools to a billion people, you're just not going to be able to predict users' behavior. So the approach that they're taking is to roll it out slowly. And I do think that if there is some immediate massive obvious harm, they will stop the

• 20:00Casey Newton?

  thing in its tracks and they will pull it off the market. But at this point, basically, everyone I know, including, I think, a lot of high ranking executives at Google, do wish that things would slow down a little, both to give society a chance to adapt to what's happened so far and to give them a chance to just kind of see, okay, like, you can do this with this now. Is there some obvious harm that we missed?

• 20:22Kevin Roose?

  Well, but they're clearly not that interested in slowing down, or they wouldn't be holding events and showing off all the generative AI that they're shoving into their products.

• 20:31Casey Newton?

  That's exactly right. It's a fair criticism. But at the same time, even us, both of us believe that very deeply. And both of us were also like, why is Google moving so slowly on this stuff? They're losing. Right. So everyone talks out of both sides of their mouth on this, I think, except for maybe, you know, some of the most diehard AI safety researchers.

• 20:49Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So I'm curious, just taking sort of a step back at this whole event that you've seen today, what is the vibe there? Is it a company that was caught flat-footed and is now mobilizing everything in its power to catch up with OpenAI and Microsoft? Like, what is the vibe of Google I/O this year? And how are you feeling? Have you changed your mind at all about where the company is headed?

• 21:16Casey Newton?

  So I would say two things about the vibe. One is constant reminders that they've been doing this for a long time. So basically, everything that Google announced was prefaced by a statement that was something like, "In 2017, we did this. In 2019, we released this." And the point that they've tried to make is, "We truly have been laying the groundwork that, you know, you jackals and hyenas in the press who accuse us of being asleep at the wheel are ignoring the fact that we've been laying the foundation for years." So that's kind of the first thing. When it comes to the products themselves, though, Google's vibe is a little bit more understated, right? They're less likely to come out and say, "We're the most path-breaking, innovative company in history." Instead, they're going to tell

• 21:59Casey Newton?

  you, "We've made a thing that we think is really helpful, and we can't wait to show it to you." So that's kind of the vibe. There's a third thing about the vibe that maybe this is more of a tech event thing than a Google thing, but it just really struck me, which is that every time something would be announced during this keynote, there would be, somebody would like scream like, "Woo!", like at the top of it, just like outrageously excited about a development in a language model, followed by laughter from everyone else in the audience, like, "Look at this nerd." And it's such a weird kind of whipsawing between like joy and shame. And you can really only find that at a tech event. And I'm just so glad they're back for that reason.

• 22:41Kevin Roose?

  Well, this is like the tech reporter version of Coachella. This is good stuff. Casey, thank you for attending Google I/O on behalf of the Hard Fork Podcast. Did they announce that they are renaming their chatbot Bard Fork?

• 22:56Casey Newton?

  They did not, but I'm told that Hard Fork is now available on Google Podcasts. So that's an exciting development.

• 23:02Kevin Roose?

  Your $5 million Zoom call from heaven could never approach that level of excitement.

• 23:08Casey Newton?

  Truly.

• 23:12Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, self-driving cars made by crews are now running around the clock in San Francisco. So Casey and I hailed a ride in one to find out if the driverless car revolution we've all been talking about and waiting for for years has finally arrived.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

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• 25:11Kevin Roose?

  Okay, I'm gonna open up the Cruise app. I wanna propose that we go to a coffee shop called Rise and Grind.

• 25:19Casey Newton?

  You know what, that's so great because I think no one exemplifies the Rise and Grind mindset more than we do.

• 25:24Kevin Roose?

  Okay, it's saying, can you meet us on Ashbury Street?

• 25:27Casey Newton?

  We are on Ashbury Street, we're at Ashbury and Waller.

• 25:29Kevin Roose?

  Okay, we're getting picked up in a car called Banana Slug.

• 25:34Casey Newton?

  They all have names?

• 25:35Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I guess.

• 25:36Casey Newton?

  Hmm, you know Banana Slug is the mascot of UC Santa Cruz.

• 25:40Kevin Roose?

  Okay, it's giving me some reminders, it says use your phone to unlock the car.

• 25:44Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 25:45Kevin Roose?

  Sit in one of the backseats and cameras will record inside the car for safety and support, so no funny business.

• 25:51Casey Newton?

  It doesn't say anything about horseplay, hijinks? Antics? Are antics allowed?

• 25:57Kevin Roose?

  Eh, I don't know. Unclear. So I should say, I've never actually been in a self-driving car without a driver in the driver's seat.

• 26:06Casey Newton?

  I haven't either, no, I haven't either. Are you scared?

• 26:09Kevin Roose?

  I'm a little scared, although I've heard that these things can only go like 30 miles an hour, which makes me feel a little better.

• 26:15Casey Newton?

  That's exactly right, and if we get in a crash, let's think how good that'll be for the podcast. Can you imagine?

• 26:21Kevin Roose?

  Oh, I think I see it.

• 26:21Casey Newton?

  Oh, I think I see it too. It's white, headlights are on.

• 26:26Kevin Roose?

  And it's got two little like nubbins on top, those are the sensors.

• 26:30Casey Newton?

  Let's see if it makes a complete stop at the stop sign.

• 26:34Casey Newton?

  It did.

• 26:36Kevin Roose?

  Okay, we've got a car, it's pulling up.

• 26:38Casey Newton?

  Hi.

• 26:39Kevin Roose?

  Hi.

• 26:40Casey Newton?

  There's Banana Slug.

• 26:42Kevin Roose?

  Banana Slug, okay.

• 26:43Casey Newton?

  It says Banana Slug.

• 26:44Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so now we have to go get in the car.

• 26:50Kevin Roose?

  It's happening. There's no driver, there's like a little Plexiglas partition, like you see in taxis.

• 26:58Casey Newton?

  Well, they anticipated the first thing that I wanted to do, which was climb into the front seat. But you can't actually do that in this car.

• 27:05Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so I have to buckle up before it'll let me start, good safety feature.

• 27:11Casey Newton?

  There's like a touchscreen that we have to confirm that everyone is buckled up before Banana Slug will start moving.

• 27:18Kevin Roose?

  I gotta say, I'm a little nervous.

• 27:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Kevin Roose?

  How's this gonna go? Okay, so now I just push start.

• 27:25Casey Newton?

  Start this ride.

• 27:26Kevin Roose?

  And it's gonna take us, okay.

• 27:31Kevin Roose?

  Let's cruise, it says.

• 27:33Speaker 05

  A few things to remember during your ride.

• 27:37Speaker 05

  Please keep your seatbelt buckled.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  Always keep your hands and arms inside.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  For crew support, press the square button on the ceiling above you. To end your ride early, press the larger round button on the ceiling and we'll pull over. Enjoy your ride.

• 27:57Kevin Roose?

  Okay, and now we're just going. Holy cow.

• 28:01Casey Newton?

  There's a cute little tablet on the back that is showing us our route. It says we're gonna be dropped off in 12 minutes. We could, if we wanted, we could play a trivia game or listen to the radio.

• 28:14Kevin Roose?

  Do you wanna do either of those things?

• 28:16Casey Newton?

  I would like to play trivia and see who's better. Okay, number one.

• 28:20Kevin Roose?

  We can't get distracted.

• 28:22Casey Newton?

  And get into the rhythm with 10 questions about music. Which band did not originate in the Bay Area? Lynyrd Skynyrd, Green Day, or Jefferson Airport? Obviously Lynyrd Skynyrd.

• 28:31Kevin Roose?

  Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sweet Home Alabama.

• 28:32Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Kevin Roose?

  I just think it's funny, like, within 30 seconds of entering the car, you were like, "I no longer care about the driverless car that I'm in. With no driver, I wanna play trivia."

• 28:41Casey Newton?

  It is sort of, okay, every time I've been in one of these before, I think, as with you, there has been a safety driver in the front seat. And there is something a little spooky about just watching the steering wheel turn itself.

• 28:51Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 28:51Casey Newton?

  Like, it sort of feels like you're on, at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, you know?

• 28:54Kevin Roose?

  Or like watching a player piano.

• 28:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:58Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so it's, we're going downhill now, coming to a stop sign at the bottom of the hill. So, we're turning right, we're waiting for a pedestrian to cross the crosswalk.

• 29:09Casey Newton?

  And this, this person probably has no idea that this car is driving itself.

• 29:12Kevin Roose?

  There's a, a, a man walking a dog. Oh, please don't hit the dog.

• 29:15Casey Newton?

  Don't hit the dog.

• 29:18Kevin Roose?

  Oh, oh, okay.

• 29:19Casey Newton?

  That dog just looked the car straight in the eye, I think on some level it knew.

• 29:24Kevin Roose?

  We're not getting as many weird looks from pedestrians as I thought we might.

• 29:28Casey Newton?

  Well, here's what, because these cars have been driving around the city for years at this point. And I think, you know, I don't blink when I see one anymore either, although it is true that, you know, often they do have a driver in the front seat and this one doesn't.

• 29:38Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Oh, God, we're crossing the double yellow line.

• 29:41Casey Newton?

  That was super interesting. What just, okay, so we're, we were sort of driving, uh, straight and the, the car just sort of veered into the left lane for no apparent reason.

• 29:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Casey Newton?

  So that was a surprise.

• 29:51Kevin Roose?

  Going very slowly and, and we did not hit anything, but that was a...

• 29:55Casey Newton?

  It was like, it was like the kind of move you do when you, when you're stuck in traffic and you want to peek out to see how much traffic is ahead of you. Like it kind of felt like that.

• 30:02Kevin Roose?

  Or like a, like a pothole that you're trying to avoid.

• 30:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah. But like, look at, what, do you see the steering wheel is like rotated all the way to the left for some reason?

• 30:10Kevin Roose?

  It is strange though that they have the steering wheel. Like,

• 30:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 30:13Kevin Roose?

  You don't, technically, like in a fully self-driving car, you don't need a steering wheel.

• 30:18Casey Newton?

  Unless, can these things maybe be like remotely taken over by customer support? Like, could, could like the CEO of Cruise take over the wheel if he wanted to?

• 30:25Kevin Roose?

  Oh, oh, God. Oh, God. We like actually just almost got driven into a sign.

• 30:31Casey Newton?

  This thing just made the most erratic sort of leftward squiggle into a like median, basically, and then quickly corrected, but it definitely made no sense whatsoever.

• 30:43Kevin Roose?

  Oh, uh,

• 30:44Casey Newton?

  Yep. This is a self-driving taxi. I know, I know. Did you see that? What happened, right? Yeah, well, how it swerved to the left. Yeah. He, you know, like, yeah, so you probably want to report that thing. We're going to. We're gonna bring this to justice. Yeah, there for me, okay? Yeah, okay. Thank you. That was a close win. This guy's on to us.

• 31:04Kevin Roose?

  I gotta say, he had his kid next to him, like in the passenger seat, and the kid just looked really jealous.

• 31:08Casey Newton?

  He was so jealous.

• 31:09Kevin Roose?

  He wanted to be in the car.

• 31:10Casey Newton?

  How excited are you as a parent to like never have to drive your kid to soccer practice in five years?

• 31:15Kevin Roose?

  Honestly, I'm like, I don't know if my kid is gonna ever drive. Like, he's young enough now. Like, you know, I, I would, I would bet that he never gets a driver's license.

• 31:24Casey Newton?

  Really?

• 31:24Kevin Roose?

  Or that if he does, it's like a, it's like a novelty. It's like doing, uh, you know, equestrian or something.

• 31:29Casey Newton?

  Right. Well, frankly, that's for the best. I heard he just got into a huge tricycle accident, so I should trust him on the road.

• 31:38Kevin Roose?

  You seem much more relaxed than I am right now. I'm like finding it hard to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

• 31:44Casey Newton?

  I mean, I will like this feels like the future to me. It just seems so obvious to me that within a couple of years, like people are going to be taking these taxis. They're never going to think twice about the fact that the car is driving itself. They're just going to be on their phones. They're going to be playing trivia, playing the radio.

• 31:58Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think for a lot of people, they sort of gave up on driverless cars, or at least I did. Like I, you know, several years ago, it was like all you could hear was like, these things are coming. They're going to be everywhere. And then they didn't. And a lot of the companies that had invested billions of dollars into developing self-driving cars sort of retrenched on those efforts. Like Uber sold off its self-driving car division. Lyft sort of closed down its self-driving car project. Ford had a big investment in self-driving cars that it sort of shuttered. And so Cruise and Waymo, which is the thing that spun out of Google, they're really the sort of last two standing in San Francisco at least.

• 32:37Casey Newton?

  Well, I never gave up on self-driving cars for one main reason, which is I just always saw them everywhere in San Francisco. In my neighborhood, I see a self-driving car every single day, endlessly cruising around, gathering data. And I just always believed at some point this is going to turn into a taxi. And indeed, here we are, we're in a taxi.

• 32:58Kevin Roose?

  Yep, that's true.

• 33:00Casey Newton?

  It's going very slowly due to traffic.

• 33:02Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, we're in.

• 33:03Casey Newton?

  We should say we're in rush hour.

• 33:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, we're in rush hour in San Francisco, so things are crawling.

• 33:08Casey Newton?

  Now, do you have any way of telling Banana Slug to floor it? Yeah, you know, I'm going to say if I went, if I'm, if I'm getting this as a taxi, I want it to be going the speed limit and maybe even two to three miles faster, not six miles.

• 33:21Kevin Roose?

  No, I'm fine with this.

• 33:22Casey Newton?

  Really?

• 33:23Kevin Roose?

  That honestly, the like experience we had a couple of blocks ago of like almost getting plowed into the median that I'm fine with us going as slow as this thing, as Banana Slug needs to go.

• 33:32Casey Newton?

  Do you think it heard that guy and was like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to.

• 33:35Kevin Roose?

  Wait, why is it like, oh, it's a, it's a turning, okay, we're turning.

• 33:38Casey Newton?

  Right, we must be getting close to coffee.

• 33:42Kevin Roose?

  Oh, it slows down for the speed bump. That's kind of impressive, actually.

• 33:46Casey Newton?

  Really? This feels like that would be easy to see.

• 33:50Kevin Roose?

  I love how this thing that we both had never experienced until 10 minutes ago. And now you're like, I'm, I'm over it. Okay, now we're making a left at a four way stop sign.

• 34:02Casey Newton?

  And once again.

• 34:03Kevin Roose?

  Oh, we're doing a little game of like footsie with the, with the other car.

• 34:06Casey Newton?

  Extremely cautious at the stop signs, which I guess is what you want.

• 34:10Kevin Roose?

  And we did just get like a horrified glare from the person who just saw that.

• 34:15Casey Newton?

  They're not happy.

• 34:15Kevin Roose?

  There's no one driving this car.

• 34:17Casey Newton?

  Talking to us now.

• 34:18Kevin Roose?

  So it's saying it's arriving soon. Okay, we're here.

• 34:22Casey Newton?

  We're here.

• 34:24Kevin Roose?

  I got, I'm, I'm, I'm impressed. Are you impressed?

• 34:26Casey Newton?

  I'm impressed. Let's see if it lets us out.

• 34:31Kevin Roose?

  Banana slug, let us go, please. Says you have to solve a puzzle before I'll let you.

• 34:37Casey Newton?

  Answer me these questions three.

• 34:44Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 34:47Kevin Roose?

  Arrived at our drop off spot. Here we are.

• 34:49Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 34:49Kevin Roose?

  Okay, now it wants a, it wants a rating. How would you rate that one to five stars?

• 34:53Casey Newton?

  Hmm, three.

• 34:54Kevin Roose?

  Three? No, really?

• 34:55Casey Newton?

  It would have been much easier and faster to take an Uber.

• 34:58Kevin Roose?

  You know, I'm gonna overrule you. I'm gonna give that a five star review.

• 35:01Casey Newton?

  Okay, wow.

• 35:02Kevin Roose?

  I was, I mean, we're safely at our destination and maybe I have low expectations, but that's sort of all I could hope for.

• 35:08Casey Newton?

  True.

• 35:09Kevin Roose?

  Okay, let's go get some coffee.

• 35:12Speaker 06

  We're hearing you guys.

• 35:13Casey Newton?

  Hi.

• 35:13Speaker 06

  Seeing those things.

• 35:15Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  Or in their training.

• 35:18Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Kevin Roose?

  Hey, we're making a podcast. Can I, can I interview you about this?

• 35:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:23Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so what's your, what's your name?

• 35:25Speaker 06

  My name is Glenn.

• 35:26Kevin Roose?

  Glenn.

• 35:27Casey Newton?

  Glenn.

• 35:27Kevin Roose?

  And Glenn is sitting, a nice man sitting next to us here at the coffee shop. And Glenn, you were just saying something about self-driving cars.

• 35:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I used to be a taxi driver.

• 35:36Casey Newton?

  Oh, really?

• 35:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I wonder how those are gonna affect taxi drivers, because they're already under enough pressure from Uber and Lyft.

• 35:45Kevin Roose?

  For sure.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  For years, I know when I was driving cab, they really cut into our business. And you know, it was, it was hard to make a living.

• 35:52Kevin Roose?

  Do you get like, what do you feel when you see a self-driving car on the street?

• 35:56Speaker 06

  Suspicion, you know, in terms of safety factor. Uh, you know, I've been driving cars for like 50 years. And the other day I was over by my apartment and I was crossing the street. And I saw one of these cars, couldn't make a turn. Onto the street. So I thought, you know, I'm going to stand in front of this thing.

• 36:18Kevin Roose?

  You actually stood in front of the the car?

• 36:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:20Kevin Roose?

  To stop it from making the turn?

• 36:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:23Kevin Roose?

  Why's that?

• 36:24Speaker 06

  I wanted to see if it would stop. I left myself enough room to, if it didn't, to get the hell out of the way.

• 36:30Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 06

  But it did stop.

• 36:31Kevin Roose?

  Oh, good. That's why you're here.

• 36:33Casey Newton?

  That's why you're here with us today.

• 36:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So I was impressed with that.

• 36:38Kevin Roose?

  Well, we're we're about to interview the CEO of the company whose self-driving car that was, Cruise. So what should we ask him from a former San Francisco cab driver?

• 36:49Speaker 06

  One, what's the expected impact on cab drivers in terms of making a living? Two, how is it going to impact the Lyft and Uber drivers? And many of those people depend on that income for a living. And I I wonder how they intend to address that. And also, how are they going to set the rates? So I'm real curious about that.

• 37:13Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah. It it's, you know, interesting to me to think that like sort of first Uber and Lyft came along and disrupted folks like yourself who are driving cabs. But now it seems like the self-driving cars are going to come along and disrupt all the people who are, you know, driving these Ubers.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  I know. It it seems like it's going to disrupt the cab industry. It's going to disrupt Lyft and it's gonna in it disrupt Uber.

• 37:35Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Kevin Roose?

  I remember talking with the president of Lyft, John Zimmer, about this many years ago. Because I sort of asked this, like, said, like, what happens to all the drivers when the cars just drive themselves? And he says, well, they can be, you know, they can be, they can do other things. Like, maybe there's a a self-driving restaurant and they can be servers in the self-driving restaurant that sort of like help you get your food as you're driving along the street. So he had other ideas.

• 37:58Speaker 06

  I think that's ridiculous. I I don't buy that. That does not.

• 38:02Kevin Roose?

  Oh, look, there's, Ren, there's another self-driving car.

• 38:07Kevin Roose?

  They're all over the place.

• 38:08Casey Newton?

  Sometimes I feel like they hear us talking about them and they like to swing over and, you know, check it out.

• 38:15Speaker 06

  So that's basically my feelings about the whole situation. So we'll see how it shakes. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I'm not diametrically opposed to it. But at the same time, there is some serious economic impacts on other people who drive for a living. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We'll ask him about that.

• 38:32Kevin Roose?

  That's great.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  Um, thank you.

• 38:33Kevin Roose?

  Well, what a stroke of fortune we bumped into you.

• 38:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 06

  We'll be right back.

• 39:13Speaker 00

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• 40:54Kevin Roose?

  This is our podcast studio and this is Casey.

• 40:56Casey Newton?

  Hi.

• 40:56Kevin Roose?

  Hey, good morning.

• 40:57Casey Newton?

  How's it going? Nice to see you.

• 40:59Kevin Roose?

  Kyle Vogt, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 41:00Speaker 08

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 41:02Kevin Roose?

  So, we wanted to talk to you because Cruz has just recently announced that you are operating 24/7 in San Francisco, and we actually just, this morning, took a ride in one of your cars named Banana Slug. I don't know if you know that one, but one of--

• 41:17Speaker 08

  I've seen Banana Slug out there on the road.

• 41:19Kevin Roose?

  What was the naming convention? Like, how did you decide on the names for the cars?

• 41:23Speaker 08

  I mean, one of our interns named one of the early AVs, like, for fun. I think the theme then was bird names, and that stuck. And so, we really leaned into it and let people suggest names, and I have no idea where Banana Slug came from, but it's not the weirdest one that's out there.

• 41:37Kevin Roose?

  What's the weirdest one that's out there?

• 41:39Speaker 08

  Uh, I'd have to come up with a list, but people have a very emotional attachment to the first AV that they rode in. Like, Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, her first car was Tostada, and every time she comes to San Francisco, she's like, "How's Tostada doing?"

• 41:52Kevin Roose?

  Actually, it's been a rough few months in the shop for repairs, so we don't like to talk about it. Sensitive subject. So, Casey, what were your impressions of the ride?

• 42:02Casey Newton?

  Well, I mean, overall, it's super fun. This was the first ride that we had taken in self-driving cars where there was not a safety driver. You know, we've each probably taken a half a dozen or so rides in self-driving cars in the past, but there's always been a human, and there is something amazing about just seeing the steering wheel turn itself. You know, Kevin was sort of likening it to a player piano, you know, sort of watching that for the first time. You know, at the same time, it made some herky-jerky movements, and it drove like 6 miles per hour slower than the speed limit, so we do have some questions.

• 42:32Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and it did almost swerve us into a median at one point, which led the human driver on the other side of us to roll down his window and say, "You guys should report that thing." So, here we are, reporting it.

• 42:43Speaker 08

  You guys are hilarious. You are moving through San Francisco in a technical marvel that took you across the city with no one behind the seat, like probably half an hour or more. And you found like three relatively small things. Meanwhile-

• 42:57Kevin Roose?

  This is what I told Casey, because he wanted to give it three stars at the end of the ride. And I was like, we got safely to our destination during rush hour in a car with no driver. That's a five star review.

• 43:08Casey Newton?

  I'm just trying to help them improve.

• 43:09Speaker 08

  No, no, I appreciate that.

• 43:10Casey Newton?

  But you're right, it is a technical marvel. Yeah. Yeah, we want to talk about that.

• 43:13Kevin Roose?

  So first of all, I want to ask, like, what does it mean that you're operating 24/7 in San Francisco now? Because as we discovered when we were trying to set up this ride, it's actually like not everyone can just whip out their phones and start hailing autonomous drives.

• 43:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we've been rolling things out in phases. Our approach is, we call it envelope expansion, where we operate in a small area, we basically have done the analysis, we believe it's ready, and then we operate there, we check all the indicators, when everything is green, we expand it. And so this can refer to the area, whether it's the full city or a part of the city. It could refer to the hours of the day, or the number of people that we allow on it. So right now, we're operating 24/7. There are a small number of cars that are out there all the time, available to employees. And then over the next, you know, a few weeks or months, we'll open that up to everyone else.

• 43:58Casey Newton?

  And how do prices compare right now to what people might be used to paying for like an Uber?

• 44:03Speaker 08

  Pretty similar. And in fact, if for whatever reason the AV takes a longer route, we charge you for what, you know, the route should have been.

• 44:09Casey Newton?

  Got it.

• 44:10Speaker 08

  Today, though, we're pricing it at parity with ride share as it exists. And we expect that, well, Rideshare right now, it's already about as cheap as it's going to get. Like, you know, these companies have optimized it, and they've found that basically the minimum amount of money they can pay the drivers to keep drivers on the road. But that's limited by the cost of a human wage. Self-driving cars don't have the human, so as we drop the cost of the technology and the cost of operating these cars, and increase the size of the fleet so it gets more efficient, we can get way, way, way below the cost of what exists today. And we also know from the data that people who use Rideshare are very price sensitive. They want to save a buck on that ride.

• 44:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 08

  What that means is when you drop the cost a little bit, the number of people using Rideshare as their primary mode of transportation is going to go up, which we're excited about because I think it helps with congestion and traffic in cities.

• 44:58Kevin Roose?

  So the last time I really paid attention, close attention to the self-driving car market was in 2017, 2018. At the time, there was a huge wave of sort of hype and excitement about driverless cars. Uber was investing tons of money into it. Lyft was telling people that rolling restaurants, self-driving hospitality vehicles were just a couple of years away. And Casey and I both went on a number of rides at that time. And the line that we got then was like, yes, they only work on a predetermined route during certain hours now, but just wait a couple of years, they'll be everywhere. So we waited a couple of years. And with the exception of a couple of cities, they're not everywhere.

• 45:39Kevin Roose?

  So what happened between, let's say, five years ago and now to make you convinced that these vehicles are ready for prime time? Is it some like technical breakthrough that made them safer and more reliable? Or is it just that you've had more time to kind of work out some of the kinks?

• 45:55Speaker 08

  I want to answer that in two ways. First of all, they are scaling up rapidly and appearing in more cities now. Like, that's starting to happen. And so we're on the verge of that rapid scale. We launched two new cities last year. There's going to be a lot more big announcements and news on expansion this year. So why did that just happen now instead of five years ago? Two things. First of all, when you have a person behind the wheel and they're in charge of taking over in all those tricky edge cases, you know, the last 1% of the problem where the system isn't ready, 99% of the time, it feels like it's done. And so you can take an investor or a potential partner or someone on those rides and they're like, oh, this is here. We need to invest now, like throw all the money at it. And that went crazy. It was like a gold rush. Like maybe like crypto a couple of years ago

• 46:39Speaker 08

  or probably like AI and large language models right now. Maybe people are a little more excited about that than they should be. And then the rest of the time between then and now was the hard work to continuously grind away at those edge cases, that last 1% of the problem, until you can safely remove that human out of the car. And that's just what it took.

• 46:57Kevin Roose?

  It really was mostly a data collection issue then.

• 47:00Speaker 08

  Data collection was a piece of it, but there's just a lot of engineering challenges that go into things like, what if someone leaves a car door open after they get dropped off? Or like, you know, what happens if the lane markers have been repainted and there's a police officer waving around traffic? What's the car supposed to do? Like, these things that don't happen that often, but when they do, the car just can't sit there. You actually have to find a way through it.

• 47:20Casey Newton?

  So wait, what does happen if somebody doesn't close the door at the end of a ride?

• 47:23Speaker 08

  We just launched this last week. We have auto-closing doors. The doors will just like, someone logs in with a camera, you know, when the vehicle says, hey, my door is open. They check that the coast is clear and then the door will slam shut.

• 47:35Kevin Roose?

  What other things did you see in your testing? What other edge cases have you seen that maybe threw you for a loop or caught you by surprise?

• 47:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot of things that are weird, like situations. You know, we see sideshows in San Francisco when people will block down an intersection and just do donuts in the middle of an intersection. Didn't have that in our test cases around, right? Had to think through that. A lot of stuff with, you know, swarms of people rollerblading in the street or segways or bikes. But that stuff in a way is kind of expected, like you'd expect a large city to have a diversity of stuff, including some weird things. What I didn't see coming is that a lot of people would essentially risk their lives and try jumping in front of a moving car to see if it's gonna stop.

• 48:19Casey Newton?

  We literally talked to someone today who did this.

• 48:21Kevin Roose?

  Yes, we were at a coffee shop and there was this guy there who heard us talking about self-driving cars. And he says, oh, I'm a retired cab driver in San Francisco and starts telling us about how he once jumped in front of a self-driving cars to see if it would stop.

• 48:34Casey Newton?

  And great news, it stopped.

• 48:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, it's terrifying to me because like we want to improve road safety, not create situations where people are, you know, creating new opportunities for themselves to get hurt. So I hope that this is a short-lived thing and that we all understand that these cars are gonna get, are gonna stop and don't need to be, you know, being reckless like that.

• 48:52Casey Newton?

  Have you ever thought about just like putting like a, like some sort of device that like shoots a beanbag at people if they're?

• 48:57Speaker 08

  We thought about water guns. Maybe those like exploding ink things if you try to like, yeah.

• 49:01Casey Newton?

  Like you're trying to rob a bank. I tell you, if that happened to you, that'd be the last time you ever messed with a cruise robot taxi.

• 49:09Kevin Roose?

  I want to ask a series of questions about safety because I think this is first and foremost on people's minds. And in San Francisco, most of the rides, maybe the vast majority of rides go off without a hitch, but there have been some incidents. Earlier this year, officials in San Francisco sent letters to state regulators asking them to either halt or slow the expansion of cruise and Waymo because some of the cars had blocked traffic or gotten in the way of emergency vehicles. How did these incidents affect public support for driverless cars?

• 49:39Speaker 08

  You know, when there aren't that many driverless cars and the only thing you hear about are these relatively rare incidents, remember, we've gone almost 2 million driverless miles at this point. You know, on a typical night, we'll do 1,000 rides for people. There's a lot of stuff happening without incident. You know, when we do have a stumble or a messed up, you know, we'll apologize for that. Or if appropriate, we'll do a recall and inform members of the public about what we changed to improve these systems. And so, you know, if that's the only thing you hear about, I think that's going to slow things back. But on the other hand, at this point, we have tens of thousands of people who have ridden in this and are starting to question, okay, is this what's happening all the time? Or is this, you know, sort of the rare events that get sensationalized and picked up and get lots of coverage? And our view is that over time, I think people will, you know, start to see more that these

• 50:23Speaker 08

  things do happen, but they're rare. And I think more importantly, we're starting to see evidence that the presence of these vehicles on the road actually is having a positive impact on road safety, and that's priority number one for us.

• 50:34Kevin Roose?

  These cars, you know, not on our ride, thankfully, but in some cases, they are making very high stakes decisions. Like, do you swerve, you know, out of the way of an oncoming car if it means swerving into another car? If it, you know, means choosing between hurting one passenger or maybe the driver of a different car? So this is the classic trolley problem where you, you know, have to decide who to run over in a hypothetical trolley. But you're actually dealing with a real version of this with your car. So is there any programming in your cars that has to sort of make decisions about which humans to protect in the event of an accident and which not to? How are you approaching these more philosophical debates that you actually have to then build into real products?

• 51:17Speaker 08

  So, fair question. It's not one we've seen yet in 2 million miles of driverless operation or in the several million that we did in testing before we went driverless, but I accept that it is a possibility. Right now, we program based on trying to minimize injury on the road. And so that generally means like we want to give more space to pedestrians and vulnerable road users, even if that means getting closer to a vehicle. And that's because occupants in a vehicle generally have better protection mechanisms like airbags and T-belts and other things than people on the road. So that's a good starting point. And that generally has Has led to good performance and good decision making. We have not, because there hasn't been a need to engage in sort of these ethical philosophical debates on like, you know, if you are in a situation where it's equally, you know, necessary to go one way or the other.

• 52:02Speaker 08

  Which one are you going to do? Which lever are you going to pull? Because the reality is in almost all the situations we've come across so far, there's a clear choice that you can make that minimizes, you know, risk of injury. And it hasn't really been a choice that we need to make. But what I think people should know is that we're using all the best research that exists to try to make these cars as safe as they can be on the road, recognizing that there are situations where there will be collisions and it's unavoidable.

• 52:26Kevin Roose?

  One of the things that I've been struggling with is figuring out what our societal fault tolerance is for self-driving cars. I think if you had asked me 10 years ago, you know, when will society accept self-driving cars? I think I would have said, you know, they just need to be safer on average than human drivers, right? If they cause a few fewer crashes or fatalities every year, then society will say that's a good thing. It seems like from the evidence we have so far, like it's actually got to be much better than a human for society to say, okay, I want to get into that thing. How do you think about society's sort of fault tolerance for driverless cars? And, you know, does a self-driving car need to be 100 times safer than a human driver

• 53:11Kevin Roose?

  before we will feel safe all riding them every day?

• 53:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, look, I think it's a, it's a really interesting philosophical debate. And I'll tell you, there's a, there's a bunch of different lenses to try to look through to come up with an answer. One is what do our federal safety regulators look at? And when it comes to any new, you know, technology, they're looking for unreasonable risk and aggregate improvement on, you know, road safety. Even our Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, was out there saying exactly the problem you highlighted. Like even if robots do result in far fewer, you know, people dying on our roadways, even a small number of them is going to, you know, have people go nuts. And I guess the last way to look at it is if you forget the fact that there is no person in the car, but think about it like, you know, segmenting different groups of the population, old drivers from young drivers or other things like, you know, if, if old drivers

• 53:59Speaker 08

  Are 50% worse than the new drivers like, you know, how do we feel about that? You know, and I think the same could be said for just a different category or grouping of drivers. So I think where we're going to land on this is that we want safer roads and it's a really interesting thing to talk about now when humans and robots are maybe relatively close in performance. But over the next couple of years, you know, given the rate of improvement that these systems have had, you know, talking about five years ago, they weren't ready yet. Now they're out there and scaling. I think this is going to be a conversation that's in the rear view mirror because they're going to be so much better than humans and we're not even going to have this debate.

• 54:34Casey Newton?

  And when you say rear view mirror, is that kind of a self-driving car joke?

• 54:37Speaker 08

  That was a good automotive pun. I have too many of those programmed into my head right now.

• 54:42Casey Newton?

  Yeah, Kevin, I have to say like, I disagree with you because I think that the minute that Kyle can get me across town for $3, like, I'm not looking up the safety report for a cruise. I'm saying that is the cheapest way to get from point A to point B. And if the thing shows up with three wheels, I'm still getting inside because it'll probably be fine. Don't you think most people are going to be that way?

• 55:01Kevin Roose?

  I don't know. If you got on a plane and it was, there was no pilot in the cockpit, even if you knew intellectually that that plane is just as safe as a human, you know, sitting in the cockpit.

• 55:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Kevin Roose?

  I think you're still thinking twice about getting on that plane.

• 55:15Casey Newton?

  I think as well, and look, it is different for me because I have been driving in these things for like seven, now admittedly, only a handful of times, but because it's gone back so far in my mind now that it weirdly has lost the novelty a bit, which as you sort of alluded to earlier, is an incredible moment, right? Just in like the history of technology that a thing that is driving itself feels a little bit boring. But I truly think that after you take your first self-driving car taxi and it's basically fine, you're just going to take them a lot more. You don't think that's true?

• 55:45Kevin Roose?

  I don't think so. I think humans are not perfect risk assessors, right? Like, that's why, you know, we should all be a lot more scared to drive than fly because flying is much safer statistically, but a lot more people have fears of being in an airplane. So I just think you're working on a problem that is as much about psychology and human sort of comfort as it is about technology. Would you agree or disagree with that?

• 56:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, we, you know, there will be an interesting test for society to see what happens the first time that a driverless car gets into an incident and someone gets hurt severely hurt. It's not a question of if, but when. And, you know, even with all the data showing evidence of of positive safety impact and other things, we as a society will have a choice at that moment to decide whether we ban something that could potentially save tens of thousands of lives per year, you know, over the next several years, or we decide that this is, you know, this is a horrible situation and something awful, but this is something that we need and we're going to learn from this and keep moving forward. And I don't think that's really something that I can say as a CEO of a company in the in the space. It's really going to be up to, you know, our society and

• 56:54Speaker 08

  our regulators, you know, and our government decide what we do in that moment.

• 56:58Casey Newton?

  When we were riding in Banana Slug today, I had the strong feeling that Banana Slug has been told, please be more cautious than the average car. Is my sense accurate?

• 57:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's it's easier to drive cautiously and slow than really fast and assertive while also maintaining safety. And so as the performance of these systems improve, you'll see them start to drive in more human like ways in terms of assertiveness. There are moments when cruise AVs already are at that point. And there are moments when they're around, you know, a mid block crosswalk or, you know, a narrow street with lots of parked cars where it's hard to see around the corner, that they'll go slower than a human. We're working on that, but, you know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna move faster than we're comfortable.

• 57:40Kevin Roose?

  You mentioned a second ago that you're seeing evidence that your driverless cars are having a positive impact on road safety. Can you just flesh that out a little bit? Like, are your vehicles safer on average than a human driver? Or are they less safe or about the same?

• 57:56Speaker 08

  Well, I'll start by saying it's a hard question to answer. Like, what exactly is human driving and under what circumstances? What we have done is partnered with VTTI and UMTRI, which are these transportation research institutes, and tried to produce an estimate of how well the human drivers drive in San Francisco specifically.

• 58:12Kevin Roose?

  Horrible.

• 58:14Speaker 08

  I mean, actually. Yes, because you know, the commonly cited national statistic on collisions is off by a factor of 10 to 20 compared to what we see in San Francisco. And so what we have seen so far, and this is still early, it's only across, you know, we analyzed our first million miles of driving, so that's a lot, but also not a lot, is that the AVs are getting involved in far fewer crashes, 50% as many crashes compared to what we observe humans doing in a similar driving environment. What's more exciting, though, is the more severe crashes, that would be more likely to lead to injury, the AVs are doing significantly better at avoiding those, so I think something like 70% fewer.

• 58:49Casey Newton?

  I think you could probably drive way safer than a human just by like never going 70 miles an hour.

• 58:53Kevin Roose?

  Right, and never checking your phone while you're driving. I mean, that was my main thought about San Francisco, why it has worse drivers than most cities, because everyone's constantly checking for new Blue Sky invite codes or whatever.

• 59:04Casey Newton?

  That really should be your whole marketing campaign, is like, cruise robot taxi, check your phone all you want.

• 59:08Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 59:09Speaker 08

  There it is, there it is.

• 59:10Kevin Roose?

  I mean, is that, that's sort of a joke, but that's sort of not, like, I feel like a killer moment for the AV industry is when you can actually just watch Netflix in the car.

• 59:18Casey Newton?

  Yep.

• 59:19Kevin Roose?

  Like, while you drive to work. Is that something that you're thinking about? Are you putting entertainment? I mean, we saw the trivia system in Banana Slug today.

• 59:25Casey Newton?

  Which we crushed, I crushed it at, I have to say.

• 59:27Speaker 08

  It's pretty hard, I'm surprised if you did do this.

• 59:29Kevin Roose?

  So, anyway, are you doing more with entertainment inside the cars?

• 59:33Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah, I mean, so the new car we're building, it's a six-seater, the seats face each other, it's more of this living room on wheels configuration, we're testing that in Austin right now. And that really makes it clear that, okay, if you don't need the front seat and the seat's facing forward and the ghost steering wheel that's moving, this becomes a really social space. And I think that is time that we get to reclaim, and whether you want to watch Netflix, or do work, or talk to your friend, whatever it is, I think that's pretty compelling, because like, you know, these days, so many people and companies are competing for our attention and our time and sucking it away from us. And I think the notion of giving that back to people is really exciting.

• 1:00:08Kevin Roose?

  Kyle, I want to ask you about the other big question, in addition to safety, that I think is on people's minds when it comes to autonomous vehicles, which is jobs and job displacement. Millions of people drive for a living, whether it's Uber drivers, or cab drivers, or delivery drivers, truck drivers. How do you think about the effect that autonomous vehicles could have on those people?

• 1:00:32Speaker 08

  I mean, it's gonna, I think with any new technology like this, you're gonna see a shift in the distribution of jobs that people have. And I think actually, one of the nice things about self-driving cars as compared to maybe like LLMs or ChatGPT, that happened very fast and very suddenly and could be very disruptive in a very short period of time. I think with self-driving cars, you know, almost a nice side effect of the fact that five years ago, we thought they were right around the corner and it took longer than people hoped, is a lot of people know this is coming. And so, you know, anecdotally, when I talk to an Uber, Lyft driver in San Francisco, no one is saying this is my long-term career. This is the thing I'm doing now. When the self-driving cars are here, I'll do something else. I think for maybe truck drivers and other things, it's maybe a bit more work to, you know, enter a different job or, you know, change the distribution of jobs.

• 1:01:17Speaker 08

  But on the other hand, like, I think we do have to take a step back as a society and say, do we wish the industrial revolution never happened? Or do we wish that, you know, computers didn't come out and displace a whole bunch of manual data entry jobs? I can't say that we do. And so, you know, I think each one of these things looks scary at the beginning, but on the other side, it makes a ton of sense.

• 1:01:37Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I remember talking with one of the co-founders of Lyft many years ago about this, and he was saying, well, you know, yeah, people won't be driving the cars, but you'll have, you know, rolling restaurants and rolling gyms and you'll need people to staff all of that. And so, he was sort of, he did seem to feel some responsibility for making sure that the people who are currently driving for a living and may get displaced by this technology actually found other work. Do you, do you feel a similar sense of responsibility for the people who are currently driving for a living to, to find them new work or to create new work for them?

• 1:02:09Speaker 08

  I think we have to contribute to it, for sure. You know, I think, and that could take the form of, you know, to the extent we're able providing training programs or alternate jobs for people. But more than that, I think it's, you know, interacting with our government and our regulators and letting them know this is coming, when and how, and giving them some notice so we can plan ahead a little bit. There are a lot of things that can be done if, if people or states or, you know, the federal government makes this a priority to ensure this is a smooth transition. But it's, you know, some of that's, you know, beyond the reach of any one individual company.

• 1:02:40Casey Newton?

  Can you say more about these rolling gyms? This is like a box truck with a Peloton in it and it's driving itself?

• 1:02:47Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I guess. I don't know. I didn't really ask for more details.

• 1:02:50Casey Newton?

  Kyle, I would maybe move that one down lower on your product roadmap. I don't know if that's where the consumer demand is at the moment.

• 1:02:56Speaker 08

  How do showers work for that?

• 1:02:58Casey Newton?

  That's what I want to know.

• 1:02:59Speaker 08

  Like, are they fresh towels?

• 1:03:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, all of a sudden, the weight plate is crushing you. I want to do some future casting, but first I want to ask about the business model of self-driving cars. So Cruise, your company, is a subsidiary of General Motors. Last quarter, Cruise reportedly lost $561 million, or about $6 million a day in the last quarter. It's a lot of money. A lot of self-driving cars companies have lost billions of dollars over the years. So how long do you think you can sustain those kind of losses? And when do you expect to be profitable, if ever?

• 1:03:38Speaker 08

  Well, definitely not.

• 1:03:39Casey Newton?

  Definitely ever.

• 1:03:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it's happening. So it is a lot of money. And I think this is a really unique situation because you have typically like an independently funded startup would not be able to go after a capital-intensive initiative like this. And so what we've seen is that the only companies out there who are willing to invest the necessary capital, kind of the activation energy to make this new technology exist, are companies like the major tech companies who can afford to invest in something on a longer time horizon, or an automotive company that understands that this is the future and wants to be on the right side of history when things inevitably shift to people being driven by their cars rather than driving them.

• 1:04:23Speaker 08

  On the other hand, we do feel a really strong sense of, I guess, gratitude towards General Motors to getting us to where we are. And we want to return that capital and make sure that GM is wildly successful financially for making this bet. So we do have an eye towards profitability. And one of the key factors there is driving down the cost of the vehicles, which we're doing through investments like building our own chips and machine learning accelerators to take costs out of the vehicle, and then also increasing the scale, which actually makes the cost per ride much, much less. And so if it is the case that this is really hard to do well, only a couple of companies crack it, and you have that opportunity to go after that market just in the US. That's that's worth a big investment upfront, I think, if you have conviction that we can get there.

• 1:05:04Casey Newton?

  I mean, my pitch is like, I probably was never going to buy a GM car, not because I have anything against GM, but just like, I don't want to buy a car in general. It's annoying to have a car in the city. But if you guys come up with some sort of subscription program for like, I don't know, a couple hundred bucks a month, and you give me 40 miles of rides, you're going to make $200 a month off me for the rest of my life. So, I mean, to me, it just seems obvious that there's a lot of money in it. It's just insanely expensive to get there.

• 1:05:28Speaker 08

  I think a lot of people are going to say, why do we even bother owning a car? As long as it's there when I need it, and it can do everything I want to do with a car, I'm not going to own a car, or at least I won't have so many cars in my driveway.

• 1:05:39Kevin Roose?

  I think one thing that we're sort of very bad at as people who, you know, write and think about tech for a living is thinking about sort of like second order consequences, right? Like, the car was invented, and we didn't know it at the time, but it was going to sort of invent the suburb and change the entire fabric of American civic life. What are some changes that you think this era, if you are correct, and autonomous vehicles are coming to cities all over the country, what other effects do you think that could have beyond sort of the obvious, like, it'll change the way you get to work?

• 1:06:15Speaker 08

  Well, I think from a, you know, city planning perspective, there's a lot of things that I think if you had a clean slate, we would do differently than what we did decades ago when most of our city plans were laid out. I don't think we'd have, you know, as much space for parking cars, like inventory or garage inventory on the streets for people. I think we'd do a lot more public transit and walking paths and biking paths as a general matter. And I think that AVs will make us a little bit easier for us to do that in the future. If cities do decide that certain parts are AV only, just like, I don't know, the streets in Europe that don't allow cars, you know, walking only. If there's certain streets that are AV only, what that will let you do is get a lot more throughput for a lot less square feet of city space. If you have roads that are only AVs that can travel in caravans,

• 1:07:00Speaker 08

  like maybe just three feet apart going at high speed, you can fit maybe three of them in every two lanes of city traffic that you use today. And so I think we'll be able to reclaim a lot of that space for other purposes while still being able to move a large number of people through our cities per square foot of road area that we allocate.

• 1:07:16Kevin Roose?

  So you think there'll be some highways or something where it's like, this is the robot-only highway? You can't go on that if you're driving the car?

• 1:07:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, it depends. If a goal of a city is to optimize the efficiency of its transportation system, the benefits of AVs is that they can sort of go at high speed on these AV-only highways, but they can go point-to-point. They can show up at your doorstep, which a bus system won't do and mass transit won't do. So it's a pretty powerful tool if we design cities in the right ways.

• 1:07:42Kevin Roose?

  And one final question that I always like to ask CEOs, which is if five years from now, we call you up and things have not gone according to your plan, if Cruise was never able to reach mass adoption, if GM has shut you down to save money, if none of this comes to pass, why will that have been in your best estimate? Is it because regulators didn't make concessions to the industry? Is it because the hardware costs just never come down? If you fail, what do you think the reasons for that will be?

• 1:08:17Speaker 08

  Well, I'm very confident in the cost coming down. I'm confident in the capabilities of the technology improving. I'm confident in how attractive and preferential this is going to be in terms of a ride experience compared to the status quo. And I'm confident in the safety performance. And so if it doesn't get there, it would be for something that is valid, but maybe not in the best interest of society. Like, maybe we do struggle with how to rationalize collisions caused by robots instead of humans, even though there are fewer of them. That could cause delays or cause a shift of this deployment to going to other countries first. In particular, if you look at China, they're wide open. The government gets it. They're going full speed.

• 1:09:00Speaker 08

  I think that that is a risk to the US economy if we're caught a decade behind on that. Or it could be, if not for that, then maybe one of these other forms of transportation, like electric vertical takeoff and landing plane comes in and we're not really talking about cars anymore. But I mean, you tell me, it really seems like at this point, we're past the critical gate. We've gone from R&D to these product scaling out there in the field. And it just seems very obvious that this is the way the world is going. And it's a matter of time. And I think from a pure sort of system of constraint standpoint, unless we as a society do something to block this or slow it down, I think it's going to happen really soon. And I think we're all going to benefit.

• 1:09:40Kevin Roose?

  I think that could be true. I mean, I also felt that way six or seven years ago. So maybe I was just too eager. But when I have friends come in from out of town or colleagues from other cities, one of the most reliable things they say about San Francisco is like, oh, my God, there are so many self-driving cars. I didn't realize these things were so ubiquitous in San Francisco.

• 1:10:01Casey Newton?

  Also, like, the only thing that prevented your enthusiasm from becoming a reality was just that the technology hadn't caught up, which I think happens to tech reporters all the time. We are constantly seeing stuff that is just not ready to be deployed. But now it actually is being deployed. And I don't know. I think the minute that people can take these taxis and they're cheap, they're going to do it. I think the minute you can own a self-driving car, that becomes such a status symbol. Think of all of the people who are going to be thrilled to be like, oh, you're still driving your car. Sucks for you. So the market is ready. You just got to get more of these things on the road, Kyle.

• 1:10:36Speaker 08

  On it.

• 1:10:37Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 1:10:39Kevin Roose?

  Kavo, thanks for coming.

• 1:10:40Casey Newton?

  Thanks for coming.

• 1:10:40Speaker 08

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

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• 1:13:21Casey Newton?

  Hey, before we go, we wanted to say thank you to everyone who has sent in voice memos for our segment, Hard Questions. This, of course, is our segment where we hear your tech dilemmas related to ethics and technology, points in your life where you're struggling to decide what to do with respect to tech. We've gotten a lot of great submissions already, and we're eager to hear more. If you have one, you can send it to us at [email protected].

• 1:13:48Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Pui Wing Tam, Mel Galogly, Kate LaPreste, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected]. And if you see us in a self-driving car, say hi.

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