EP30: Automotive User Interface Conference, Stanford 2024

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast, and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good day, good morning, good afternoon. It is John Summers, the motoring historian. Today’s episode It’s about a conference that I went to a couple of weeks ago, a week ago now called Automobility User Interfaces 2024 or something like that. Of course, I go to this stuff because I, I feel like as [00:01:00] a historian, being a historian isn’t just about looking at, you know, the war of 1812.

It’s also about looking at What’s happening at the moment and trying to do that thing that historians do, which is look closely at what’s happening at the moment and try and use that to perhaps try and foretell the future, but at least give some impression of what might be happening. What it might be sensible to do in future based upon what we’ve what’s happened in the past.

In other words, you know, if you know winter’s coming and you’re not going to be able to grow any crops at that time, you best not eat it all in the summer. It’s just that kind of, you know, knowing what happened has happened. Other years helps you make good decisions in, in future. We, we seem to have forgotten that in our society at the moment with our not valuing.

Um, or paying storytellers properly or historians properly or, or anything like that. We only pay people who [00:02:00] report on the contemporary, the walls falling over, the walls fallen down, it’s fallen on people. It’s terrible. Nobody’s bothering to think about, well, who, who built the wall and what can we do to build the wall better next time?

No, no, that’s all for another day. We like the shock and horror of people crushed under the wall. Don’t we?

So, the 2024 User Interface, Automobility User Interface Conference, um, took place at Stanford. I don’t usually have occasion to go to campus at this time of year, um, because, uh, my class falls in, in the spring. So, it was nice to have some time on, on campus again. It’s nice to be in, in, in that kind of, [00:03:00] of, of environment.

I guess I’m, I You know, I’m involved because, uh, as usual in with, with these things, you know, you know, somebody and, and in this case, um, a number of my former students were at the conference and one of them was in fact, one of the, one of the organizers. So, um, my role, you’re probably thinking, what the devil do you know about automobile user interfaces?

Um, you know, the, the, the answer is, um, the, I wasn’t, you know, Give in some meaningful paper. Well, I don’t know what I gave was meaningful. I wasn’t giving a paper of my research. Um, you know, as I do at the, uh, you know, as you as one normally does at a conference. And this is very flattering. I was asked to do the closing keynote and it wasn’t just me.

I was asked to do it with, uh. Barbara Karanian, I guess, Dr. Barbara Karanian, although, uh, seems strange to [00:04:00] think of Barbara as a doctor, but no, I’ve, I’ve co taught, uh, the class now for 13 years and, and always, uh, always alongside Barbara. And in fairness, you know, let’s call spade. I am officially a teaching assistant and, and I ride alongside, uh, Barbara who, who’s, uh, you know, visiting.

Professor, I guess, uh, what she does gives my cast stuff a lot of academic credibility and what. I do gives her storytelling stuff or to mobility or, you know, automobile credibility, if you like it, it’s as, it’s as simple as, uh, as Michael Shank said to me years ago, the, the, when we were talking about pebble beach was that, you know, he felt like he was in an art gallery where there weren’t any, you know, badges and he needed me, you know, where there weren’t any, you know, information [00:05:00] bits at the side and he needed me to tell him what we were looking at.

And more than that, he meant not just, uh, this is a Pizarro, um, more, he needed me to position Pizarro alongside the other, you know, artists of that type and why this piece was, was interesting. So, you know, this Maserati Ghibli is worth 200 grand. Look, because it’s the best. Got the big motor and it’s a convertible, whereas that one’s only worth 150 because it’s the hard top and it’s in a less desirable color.

And, you know, it was wrecked in 1974. They probably all were, weren’t they? Let’s call a spade a spade, by the way, with these people who are paying out of the ass for old supercars that supposedly have, you know, completely blemish free histories. They’re all bloody wrecked. In period, weren’t they? Because they were always owned, supercars, hypercars, they were always owned by people like Floyd Mayweather, or, or that halfwit that drove the Veyron into Galveston Bay, [00:06:00] if you’ve not seen the video, it’s, it’s, it’s worth it.

They were always owned by those kind of Justin Bieber, flamboyant, idiotic people. Diddy. How did I get on to Diddy from talking about automobile interfaces? My God. So I was asked to do the keynote. So that’s flattering, right? Barbara and I asked to do the keynote. Clearly, if we’ve been asked to do it together.

Yeah. Thanks, Arthur. Thanks. Bloody dog always barks when I’m talking. As Mark Gami said in the pod when we were talking together, he’s probably thinking to himself, you’re yapping, why can’t I? I guess he’s right, isn’t he? Yeah, he does think he’s right. I’ve tried to wait him out with these things, but you know what, it never bloody works.

So I was asked to do the keynote, clearly asked to do the keynote with Barbara, uh, clearly at that point, what the organizers are looking for is for you to do something which they’re familiar with, which in the case of one of the [00:07:00] organizers, he’d been in the class, so it seemed reasonable to both Barbara and I that we do something that was along the lines of, of, of what we do in the class, but.

You know, you have 10 weeks and, and, you know, 10 weeks of, of, of two hours where you can get to know the class and it’s in a small space. So trying to replicate what we might do in a classroom setting, um, if you want to Google up the course, by the way, it’s ME236, Tales to Design Cars By. And as I said, Barbara, my colleague, Professor Barbara Karanian.

You know, and the ancient history on that, whilst we come to mention it, is the, the, you know, the great and the good of Pebble Beach, folk like Miles Collier, Fred Simeone, um, they, they realized that, Uh, Jay Leno, you know, they realized some years ago that the issue with shifting generations and old cars was, was bigger than, you know, the values on, you know, [00:08:00] not so interesting 30s cars was going down then.

And of course, now it’s. 50s and 60s cars, right? They recognized that it was it was bigger than that. It was bigger than once upon a time. There were many people in the Los Angeles area who could rebuild a Barani wire wheel for a Ferrari, but those People were all old and we’re all dying. And that was, you know, an issue for somebody like Jay Leno.

That was, that was where it was, was, was felt first, but, but people like Myles Collier over in, in Naples, in, in Florida, there at the Revs Institute. He realized that the issue was deeper than that, that there was a generational thing going on that fundamentally young people didn’t care about cars. This was about 10 years ago.

So with. People like McKeel Haggerty, um, they came to Stanford and, and we’re like, can you try and do like a humanities inspired thing, um, that links science link, [00:09:00] you know, cross disciplinary, a truly transdisciplinary thing, um, that will put the car front and center of academia. Awesome idea. Awesome idea.

Um, I got involved in the program with Michael Shanks, who’s an Englishman. He grew up in an English nuclear submarine town. So did I. He’s about 10 years older than me. But other than that, he went to Cambridge and was very successful academically. Me, rather less so. But other than that, we have quite a lot in common.

We have very similar kind of approaches. I think he was always, he certainly sat down and met with me. The very first time because he was intrigued with the idea of me making money, walking around the forum, telling stories about Rome. It just completely plays into his, he’s an archaeologist, Greece, um, Greek stuff, but Roman stuff as well.

But, but really just a passion for stories. And it was that passion for stories that led him to introduce me to [00:10:00] Barbara, which is why Barbara and I. Uh, got involved in doing the class together when, you know, there was a REVS program at Stanford and when Miles and all these other wealthy guys from the car community made a big endowment to the university.

You’re probably wondering what happened with that, by the way, actually, you’re probably wondering why I’m not talking about the UI conference yet, but let me, let me finish this Titus groan like digression here. Uh, first of all, what happened was that there were 3 really key professors involved in it. The guy that I worked with Michael Shanks, who was an archaeologist, so for him, it was contemporary archaeology, and he became very passionate and interested in cars as archaeological objects, which fascinated.

The car guys and and fascinated me and and all together. Awesome. And Michael, I can’t thank you enough for the insight that you’ve that you’ve brought to me over the years on the right hand and really on the [00:11:00] edge of campus, an organization called veiled Volkswagen. The Volkswagen, oh, bloody hell, I can’t remember the acronym now.

Um, the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory, um, on the edge of, of campus there. Um, this was, you know, the time, this is 2012, 2013. This is when autonomous research into autonomous cars, when it’s clear that this is a data crunch and you just need to do a lot of miles. But, but really there was, this was.

You know, a decade before Waymo, more than before it was baked for market. And of course, Stanford was involved in in that research through through Vale. So we had now DTT or they had now DTT and they would use it to lap Thunder Hill and take all of this, take all of this data. And it was really very exciting to be involved with because it was clear at that time that that this was going to be the future.[00:12:00]

The guy that ran that was a guy called Chris Gerdes and he was really all hard science, right? And then plugging this together, the guy with the relationships with the car companies and the guy with a feel for humanities And a feel for the hard science was, was this guy Cliff Nass and, and, uh, really he was, uh, the original like mad eccentric, just mega brain academic.

That’s how you’d, you’d, you’d thought of him. And, and, and, uh, you know, I was thinking the last time I saw him, he was driving his Volvo 740 and I was involved in some kind of. film shoot with a Jaguar XK 120 and he came along and interrupted the film shoot and the producer sort of shooed him in his Volvo out of frame and that was the last time that I saw him.

He had a heart attack in his mid 50s and it was [00:13:00] Yeah, it was, I’ve known a couple of people go like that and it’s shocking when it happens. It makes you realize that all of life is like a motorcycle ride and you never know when you can can go, frankly. But look, I don’t want to dwell on that macabre note.

But yeah, Cliff, we lost Cliff. And, uh, that meant that The money may be, uh, towards what Chris was doing with the research with Shelley, the autonomous Audi TT out, uh, you know, and various other sort of hard science things, which frankly, you know, the revs guys probably, you know, miles Collier went to MIT, you know, he probably he probably Could have had MIT do that kind of research.

But anyway, so I think that’s why programs at REV sort of dried up because, uh, and I’ve tried to give you some insight there into the politics of, [00:14:00] uh, of, of Stanford there. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I said to Michael, as it was all happening, you know, this feels like it’s like medieval baronies in like, you know, France, like, Medieval France or England, where, you know, if you are aligned with the wrong people, you just don’t go anywhere.

Whereas if you’re aligned with the right people, you know, you ascend to, uh, to new heights. And yeah, that’s, that’s, you know, that’s completely, that’s completely how it works. When you make an endowment to a university, you can’t say like, I want this to do this kind of project, not that kind of project.

You’re making the endowment. And that’s just how it, Uh, how it works. So anyway, so there was revs at Stanford for a little bit. Our class survived the, uh, uh, you know, because our class is an arts based class. It’s a storytelling class that sits in the mechanical engineering school. So, so look, and, and it’s been successful in terms of people who have [00:15:00] continued to come to it.

And look, that’s worth talking about now, although this is a digression. Why do people continue to, to come to the class? Well, Because automobile design is so bloody exciting at the moment, isn’t it? I, I don’t mean that, um, that, you know, as a car guy, you might, you know, it might not be excited about car design, but, but personal mobility is in a period of revolutionary change.

That’s more exciting than it has been at any time since the 1920s, right. When you know, everybody could afford a car and lots of people could drive and there were proper car mechanics and there was proper gas distribution, you know, the. The design, this, this pivot to electrification and autonomy and the different ownership models.

This, even though they’re not coming as quickly as it looked to us 10 years ago, it looked like they were going to be here by now in the mid 2020s, but you know, we aren’t there yet. But as usual, you know, in the short term, we underestimate the impact of technological change and [00:16:00] in the long term, in the short term, we overestimate it and in the long term, we underestimate it.

So in other words, we, uh. At the moment, we’re in, uh, we’re feeling like, Oh, is autonomy ever going to come? And, and, uh, by 2050, we’re all going to be in flying cars. Like, you know, my neighbor who works for Joby Aviation. That’s a total digression. I’ll put the link in. Really interesting in what they’re doing.

Is flying cars. Cause of course you can’t really do flying cars where we drive, because then everyone has to have their own PPL, right? Since bloody people can’t even drive properly. You can’t expect everybody to have a PPL. Well, if the cars can fly themselves, when autonomy comes, they can fly, right? Why not?

Right. Why not? I mean, I’m just hoping, right, that when everyone’s in their flying helicopters, the roads are going to be empty and I’m going to be able to drive them in my cars and sports bikes. That’s what I’m hoping.[00:17:00]

I’m going to listen to this back and be like, where was I going with that? I was going somewhere with that, wasn’t I?

So it’s flattering to be asked to do this, this keynote speech. Um, and I guess the irony of it is, is probably more people are going to listen to this pod than were in that audience. But because that’s a, like a face to face experience where, you know, you’ve [00:18:00] like put on nice clothes for it and it’s not, you know, taking place in your basement when you’re looking at some of your crappy jigsaws, you know, That has a completely different, um, vibe to it.

And, and, uh, you know, you, I guess you forget what that in person vibe is, is like, and that’s what’s special about, um, about attending a conference. So what our class is about is about when a student gets to Stanford, they’ve already put themselves in the top sort of 1 2 percent because that’s how many people, you know, that’s how few people get in based upon, you know, based upon the number of applications, right?

So. It’s natural for them as they move towards graduate, it’s natural for them as they move towards graduation and looking for a job to think to themselves, what am I going [00:19:00] to do to really make myself stand out? Because they’ve stood out up to now, so it’s natural for them to look for like a Sterling Moss, like unfair advantage, you know, unfair advantage, but just something that’s gonna and if you, if you, If you’re going to come from a hard science, um, kind of background, like, and a lot of our students, some are product design, but we have aero, astro, mechanical engineering, you know, hard mechanical engineering, um, You know, people who have majored in maths and science since perhaps they were 16 or 17, and they’re now in their mid 20s when they’re having this thought that I might need to think about how to Present myself in a job interview or how to conduct myself when I’m, you know, invited to do some kind of like a hackathony kind of [00:20:00] project.

I need to decide how I’m gonna, you know, handle myself in that situation. So I might get a job out of it rather than, you know what I mean? And, and, um, You know, if you think about, um, I always feel like this with car mechanics, you know, the reason that car mechanics choose to be car mechanics because they like cars and they like working with machines.

So the whole element of dealing with people, like explaining to them why yes, You’ve only just got a leak on the thermostat, but I need to buy a, I want to buy a new thermostat and I want to buy a new water pump and I’m going to charge you for all this new coolant as well. You know, people don’t understand why that needs to be.

It feels like they’re being ripped off. That’s not the case. You, you, you just, you know, people don’t understand the, uh, understand the situation properly and it’s hard to explain. Yeah, so what I’m saying is that the students are [00:21:00] looking for some kind of a way to communicate about themselves in a really clear way.

So the fact that Barbara and I have this class where it’s about storytelling and the storytelling is themed around cars, that is a useful vehicle. Pun intended for for people to be able to to to think about, um, you know, both cars of the past and cars of the future and and also their own involvement with cars and and how that can relate to if they’re, you know, design people, how that might relate to product design, how that might relate to presenting their own ideas to to people.

Peers or, you know, any employers or or anybody else. So look, right, that’s sort of what we’ve developed over the last decade. We thought that we would condense, you know, try and condense some of what we did, what we do in the class into [00:22:00] the hour long keynote that we had. Now, a lot of what I do with, with Barbara, it feels like a double act, right?

And I, I have said to people, you know, if, if, if we are a double act, who’s the, you know, who’s the straight man and who’s the, you know, who’s the, because both, because, interplay between us on stage. Neither of us really knows what, quite what the other one’s going to say. We’ve, we know each other really well, but we don’t quite know, you know, I never say the same thing twice.

And Barbara’s whole teaching style is. You know, I feel like she’s the opposite of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. He always says that a lawyer, when he asks a question to a witness on the stand, he should always know what the answer’s going to be before the witness says it, because, you know, he’s using the witness to build his case and, and build a, build an argument.

Well, well, I, I naturally operate in an environment where I, Quite like [00:23:00] to know I quite like to not be sure what’s around the curve. You know, I’m comfortable with ambiguity to use Barbara’s, uh, Barbara’s parlance, but, but she seems to, to unconsciously thrive on putting people herself included on, on the spot.

She doesn’t mind, um, You know, if somebody’s not listening or looking at their phone or something like that in the classroom setting, she’ll challenge them full on, you know, around not concentrating. It’s really refreshing, frankly, in a modern classroom setting that you do. that she demands that level of focus and she demands it, you know, from herself as, as, as well in the, you know, uh, she said, so, yeah, so we did a little, um, we did like a microcosm of our class.

It seemed to go over, um, extremely well, um, you know, in that the organizer [00:24:00] was, was flattering and, and other people were, were complimentary about what we did and, and, So that’s pleasing, right? Isn’t it that that’s something that whenever you do something that’s a little bit experimental, you’re never sure whether it’s going to work and when it works in one setting, you’re never sure whether it’s going to work in another setting when you’re working with somebody where you’re not sure what they’re going to do, where you’re looking for audience participation, which we did right from the start, you know, at first a show of hands, but later come up and um, you know, share your stories on the microphone.

Well, that’s a lot. If you’ve not engaged with people, then nobody’s going to come up and then your whole thing is kind of, you know, it’s going to fall flat, right? It’s obvious that you’ve not engaged if nobody wants to participate. Whereas even if you’ve only engaged with 30 percent of the audience and there’s another 70 percent of us sitting there being like, what the fuck is this all about?

If some of [00:25:00] the, if the 30 percent are enthusiastic and are sharing, which they absolutely did sharing their own experiences, similar to the things that, you know, us up on, up as up on stage did, yeah. So pleasing. I’ve taken 25 minutes to say that, but, you know, I don’t know, maybe, maybe this won’t feel like 25 minutes when you’re listening back because I’ll have edited it down.

So let’s actually get to the nitty gritty. Well, I too, but so let’s talk about what I’m going to how I’m going to structure this. I’ve got like a little intro piece now, which is already run much longer than than I intended it to. Um, I’ve got and then I made notes on some individual sessions and that’s worth talking about because it will break out the individual.

You know, ideas, so I think, let me frame this whole thing first and, uh, by saying that when I think of a user, [00:26:00] an automobile user interface, what I’m thinking about are the gauges, the steering wheel, the shift lever and the pedals. Almost every element of the conference was about how autonomous vehicles are going to communicate with us or with passers by.

In other words, it was less about, you know, whether or not you have, like, nice leather or not, or vegan leather. As somebody, well, talk about this guy in a minute, this guy from Bentley that I spent some, some time talking with, um, you know, less about what the traditional automobile user interface and far more about how people are going to interface with mobility [00:27:00] devices.

in when they’re autonomous or when they’re scooters on a sidewalk or when, you know, there’s lots of people on the bus versus one person riding on the autonomous bus. It’s, it’s, it’s, there were lots of. So, so yeah, so as usual with these things at Stanford, you go thinking it might be about one thing and then find it’s sort of about that thing, but it’s also that thing thought about in a much more.

In a much more deeply, in a much more deep way. I’ve had that. Um, it’s why I love being involved in the, with the university, right? Because you have that kind of, of deeper insight. But look, let me actually. Get stuck in, right? Um, so the Bentley guy who Barbara, who Barbara and I sat down with just at a table when we were working together to complete what we were going to present on, and he just happened to be across the table.

Barbara struck up conversation with him because she strikes up conversation with everybody like that. Um, in that first [00:28:00] conversation, um, he said to me, look, he said, I don’t like screens. I feel like screens shouldn’t be the focal point. Of interior design, and I was like, I mean, I was like friends forever with him at that point, because it’s clear that he’s thinking deeply about this whole conundrum of how do you make Bentley modern without throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Because, of course, the awesome thing about a Bentley is the old fashioned wood and leather and clock and, you know, old fashioned gentleman’s. Drawing room experience of Bentley. So it’s, what do you keep, what do you throw out? So that was a really interesting conversation. And, and, you know, if you take nothing away from this presentation, other than the fact that, um, most.

Automobile design now begins with the screen [00:29:00] as the focal point, and it pulls out from there. And he said to me, I don’t get it. Interior design, we don’t start with a television and design the living room around that. Why are we doing that with cars? But I think this is because we’re in a first generation of these kind of vehicles.

And at the moment, we’re still like fully screen focused. Um, because, you know, we’re in this place where 40 percent of people use some stuff, but not very much. 30 percent of people buy the car because of the tech and care about the tech and connectivity and rah. And 30 percent of people are like me and just don’t give a shit.

So, I mean, I realized I’d driven that Tundra 1100 miles before I even tried to work out if my phone could connect to it, my phone connected to it. And that’s all I’ve done. I’ve not used the navigation, not done any of the touch screen on it. My phone can connect. I can listen to my JTEC EDM. [00:30:00] Um, I’ll add a link.

Love JTEC. Um, That’s what I listen to. I listen to that through the Tundra stereo. Works perfectly. That’s all I need. You know, for me, 2016 is too high tech and I’m not alone. Apparently, I represent about 30 percent of new car buyers, let alone overall car buyers. So, um, I think we will pull back from this screen focus, but this Bentley guy and he’s a young and this Bentley guy was the first person who I had ever seen.

engaged with, who was like, you know, own live screens. And I thought it was brave sitting at a conference like this one to be like that straight away. So, uh, that was, was really cool. One of the other headlines is around Waymo’s now just in the last couple of months, the Waymo self driving Jaguar I paces, um, have moved from [00:31:00] being something which, you know, you had to sign up for the program and be like an approved user and probably provide them with lots of feedback about how the car drove.

Um, that phase is now done and anybody can drive or can ride a Waymo. Amusingly, my wife managed to break it the first time she used it because she put. The three Germans who were visiting us in the bank and she rode in the front with Ollie on our lap and the car drove a block and then a human voice came over the tannoy being like, you know, Dutch, there’s three people in the car.

There’s too many people in the car. One of you asked, you know, get the fuck out. DSA didn’t say that, but that was, you know, basically what it was, uh, what it was driving at quite literally. Um, and just a word on these Waymos, one of the famous tropes 10 years ago was an autonomous car that sat at the intersection of University and Cooper, just outside the university in downtown Palo Alto, [00:32:00] and it sat at one intersection for two hours because it was waiting for its turn to go.

But of course, in the real world, nobody waits for their fair turn. Everyone just walks or, you know. Drives when they can, and the car was completely confused by that because it was so rule following. Well, one of the astonishing things about these Waymo’s, and I’ve only had a couple of rides in them, is that they actually drive like, you know, they actually, as Dana said, you know, they go, they actually drive, they actually go, which means that, you know, at the stop sign, it complies with the law and it stops, but it doesn’t stop.

And lean back and then go, it pauses the break and then it goes and and and just like, you know, just like I do, um, I don’t quite roll it, but nor do I, you know, so there’s that assertiveness that they have, which has to be tuned for [00:33:00] each urban environment, right? That assertiveness that they have is is really interesting anyway.

So the fact that the. So the whole business of being able to ride a Waymo and what was a Waymo like and, and all of that, that was like the weather in terms of a topic of conversation for conference delegates. And, and, and it should be said that this is about 200 people who, who’ve come from all over the world, um, So the last one of these conferences, like last year, it was in Brisbane.

It was in Stanford like three or four years ago, but there was another one like somewhere like Dubai or something like that. Like they really, it’s really a Ingolstadt, not Dubai, Ingolstadt, because I, and this is another feature of the community that there’s a lot of of Asian women, it would seem, involved in the, in the, in these research projects.

Um, so, you know, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Chinese Americans, um, but there’s also [00:34:00] an awful lot of Germans. And the Germans are Or speak bloody perfect English to the extent that I said to one of them, dude, when the conference was in Ingolstadt, did you speak German? And he goes, no, it was all in English.

Really? And he’s like, well, all the research papers are in English. So, you know, so it’s weird. It’s literally like if you’re in that space, you speak German with your friends. But, you know, when you’re all of the work that you do, it’s like reading magic. All of the work that you do is in English, all of it, and you’re doing research papers in English.

It’s really, yeah. So, so that was, you know, and that, of course, that’s really a great way to position the conferences is, um, you know, uh, Dana’s place, they have this, you know, thing, the imposter syndrome where, you [00:35:00] know, because everyone’s so clever and accomplished, you feel like you’re not accomplished enough.

And, and, you know, the negative element of this is, is, You know, Michael Shanks, my colleague, is the high school that his kids, um, went to, um, they have, you know, uh, an issue with suicides. And it’s as when I said to him, but Michael, why he was like, well, you know, it’s cause no one’s, you know, they’ve not made a million by the time they’re 17 kind of thing, because there’s, there’s this massive peer group pressure to, uh, to succeed.

I guess what I’m saying is, you know, everyone at Stanford is clever, everyone you meet is clever, and BAC is fun to be around, it puts you under pressure, but it is also really stimulating to be around, it’s why I have carried on doing the class, frankly, and certainly when you come to a conference like this, it’s when you come to a conference like this, you know, I want to be around the conference [00:36:00] to mingle with the people and understand it before, and, you know, the people that had invited me, you know, invite us to speak, They were keen that we come to sort of the banquet, you know, dinner, evening and all of that, because I said, you know, he’s a better opportunity to to mingle than necessarily in the in the sessions there.

So, I mentioned that I had some former students involved, I’d say there’s about half a dozen people, some of whom I recognize some, most of whom I spoke to, um, what are they doing now? Um, Two are academics, um, in the field. Three are with car companies. So, uh, Ford, BMW, Zooks. Yeah, I mean, I just, I’m looking at my next note here and then, and as usual, I’ve done things out of order.

My next note was German speaking, perfect English, intimidating intellect. And yeah, that’s, uh, that, that’s completely, uh, [00:37:00] that’s completely what it was. It’s all right. What did I learn? I’m going to go through the talks that I, uh, that I, I did, uh, sort of, of one by one, but there’s, um, there’s sort of, there were a number of different events.

And just from a storytelling perspective, it’s worth, you know, thinking about what, what worked well, if you like, and what didn’t work so well. So, um, the three days, um, in the days papers, um, and then one of the evenings a sort of mingling session where people had prepared posters and the posters outlined the idea that they had.

So it wasn’t a full paper, it maybe wasn’t fully researched. Um, but it was, was, you know, the idea laid out on the paper and then on the poster there. So you the poster and then the dude that did the research or had the idea or whatever, he’s there. So you can ask any clarifying questions and engage with, with them.

Um, super [00:38:00] simple idea, but what an. Absolutely awesome way to, to communicate. It was one of those things where I was like, I can’t believe I’d never been to an event where these, this kind of poster workshop, selling the idea thing before. I just thought that was absolutely, um, absolutely brilliant. ’cause you could engage with the things that you wanted to, you can engage the extent that that, that you wanted to.

It was, was really a fun thing. So that was, was, was one of the evenings. Um, another one of the sessions I, I sat in, and this was, was really compelling as, as well, um, it was short videos. And so they’d stacked like eight of these five minute videos. Or six, eight videos, eight videos and how long they were in anyway, they stack them back to back, but in order to make sure that you were properly engaged and really thinking about them, they asked you to rank your top three of the eight and [00:39:00] then at the banquet, they announced a winner.

I’ll talk about the individual ideas in a minute. I just thought that was a great way. The two, right, the duality of the short format video, which you watch in a cinematic kind of setting because they put it up on the big screen and you’re sitting there voting. And you know that in three quarters of an hour, this is going to be done.

So you’re not going to be there. Like, you know, there’s not 20 videos to watch. There’s eight. So yes, it demands a level of common concentration, but, you know, we’re all in the conference and the conference was pretty expensive. So, you know, they, they, again, they, they were, you know, we were talking about participation earlier and, and, you know, they were right to expect that level of participation.

And, and, you know, the bulk of the conference is the traditional conference way of, of papers where people present their academic research. And, and, and, you know, that is, is [00:40:00] fundamentally pretty dry. I mean, that was the language that I heard used a couple of times. And of course, what people mean by that is fucking boring.

And I thought a lot about this as a storyteller, because it shouldn’t be boring, because the ideas are interesting. So often, the way in which the presenters, and it’s not the presenters fault, the presenters have to present in a certain way. They have to say, this is the research that we were doing, this is how we set about doing it.

This is what happened, and this is what we learned, and this is what we think should happen, you know, going forward. So, with that format, and I guess that’s why I like the video format, because you were like, it was like, these people would have like 20 minutes or however long on stage, right? And within. You know, whereas the videos, they were like three, four minutes long [00:41:00] and all right.

You could say, well, the ideas in the video were less well developed, but I just feel like the short format was very compelling, but for all that, after people finished speaking, there were lots of people coming up to the microphones that was set up and having, having questions that they wanted to ask. And quite often, not everybody got all their questions asked.

And one of the things that they did also was they had a sort of. You know, leather couches up on the stage and, and, uh, uh, often they’d sort of do three or four that was similar together. And then afterwards they’d have somebody who knew the space very well, be a sort of chairperson. And that person would run a panel discussion then.

Um. And people would ask questions of the panel rather than of individuals. So I feel like the dryness is, is a feature, not a bug, right? That there has to be this level of, [00:42:00] of, if this is a conference, which is on the very cutting edge of this kind of, of research, this is where automobile designers come to get ideas.

This is where people. PhD students kick around the idea of, is this a real project? Am I solving a real need? Is the methodology that I’m doing? Is that meaningful? Is somebody else working on the same thing? Can I network with them and try and do this? You know, there’s, there’s really an, an awful lot going on here in this really quite You know, and I felt like most other people, I wouldn’t say everybody knew everybody else, but most people had been to the conference, um, before, you know, a surprising number of people had like being to the Brisbane one and the Ingolstadt one, which, uh, you know, shows how unusual what it is.

That you’re doing and this is, um, and this is why, you know, there was a really interesting blend of ideas, [00:43:00] which were fully baked ideas, which weren’t baked or people working on similar ideas, which made you feel like. Oh, this is the zeitgeist of what’s happening at the moment. So, so two of those zeitgeist areas that, that I thought I felt like I encountered with one is how do you tell people that the autonomous car needs you to take over and drive?

It’s having an emergency. It needs you to take over and drive. Now, apparently the industry standard is three to five seconds. So it has three to five seconds to say, motherfucker, you need to drive or, you know, shake the seat or maybe have a dog barking or, you know, warm you up gently. It needs to find some way to make you take over because if it does what I just did, [00:44:00] Quite often people sit up, engage, and then crash the car.

This is what one German PhD student told me. I was like, I mean, you could, when she said it, it seemed so obvious, you know, she was like, but the people, when they take over, then they make bad decisions. They do not look in the mirror, they swerve, they crash. And I’m like, yeah, and I could see that she’s distraught, right?

Because, you know, the machine, it was doing a better job. You know, it had already it had already decided that you couldn’t swerve. That was why it needed you to take over. You know, you could see the the the, you know, I realized how in that moment, how passionate she was about solving this thing. Anyway, she had a system of light.

which, you know, graduated system of, of lights and a number of people were working on light based things. So, uh, the BMW one was absolutely fascinating. This was like dynamic [00:45:00] lighting where they’re, where, you know, you can, um, not just change the, Interior lighting of the car, but also change the way the light reflects on things like the leather on the inside.

So the color of that seems to be different. You can also do things like push buttons. So, you know, answer the phone call, listen to the voicemail message, you know, set the navigation going, um, that you can do that from a light button. Which you can, yes, put onto a surface on the car, but you can also do it onto the back of your hand.

I’m actually going to sit down with the guy that, because he’s one of my students, the guy that organized the conference, that was his project, one of the projects that he’d worked on, and that was, that was one of the most fascinating things that [00:46:00] I encountered because that seemed ready for market. That seemed ready to go to market.

A lot of the other stuff I’m going to be talking about, it’s not ready for market. It doesn’t make it less interesting. It doesn’t make it less valid. It just means the dynamic lighting shit you could see on like a BMW within the next couple of, uh, next couple of years. Just as an aside did talk about current BMW design did say to him, you know, what about the buck teeth?

He showed me a meme. I’ll add the meme in here. It is quite amusing. He then showed me, um, this Neue Klasse concept, and I’m going to put an image of, you know, linked to that as well. I’ll leave you to see what you think of it. I mean, I, you know, Fundamentally agreed with the point that he’d made that, you know, we develop some products for some markets and we deliver other products for other markets.

And, you know, [00:47:00] we believe that a product like the Neue Klasse might appeal to somebody like you and it. Oh, yes, it did. It did. So look. All of these YouTubers say without further ado, don’t they? And, uh, there’s been lots of ado without further ado. It’s a filler phrase, isn’t it? It’s a filler phrase, but we like filler phrases.

It’s easier to understand the information if we use the filler phrases. You can hear me rustling my pages now, can’t I? So after talking for 50 minutes, now I’m about to actually talk about what I witnessed at the conference. Monday, I missed the whole day I was deciding what I was going to write. It was the school tramp camping trip the day before.

Like it was, you know, I went to campus, but I just worked with Barbara to confirm what we were going to what we were going to do. And we understood how we were going to present Tuesday morning. I missed two. And Wednesday was the [00:48:00] day that I was going to do the keynote in the morning. So I was definitely around, you know, going to be around on the Wednesday.

So on the Tuesday afternoon, I went to a panel on sustainability. There’s actually a school of sustainability at Stanford. I wrote a session on a study on. Ecological driving advice and whether or not it works. How instructions influence the efficiency of eco driving solutions. I was talking about, I put in quotes here, cognitive distractions.

So they measured eye movements and basically how if when you were like, you know, Turning off Enya and turning on Slayer, how at that moment, you weren’t focused on the car being like, I’m sorry, Dave, I need you to [00:49:00] take second gear now. I’m sorry, Dave, I need you to take second gear now, you know, like, you know, so in other words, people pay attention to eco driving if they’re not doing something else.

This was a team of academics from, from Berkeley, which I just thought was somehow typical. It’s like such a, uh, it’s just coming from such a place of not understanding motoring as it has been, and just, it’s not even car hating. It’s, I feel it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s like, Paving a parking lot over wildflowers and not even perceiving that you’re killing all the wildflowers.

That’s how it made me, me feel about it. It really was, was pretty, uh, was pretty shocking. The conclusion of the research was that drivers need to be in, in what was called in the right status, i. e. concentrating, to be able to accept [00:50:00] ecological driving advice. I wondered, I’m not sure what status I need to be in to accept ecological driving advice.

Rarely have I, you know, I just feel like this was like, this is like when you see an interesting car passing you on the freeway, a high rate of speed on the other side, you know, it just, it was there for a moment, it just passed for a moment, we were communicating on the side and now we’ve just passed. I really was, was not, there was another presentation in that sustainability session, which I missed, which was about getting EV chargers installed in homes.

And there was another one about incorporating shared autonomous cars and buses properly for taxi and delivery services.[00:51:00]

One of the questions was, what are you excited for in the future? The answers were that the one individual, I can’t remember her name, blonde French lady. Um, she was talking about, and I can’t remember which city it was she was talking about, but she was talking about a business model where the city was paying Uber to do the last mile of the bus route.

In other words, people who live right out in the sticks, instead of them riding the bus, they call an Uber and then the Uber is paid for by, you know, the, the Uber fare is no more than the bus fare because it’s like part of, of public transport. And I [00:52:00] just thought that that was As one of those little wrinkles that you don’t think about, and then when you see it, you’re like, wow, there’s a whole, the future efficiencies that we can accomplish are enormous effect, of course, is, is compounded by autonomy, and it’s compounded by the fact that we can increasingly have, you know, the, the door dasher can be the Uber driver.

As, as well, if, if that makes sense, it can be delivering people and goods when we can join the, the algorithms up, uh, up properly. The Berkeley lady, when asked about the future, talked about. Zero pedestrian fatalities. She talked about how pedestrian fatalities had gone up recently. And, and, you know, I guess I’m like, ah, you’re the one to blame for all of these [00:53:00] stupid driving, impeding, you know, more space for pedestrians, you know?

So in San Francisco, they put all these. bollards up around curbs. So where, where people used to like, you know, stand off the curb, and if you were using all the roads, you might hit them. Right now, instead of like turfing people, instead of encouraging people to stand on the bloody pavement, no, now they’ve put these bollards around so people are fine standing in the road and now you have to square off the corner in the car, which if you’re in a big vehicle is hard to do.

It’s literally they’ve made it harder to drive so that. Even if you’re drunk and fall off the pavement, you can’t get run over. Just for me, I feel like it’s a back to front way of thinking about it. Pedestrians have to be, uh, responsible for them, uh, for themselves. Uh, one of the others, um, a woman that [00:54:00] lived in London, who was on the panel as well, um, her, uh, answer was, was that she was interested.

To see what she called friendly and easier to use interior design more and by friendly, she meant more intuitive you are, you know, in other words, I don’t know what she well, that’s what she said, and she also said that nothing was more important than safety and security. I wrote that down. Nothing is more important than safety and security.

What happened to the freedom of the open road? There’s no freedom of the open road when nothing is more important than safety and security. I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you do that. I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t let you do that.[00:55:00]

The other thing that, uh, miss, uh, nothing is more important than safety and security said was, uh, that the driver is relieved from the heavy burden of being told about eco driving. So their research was that you only needed, you didn’t want to like overburden the guy with too much information. You had to like wait for the right time to tell him about eco driving.

And I’m just like, I just wrote down, like, it’s the opposite of the old Jack Brabham story, isn’t it? You know, they said to Jack Brabham once, Jack, Jack, how are you? How are you so fast? What advice do you have? And he said, well, lean [00:56:00] close and let me tell you, more throttle, less brake. Well, this is the opposite, isn’t it?

Eco driving is simply less throttle and less brake, isn’t it? It’s the same thing. It’s less throttle. With most EVs, with the regen braking, it’s one pedal driving. So you just have to learn how to coast up to this. You can’t learn that. My God. Like, how drunk are you? Like, how uncoordinated are you if you can’t do that?

It is one pedal driving, yet the driver needs to be relieved from the heavy burden of being told how to drive ecologically. I mean, it’s just so Sustainability is more than EVs, it’s changing in city infrastructure to as comparatively obvious, isn’t it? But, [00:57:00] but when you, when you say it in that way, but it makes you realize how infantile the approach of, you know, replace everything with an EV and we’ll be fine.

It makes you realize how infantile that approach is. It makes you, you realize how urban personal mobility is. As much about infrastructure, more, far more about infrastructure than it is about whether we ride in a bus or in an electric Volkswagen or in a, you know, gas powered Mercury, I think it was the French lady who said instead of so many lanes, cities need to take lanes away from cars.

And I was like, Oh, yes, that’s exactly what’s been happening in San Francisco, that cities, that the city has taken the lane away from the car. So on the school run at the moment, it used to be this two lane sweeper where you could weave in and out of the slow [00:58:00] people and usually get through the next green line.

Whereas now they’ve done it where it’s one lane for cars, one lane for the cyclists. And now you can’t weave. So it means you always get caught with the light, so it means that even if I’m in like a zen mood and I’m like, I won’t ride, drive in the cycling lane today, you know, even if I’m in there because I’ve never driven in the cycling lane, even if you think I won’t do that, by the time the light is gone.

You buy the, you then get caught by the light and you sit at the traffic light waiting for the two or three people in front to, you know, finish chewing at their third Xanax of the day or something, or feeding their kid in the backseat or something like that. I mean, I don’t know what people do at traffic lights not to go because, you know, in theory, it’s possible for you to just drive around them every time because there’s nobody.

In this, the light turns green and you can just drive all the way around them. It’s like, you know, it’s like a Fernando Alonso start where you’re on the third row, but your third into the first corner, cause you’ve got driven through the middle. I feel [00:59:00] like I do that. I feel like it would be possible just in theory to do that all the time, to be honest, right.

I said this to, to, to the boy. It’s, it’s like when they did the pedestrian, when, when they, Uh, turned the right hand lane of the M4 from Heathrow into London when they turned that into a taxi only lane. At first, I was like, you know, as I said in the pod the other day, like, what the fuck have they done to me, pub?

You know, this was mine. I was used to it. It was familiar. If you don’t get that reference, the Mac lads. I’ll put the link in. It’s not safe for work, highly offensive, but it reflects how people feel about change coming to the things that they love. And because I love motoring, when the change came to the outside lane of the M4, a section of road which I historically used to see Good, a good deal of speed along a piece of road that I loved.

’cause you came [01:00:00] along, you got over Heathrow and then you got onto the West way and, and you know, I remember coming into London with, with my dad, you know, in the eighties and used to be able to get onto the west way at Autobar speeds. I’m not saying that we necessarily ever did that, but you used to be able to, to do that, you know, wanted the chisik fly over there.

Um, but then, you know, they turn the whole section from Heathrow to like this 50 mile limit. Well, then I realized, right, I could ride it on my motorcycle. I was allowed, you were allowed in the taxi lane. Well, then it became like my own private overtaking lane. Well, in a sense, that’s what’s happened with these, you know, so at the moment, so, you know, In theory, one can just completely bend the rules and take advantage of it.

I’m not saying I would ever dream of doing that, but you know, you can. So, but I mean, yeah, it’s the, the roads are becoming, they are by design becoming less free and it is [01:01:00] driven by the theory of these academics. Instead of so many lanes, cities need to take away lanes from cars. The other thing that I’ve written down, and this was a guy from Toyota who stood up and said this, is that, you know, we just need to walk more.

We need to design communities that are set up around walking, and Stanford is An ideal illustration of a community, which is set up around walking and cycling. And yes, it’s weather based, but with electric cycles, you know, we can extend that range. We can all be a bit more like Amsterdam and a bit more like the London of the 1970s that I knew.

So you can see I’m conflicted here, can’t you? You can see I’m conflicted by the efficiency on the left hand, but I just. Oh man, nothing is more safety than, nothing is more important than safety and security. I mean, it’s, oh, oh, it just makes me want to, oh, I don’t know. It just makes me come [01:02:00] over all. Yeah.

Get Enya off the stereo and wear the fucker slayer. Like the eight videos. Let me talk about those next. The first one was from Robert Bosch, and it was looking at what it called chauffeur deceleration for autonomous cars. Um, so really what it was saying was that, you know, we looked at the way that chauffeurs slow down and it showed like, you know, a graph representation of that.

And then we tried to replicate that with autonomous, with an autonomous cars. Current autonomous systems tend to just do one step, whereas the chauffeur tended to do a two step deceleration stage. It felt a little bit like boiling the ocean to me, but this is, this is where we are with autonomous car Research at the moment that we’re [01:03:00] fixing the sort of edge cases and I said to you one of the, I mentioned earlier, you know, one of the striking things about the Waymo was that it worked brilliantly, you know, it drives like I might want to drive at no point could I fault it’s driving the times that I’ve, uh, that I’ve ridden, that I’ve ridden in Waymo’s, I must have done, you know, three or four rides now around, around the city here, none, nothing on the highway, nothing longer than about, uh, Uh, than about 20 minutes.

So, um, you know, I guess this is necessary, but it feels, you know, it’s, it, it shows the incremental steps that we’re taking this, this, this video. Uh, the next one was about resting better in EVs. Now, what I thought this might be about was I thought it might be about, you know, basically turning your car, you know, instead of like economy class plane seat, turning your car seat into something that was more like business class, [01:04:00] or maybe even Emirates first class, you know, where you could actually sleep properly in the car.

Cause with autonomy coming with people, you know, with Uber drivers who come from, you know, they drive from a poor part of the state. into the city because they can earn more money over the weekend in the city, but then they won’t go home. They’ll just sleep in the car and work throughout the weekend. Um, you know, I thought it might be something around facilitating, facilitating that, but it wasn’t.

It was. Some bollocks mode where if you did the school run every morning, the school, the car knew that you were doing the school run and it knew if you reclined the seat, you wanted to sleep. So it automatically, you know, turn some soothing music on and, you know, put the seat to your favorite like heater setting.

It knows that you’re about to get to school. So a minute before you arrive, it like shapes the seat to gently wake you up. I mean, I just had no idea [01:05:00] what the rest mode added that reclining the seat and turning the heater on yourself couldn’t do. Totally solving a problem that didn’t bloody exist. Such a, like, bollocks thing, I thought.

The next one Was Dorim and I’ll put a link into this because this is really bizarre. So this is, uh, uh, electric minibus, which travels around the community, which is glass sided. So you can see people inside it. So it’s easy for you to make friends with them. I know, I know. It was South Korean, and I guess it’s aimed at the fact that a lot of people, uh, have real, like, social isolation in, in South Korea.

So the example was, like, some old bloke who got out to play Mahjong, or another example was an only child who had no friends and played the computer all the time. Now he could [01:06:00] play the computer with, like, people in the Dorian bus or something. It looked shiny. Who knows? I know nothing about the problem that it was purporting to solve.

It seemed to be very regionally specific problem and the solution seemed, you know, the problem seems like a real problem. The bus with transparent sides, it seemed like, you know, people are really lonely, so we made this great bacon. It seemed a bit like that to me, you know, now everyone’s eating the bacon and they can make friends with each other because they’re eating the bacon, you know, it seemed like the bus, it could be, you know, or, you know, it could be anything.

It could be eaten bacon. It could be nice cream. It could be, you know, rolling naked in the grass, you know, it could have been anything.[01:07:00]

Socks just cheering up my action plan. I guess it’s better if it’s chewed up, isn’t it? Then I won’t know what I meant to do. And, uh, and then failing to do by spending too long, too long doing this. BMW dynamic light. That was the fourth video. I mean, I put here cheesy and pointless, but a really clear application, which is just making BMW seem even more futuristic and cool.

I, I wrote down here, this is beautiful from the video. Imagine a light that is mindful. So that’s right, when you get in the car, if it senses that you’re in an aggro mood, it’ll be all like mellow. Or, you know, aggro, it’ll like be aggro, do like red, like err, lighting. Also, that thing I was talking about earlier, where it can, you know, shoot different light, it has like, it can shoot different light onto different surfaces inside the car.

And that light can also be in the form of, you know, [01:08:00] Buttons. So this is getting away from the business of, you know, you have to go into a menu and a drop down and all of that to change the heater or to put the window down to get away from that. Um, you can have, you know, but to also get away from the business of, you know, being able to, design a clean interior that doesn’t look like the flight deck of Concorde in terms of the number of switches and dials and all of that.

So you don’t need to do that. Um, the, the idea is that this dynamic lighting can, can, you know, so you can do, you know, you can have like the lighting for the heater button, say, on the dashboard there. So you. Or, and the passenger can hit the button and adjust it. Or you could, you know, if, or what my student was telling me is that yes, you can have it on the back of your hand.

Cause that’s what the video was showing, but you need to do like a haptic movement to tell it to do that. So I’m going to find out more about this BMW dynamic lighting, but this was a really, [01:09:00] really weird, really cool, really like futuristic y kind of, uh, kind of a thing.

The video number five, I just read while I wrote down human takeover of autonomous cars, important, hard for deaf mofos. And I guess it would be right. Cause in that moment that we were talking about, I was talking about earlier that three to five seconds where the cars alerting you to the need that it can’t drive anymore.

It’s got some issue. It needs you to drive. A lot of those warning methods are going to be some kind of the ubiquitous beep, aren’t they? And, and, uh, obviously that’s not going to work for people who, who don’t hear properly. So look, right, it’s, this [01:10:00] was another one that was sort of about lights, um, and how you can use different lights to, you know, uh, basically communicate to people, you know, they need to do something or go in a certain direction or, or something like that.

Number six was the one that I voted for. I felt like this was the, the, the best solution, although I felt like that the BMW one was clearly the most baked and the most ready for market, I felt like the BMW one was kind of, you know, it’s like a cool thing, but it was a trinket. It wasn’t, you know, doing anything really meaningful.

This number six one I felt was, was really kind of a, a, a meaningful, uh, was more meaningful. It was communicating. What the autonomous vehicle is doing to people who are inside it, you know, like what, but really it’s that moment where you get in the way, Moe, and you say, take me downtown and suddenly it [01:11:00] starts driving not in the direction that you normally go.

Now, in that moment, you don’t know that there’s been an accident and this is why it’s driving a different way. If it communicates that to you, you’re like, oh great, you know, you’re relieved the car’s doing a great job. If it doesn’t communicate that to you, you’re like, what are you doing, you crazy computer, stop, like, no, go the other, you know what I mean?

You, you, and many of us have had that situation. It’s, you know, compute, we’re all familiar with computers that are spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and you wish they just say to you, look, I’m broken, I can’t do this. Okay. You know, this won’t work, but they don’t do that. They, they, they spin endlessly.

And, and what, what we’re saying is that this was some research that was thinking about how to communicate to people in a way that they, uh, they, they trust the car. And the net of the research was, was [01:12:00] that for normal things, you don’t need very much information. In other words, when my wife calls the U Waymo, it comes, she gets in the, uh, she, she tells it, take it, take me downtown to my office.

It, you know, this where she goes every day, um, when she gets in the car, you know, and, and, and it sets off. It’s not gonna make a big song and dance over the fact that the time that it’s gonna get there is normal. The. And the route that is going to take is normal. However, if there’s been an accident and it’s going to take a different route, then it needs to communicate a lot more information to tell her that that’s what the, the, the situation is.

So, um, Again, you know, I feel a little bit like the research that revealed that if you listen to Motorhead, you tend to drive faster. It’s kind of obvious, right? If you’re listening to Motorhead, you’re probably either in the mood for driving fast or somebody who drives fast anyway. Definitely listening to fast music is [01:13:00] going to make you drive faster.

I didn’t really need a research paper to prove that. But you do, right? Because until somebody does the research, it’s just opinion, conjecture, something I pulled out of my arse and, and that won’t do. So I like this because this was some research around something that I think’s really, uh, really important.

The other environment is, you know, the illustration I just gave was, was my wife and Waymo. Um, the, um, Use cases that a lot of, of, of these researchers see, and a lot of the researchers that are based in, in Asia, they’re based in Germany, a lot of them were based in Utrecht, um, these tend to be communities where people are riding the bus more, and they tend to be communities that might be really well served.

By small buses. And I know, you know, I was talking, I prattle endlessly about my [01:14:00] class, didn’t I? At the beginning of, uh, of, of this pod, one of very early on in the class, when we were talking about urban mobility solutions. You know, the idea of the small bus, um, really crops up again and again. I, it really works well in, in certain communities.

There was a small bus that got around the medieval Borgo bit of Rome. I remember the medieval Borgo bit of Rome. I remember when I, when I lived there before I, before I was rudely interrupted by the corgi, Arthur, knock it off. It’s just the postman, dude.

So number seven was about. infotainment complexity and how that affects driving [01:15:00] concentration. I wrote that it seems obvious that a complicated stereo equals distracted driving. Um, they concluded that more research was needed. So that seemed. You know, the next one was, um, I wrote a talking AV butler or autonomous vehicle butler.

I then wrote fucking annoying. I then wrote video with silly, squeaky AI voice. So, yeah, I think people like that one.

I’m not hesitating, aren’t I, because I don’t want to offend the researcher who did that work. And really, I might find it fucking [01:16:00] annoying, but really, it might be a useful thing for a lot of people. You know, and I’m struck by the fact that I’m now moving into old age. The reality is that these students that I teach, they’re like half my age and they might never have need to drive as far as, as I have over the years that the, for many people driving is in the city experience.

You never would. drive a long way, you know, an hour and a half up the freeway to Napa, you know, that that’s, that’s it. And interestingly, of course, that’s the kind of thing that the autonomous car can do really well, the freeway stuff, it finds easy, the The bits of driving that are really good fun, it finds AVs, of course, find easy.

And these edge cases that [01:17:00] the AV developers are wrestling with, they tend to lie in an urban environment because there’s just so many more variables and so much, um, you know, unpredictability. And I think another thing that I’ll touch on here, and it’s just, Such a, just a ridiculous irony of, of the space.

You may have listened to the, uh, pod that I did a couple of months ago about leadar developments in, in Leadar, and, and you might remember that in it, I was amused. The, the leadar developers are basically, or partnered with German car makers and the German car makers each have their own like. Clearly, technical partners in developing autonomy, and clearly that’s because they want to make sure that their kind of autonomy is somehow superior or differentiated from those that their that their competitors are going to come to come to market with.[01:18:00]

Yeah, so there was another one about lane keep assist and. Lane center assist and, you know, adaptive cruise for cyclists. I mean, the results of the experiment were spoiled by the fact that many participants and you saw these poor schmucks riding on a bike wearing a VR headset. Um, because of the VR thing, people were sick, which reminded me of one of the students, um, one of my former students who did that, who was in the class the very first time that I did it.

He’s a professor now at a [01:19:00] university on the East coast. Bravo, Dave. You know, I did a thing where in, he had a lab, right. The. Oh, actually the overlooked that the main quad at Stanford is really it was an impressive room. And I, I, I guess, infinity. I remember it paid for him to have this him and other researchers, of course, have this like, basically, it was like half of an M 35.

that was in the room. So where you actually like sat in a real car and then it was a driving simulator. Well, you know, you sat in a real M35, but it didn’t move like that. And that really gave me, especially on deceleration, the worst motion sickness. And I sort of battled through it because I thought it might get better.

And I, I wanted to do Dave’s experiment, but I lay On the grass. Um, you know, if you visit, if you look at pictures of Stanford, you know, the the oval there, like with the palm [01:20:00] trees. Now I lay there on the grass for 2 hours before I felt well enough to walk back to the car. So look, so what this reveals to me is the.

You know, the, the, the experiments that they’re doing are, in that case, many of the participants delivered flawed results due to the, the sort of motion sickness. So, I, I’m just, I don’t know. I mean, do you need help? Riding in the middle of the road. I mean, maybe you do, but I don’t think you need a technical solution.

I just think you need to ride the bike better. It’s a little bit like the eco driving and you can only tell people the eco message when they’re not adjusting the stereo, like, no, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s no more complicated than press the throttle more gently, coast more, less throttle, less brake, literally less throttle, less brake it’s, it’s, it’s really like, ah, For me, [01:21:00] like, Oh, I don’t need the, I don’t need the machine to wet nurse me like that.

I just don’t. And it’s offensive to me that these technologies are, I feel like are being forced upon me. And I feel like that is, if that sounds Trumpy, it shouldn’t do right. It’s not unnatural to feel uncomfortable. Uh, pace of rapid progress, and it’s not uncomfortable, it’s not, there’s nothing wrong about questioning whether or not the progress really is progress, because I think when you’re de inventing driving or de inventing cycling, instead of the freedom of cycling, now it’s all going to be controlled by the computer.

How is that remotely a step forward? Like how, how, who, who was really thinking clearly when they thought that might be, again, I don’t want to, I probably have offended people, haven’t I, but there by if any, but [01:22:00] maybe poor Blythew did that research as the misfortune to be listening to this. Anyway, the next one was enhancing pro social behavior.

In micro mobility. So basically it was people fucking hate scooters, you know, twist and goes. What can we do to fix that? If you think of it, right? Actually, it’s a super valid thing to be working on because scooters are an excellent transportation solution, but because of the way they were introduced in cities.

People hate them. If people had thought about how they should be introduced, if, for example, instead of being able to just park willy nilly, they’d been corralled in a particular area, like close to bus stops or something like that. If something like that had happened, then at that point, um, people might have, you know, if they’d have been proper Rules and training applied so people weren’t feeling like they were going [01:23:00] to be run over whilst they were walking their dog on the sidewalk when by, you know, some speeding youth on a scooter, you know, you just needed to, there was, there were a couple of very easily foreseeable issues.

The company’s made no effort to head off that means that the scooters got a bad rap and got banned in lots of cities, I think, in a completely unnecessary way. I think there’s absolutely fully scooters, you know, twist and go stand up electric guys, I mean, some of these things can do 50 miles an hour and actually ride the bumps.

I’m not suggesting necessarily there’s a place for that. But what I’m saying is in cities like London, Paris and New York, where you might have. You might pop out of the tube and have, you know, a 20 minute walk at the end of the tube, having been able to turn that into a five minute ride on the scooter, that seems like a really meaningful [01:24:00] way of taking foot traffic off the sidewalk and, you know, riding an Uber.

Or riding a Waymo or riding the bus or something like that. You know, it just seemed, it just seemed sensible for me. And then apart from anything else, you know, crudely scooters appeal to me cause it’s two wheels and it’s independent. And that’s really what I’m getting at is I want to feel. independent.

I’m interested in maintaining the freedom of the open road, not in restricting the freedom of the open road. That’s really my agenda in this. I don’t want to be some chumpy Luddite. I just want to maintain the freedom of the open road. Look, so there’s a lack of regulation and lack of trust of scooter users looking at how to change that.

It’s, I can’t read my own writing. Oh, pro social driving is driving which is safe and Uh, considerate of others. Pro social driving [01:25:00] has been about pedestrians up to now, but we thought about scooters in our research here. If you tell people what they do wrong, they can improve and be more pro social. So in other words, a lot of scooter riders, when they like, you know, cut people off, they didn’t actually realize that they were upsetting people.

Seems a bit hard for me to believe, but there you go.

They measured space sharing conflict and I guess, um, a lot of the presentations, I’m not sure if this one did, but a lot of the presentations use this Unity platform, which is an AI way of doing the research. In other words, they didn’t do the research themselves. They didn’t actually have [01:26:00] real people on scooters.

I don’t know about this particular one because Barbara only told me what Unity was afterwards, that it’s like AI. experimentation. So if you think of it, you can prototype experiments really fast. But at the same time, these experiments didn’t take place in the real world. They all took place in the brain of a computer.

So now this experiment which took place in the brain of a computer is now going to somehow enhance the way that we behave riding scooters on the sidewalk. It’s just, I mean, who knows, it might do, but I’m just telling you, I’m just trying to Just illustrate just how eye poppingly deep this, uh, this rabbit hole goes.[01:27:00]

So being pro social in the case of these scooters was basically yielding to other sidewalk users rather than, you know, zooming too close to them or, you know, cutting them off or potentially even running them down. Although that was not a scenario that looked at. So when you gave people the feedback, that meant that they increased the passing gaps.

If you were like, look, you really cut that dude up, don’t do that in future. People were like, oh, all right, you know? And it also increased their willingness to yield. They were more ready to like stop at things if you, you know, shamed them a bit. Who knew, right? Because I’m sure there’s some riders who just be like, you know what, fuck you.

I guess in the case of the experiment they did, it made a difference. Uh, it’s just partly [01:28:00] paid for by Honda R& D. I guess Honda R& D have got a lot of money they don’t need. So one thing that came up in the questions was perhaps, um, You have something similar to these dongles that insurance companies have you put in the OBD2 slot that monitors how you drive so you can supposedly get a better rate or, you know, more likely so that they can ding people who are bad, you could maybe do something like like that, that if you.

were a shitty rider, you could just, uh, you know, they’d bill you or, or ban you accordingly. I guess the, uh, the, the other things that cropped out was, was in the discussion afterwards. We, we talked a bit more generally about scooters and then one guy pointed out the pot, a pothole can kill a scooter user.

And of course, it can write the big ones that they have in San Francisco. So this whole business of them not being allowed to be on the sidewalks [01:29:00] that forces them into the road with other traffic, other traffic that’s moving faster. It forces them to the edge of the road. It often, you know, it can literally force them into potholes.

So. The thought was that it’s that infrastructure point again, but it’s also the sort of other point that was made was that scooters represent a limited solution because in order to use them, you have to rethink your lifestyle. So there’s always that thing about, you know, you have to be like, you know, if you If you’re not a young, energetic person, generally speaking, you’re going to find it quite hard to use a scooter.

And, uh, you know, one person used, I thought, a slightly facturous example to talk about, you know, how do you do the Costco run? It’s a little bit like, you know, the reason why Americans need a Suburban or Fiesta. But notwithstanding that, the fact is that that scooters do require a significant rethink of city infrastructure and users.

It requires a [01:30:00] significant rethink of, you know, driving lifestyle and not for nothing. You know, I looked at the Lime scooters here, which is the only scooter sharing, ride sharing thing that survived here. I used to do Revel mopeds and only Lime are left. But to be honest, it’s so bloody expensive. It’s easier to Uber, you know, if you’re on the thing for an hour, it costs you like 20.

Well, that’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, that means you ride the thing for 10 hours. You could fucking well buy one for Amazon. You know, what would it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, exactly Arthur. Exactly, exactly. There’s no point in, uh, in doing that at all. So moving to day three of the conference, really interesting concept, which was my first note of the day, which was the notion of a taxonomy, a glossary of terms, if you will, of the communication methods, which pedestrians And car users use with each [01:31:00] other.

So it’s honking, it’s headlight, flashing, it’s gestures. Yeah. All of those methods of communication in order to basically teach those things. To autonomous vehicles so that they can, you know, so that they can pick up on them. It is funny because of course, I’m, I, when they’re there, they were talking about how these things are in some ways nationally and regionally specific.

And I immediately thought of that thing that people always do in France and they never used to do in England, which is if you’re on an end road or this might used to be true now, if it’s true anymore, that if you are on an end road and people come towards you or flashing their headlights, you knew there was a speed trap.

up the road. They used to flash their headlights to warn you that there was a speed trap up the road. The talk was the, the, the, as I said, that these are nationally and regionally specific and, and a comment was made that these studies are being done [01:32:00] in, in countries like Germany and, and Holland where people tend to really follow the rules.

And, uh, Therefore, all the research is done in an environment and it’s done in quite a controlled, sterile, you know, although it’s the real world, it’s a far more controlled and sterile version of the real world than, you know, Calcutta, Mombasa, Nairobi, or, or even for that matter, Minneapolis, St. Paul. The next one was, was entitled steering towards safety and embodied driver guide.

So this was like having a friend in the car directing you. It was, uh, the way that they set it up was it was a bit like, well, it was one of those like mannequin kind of wooden figures, but like a hologram of it, um, basically on the dashboard where the, you know, where the CD player used to be, or the cup holder is, you know, high up on the dashboard there, um, in the middle.

Um, but yeah, the notion was that the best way to have directions is have a [01:33:00] friend, like in the car directing you, they sort of lost me on that because, you know. It’s the surefire way for Dana and I to have a fight if she tries to do any kind of directions for me, I do much better in the car on my own. I mean, I do alright if one of my friends is directing me.

I feel like, I feel like if people drive like a long distance, they, they know how to direct people. And I feel like people who don’t You know, drive long distances, don’t think ahead sufficiently to, anyway, I don’t want to slate my wife’s driving skills. I just did, didn’t I? Totally. Sorry, Dana. I mean, to slate your driving skills is probably just our total, you say tomato, I say tomato.

Anyway, they listed 21 types of gesture I wrote here, it was a safety AI, you know, safety AV version of rally pace notes. So, you know, for turn left, it’s easy to find a gesture, but for there’s a storm coming, you know, you [01:34:00] need to be aware you might not want to do this long journey because the weather is really bad on this long journey.

It’s hard to find a gesture. for that. I wondered, I actually asked a question at the microphone there. I wondered if you could use rally driver pace notes. Um, I feel like they would have developed the, you know, sharp, right, gentle, right, you know, go straight, all of that stuff. They would have developed quite well.

I wondered if that could be applied and the researcher was actually a thin. So I thought that might work quite well. The next one was, uh, how do autonomous cars elicit uncivil behavior? So as, or as the, the, the woman from, uh, the Swedish, uh, transportation ministry said to me, you know, she’d seen people abusing and yelling at AWAMO, you know, why do people hate the autonomous cars?

Because, you know, her own community experiment with autonomous cars, people have felt very [01:35:00] positively about the way the autonomous car had moved with, with, with society. I encountered this term, the griefing of AVs, so that is, it’s obviously a British researcher that’s named that, isn’t it? Which is, uh, which is deliberately fucking with the, with the AV.

It’s deliberately like causing a situation, you know, where the AV can’t go forward and can’t go back or something like, like that. So it wasn’t actually, so it was. Measuring the ways in which people grief AVs and the specific example it had was, was an example of, of, of a delivery robot, the cyclist was riding around and around and around and in so doing was stopping it from moving forward and was doing that quite consciously.

They rode away, it started moving again. and they wrote back, they did the The thing again, so this was the example. It wasn’t, it wasn’t quite the, the example of the person burning [01:36:00] the way Mo in, in, uh, Chinatown a couple of, of, of months ago, but it’s poking around that idea, right? It’s poking around the idea that because of the way.

The AV that was used in Sweden had been used, you know, it was used close to a home for people with Alzheimer’s, so it gave these people mobility and it took them to and by ice cream and it did it sort of on a walkway and it went at nine kilometers an hour. So it went very slowly. Um, this was why people a different reaction to it from, you know, the way that.

You know, somebody who’s presumably had a pretty shitty shrift of life in, in living in the streets in San Francisco, and they see this Jaguar with nobody even in it driving itself, it’s not, I, you know, I find it understandable that as the face of [01:37:00] modernity and technology and everything that they hate, I understand why they might want to take out their rage on the, uh, You know, better they take out their rage on the Jaguar than on Waymo employees, right?

Much better they take their rage out on the car than on that. So we are poking around why, you know, some people want to take selfies with the Waymo, other people want to attack it. We’re poking around that because we now have this term griefing, which even describes the way that some people react. to autonomous vehicles in, in their community.

So I think it’s interesting that we’re measuring these kinds of things. The next thing, really interesting piece of, of research, um, and I, I think the most interesting thing for me about it was the fact that it incorporated a piece of established research, which is called the bystander effect. And it’s quite simple, that if there’s other [01:38:00] people there, you’re less likely to do something about something that’s happened.

So the particular example was, you’re riding on an autonomous bus. And all of a sudden, a drunk person gets on and starts acting the GOAT. If only you were there, you’re more likely to do something. Get off the bus, confront them. You’re more likely to do something than if there’s a group of people there.

If there’s a group of people there, you tend to wait and see what they do. And this is a proven piece of research that was quoted from the, the 1970s. The, the, uh, the quote was almost as old I was, which was interesting because none of the other academic research that was cited was earlier than the turn of the century, which, uh, you know, again, yet another occasion where I, I, uh, and then another moment where I felt a little, a little old.

So, yeah, so shuttle buses, AV shuttle buses, um, and looking at The [01:39:00] ways in which people, um, respond to there being no staff on the bus, because when there’s a bus driver there, you feel more secure when there’s a bus driver there. If the traffic’s not going anywhere, you can say, Oh, is there an accident up there?

And the bus driver will be like, maybe, although I think there were roadworks earlier in the day, you can’t have that kind of, of interaction if there’s a The bus is, is just there on its, on its, uh, on its own. So what it, what it did quite interestingly was it, it, it, it broke, I think it broke the process down into awareness, um, recognition, responsibility, options for action, and then a decision to act.

And the bystander effect makes you less likely to move to stage three, the responsibility stage. So in other words, if the autonomous bus has a flat tire, but you’re still trying to drive on the flat tire, if there’s a group of people there, you’re more likely just [01:40:00] to sit there and do nothing. Whereas if you’re on your own, you’re more likely to step in, step up to the microphone and be like, Hey, the bus is driving on a flat tire.

Like what the. You know, tell it to stop, you know, that it’s more likely to, to, uh, you’re more likely to do that.

So I guess really what it said was it had applied the bystander effect research. To specifically to a very real world situation in A. V. Buses A. V. But and had noted that in a situation where the more people there are on the bus, the less likely people are to do anything about [01:41:00] it. So you need to put in place something in order to overcome that bystander effect.

That was the gist of it. And that’s it. All

right. So to wrap this up, this is a really exciting community to be, uh, to be a part of really interesting research. Some of it, as I say, bit half baked, but. This is inevitable in this kind of space. If you’re pushing the edges of thought in any space, some of the experiments are going to seem half baked.

Some of the ideas are going to seem half baked. The important thing is, like when you go to a modern [01:42:00] art gallery or something like that, you take away what you can from it. And, and I, I found it really interesting because I feel like, um, It’s just the very fact that everything that we talked about was about communication with AVs.

There was nothing to do with the steering wheel or the seats or, you know, whether you should use a knob or a dial to turn the heating up. You know, there was nothing about that. It was all about thinking deeply about how we’re going to communicate with the mobility solutions with autonomous vehicles.

Mobility solutions. And that is, um, just an exciting field to, to, to be a part of. I hope I’ve communicated some of those ideas properly. I appreciate you listening all the way through. Thank you, DriveThru.[01:43:00]

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Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to Jon Summers
• 00:44 Conference Overview: Automobility User Interfaces 2024
• 00:56 The Role of Historians in Modern Contexts
• 01:47 Reflections on the Value of Storytellers and Historians
• 02:39 Stanford Conference Experience
• 03:47 Keynote Speech with Barbara Karanian
• 07:28 The Importance of Storytelling in Academia
• 08:36 Generational Shifts in Car Enthusiasm
• 11:23 The Evolution of Autonomous Vehicle Research
• 43:14 Challenges in Autonomous Driving
• 48:06 Sustainability and Future Mobility Solutions
• 52:40 Pedestrian Safety Measures
• 55:19 Eco Driving and Autonomous Vehicles
• 56:45 Urban Mobility and Infrastructure
• 59:07 Personal Reflections on Driving Changes
• 01:02:08 Autonomous Vehicle Research Highlights
• 01:22:04 Pro Social Behavior in Micro Mobility
• 01:37:40 Bystander Effect in Autonomous Buses
• 01:41:33 Conclusion and Final Thoughts