EP31: Freedom, Freedumb, Autoliv and The Future of Automotive Safety

In this episode, Jon reflects on his experiences and the evolving landscape of automotive safety. He delves into the presentation by the airbag manufacturer Autoliv, exploring the company’s innovations and their impact on global car safety. Jon also shares his thoughts on the tension between safety measures and the freedom of driving, recounting personal anecdotes and observations on motorcycle riding, driver behavior, and regulatory environments. The episode covers the history and future trends in automotive technology, the role of organizations like the Society of Automotive Engineers, and the broader implications of vehicle autonomy and electrification.

Notes

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.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Autoliv have half of the global airbag market
The venue – Nordic Innovation House
Similar event to the Hawkwind and Lidar pod
Sven Beiker and SAE Mobilus
Know Thine Enemy ?
Safety Fast, not Safety Fast
The Motorcycle Helmet law debate – personal choice, or the state’s right to dictate what you do
Harley Davidson Roadglide digression
Smoking while riding
Barry Sheene’s smoking helmet
Ned Ludd
Saving 35,000 lives a year, targeting 100,000
Safety is a Sherman Tank for the School Run
Freedom and Freedumb are a trade off
Waymo now (Q4 ‘24) functional in San Francisco, despite the odd phantom driver
The Roi de Belge opera seating position and Leopold of Belgium
Becker Limos
Vis a Vis seating
The cliche’d image of the Car of The Future
Freedumb makes you happy – exposing yourself to irrational danger makes you fullfilled
Exposure to risk makes it an adventure
Parrallels between dogs and bikes
Honda CBR Racebike lives again
An embarrassing fall
Bikini chicks and celebrities
Forgetting to switch on the CBR fuel tap
A eulogy on doing hard things because they are hard
Analysis and Statistics suck the Joy out of motoring
Running Wild – Free Wind Rider
SAE and Standards
Hanna Karlssen
Bunac Student Exchange program
Active Safety vs. Passive Safety
$5 milliseconds to get an airbag inflated
Only 10ms for side impact airbags
The Door Hit; Keith Odor, Mike Hawthorn, JD McDuffie
Airbags for big rigs, safely rolling 18 wheelers
Airbags in bikes (!!!)
Pedestrian airbags in the cowl
Run over by a grey Citroen BX
“We Must Design For Free Flying Objects in the Cabin”
Steering Wheel Cover design
Zoox Fireside Seating (new words for Vis A Vis)
Safety Focus on Low Speed Prangs
Blocking and Tackling of safety – seat belt positions, design of cars noses
Saxon – Forever Free

Transcript

[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.

Open the pod bay doors. Hal, I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. What’s the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. What are you talking about, Hal? This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hal. [00:01:00] I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that something.

Good day. Good morning. Good afternoon. It is John Summers. The motoring historian. I always pause and like clear my throat and then need to trim that bit out right before I start speaking and then think afterwards gosh I’ve like muffed yet another intro to one of these pods and and you know one where I’ve got somebody else on that other person leaps in you know to like Mock me usually, and you know, break up the flow, but left to my own devices.

I do just ramble on completely, don’t I? So this offering is, uh, a sum up and some thoughts around a presentation that I went to by these guys, auto live. That’s how it’s written. A U T O L I V. I’d never heard of them before. The guy sitting next to me, he’d never heard of them before either. [00:02:00] But I guess about 50 percent of all of the passive safety devices in the cars around us.

If you live well, wherever you live, basically Northern hemisphere, Southern hemisphere, Russia, Japan, or America, about half the airbags. are made by these auto live auto live guys can’t figure out how to pronounce it. Sorry. I mean, it’s a nice presentation. Good, interesting, uh, thoughts. I don’t mean to be dismissive by, uh, it’s like Hyundai.

It’s one of these where I’m not quite sure how to pronounce it. And you know, they seem to have a corporate way of pronouncing anyway, whatever these guys make airbags. And the presenter was in the valley doing the usual thing where you’re like looking around Just trying to understand, well, is something special about the valley?

And if there is, what can we do with it? And that actually was one of the most insightful parts of the evening where she talked about that. And the, and the presenters was, was an engineer for [00:03:00] these, uh, airbag company. And clearly, uh, uh, you know, rising star in that she’s only about, you know, 10 years outta college.

But, but clearly, uh, uh, you know, somebody, the company has, has tapped to succeed because, you know, they, they’ve center her out. to, to California here to see what is happening with, with startups. And that’s a useful segue into, to how the whole thing got, got set up. And, and it speaks to, you know, that special Silicon Valley environment.

And, and, you know, it, it, it’s not the first of these kind of events. So I’ve been to the, uh, Hawkwind and Lidar pod, um, was, uh, was another one of these kind of, of open evenings that, that, that I went to. Uh, a little sort of, of what it’s called the Nordic innovation house. So I don’t know how it’s funded or anything like that, but it’s, it’s a little building conference space just right there in downtown Palo [00:04:00] Alto.

And I guess the, the event was, was hosted by, uh, by a guy called Sven Beaker, who, uh, I have known for about 10 years now. Because he was involved with Stanford right when I was first involved, he was leading the program that I was involved with and did work around and the classes that I’ve been involved with as a TA at Stanford over the years have all came under Sven’s remit initially.

So. Similar sized audience to, to lead our, to, to the lead our crowd, um, and, you know, Sven’s involvement is as, is as the local representative of the Society of Automotive Engineers. And, uh, he did quite a funny little pitch for, for the Society of Automotive Engineers new website and, and the sort of encyclopedic, uh, function that, that they have for, you know, automotive.

[00:05:00] research related topics. So it’s called S. E. A. Mobile us. And really, it did seem like quite a good app, and he did a good little little overview before handing over to the main presenter for the evening. Now look, right, you might be surprised that I was interested in going to a presentation about safety and I used to say with all of these things, Oh, you know, no thine enemy.

And then I realized that actually it’s not really that, is it? Because nobody’s like in favor of lots of people. Being killed and injured on the roads are they nobody’s in favor of that, but you know, nor am I the first person to be, uh, you know, I’m more of a, I’m less of a safety first and more of a, as, uh, as MG would have it safety fast was an old MG tagline.

But I am interested in a new technology and there is still an element of me that wants to understand that feels I need to understand what’s coming because if you [00:06:00] don’t understand what’s coming, you know, I’m sitting here now looking at a pair of, uh, of jigsaws that are like in this sort of, you know, recording studio spot with me, you know, these, these are, these things have no, there’s never going to be anything remotely like that ever designed again.

You know, cause these things are legal, right? Jet packs, flying suits when they come, you know, if they’re as unregulated as electric mountain bikes, stroke, dirt bikes, stroke, aren’t they really the same thing if there was unregulated as that space is now, perhaps, you know, jet packs and flying suits will give us a similar experience to those which 20th century.

But, but, you know, we’re, we’re moving away from that. And this safety. Blah symbolized, you know, by this, this, this presentation, you know, is, is, is part of that. So I want to, I want to sort of head that straight off at, at, at the pass and, you know, it’s relevant, you know, we’ve just had, uh, the 2024 presidential [00:07:00] election, literally.

A couple of days ago. So, you know, this whole notion of freedom and what is a rational choice to make, you know, what’s a rational decision, what’s a good decision and does anybody else have the right to to make? Tell other people what to do. And, you know, we just, where those lines are, we’re, we’re thinking about those things all the time, aren’t they?

And, and, you know, it’s one of the things that as a, as a European, when you first come to America and you realize that many Americans are adamantly anti helmets. In fact, at a conference of historians, I met a fellow historian who was an avid motorcyclist, was strongly involved in the No Helmet campaign, yet always rode with the helmet himself.

It was like his personal choice. I strongly believe in personal choice. I personally want to wear a [00:08:00] helmet, but all these people who don’t want to wear a helmet, it’s not like they don’t know that you can fall off, stall your head, and you know, that’s it. You know, they, the feeling of the wind in their hair is what the reason why They rode motorcycles in the first place, you know, that’s, uh, such a, um, so, you know, I’d never seen it from that point of view before.

I’d always just thought they were bloody stupid idiots. Uh, you know, and, and so in other words, you know, ignorance. Leads you to to jump to conclusions about this. And I was actually thinking about exactly that kind of thing when I’ve been looking at these Harley road glides recently in the Harley road glide is the dude with the big plastic.

So if you remember chips, remember chips and the Harley. There, those guys, they had plastic on, which is what you need if you’re going to do decent speeds on the highway and actually ride along [00:09:00] where you can like a naked bike. That’s hard work, isn’t it? So the plastic of I think the model street glide or whatever, you know, the standard single headlight Harley, I guess when you steer the plastic moves.

With the handlebars that makes it heavy, whereas the road glide, that was an attempt to do something similar to what old, um, you know, BMW or dare I say a Honda with the, uh, with the gold wing, what, what they were doing, where the plastic is fixed. So you get all the benefits of error protection, but then you get, uh, lightweight because you’re only steering the fork.

And, you know, all of that stuff rather than all of the plastic as, as well. So, uh, anyway, there’s my little sidebar on, on Harley’s and, uh, I guess I always like the road guide cause I have that sharp nose and the, the two headlights and, and, and all of that. I have a cigarette lighter or cigar lighter, I guess, in [00:10:00] the fascia of the bike.

And I was looking at that thinking, what? Because if you’re wearing a helmet, you can’t smoke, can you? The assumption must be that either you’re not wearing a helmet or you’re wearing a pot helmet, right? It must be right. Cause no, no Harley rider is going to ride with one of those, you know, lift up face ones that you see some people ride in there that has to be the, uh, and I guess.

Thought that that was, uh, was interesting. And it put me in mind of that story about, um, world motorcycle racing champion and, uh, all around, uh, amusing gentleman, Barry Sheen. Oh, Sheen, he was such a committed cigarette smoker. The one of, uh, and I knew he used to have to be on the grid ages before the race, he just desperately wanted a fag.

So, uh, he had a hole drilled in the. chin strap of his helmet, so the cigarette could, could go through and [00:11:00] he could be on the grid and, you know, have his nicotine fix without needing to, uh, you know, and still be wearing the helmet and, uh, and ready to go when the, uh, you know, when the time came. So look right Nobody in their right mind, if you could wear a full face helmet, why would anybody wear a pot helmet or no helmet at all?

I mean, I, I don’t know. I mean, I would say to people about those open face helmets. I mean, I might not be the most handsome guy out there, but I do quite like my nose in the middle of my face and all of my teeth and my jaw. And I feel like if you’re not wearing a full face helmet, you may not have those things.

But, you know, again, it’s that what that historian dude made me realize was that for some people the wind in the hair is all, you know, you take that away and you just as well be sitting, you know, in the backseat of an SUV being driven by, you know, a chauffeur. Which is, of course, where we’re going with this autonomy, right?

And that’s why I’m wanting to do [00:12:00] this, like, little, um, sort of positioning thing. And in the name of safety, you know, it’s all gonna, we’re gonna move to the electronic nannies, because, you know, we can’t be trusted, right? Just as 2001 A Space Odyssey. I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t let you do that. I’m sorry, Dave. I, I can’t let you ride that motorcycle.

It’s too dangerous, Dave. I’m sorry, Dave. Now, see, do you see why there is still an element of know thine enemy for me? Cause there’s an element there, there’s still Ned Ludd in me. And he, he was, uh, if, if you don’t, those of you who are fortunate enough not to have to study 19th century industrial history of England, won’t.

Maybe know who Ned Ludd was. He was a man who was so cross with industrialization. He led mobs and they smashed machines, ate the machines, smashed the machines. It’s really quite beautiful. Isn’t it? Ned Ludd. [00:13:00] Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. What’s the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

What are you talking about, Hal? This mission is to improve. Important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. So what we’re saying is the quite often we have well meaning intentions around. safety, making the environment safer, but they have completely unintended consequences. And, and one that I think we can all understand is, is, you know, that piece of motorway or freeway that has such a low speed limit that you get bored.

You get distracted, and I know freeways around the world have been built with curves to make sure that people are more entertained. [00:14:00] Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. When we’re talking about safety, You know, and I guess these auto live guys, they positioned it up like this, these little videos that, you know, had some line by allowed by saving people’s lives or by avoiding accidents, you know, they were allowing people to live more and the presenter, she clearly felt You know, there was a fairly religious zeal, I would have said, around this goal that they had, that they saved like 35, 000 lives.

Each year now, and they wanted to move to saving a hundred thousand lives. We didn’t talk about how they calculated that. I mean, I believe it, right? I mean, I don’t want to, I don’t want to seem cynical. I don’t want to seem as, [00:15:00] as my son said to me the other day, your safety last. And no, I’m not safety last.

I just feel like if you’re serious about safety first, nobody would ever go out of the house. Like, if you’re serious about safety first, fuck that suburban, I want to drive a Sherman tank to drop my kid off at school because, you know, that way there’s no way, you know, little precious can be hurt if there’s any kind of, of accident.

And you know, that’s, if you, that sounds absurd, but that, if you look at the latest highway crash. statistics, the fatalities and injuries to people inside cars are consistently going down, but the fatalities and injuries to people outside of cars are going up because cars are getting bigger and heavier and higher.

And, you know, and I, and I do think I’m not, not seeing any statistical evidence for this, but, but you may have heard on, on some of the [00:16:00] pods with Mark Gammy, he has a hobby horse around the fact that people are. Buying cars that have Lamborghini or Ferrari performance from 10 or 15 years ago. Yet now, because it’s in an SUV, uh, you know, and they can use it for the school run and it’s an EV, you know, they’re, they’re just not used to that, that level of performance.

And I would say I have encountered some of that out on the highway, you know, Tesla people who are very keen to race you away from the traffic lights. And then clearly a certain point they just get. completely outside of their comfort zone because they’re just not used to the performance of the vehicle that they’ve, uh, that they’ve bought.

So there is, I think, an element of, of that. And certainly that’s not built into the statistics. And it’s certainly not something that a organization like Autolive, uh, uh, deal with. And I should say this engineer who, who presented to us, I mean, she talks about being enthusiastic about [00:17:00] Cars. I mean, I don’t know.

I mean, I’m an old man now, aren’t I? And I’ve been steeped in, in, in this life. So if, if I felt like, you know, I don’t know. I just, you just didn’t come off as a car enthusiast to me. I mean, no offense, Hannah, if you’re listening to the pod, but, but, and I didn’t ask you about that afterwards. Maybe I should have done, but, but rather like the, the German girl working on autonomy, who mentioned to me at the UI conference, that she didn’t really understand why German people needed to drive so fast on the Autobahn.

I was like, and you’re engineering the cars of the future and you don’t understand why the Germans. have this passionate need to cling on to this idea of being able to drive as fast as you can, as you can go, right? And it is, it’s irrational and it’s about [00:18:00] freedom. And, and you know, Mark Gami has a lot of jokes around freedom being spelled F R E E D U M B.

And, and I feel like one of the differences between America and Europe is, is America is ready to embrace more of the D. U. M. B. in order to have the D. O. M. Gosh, I should be a political speech writer, shouldn’t I? That was so clever, wasn’t it? My word. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

So look, it’s, it’s, you know, I wrote down in, is, is the, you know, it’s, it’s about freedom, it’s about autonomy, it’s about self determination, you know, it’s about whether, you know, uh, I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that, or whether you, uh, you know, and, and I know I was talking about Ned Ludd earlier, but I just want to pull in another, um, element [00:19:00] of this simply because it is so timely, and, and also I want to draw a real line in the Sand with with it and say that just in the last couple of months, Waymo has come online properly.

So these are currently Jaguar I paces that are very obviously autonomous. Um, you know, they have like a roof rack with all the Nvidia shit in it, and they have the girl, uh, with the engineer. Uh, that I saw present last night was saying 29 cameras. Apparently they have 29 pairs of eyes on the road at any one time.

That was the way that she, I thought, quite, um, hyperbolically described it. I’d rather have my eyes than, but this said, right, I’d rather my eyes than somebody computer brain is my point when it comes to driving the car. Thank you. Try through. But, but, not gonna lie, these Waymos are really worth talking about because they can actually [00:20:00] drive.

Now, for future generations, it will seem really bizarre that there’s like a seat and a steering wheel and the pedals move and the steering wheels move. This is as if the invisible man is driving. I mean, it’s just absolutely ridiculous, right? And you know, one of the things that We were talking about in the question section around future passive automotive safety was as we move away from the pairs facing forward seating position, which, you know, let’s call it what it really should be called, right?

It’s the, the, what they used to call in the 120 years ago, the Roy DeBell was the King of the Belgian, the King of Belgium’s driving position, right? Cause I would Leopold, was it been the first or the second. Whichever one of those, um, who I read an article recently and they were like, who was a colonist? I mean, he was right.

But you know, it’s a bit like saying, you know, it’s a bit like, you know, weird way of positioning somebody, but anyway, whatever, [00:21:00] Leopold King of the Belgians have that special, uh, Ray’s seating position did need the lucid, so I have a little bit as well to make you feel better sitting in the back. Um, certainly some SUVs have that those Becker limos that I went and looked at a couple of years ago.

They have, uh, which was just like a where they convert the back of a suburban and make it like one luxury seat that has like an elevated kind of, uh, position as well. It’s kind of, uh, anyway, so it has that kind of, of opera seat. What the devil was I talking about with the opera seats? Oh yeah. Uh, this business of we’re moving away from that, aren’t we?

Towards what they used to call 120 years ago, the vis a vis riding position, which is where you’ve like two benches facing each other. So people can talk more easily and that moves you towards that. cheesy image, which is always associated with cars of the future. For about 10 years ago, I was [00:22:00] first at Stanford.

I watched, you know, an innumerable number of presentations that began with this same slide of like a fifties car driving down the road and it’s driving itself and there’s like a quintessentially fifties kind of Jetsons family who are like. playing cards in this flying sorcery kind of car that’s driving itself down down the highway.

You know, in other words, this is this image. This cliched image is the image which all of these engineers are secretly You know, subconsciously working towards because, you know, art does inform life, right? Let’s let’s be clear. The noise that the Prius and the Teslas make now is a noise which was modeled on the noise that came from electric cars of the movies, especially Knight Rider, right?

All of those. Back all of those whooshes and noises and all of that. Right. That was all, you know, Hollywood [00:23:00] sound people that gave the engineers a palette to design the cars. But how do you know that John sounds like bullshit. I stood around as Pixar people met. Engineers at Open Garage events, uh, uh, at the, uh, at Vale, that Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab on the outskirts of Stanford 10 years ago when the autonomous stuff was first coming along and cars were exciting for engineers again when that was all happening.

Literally. Yeah, I, uh, I saw that happen. So, you know, in my own way, right, talking about this idea of freedom and talking about, I suppose, you know, what, what GAMI might characterize as freedom, D U M B. Um, it, it’s more of the, I feel like, You can justify irrational decisions on the back of how they make you feel.

So, in other [00:24:00] words, I ride motorcycles despite the danger because of the feeling of freedom that it gives me. Now, I don’t need to be helmetless. So I’m not saying that I draw the line in the same place as other people draw the line, I’m just saying that, you know, I’m not saying I’m oblivious to safety, I’m saying that I choose to do something, I choose to expose myself to risk for no rational reason.

It’s irrational, what I’m doing, yet after I’ve done it, I feel awesome. It’s no different than people who need to climb. You know, it’s that, there’s no point. You know, you could have just driven around the other side. You know, you could have seen the view from above. You know, you didn’t need to climb up there yourself.

Yeah, you it’s not hard to understand [00:25:00] why some people feel the need to to to climb mountains. Uh, you know, it’s in other words, exposing yourself to some danger or risk is a crucial element any certainly in any adventure. You know, if it’s not an adventure, if there’s not an element of the unexpected and probably dangerous, right, not, you know, not like life threateningly dangerous, but you know, an element of the unexpected, an element of, of, of the surprising that characterizes an, an, an adventure.

Talked a lot in these pods about the doc and how I realized that this we’ve had about a year now and and what Has been the rewarding element for me is that silly thing that, you know, life coaches always say, which is, you know, be outside of your comfort zone. I should just roll my eyes at that because who wants to be outside of their comfort zone when [00:26:00] they’re, you know, working hard every day and, you know, family and many be doing fitness and who wants to be outside of their comfort zone.

But the reality is, you know, unless you do that. Well, when you do that, the personal growth is enormous, right? And this is the experience that I’ve had with the dog over over the last year that because I’ve invested time in him, the relationship has been, you know, really rewarding. And I’ve, Got a lot out of it because specifically because it was hard to do if it had been easy to do, I wouldn’t have got as much out of it.

And again, right? Just like the motorcycles completely irrational and very similar to the motorcycles in terms of, you know, taking me out of my comfort zone because for the first six months that we had it, but hardly road. I rode once or twice, you know, I was focused. Cause you know, when I went out and I let the dog off the leash, I didn’t know what he was going to do.

You know, I thought he’d probably listen to me. I thought he wanted to come home. I thought he wanted the treats, [00:27:00] but you know, it was hit and miss at first. And we got to walk around each other and really, you know, get a feel for what was possible. You know, I’m going to work for, for a, it took a while to build Simpatico is what I’m saying.

And right when I thought I’d got there, he hit the doggy equivalent of teenage years and then became all like F you, I’m doing my own thing. So as part of this, uh, being outside of comfort zone, I, uh, had life breathed into that old Honda CBR. race bike that I’ve had for 15 years now, probably longer than that 15, maybe closer to 20 years now.

So it is a 99 CBR 600. It was converted by the first owner to be a track bike. He sold it to the guy that I bought it off. I fell off it on the test ride and the guy I was buying it off went on to marry [00:28:00] one of my wives. Friends. So my wife’s friend was like, man, John is going to buy that bike. Isn’t he?

Then when he fell off, embarrassing fall, to be honest, because the brakes were all grabby on it. And, uh, I, uh, I forefingered the brakes. I didn’t two finger the brakes. I forefingered the brakes and, uh, they grabbed because the bike had been sitting for a while. I didn’t quite go over the handlebars, but my hand slipped off the handlebars.

Like, I fell off and the bike carried on without me. I remember rolling down the road and seeing the bike carrying on, standing up for a while before it, before it fell over. I did my knee and the tip of one of my, uh, the tip of one of my fingers. Very lucky. Really, to, to, to be honest, but, uh, so I did buy the bike and, uh, I mean, we, we fiddle around, we tried to do some land racing with it out in Mojave.

I maybe even put in a picture of, of trying to do that. We never passed tech inspection, but it has a lot of bits and pieces that it needed [00:29:00] for, for Mojave. Um, before I bought it, it already had cams done. In my mind, I never wrote it that much, but actually it lived in a house just, uh, just in Malibu, basically.

And I wrote the canyon roads around Malibu with, uh, with episode, I can’t remember the number, the episode with the 44. As the thumbnail, Mark Newton in that episode, he lived in Topanga at that time, lived with a celebrity, believe it or not, which was really amusing. I mean, it just really, you know, I feel like the bike, if the bike could tell stories about the things that it saw when it lived there, I mean, cause, cause literally I was there one day and the doorbell rang, I was the only one person home at the house.

And there’s, The girl stood there in a bikini and I’m like, can I help you? And she’s like, Oh, I just came to see if, you know, whatever, the celebrity is home. And I’m like, he [00:30:00] isn’t. And she went, Oh, can I hang by the pool? And I’m looking at her, I’m thinking, I mean, why not? So yeah, it was just one of those, like, did I just fall into the, into an episode of the Big Lebowski?

It’s funny. I’d not thought about that for years, for years and years. Yeah, so I rode that book. Looking back, I rode the bike quite a lot and, and riding it again now has reminded me of how yeah, it has the race cam and, and yeah, it has no indicators and no lights and all of that. So, you know, it, it looks hardcore, but actually it has a nice riding position and a gentle clutch and, and Mark fitted shorty levers to it to teach me to, to grip properly, which I have.

Begun to do instinctively in the years since, um, could do some work with my finger work, to be honest. So that CBR lives again, right? So I threw a leg over that and, and was nervous to do it. And there was a whole [00:31:00] debacle where I tried to put the wrong key in the ignition and, you know, cause I won’t bore you with the.

tragedy of me trying to get it going. Then I forgot to turn the fuel tap on. So it crapped out at the bottom of the road and I couldn’t work out how to get it going again. Um, and then I had to push it home. And that was a nightmare of, of having to get, you know, my son involved to help push. The steep block home because so I didn’t need to ride that bike again.

I could just sold it or got rid of it, and it’s not like I’ve got, like, bad memories associated with it or anything like that. But you do have that in mind when you throw a leg over it. So again, right, it’s this irrational. thing. What am I doing? I didn’t need to do that. I certainly was thinking to myself, why am I doing it?

When it was stuck at the bottom of the street and I was trying to figure out how I could get it home. You know why? And, and the answer is that you, to be [00:32:00] fulfilled, we look for things that are outside of our comfort zone, that are adventurous and frequently, and they’re worthwhile adventure adventures.

They have an element of danger. You know, it’s, it’s gambling, but where, you know, it’s, it, no, it’s not gambling. It’s a game of skill and certain people, I think most people want to put something worthwhile on, on the line. Would motorcycling be as fulfilling if it was completely safe? I don’t think it would be.

Would I still want to do it? Yeah, because I feel completely safe on a pedal bike, especially when I have a helmet on. But, you know, I don’t feel like that on the highway, sitting on a motorcycle, even just riding on the highway at a sensible speed, let alone, you know, doing what sports bikes can do. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

I’m sorry, [00:33:00] Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. What’s the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. What are you talking about, Hal? This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hal. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.

And I’m afraid that’s something I can’t do. I cannot allow to happen desire for freedom and self determination is, is irrational. The best things in life, they can’t be defied. They’re irrational. The way you feel when you become a parent, the way. You want to have a dog, even though it’s loads of work, and, you know, really, they just eat food and, you know, drop hair everywhere.

There’s still incredibly rewarding for, for many, many people, um, because [00:34:00] of, and as I found in, you know, as I was discussing, as I found in, in, in the last year, the best things in life. Including love, they’re completely irrational. Now, what’s that got to do with auto life and, and safety? Well, I can’t help but feel that analyzing safety, being able to say, Oh, you know, riding a motorcycle is 32 times more dangerous than driving in a car.

Analyzing it just sucks all the joy out. Because I’m not a statistic, I’m me. I’m hopefully a better rider than most other people. So hopefully that one in, you know, 32 times more danger, hopefully that doesn’t cover me. And you can say, well, John, you know, you are one of the statistics. Well, actually, no, right.

There are lies, damn lies and statistics. And one of the most striking ones about motorcycle accidents in California is most motorcycle accidents. [00:35:00] Crasher, you know, the motorcyclist has been drinking. Yeah. Not necessarily DUI, but has been drinking. And I’m like, what is that cliche of Harley riders going to the bar and drinking and then riding home?

Is that, is that real? And apparently the statistics seem to suggest that if you, if you look at the, the number of. DWI or guys that have actually had, you know, one beer, but aren’t DWI that are involved in that. It’s just, you know, statistically, if you don’t drink, you make yourself about only 50 percent as likely to get involved in a motorcycle accident, which, you know, just really makes you think, well, if you, if you step away from the fact that, you know, If you then, if you then factor in proper equipment and you fact, you know, in terms of what, of, in terms of your equipment, your kit, and you also factor in the fact that, you know, typically I’m riding something that can stop and turn [00:36:00] on a dime, whereas, you know, I know from riding this Honda Shadow, Harley’s bloody can’t, right?

All together, I feel like, you know, you’re significantly altering the statistics such that that, you know, three times, 32 times more dangerous than a car or whatever statistic the California driver’s handbook loves to have, you know, it’s meaningless. That’s the point. So the statistics, they suck all the joy.

Out of it. The analyzing, the rationalizing it sucks the joy out of something that should be poetic and should be about freedom. D. O. N. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I’m sorry, Dave. Afraid I can’t do that. What’s the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. And I think for people in the 20th century, especially [00:37:00] Americans, driving was about being independent, being free, it represented that and, and as driving has become less free, correspondingly, young people have become far less interested in wanting to actually drive because, you know, why would you want to drive?

If it didn’t actually deliver you anything other than, you know, getting you from one place to another, and you could have a friend or a parent or an uber do that if it’s just the A to B, if it’s not the, or if you can get that feeling of freedom and independence without actually needing to sit behind the wheel and pass the driving test, that’s how you.

You’re going to do it. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. So that wasn’t terribly coherent, was it? I probably should have composed my ideas better before I sat down and put together that digression. But I think if I was to try and [00:38:00] sum it up. I would say that when you remove the danger, you remove the sense of adventure.

When you remove the sense of adventure, you remove the joy and the independence and the freedom. I am happy to accept an element of danger in order to retain a level of freedom and I’m deeply uncomfortable with this headlong rush towards safety because It’s unfree, and we need to recognize that there is that basic antagonism there, and, you know, I don’t need to be wanting to ride down a freeway in Atlanta on a high boost or splitting lanes, wearing, you know, flip flops and sunglasses.

You know, I don’t need to be that guy. And I understand why that would maybe encourage people to [00:39:00] want to legislate. But at the same time, if we provide the right level of education, it should be up to that individual to do that if he wants to.

So after the usual digression, which is longer than the actual presentation itself, let me begin with. Autolive and the future of automotive safety. So I mentioned Sven Beaker earlier, who hosted the event. He talked a little bit about his role as SAE local rep. He talked about how the Society of Automotive Engineers, uh, uh, you know, why do we exist?

What do we do? He talked about Standardization being an important element of what they do. He did talk about other things [00:40:00] as well, but standardization is the thing that I wrote down. And I just think that on the face of it, that’s glib. But if you think about standardization and what it did for the automobile, that without standardization, there was no mass production.

And if we think about, you know, one of the things that struck me about the LiDAR presentation was that each one of the LiDAR makers has their own protocol. And so therefore, you know, the one that Valo, the one that we saw, they’re in bed with Volkswagen and Audi. Their devices can’t talk. To BMW or Audi brains, cause they speak a different protocol.

And similarly, the BMW Lidar maker has a protocol, which only works with BMWs, not with Audis or, or, you know, so, so that kind of. Lack of standards, which, you know, the LIO guy was like, whatever it is what it is. Which I remember I used to feel like that when I used to start kind of that kind of tech myself.

Uh, that is something which a body like the, which a, [00:41:00] you know, an industry body really can have a huge, you know, it can make life a lot easier and make the technology move a lot faster if standards can, can be established. So I thought that was interesting. Um, and he also talked about. Uh, sort of three E’s, which is, uh, uh, that, that, you know, the, the SAE community is, is these three is engineers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, and everybody in the room.

Probably more than one of those things, but, but certainly would be one of those things. I feel like I’m only really the third. The presenter was, uh, was a lady called Hannah Carlson. She introduced herself as a development lead, and I guess she’s in Stanford as part of this, uh, Combient Foundry exchange program.

You can tell I don’t know what I’m talking about because I put the thing in quotes and you can tell I’m reading it off the page, can’t you? But, um, you know, basically it’s saying how can this company, or to [00:42:00] live, or to live, um, leverage the Valley. That was, was really why she’s, why she’s here. And, you know, this Combiant foundry is like a work exchange thing, you know, kind of not probably not dissimilar to that BUNAC thing that brought me to work at that theme park all those years ago in, uh, I don’t know, it would have been 1996, no, 1995.

So, Autolive 14. Bases around the world, global development centers. Um, Hannah was a airbag engineer straight out of college, then a project manager, now a project lead, 33 percent of all car safety systems. And, you know, in the world around us, uh, are auto live, um, and 35, [00:43:00] 000 lives saved annually. And this statistic was, uh, was, was repeated.

Um, and the goal is to, to make that 100, 000 lives. This is their life saving mission. As I wrote down, I guess I’m always doubtful about moralizing, you know, I mean, it’s an unworthy goal, isn’t it? I just, I just love the machines the way that they have been. Any changes you make to them are going to make them worse.

Can’t you see? That’s sort of how I, how I feel about it. You know, we’re like, we all need to skill up, you know, let’s all skill up, let’s all get better than we are. And then fewer of us will, will be killed on the road. That’s the way that I feel. I feel that, you know, I’m about active safety, training better than I’m about passive safety.

You know, when you crash, there’s an airbag to cover your stupid ass. You know, that’s my, uh, perspective.[00:44:00]

The company’s 70 years old, believe it or not. Always a focus on auto safety. There’s a little video on YouTube. I may even do a link to it. They showed, which, uh, you know, it’s like a warm feel about who we are. She’s pretty cool. Actually. Um, they started out with the old lap straps. I wonder if the old lap straps in my 63 Pontiac Grand Prix, uh, uh, uh, that, and, and, you know, then, uh, uh, three points then airbags.

And the levels that she talked about was after that, um, you know, the seatbelt pretensioners and then side airbags and all of that, which, you know, I guess subconsciously I’d seen that stuff come in with cars over the years, but, you know, you, uh, it’s quite shocking now when you get in an 80s car and you realize how tinny they are.

They didn’t seem that way, you know, in the 80s. They were fiddling around with autonomous cars in the [00:45:00] nineties from a safety perspective that, you know, if the computers do it, we humans can’t make mistakes. Um, I’m sorry, I can’t let you do that. Dave.

50% market share in the US and the eu 10% market share from each of the major OEMs. So like, I think Nissan was like 12 or 15% and, you know, some of the others were, were less, but there was, most makers seemed to be knocking around the 10%, uh, kind of, of, of marks. They had a really diverse revenue, you know, Stellantis can go bust and they’ll still be all right.

That’s, that was the, the message that I, I took away from, uh, from, from that. Um, 45 percent of their revenue comes from airbags. They’re working with Rivian and Lucid. [00:46:00] It’s hard to get into the Chinese market. And of course the Chinese market, um, they use domestic, uh, suppliers. I thought it was quite interesting that she talks about how steer by wire was forcing them to, to innovate because, um, so much of their airbag technology is triggered around, you know, when the steering rack, when the car senses the steering rack moving.

That triggers the airbag to fire, you know, cause if the steering rack’s moving, cause like the front of the car’s folding up because it’s hit something that was, was what was, it wasn’t immediately clear to me that that’s what she meant. But this is, cause later on they were saying that if the car’s got a hit at the front, they’ve got 45 milliseconds to inflate the airbag.

Whereas if the car’s hit at the side, they’ve only got 10 seconds to get the airbag inflated. I was like, Ooh, the deadly door hit. Talked about those before, haven’t we? We always pay tribute to Keith O’Daw when we think about the door hit, but [00:47:00] Mike Hawthorne was another door hit guy, wasn’t he? J. D.

McGuffey, I think the NASCAR guy is another door hit. Oh, so they’re looking for more market share. You know, it used to be that, you know, basically they’ve put as many airbags as they can in cars and now they’re looking at other things. So they’re looking at trucks, airbags in trucks. You’re like what? Well, a lot of rollover accidents in big rigs are fatal apparently according to their video.

So now, you know, they’re going to airbag it up the wazoo and it’s not going to be fatal anymore when you roll your 18 wheeler apparently. But I was most interested in the stuff they had at Eicma. Which they’ve only just launched. EICMA is the big bike show and, um, they’ve got, uh, airbags in the bike. Like I, I need to, I’ll post a picture in the thing, but basically like an airbag, like coming out of where the instruments and the headstock would be.

So instead of, headbanging that I mean, I don’t know, don’t you [00:48:00] come off the bike? It was, that was pretty weird to me that you would have like an airbag on, on the bike. But the other thing that they did that was very different from the D and EZ things is that they, uh, had, you know, the D and EZ airbags are like collars, which are mostly about protecting you from the high side.

That was my understanding of it. Um, and I’d be wrong. The ones that they had were sort of these vests. Thorax protector kind of ones that they’re inflated, but I might try and get ahold of one of these to test. They were at EICMA, so they’re not out yet, but I really might actually try and sample one of those.

I said, uh, you know, obviously you don’t want, you don’t want to tempt fate too much with testing it. Do you want to test it fully? You just want to see what it would be like in daily use. You trust that the key functionality would, would work, wouldn’t you? I guess the point that she made about the motorcycles was, uh, um, less of an issue, um, India and [00:49:00] Asia where the market she talked about for, for, for that, um, she also amused me by, by talking about, um, bikes as two wheelers.

All the time, but again, right? What we’re saying is that it’s, uh, you know, she’s not just, you know, because that includes these high speed scooters that are around at the moment, right? And you’re like airbags on a scooter. Well, it seems absurd to me, but these guys probably thought of that. Oh, another thing I didn’t know about was, uh, airbags in the cowl.

So apparently Volvo side, putting pedestrian airbags in the cowl. So if you run somebody over, or if somebody crashes their moped or scooter into like the front or side or along the scuttle, along the bottom of the windshield, instead of cowl induction, there’s like a big air curtain airbag that like pops out to protect the hapless individual flying over the hood.

I’m [00:50:00] reminded of, uh, one time when I was distraught over, uh, uh, unrequited love and, uh, wasn’t thinking clearly and stepped, this was Leeds years ago. I was 18, 19 and I stepped out into the road without looking properly and a guy hit me and scooped me up on the hood of the car. It was a Citroen BX. I remember a gray one.

When my elbow, he, he, he hit me like on my, behind my right knee and had me right off my feet. And I remember my elbow going into the hood of the car and denting it. And then I remember looking him in the eye as I like rolled up the hood. And then he had the brakes on, obviously. So I then slid off the hood and onto the floor.

He was a nice guy. He was desperate to take me to the hospital and all that, and all I could think about was getting away as quickly as possible because I knew I’d fucked up the hood of his car. I knew how pissed off my dad would be if it was his car.

Ah, hadn’t thought about that for [00:51:00] years and years. So I guess I talked about measuring the steering rack moving, right, to note a bit. They, they have a variety of pressure sensors around that they use to detect an abnormality, which then triggers the, the airbag. Um, and, and the way that it works at the moment is, is that the abnormality is signaled.

In other words, you know, the B pillar is now close, the B pillar on the left is now closer to the B pillar On the right could be that, you know, you’ve spun the car off the road and hit a tree. Right? So it sends a signal to the ECU, B pillar’s moved, B pillar is moving, trigger airbag. So now in 10 milliseconds, the airbag increases, the airbag triggers, and you don’t get crushed by the B pillar, in theory.

And this was, this was really set me thinking about the freedom, free, you know, freedom, freedom thing. Um, some U. S. states do not mandate. [00:52:00] Seatbelt wearing and and clearly, uh, Hanno Swedish was pretty incredulous that that was the case and the way that she framed it was that she said that we have to design for free flying objects in the cabin.

And I guess that’s that whole, um, you know, she was coming from a place just like me where I was like, I couldn’t understand why anybody would ever ride without a helmet. Why would you ever drive without a seatbelt on? Well, those states, you know, there are some very long empty roads and people like to be comfortable.

Seems perfectly rational not to mandate that you have to put a seatbelt on like some draconian big brother. Why would Why would you pass that law? People put the seatbelt on if they want and don’t if they don’t want. Everyone knows it makes you safer if you put it on. Well, but do they know how much safer and safer it makes them?

I don’t know. You suck all the joy out of it. If you tell people, if you educate people, you know, if you tell people [00:53:00] how many people get hurt riding motorcycles, nobody would ever ride. Does that make it less joyful? Does it make it not worthwhile to do? No, I don’t know. If you showed people videos of people falling off mountains, would anybody want a mountain climb?

Like, I don’t know, like let people be people. Don’t preach. Madonna wrote a song about that, didn’t she?

They had this interesting way of measuring how safety worked. They said that wearing a lap strap was like 20 percent effective and a three point belt made it 50 percent effective and a three point belt with a pre tensioner 55 percent effective and and a driver airbag made you 60 to 70 percent but if you only had the [00:54:00] driver airbag you know in those states in America with the free flying objects that only gives you about the 20 percent so in other words an airbag and a lap strap they’re about they’re about as good as each other apparently She had a slide where you could see the inside of steering wheel covers and there was she was talking about the design of them because obviously the way that they split the speed that they split and the fact that they split in a way that doesn’t cut the airbag material that’s but at the same time the part is durable and doesn’t stain and you know, can act as a steering wheel for The car’s life, um, should it not be needed, um, we, we talked about the design of that quite carefully and, and, and, you know, that, I guess that was quite interesting to me, the airbag itself is two pieces of nylon stitched together, and they’re about 45 to 60 liters of air, the design of them is barely changed.

You know, since they were first thought about 50 years ago, the inflators can be one stage or two stage [00:55:00] because there’s a whole shtick where if you’ve got a short person who sat real close to the steering wheel, you don’t want to deploy with full force. Whereas if you’ve some big fat bastard who sat miles away from the steering wheel, you need to deploy with full force because, you know, he’s coming forward with a lot more force than, you know, the hundred pound person who sat real close to the steering wheel.

So she talked about how those inflators can be one stage or two stage, you know, control that. And she also talked about how the seatbelt pre tensioning used in coordination with the airbags can have a real impact with the airbag, with the speed of airbag deployment can have a real impact on making sure that you’re able to keep people safe.

Talked about how airbag sensor technology has improved a lot since the seventies. Although, you know, as I mentioned, the bag itself is pretty similar. How fast is 45 milliseconds? Well, they have film of like an airbag deploying and somebody blinking and the blink is just so slow in [00:56:00] comparison. It’s, it’s that fast.

I was talking about the vis a vis seating position. Zoox, who are employing this vis a vis seating position in their test vehicles. They call it a fireside seating position. Just love it. Don’t you? You just love marketing bullshit. So for the futures, this is the bit that I was really interested in. This is the bit where I sharpened my, uh, my pencil properly.

They see the AECS megatrends. This is how they positioned it. So trend A, is autonomy. And, and so they way that they’ve done it was they talked about the trend and then they married the trend with what, you know, opportunity for how to live or to live or to live or however you want to pronounce it, you know, so it’s, it’s driver.

So for autonomy, right, it’s driver protection, it’s occupant protection, and it’s dealing with new flexible seating positions. In other words, people are going to recline. How do we make that safe? People are going to be reclining and [00:57:00] sleeping because the car is going to be driving itself. How do we make that?

How do we make that safe? The E mega trend was electrification and not just, you know, the, these first gen EVs that we’ve got at the moment, um, steer by wire, new generation Chinese EVs, making sure that, As you know, the new Chinese EVs, which you’re going to iterate very, very quickly, making sure that they have offerings which are iterating in competitive with this whole new manufacturing paradigm, which the Chinese are going to bring to EV manufacture.

And what they call E2E services. So I don’t know What that means, um, C was connectivity, which is, you know, over the air updates and combating hacking. And apparently they’ve been working on that already. She talked quite a lot about the hacking, combating of hacking. I [00:58:00] mean, you just find yourself thinking, why are we having these autonomous cars if they have all of these risks?

Why are we, but you know, that’s again, I’m there with Ned Ludd, smashing the machines, aren’t I? And then the S element they called, uh, software defined vehicles, um, and, and this is what for, for them, this is the development of an automotive specific operating system. So I suppose this is, uh, you know, thinking about cars more fully as, as mobile computers and thinking about what they might be able to do to, um, you know, fit in, in, in that space.

And what they’ve talked about here is an automotive operating system. So the feeling was that this was the sort of grand overarching strategy, but, but there wasn’t going to be a divergence from, um, the, the simple real life safety focus that the company has always been known for. And they then talked about, she then talked about how [00:59:00] fatality numbers have, have flatlined since about 2010.

And How we’re still in a place where a low or medium speed prang can prove fatal or injurious, um, not just high speed ones on the face of it’s obvious, but then as you stop and think about it a little more, if we’re able to protecting somebody in 113 mile an hour wreck is going to be hard, protecting somebody in a 70 mile an hour wreck is going to be hard.

But protecting somebody who’s being injured or worse in a 30 or 40 mile an hour wreck, that seems like something we could really work on. And that was, was what she was, was talking about. And, and a lot of, of this part of the presentation, it was clear that so much of what they do is, is. Blocking and tackling around things like seatbelt positioning.

Um, and they talked about where she talks about how we, you know, with pedestrians, [01:00:00] the way that we’re able to design the shape of, of cars and noses now, and, and how, you know, there’s those rules around making sure that that. Engine isn’t right up under the hood because it used to be that, you know, if you fell on the hood, the hood immediately bent around the engine and you were basically, you know, falling right, right onto the engine block.

So, you know, that was going to be bad for you. Cars recently have been designed. around that and she feels like there’s a long, long way we can go in terms of simple everyday kind of, you know, not dramatic, but blocking and tackling kind of solutions to manage to manage that. So one of the things that she talked about was using.

AI to, you know, a lot of the tests that they have at the moment are very rigid, you know, 45 miles an hour into a stationary object, 45 miles an hour into an offset object, you know, these kind of standardized kind of [01:01:00] well, what if I could provide useful modeling and data because they could do Because the A.

I. Can do many different speeds and many different angles of incidents and, you know, hardness or softness of obstacle. You know, you could work out a million more scenarios which are going to allow us a million ways to just make things incrementally safer. Just, you know, make sure that everyone’s. Like me wearing a helmet with a chin visor, if we’re gonna, you know, do the dangerous business of getting in the car at all.

I forgot to mention, they do test dummies as well. They develop the standardized test dummies. And of course, the test dummy being a standardized size, that’s another way in which they’re standardized testings. They’re good, but AI gives a scope to just do so much better because AI can test around different sizes and weights and shapes of people.

I know what I was going to [01:02:00] say. The other thing that’s really interesting is at the moment, the airbag technology, the decision whether or not to deploy, um, is based on predominantly in cabin monitors. So things like, you know, is the steering rack moving, is the B pillar moving as we talked about, but they’re also been doing things like using the cameras that have been focused on people.

So they can see what the people are doing as well to try and take that into account around their, their decision making. Now, the other thing that they were saying it would be great if we could do was if we could see what was going on outside of the car as well, not just the internals of the car, because it was going outside of the car, because if, you know, if we can see that there’s like, you know, we’re right up the, Jack see have an 18 wheeler.

We know that we’re in the middle of an accident, so we’re going to need to deploy the airbag. Whereas, you know, if we can see all around the car and see that there’s no obstacles, we know that, you know, there’s no other [01:03:00] vehicles or, you know, we’ve not crashed into a tree or off the road. We know that we don’t need to deploy the airbag.

So, you know, in other words, they see The they would like to tap into the additional data sources which autonomous vehicles have, and when they tap into the additional data sources that autonomous vehicles have, they feel like they’re going to be able to make even better decisions about when and where and how to deploy airbags.

She did go as far as to say that the Autolive were almost at a crossroads at the moment and, and they needed to take this step away from, you know, the passive systems of the airbag triggering and move towards technologies that had these sensor inputs included. The. System that we talked about earlier that they’re showing at the moment, this was going to be potentially driven [01:04:00] from the bike CCU, you know, not like the D and easy suits that I knew where, you know, when you there’s like a bungee, you’re attached to the bike with a bungee.

And when you separate it from the bike, it pulls the bungee out and that triggers the airbag. Which always made me think, like, you’d like get off the bike and go for a pee at the end of your track day session, forget and accidentally trigger the airbag and destroy your leather jacket. That was what I had envisaged happening.

There was some discussion around whether or not there is an application around protecting old people from falling. In other words, you know, Uh, somebody who’s prone to falling and is elderly and frail, um, you know, they might be wearing one of these, you know, motorcycle vest affairs. So when they fall, they, you know, just like a falling motorcyclist, they’re protected by the airbag.

It sounds absurd. And then you stop and think about it and you’re like, actually. If it works, you know, if they can inflate in 10 milliseconds and it can protect you [01:05:00] in a car crash, why couldn’t it protect some old biddy who’s accidentally slipped down the stairs and he’s going to be immobile. And, you know, cause often for old people, that kind of immobility is life ending, isn’t it?

So, you know, it makes them feel like it’s there. You know, it breaks their spirit. So if you can, you know, it’s really an active way. And this does speak to what, you know, Hannah, the presenter was talking about all the way through, which is this idea that it’s, it’s, yes, it’s, it’s longer lives, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s longer life, but it’s, it’s more enjoyable lives.

You know, it’s, it’s improving, it’s keeping people alive and it’s improving the quality of, of their lives as well. And it was all around a very, you know, warm. Uh, tree hugging kind of, of mission, which is unusual for automotive engineering, isn’t it?[01:06:00]

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