Billy Riggs (00:42)
Well, welcome back to Rewiring the American Edge, where we talk everything about technology shaping the future of our planet and the policies that govern them and the edge that our countries need to stay competitive. Unfortunately, we've already been rolling for a little while and Mr. Vyas is on fire today.

He has some choice nuggets for us. And he's also driving very safely. He has his hands on the wheel and he's got his phone facing him on a dash carrier. So no worries. But today we're talking what's happening with all of these self-driving cars.

Vipul, tell us how safely we are driving and what's happening with all this, this AV rideshare wars and everything that's heating up in AV rideshare And we are bringing back the amazing Dr. Henriette Cornet. Vipul, how's it going down there in sunny Palo Alto?

Vipul (01:45)
Good. I'm in a place where we were seeing Waymo's and stuff for now for years. I think they thought my front of my house was like a parking lot, so just hang out there. This was years ago. I don't see them too much anymore. But I could really be using an autonomous vehicle right now. That'd be nice.

Billy Riggs (02:05)
All right, well, there was Waymo Waymo and now there's just a frenzy unfolding because Uber just dropped a mega deal with Lucid and Nuro. And if folks don't know, Lucid was a little on life support and really looking for bailout and Nuro, which was a company that was doing little

pizza delivering and medicine delivering robots in Mountain View, just south of Palo Alto. They decided to do a partnership. I don't think a lot of us know what it means, I guess in name only, it's a next-gen robot fleet.

So Waymo announced last week, they're going to lock in and deal with Avis. So they've departed or added to their partnership with Uber. So Avis is going to now do operations. a lot of people know that Waymo does a lot of their operations with Transdev. So I think, you know, we've talked a lot about that at the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative. Then of course, Tesla expanding their...

Vipul (03:02)
Thanks.

Billy Riggs (03:14)
their phallic ODD in Austin. Yeah. Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky. then, but then, doing some really kind of controversial stuff in California, launching a service and then, maybe, maybe skirting around some regulations. it's maybe the rumor is taking passengers in California. I've talked too much. Welcome a Nuro just passed.

Vipul (03:36)
A Nuro just passed me by the way. Funny enough.

Billy Riggs (03:40)
Vipple

Drive safely. We should say welcome back. Dr. Henriette Cornet, our road taxi expert, our expert whose clarity walks us through all things mobility and AV systems. Welcome. Can you walk us through what's going on here in the wild summer of AV news?

Vipul (03:56)
you

Henriette Cornet (03:56)
Hi.

Billy Riggs (04:02)
What's happening here with AV Madness at the end of 2025?

Henriette Cornet (04:08)
I mean, are we at the end of 2025? So thanks for having me and hi everybody and hi Vipul. Nice to see you. You said a lot already and I have the impression the past maybe years even, we can talk plural, been so full of collaboration and that's what's central here. I think many players realize that...

They should not do everything on their own and that there is a great value on using what's already out there. And you mentioned Transdev, which is a good example because they have been doing fleet management for manually driven fleets for ages now. And they have built so much competency around that, that it's kind of a natural step for them to evolve to the management of automated or autonomous fleets.

So I think that makes sense to see this type of collaborations happening and players don't have to do everything on their own. can really focus way more can become really focusing on their driver on this way more one, there was a way more driver really and let the rest of the package to other players that can do that better.

Billy Riggs (05:20)
Well, maybe, maybe we can, I'd like to hear from you both, kind of maybe let's unpack first because I think it may be easiest to dispense with. know, what's, what's going on with, with Tesla? And is this, is this really, is this a mirage and, and maybe let's talk first about, you know, is this

Is this vision of an AI based, a software based solution to self-driving real in the near term? And then, is this this rampant expansion this year, even possible?

Vipul (05:57)
I'd say for Tesla, it's a little bit, you know, people talk about this is somewhat existential because the Chinese and I, you know, I conflate a little bit AVs and EVs, though I know that's not truly the case. in the case of Tesla.

the Chinese electronic vehicle manufacturers are going to be able to out compete them on both features and price. They're going to be the proverbial better, faster, cheaper, I fear. And they're, know, they have a lot of excess capacity. And so that's going to become a bigger thing about a competition, a lot of innovation for relatively cheap. So the implications for that, and I'll make this quick, is that I think Tesla

has to create a very different product going forward. And if we're looking at car as a service in terms of autonomous vehicles, then you don't make cheap, you make durable. You make things like a Boeing or an Airbus that essentially can, you know, if you look at a typical 737, it's running most hours of the day. You're trying to squeeze as much out of that piece of equipment that acid as possible. And that is a very different type of manufacturing, a very different type of product.

Billy Riggs (07:05)
you

Vipul (07:08)
than a consumer electronic vehicle. And so given they probably can't compete at the low end of the market anymore anyway, this may be the right place to go. And then you get beyond just, like Boeing, if you think about Boeing as a template, you look at the actual vehicle

and then you look at the actual service packages that are sold along with it, which are pretty different than a consumer vehicle. So I think that's gonna happen. Now the biggest question is,

promise I'll wrap here is how's this from a use case perspective can affect the average consumer? Americans, for example, are very used to having their vehicles in extension of their home. They just throw a bunch of, know, shit in there and you keep it there and, know, maybe not around San Francisco where it could get stolen. But in most places, it's sort of an extension of your, you know, your home. It's almost like a portable or mini RV in a way. And

That's where put your groceries. That's where you put your just stuff, your baby seats in there, et cetera, et cetera. How is that going to change? then obviously people in other countries, other places that may not use their personal card as much, you know, worked around that. They live life just fine. Is there going to be some adaptation and adoption issues? Sort of a change, cultural change management question. I don't know how U.S. consumers

will adapt or change to conform to that really different notion of this is not your vehicle, this is not your space, or at least your space maybe just temporarily. So that I think is something that people haven't thought through fully. Because right now they just look at them as a proxy for Uber or a taxi, which is fine. But I'm not sure that's really a proxy for owning a car in most places.

Billy Riggs (08:52)
Yeah. And I think when you dropped your ultimate knowledge bomb there, which was, how does the market for selling cars change? It changes from being a product that you sell once to a product that you sell multiple times over its life cycle. And there are not many U S manufacturers that are thinking that way.

There are not many manufacturers that are thinking about the life cycle of the vehicle being ongoing revenue. And that's a new phenomenon. back to kind of the primary question, is this software defined vehicle something that is realistic in the near term?

both from a software as well as from policy standpoint. Henriette, this a mirage? Is it a reality?

Henriette Cornet (09:45)
Are you referring to Tesla specifically, to what's happening up there with Tesla? mean, think there was a lot in what people say regarding the personal ownership of a car versus mobility as service, and really saying you want to move around and whatever vehicle it will be. also, I think what's in mobility as a service, what's embedded in it, in this idea that you could have any vehicle depending on your needs.

Billy Riggs (09:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

Henriette Cornet (10:12)
If you need a vehicle for moving out, for moving from your flat, can have one. If you need a luxury vehicle to go to a very chic restaurant, you can have one. A limo to go to a very chic restaurant, you can have one. And you have this flexibility of the product that you don't own and that match exactly your current needs. Whereas today, actually, in the way people have bought cars, they try to match with ownership.

all these use cases and they buy a car and I can relate more to the French way where you would buy, people would buy a family car where all the kids can fit in and then you're sure you can go on vacation with them but they drive it the rest of the year where they don't have this, they don't have all the kids at once in the car and they don't drive on vacation with so many luggage. So you have this disproportion of like which vehicle for which use that's a little bit one aspect of it.

because I wanted to come back on what people see with the storage aspect. think that's definitely a thing. can see that. Regarding Tesla particularly, what I found interesting when they came out, when they announced their deployment, what they wanted to do in Austin, it was just after I published a video actually comparing Waymo and Tesla, which had a nice resonance. And I was watching it again thinking, is it still accurate? Because the way I always see

The different, or the way I like to classify players out there, it's really the ones that are doing more the services and the ones that are doing the product. And on the product side are all the car manufacturers that want to sell more and more cars and make sure that you always buy a car and if possible many, like several per household. And on the other hand, you have more like the service that are more for cities, more like thinking of how to move people, but not necessarily...

not necessarily through selling vehicles. So I found it interesting that Tesla being always on the side of selling products and as many cars as possible, going into the service side with this robot taxi, because a taxi is a service at the end. So I found it interesting and fascinating, as fascinating as there was kind of at the same time.

an announcement from Waymo to collaborate with Toyota and saying as well that in the midterm, longterm future, Toyota personal cars could be equipped with Waymo driver, which I think it's a very more longterm situation, but then you will have these two areas matching and merging again of the service and the product being kind of confused, like kind of, you know, like overlapping, so to say. So that's what that's.

at stake for me when I hear this type of development and initiatives from different players. But from Tesla itself, I'm not sure they have everything it takes to make a service because as we said before, a service is much more than just a product. I'm not even sure. mean, their product is not level four, level five, level five, nobody's capable of level five anyway. But even level four automation is not,

Billy Riggs (13:01)
Mm-hmm.

Henriette Cornet (13:23)
Level 4 automation is not on there. They can't do it today or their ODD is very restricted. They have safety drivers, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm not sure how far they will go there. And I think they will need a lot of additional collaboration and partnerships to make it feasible.

Billy Riggs (13:40)
I think you emphasize one thing is that the core importance of services is the core business moving into the future and rideshare is really been heating up with and irrespective of

Vipul (13:47)
Thanks. ⁓

Billy Riggs (13:53)
Waymo really operating at level four and Tesla trying to say automation is our future. The automation piece is less important than the actual delivery of a rideshare, the delivery of a ride.

Henriette Cornet (14:05)
Yeah, because

maybe in the mind of people listening to us, what they should really realize is everything that Tesla has been doing and other car manufacturers, all other car manufacturers, it's this ADAS, this Advancing Driving Assistance System, which is like helping you keeping the lane, cruise control, parking valet, this type of thing are more really like the...

assisting you in the driving functions. that's, for me, that's a legitimate role to have. And that's fantastic because what you do with that is you increase the safety on the road. And I think OEMs have played, I've done their job making vehicles safer with all this detection and lane keeping and et cetera, et cetera. So this path is legitimate and I think that's fine, but you can't make like,

having this path mixing with the service suddenly and becoming fully autonomous, the step is huge, is huge because for people who know the level of automation, all of that is like a level two automation where the liability is still, so the responsibility is still on the driver. But when you move to level four, the responsibility goes to their ADS, the autonomous driving system manufacturer.

And it changes everything. this type of step, I think, can be very misleading. my perception, so the way I look at Tesla right now and what they're doing in Austin is I'm a bit, I'm a skeptic first, definitely. And I'm also worried that it may mess with the mental models that people may have gained through the development of Waymo and being safe and being like very comfortable, et cetera. I'm a bit afraid that it will mess up with the entire

industry almost and mostly from the public perception side that we noticed I had many accidents with their ADAS system and now entering the robotaxi may be very disruptive on that matter and we see and you mentioned million-year tradition where even seeing the regulations getting more stricter because of what's happening so when we were so cautious and really having a lot of taking like

Billy Riggs (16:11)
you

Thank

Henriette Cornet (16:19)
long step, a small step, I want to say over years, it took them so long to get where they are. This also may not be clear for everybody, that it was a path necessary that you cannot speed up some of these steps.

Billy Riggs (16:34)
We talked a little about that when you were on last time about not getting distracted by level two and three and

not having people get mixed up in what is level four or level these other levels of technology. This is level four and this is everything else. ⁓ I'd like to come back to rideshare and what that means for the future and

Henriette Cornet (16:44)
Yeah, totally.

Exactly.

Billy Riggs (16:57)
and services and future implications. But first I'd like to, I want to actually talk about, infrastructure and operations and, these plays that Waymo is making with Avis, which is a little different than

what is happening with Transdev. So they're making some diversification moves themselves in saying, can we diversify our operations? And it's not flashy in terms of fleet operations, but it might be smart: cleaning, maintenance, charging. Those are the dirty jobs that we've been talking about as a part of

Rewiring the American Edge. And maybe those are the things that a manufacturing company, a company that builds vehicles needs to think about when they're scaling their service. I'd love to hear from you both if you think these are the things that a AV-OEM needs to think about as a part of their scaling efforts.

Vipul Vyas (17:59)
I do. I mean, I think that's what I alluded to before in that what you're manufacturing is fundamentally different. And as a product manager, when you look at, you know, the old classic four P's, price being one of them, it's going to be pretty different. And I think that's actually a positive for US manufacturers of any of these vehicles because now

you can afford to at a premium because you're going to be selling longevity and repairability and durability. those things people are willing to You're paying for those things and efficiency, fuel efficiency. So if you can innovate and excel along those dimensions, you're going to do well. And it's not just a pure race to the bottom.

So I think that from that perspective, it's a positive.

Billy Riggs (18:53)
Henriette, do you have any thoughts?

Henriette Cornet (18:56)
I think because you mentioned the infrastructure, right? What's needed on this side. And I think that's also something that's very much in the shadow that not a lot of manufacturers are communicating about the amount of infrastructure that is actually needed being on the physical side, of course, in terms of depot. There are a big work happening at the depot that is not really transparent to the end users, to the customers.

but also all the digital infrastructure of mapping the area, et cetera, and require a tremendous amount of work, of time, of information, of skills to be able to do that. So that's where as well, it's not something that can happen overnight when people start this type of business, definitely. And where's the advantage of Tesla regarding mapping could be that because they have come around all their vehicles and they have been driven for so many times,

there is this idea that they have gathered so many data and so many information on the roads, et cetera. So that could be on their side as a positive, as a positive or as an advantage.

Billy Riggs (20:04)
Yeah. I think you also see Waymo increasingly doubling down on their strategy of looking at a distributed corporate stack. They're continuing to look at diversified companies to serve them. And so they're de-risking. They're looking at different companies to serve them across geographies.

Henriette Cornet (20:27)
Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (20:32)
and that actually is good from a strategy standpoint there. They've also, from an Avis' standpoint, you see legacy car companies adapting and actually think it's really creative on behalf of Avis where you see, kind of a traditional mobility infrastructure firm, a traditional auto leasing firm,

now maybe getting out of the traditional auto leasing business and saying, "Hey, actually we can do auto servicing for a different type of fleet management." And that actually is kind of exactly what you were talking about with existing transit operators. And so I'm wondering Henriette, if you see.

an opportunity for even public transit agencies to say, "Hey, we could even ingest fleet operations for private operators in the future." So is this a potential business line for public transit agencies to say, Hey, you're an AV company. Why don't we do a public private partnership with you where we do your fleet management. You do some operations for us. That's part of the deal.

Henriette Cornet (21:46)
They don't even, they don't even need to go that far actually, but I wish there will be more public private partnerships. And my vision for transit in this area, in the area of autonomous driving is back a bit to what we see with the service that there are some model existing. I think one very promising one is in Oslo for example, or Hamburg is doing also some interesting projects.

Yeah, trying new models in terms of collaboration between transit agencies and private stakeholders is that you contract private providers for a route and for a number of people that need mobility, but you don't force. to say you don't say exactly which vehicles you need and you don't say to the contractor, even maybe you set like some guidelines or requirements in terms of frequency and the demand.

in the neighborhood to be served, but kind of that's all. And the contractor will figure out itself how to deploy the mobility and if autonomous mobility is a wish there. And what I want to say with that is public transit, I think, could gain in becoming less involved in their own operations. And mostly what I see a lot in the US, and I think it's a big risk for transit agencies, is owning their own fleet.

I think it's dangerous. I think you risk like obsolescence and you are stuck with one provider and it's not efficient that public transit agency deal with owning a fleet and even some time operating a fleet. With operating a fleet, I'm sure it would be a transition, but what I found interesting is models where they actually even subcontract that, that part saying we want this neighborhood to be covered with a good mobility system that should have this requirement in terms of frequency.

and safety of course, quality of service, and after let the bid and the competition happen to other provider dealing with this demand. If I can stay on this matter, I think maybe I have mentioned that in the past episode, because that's always an example I like to mention, is the collaboration between DART, which is the Dallas...

rapid transit in the Dallas area, rapid transit, think that's Dallas Authority for Rapid Transit, where they are collaborating with Uber Transit to feed their train lines. So really as a first last mile, giving subsidies to Uber rides.

if people get dropped off at a train station. And it's a bit similar to the Waymo credit program, maybe we have worked on with USF, at USF. It's a bit similar to see if you pay people to go to the first transit station, then suddenly they will use transit for the rest of the ride and they will not take an Uber from their neighborhood to the city center. And it can have a lot of positive effect in terms of environmental aspects and of course congestion.

Billy Riggs (24:24)
.

Great.

Henriette Cornet (24:45)
It's kind of a win-win situation. Win-win-win situation. For the user, it's cheaper. For Uber, they get paid anyway. And for the city, it's also cheaper rather than a bus line that may risk to be empty a big part of the day. it's more the gaining flexibility. So that's the type of model where autonomous, if you add the component of autonomous on top of that, you increase even more the efficiency aspect and the cost aspect where

The operators themselves can optimize their costs and at the end everybody is winning. But the transit agency themselves don't really need to decide on that if you know what I mean. That should not be their main concern.

Vipul Vyas (25:26)
And Billy, I have to drop, but I would say I'm the follow up to what Andrea had said on infrastructure, which I didn't answer that question before, but I'd say I'll say something extremely controversial and then leave and leave with the bomb, the hand grenade thrown. And that is the U.S. historically. And again, I reserve the right to be wrong. Had some of the best transit systems, both in trust city and intercity when they weren't owned by the government and people.

Billy Riggs (25:53)
you

Vipul Vyas (25:56)
probably don't remember, but usually utilities, electric companies, electric and gas companies used to ⁓ bus

lines, light rail, tram, trolley lines within cities for a long time, for a long period of time. And they also owned most of the intrast city transit. That's the US historic model. And I don't know if I wasn't around or alive then.

Well, guess a little bit, I was alive during the bus era when the electric companies still owned buses back in the late 70s, early 80s. But I think things were not bad back then. And maybe that's a model to look back upon. I don't know who that would, private enterprise would be. But you

Billy Riggs (26:38)
Well,

I think, yeah, I mean, you, you don't leave yet because the, I think what Henriette alluded to also is, and she can, I would love if she shared a little bit because she also alluded to a paper that we just dropped earlier this

Actually late last week, there was a drop of some research that just came out from us that actually, Autonomous Vehicles and the City lab just released some research that we did based on a phenomenon that happened last fall. Waymo did a partnership that we evaluated, or they did a pilot program where they did a transit incentive. We can't say why they did this. We don't totally know their corporate intentions.

but, they, gave it $3 incentive for people to connect with public transit. That's the value of the public transportation fare in the San Francisco Bay area. so all in all, it was the value of the trant, ride on a public transit here. And so it was a transit incentive, the value of the transit fare. And, about 70 % of people, that took

that Waymo ride connected and got on transit. And a large portion of them actually otherwise would have taken a car. so there was a vast poll of people in terms of filling gaps in the network. But a lot of them otherwise would have been on rideshare too.

And so there was, there were already people that were, were kind of stranded and not being served by public transit. So there was really a network that wasn't being served by traditional public transit. I think what the research showed that there is a need for a new form of service. And this is where I think what we would say is that.

flexible on-demand autonomous vehicle service, door-to-door service could be that solution. Henriette am I mischaracterizing the research.

Henriette Cornet (28:31)
door to door.

Vipul Vyas (28:36)
others.

Henriette Cornet (28:37)
Totally. Yeah,

No no, that's great that you bring that and that I don't know if it became an obsession of mine. And I've been working in this area now for really a while, this combination of autonomous mobility and transit, which is not always obvious. And I really still see the first last mile being very interesting because on the rail, of course you can have autonomous train, but I would almost say no one cares. The customer will not even notice. And that's more on the really deep.

operation side, but on the other side, it's on road and for first last mile, you have this gain in flexibility and on demand and door to door where I'm convinced people will want that more and more. So Uber has shown how popular it became and that's just what people want. Also this digital aspect, this booking, like you buy everything through your phone today, like Amazon, you watch your movie on your phone, you drive with mobility.

absolutely normal, that's unnatural, think that's more on this on demand, immediately comes back. And transit agency needs to consider this aspect. If they keep like having large burst for first last mile that you have to wait for 20 minutes, it just doesn't work. I think people happy with the train system with the mass transit, everybody sees the advantage of that and you go faster on a mass transit than in your car stuck in the congestion. But the first last mile, if it's not solved,

Billy Riggs (29:41)
Thank

Okay.

Henriette Cornet (30:02)
That's, it

Vipul Vyas (30:03)
And they're gonna have to do private partnerships because one thing I'm confident of is the transit systems can't figure I mean other other industries already figured out, you know code sharing Airlines do this with rail even I mean Amtrak actually does it with airlines, but the airlines are the ones that do it know, they're the ones who perfected it or conceived

it in the first place and then and the immediacy front is that look I'm Caltrain which I love. I

try to top up my Clipper card. And so I put $60 on it for a game I was gonna go to from San Francisco, from Palo Alto, San Francisco. And I was like, why is my balance not updating? Why is my balance not updating? So I kept adding, maybe I did it wrong. And then I got an email, maybe an hour later, maybe two hours later, which again, just shaking my head that said, your

payment will be available on your balance in five days.

Who are these people Now I'm just irritated like I'm never using that again because they just basically stole from me, right? But it's the government so you're what can you do? But I just left me with like in this day and age. I should have just mailed you a check I should have just gone to a counter and given you cash like and they think this

Henriette Cornet (30:56)
No, that's not okay.

Vipul Vyas (31:13)
is acceptable and so you can't

You can't rely you have to go with the private industry on this stuff because There's enough evidence to suggest it'll fail otherwise

Henriette Cornet (31:22)
You bet.

But Vipul, something we should not forget, that's a European talking here and people won't be surprised that I'm defending government structure, is really you need some level of public aspect in dealing with mobility because you can't let just the market decide who goes where and you need a public level. And for equity, for equity reason, it's so important. You cannot let the market drive everything.

Vipul Vyas (31:46)
don't disagree, but I would say that.

But.

Henriette Cornet (31:54)
in terms of mobility, access and things like that.

Vipul Vyas (31:56)
don't disagree,

but before you can get to equity, you have to demonstrate competence. And if you can't demonstrate competence, then you shouldn't be responsible for equity, because all you're going to create is chaos. And so that is, I think, a fair expectation to have, which

Henriette Cornet (32:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, or

bad service going in your direction, bad service for people who don't have any other choice. And that's even, that's also terrible.

Vipul Vyas (32:18)
write even worse.

Billy Riggs (32:21)
What was your Darth Vader quote to start us off, Vipple?

Vipul Vyas (32:24)
⁓

mean, I was more around AI and that was around, know, AI is either going to take us to Star Trek or Star Wars, either consolidated power among a very few and bad services to bad government or egalitarian utopia, which, you know, we'll probably end up somewhere in between, ideally. And neither one, you know, definitely not the Star Wars extreme.

Billy Riggs (32:41)
you

Vipul Vyas (32:48)
But the previous question around Tesla, they've made the biggest, from way back earlier, just I'll close with this, they've made the biggest strides, I think, in self-learning versus guided learning. And so that may or may not, we'll see, that may be a bet that lets them get further faster. But I think that's to be determined.

Henriette Cornet (33:10)
What do you mean with guided learning?

Vipul Vyas (33:11)
Most people have done guided learning where there's essentially the AI model is trained versus Tesla has moved from that model in the last year or two to where it's observational training. It's not like this is a stop sign. This is what you do at a stop sign. These are the instructions for a stop sign. It's more, what do I observe happening when a stop sign is present? Which is very different.

Henriette Cornet (33:36)
Mm-hmm.

Vipul Vyas (33:38)
It's more ⁓ self-guided through data and observation of the data versus learning through instruction. Yeah.

Billy Riggs (33:39)
you

Henriette Cornet (33:45)
Yeah, programmed.

Yeah.

Billy Riggs (33:47)
And a lot of the industry is catching up to Tesla on this front. It's definitely oppositional to the traditional DARPA-based approach with lots of sensors and less software. So...

Vipul Vyas (33:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's

a shift, I think, that we'll see if it pays off. mean, obviously they did the anti-LIDAR thing and that didn't work out. Even robot vacuum cleaners use LIDAR these days. So we'll see if this was a right bet.

Billy Riggs (34:14)
Yeah.

Henriette Cornet (34:14)
Yeah,

I'm wondering if this type of path is if transportation with road safety is the right place to play with that. Yeah, exactly. would say do vacuum cleaners and don't risk lives with that because this idea of I learn from a stop sign just watching of others. don't know. It makes me nervous hearing the theory of that.

Vipul Vyas (34:23)
Maybe robot vacuum cleaners, right? ⁓

It's a little

bit better and I simplified it, but yeah, there are risks. There are risks of all sorts, right? But I'll let you guys continue. Thanks.

Billy Riggs (34:48)
Well, I just have one maybe closing thing. Henriette, I think what I wanted to say is that, the future's really about sharing. And I think what we heard from you is kind of rideshare and this entry of Uber has been super accelerated. Whether or not that is Tesla.

whether or not it's Waymo partnering with Uber and this idea of the ride becoming more and more prevalent and the industry implications and everybody diversifying across the market is really telling us a lot about the industry and where it's headed. What do you think that means for the future? And if you had one takeaway.

Henriette Cornet (35:18)
Yeah.

Billy Riggs (35:29)
that you want to leave for the audience about what that means, what do think that would be?

Henriette Cornet (35:34)
Yeah, I think that would mean that in cities, there is a hope that multimodal mobility can really work, so to say, and that people can find their way through. Not everybody, you will have people with special needs that cannot transfer, or maybe also the topic, I think we touch upon that in the paper, topic of digital literacy, that people don't want to book through an app, et cetera. So we will have...

all kinds of special users with special needs that will not jump into the on-demand rideshare and multimodal to access your transit system, et cetera. But for the mass, think that's really something extremely promising. And the next step for me, so it's really first, there is a discussion of the rideshare being manually driven or autonomous, and it doesn't have to be autonomous.

Sometimes I think I'm perceived like someone selling autonomous cars and I'm not. mean, if you have an efficient system with a driver, I would say keep it. It's just that autonomous mobility, like autonomous system will give you higher safety and more flexibility in your operations. But as I said before, it's maybe not something the transit agency have to deal with. It's maybe really on the side of the operator.

And the other things, the next steps that I think we need to look at closely and that's something that a partner like a company like MOIA is looking at is the idea of pooling, back to pooling. I know Uber has tried and has tried in the past and it has not been very conclusive and people say, no, we don't want to share rides with strangers. But I think it really depends on your vehicle. And if you have a vehicle that is spacious enough that you can do pooling,

that would be for me the next step towards more efficiency and cheaper rides for everybody. So I really hope to see this rideshare industry in looking at that as well and not going like this idea of that we are all in our little bubbles all the time isolated from each other. I found it a bit sad to be honest. I like the public part of the public transit aspect and I'm...

Billy Riggs (37:26)
Thank

Henriette Cornet (37:44)
I believe it really, know sometimes I need to be quiet in my Waymo and talk to nobody, but the rest of the time I really enjoy the public and the public transport. And that's where ridepooling could be something that could really change how cities are, how transportation works in cities in of congestion, efficiency and more flexibility for everybody.

Billy Riggs (38:07)
That's great. That's great. Thank you so much. So the takeaway is maybe future is real, but it's incremental ⁓ it's diverse and it's driven by partnerships and coordination and the public sector has to be engaged. I think that's, but at the end of the day,

Henriette Cornet (38:15)
Yeah,

Totally.

Billy Riggs (38:27)
and I think we, we both agree in this is, in all of our work, it, it also is about, getting people out of private cars building the future of, of livable places. think, you know, we want to live in the places, that, to be in the places that are the most livable. so,

Maybe that's where we can end up today. I just want to thank you for joining us. It's always a pleasure to have our resident expert on AVs on the show. Vipul, thanks also for joining us. it's always great for you to drop the knowledge. And thanks everybody for joining us. Tune in next time. I hope you enjoyed the last episode with Parker and let us know if you have any feedback or comments. We'll see you soon.

Henriette Cornet (38:54)
Thanks for having me.