 Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in Mountain View, California at a really cool start-up, Phantom Auto. They're coming at this autonomous vehicle thing from a very different direction. They're not a car company. It's a pure software play, but it really has a huge impact on the autonomous vehicle industry. Autonomous vehicles are meant for no driver. You guys have a driver, but you're really assisted driving from a remote location. A third party who can provide a safety solution for a number of AV operators. Let's say if it's one of the big OEMs of right-sharing companies, they can connect to a vehicle remotely and when they move the steering wheel or press the gas or brake, it would actually happen in real time. We think we have the ultimate fallback mechanism at this point, which is actually still a human. The machine is very, very good, but for these edge case scenarios, you still need to bring a human back into the loop. Road construction areas, severe weather conditions, all this stuff happened all the time. Autonomous vehicles may struggle with the situation, so Phantom Auto provides a solution. Whatever the situation is, get you around an obstruction, pull you over to the side of the road so you're not blocking traffic and in a much safer situation. And a human's cognitive ability to process information on the fly, we think that's the hidden key to making autonomous vehicles a reality. It's a life-saving technology. You use a lot of off-the-shelf, really simple hardware to execute this. There's Logitech, little steering wheels over there, the big curved Samsung screens, basic cameras on the car, so I get in and it would just work. Regardless of the kind of vehicle that a company might utilize, we have to be able to control that vehicle smoothly and safely. How do you guys deal with the latency issue? Obviously, that's our secret sauce, but we've been able to get that very, very low. We connect multiple networks at the same time, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, and a few networks, right? Once they're bonded, you get a much stronger connection. These are life-saving vehicles. Everyone wants these deployed as rapidly as possible, but we also want that deployment itself to be as safe as possible. AAA did a survey recently that showed 75% of consumers are afraid of trusting the machine and autonomous vehicle. If you take a step back and look at the forest and not the trees, you have 1.2 million people dying every year worldwide due to traffic accident fatalities 40,000 in the U.S. in 2016 and 94% is due to human error. If we had that happen even just for two weeks in aviation in the U.S., aviation wouldn't exist as we know it. So if you eliminate the human for the most part from that equation, you can save a lot of lives. We do view there's going to be a big consumer adoption hurdle to overcome, and a piece of that is having the passengers in the car comfortable and feeling that someone has their back. I saw someone of an awakening in the government like we're really scared of this being deployed, but in reality we should be scared of this not being deployed. We are working with a variety of cybersecurity firms for making sure that our solution is extremely secure from the hardware that we can offer in the car to the software, to the actual control center, the operation center where the driver's driving you, making sure that we have end-to-end security. The AI I would say is about 97, 98% of the way there. A reality of having autonomous vehicles interacting with other autonomous vehicles might create new edge case scenarios that don't exist yet. I think the regulators are coming to the realization at this point that if we want to get these vehicles deployed right now, we need to have some sort of bridge to that technological gap to get us from 98% to 100%. Right now it's a relatively small number of cars and a relatively small number of players, but we see a huge opportunity and huge growth in the sector over the next five years. So can I go take a drive? Yeah, sure. All right, let's do it. We're going to check out, we're going to take a drive. We'll see you in the car. Thank you. Being a Lincoln MKZ 2017 and the reason this vehicle is so good for autonomous vehicle development is because a lot of the driving, steering, gas, and brakes is enabled through a system called Drive by Wire. That means it's an electronic signal that goes through the can bus and initiates these features, locomotions in the vehicle electronically. We can create an artificial electronic signal and inject it where it processes that information and artificially move the steering wheel with the brakes or the gas like that way. Ready? Three, two, one, go. Here we go. Besides operating as our safety driver, we haven't started going yet, so you are on call. We look both ways. Now this is kind of interesting because I can see what Ben can see, and he can see what I can see. So it's kind of an infinite loop. He can see almost 360 degrees around the car. Ben can hear everything that we can hear in the vehicle if someone's honking at him. Making a right hand turn. I'm using not a very good right seat driver because I complain about people getting too close to the curb. So good job, Ben. Stand nice and wide. For every latitude and longitude coordinate, we would get data points such as bandwidth and latency. And if there's ever some sort of dead zone, he or she would know that in advance and know that they could not engage the vehicle. You could even geofence that off in two, right? If it's just a dead zone. Correct. Make the car go around it even if it's not the most efficient route. Correct. How consistent is the coverage, the mobile coverage that you find? Say T-Mobile is not good in a certain area, but AT&T is good. Okay. Then we would use AT&T's service. If the latency is shifting, we're always going to make sure that you can steer, that you can have brakes and other stuff that isn't as high of a priority falls lower down the list. We're now going to go into a gas station. Gas stations obviously don't have land markings. You're dealing with pedestrians, different vehicles coming in and out. But for us, obviously, since we're being driven by a human, we'll be able to go through just as though it was a human in the driver's seat. It's really just about a human being able to read the motions of the car, right? You take a few inches forward, then you pause. It's understanding that scenario so that you understand when you can move forward or when you might need to feel back. But at the end of the day, you hope that at some point the autonomous vehicles will be able to handle an increasing number of these edge cases. We're gathering data, critical data, right? Educate scenario data so that we can feed that back to our customers so that they can have the data that they need to further train these vehicles. That was fun. Great job out there. Thank you. What does it feel like driving this thing? Driving remotely is actually very different from driving a car normally. And I know it might sound obvious, but there's a lot of things we take for granted driving the car. For example, you don't actually understand the momentum shifts that are happening in the vehicle. So you don't know how hard you're braking or you might have a different depth perception because the optics on the cameras, all these things kind of add up into a completely different driving experience. As I'm developing the system, I'm testing it and seeing exactly the information that I need in order to create that safe and smooth driving experience. And so I'm looking at what's difficult for me as a remote operator or what information am I lacking? And then I go back and develop those things. So at the federal level, there's a bill in the House and the bill in the Senate, neither of which have been passed. But we expect that one will go the distance this year. So you might actually have the rare scenario where the regulation outpaces the technology, which is a good problem to have. In fact, I would say it's not a problem at all. I mean, a human who's going to intervene on your behalf will be really important. On the business standpoint, we have several deals are already closed. Some pilots plan over the next few months. So you will be seeing a lot more, I think, of us very soon out in the market. Thanks for sharing the ride and taking care of us. Appreciate it. Thank you. We're at Phantom Auto in Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time. Bye.