 Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in Milpitas, California at Western Digital Offices for the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Meetup. About 300 people. We're looking at all these cool applications and a lot of cutting edge technology that at the end of the day, it's data dependent. Data's gotta sit somewhere. But really what's interesting here is that the data and more and more the data's moving out to the edge and edge computing and nowhere is that more apparent than in autonomous vehicles. Great to see you. Nice to meet you. The technologies that Silicon Valley is famous for inventing, cloud-based technology, network technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Historically those may not have been important to a car maker in Detroit. So well, that's great. We had to worry on our transmission and make these ratios better. And that era is still with us, but they've layered on this extremely important software based and technology based innovation that now is extremely important. Really autonomous vehicles will be made possible by just the immense amount of sensors that are being put into the car. Not much different than as our smartphones or our phones evolve, sensing your face, gyroscopes, GPS, all those kind of things. So there's the raw data itself that's coming off the sensor, but the metadata is a whole other level and a big level and even more importantly is the context. My sensors are seeing something and then of course you use multiple sensors. That's the sensor fusion between them of hey, that's a person, that's a deer, oh, don't worry, that's a car moving alongside of us and he's staying in his lane. Those are the types of decisions we're making with this data and that's the context. Clash was just about like mapping for autonomous vehicles which is an amazing little subset. There's been a tremendous amount of change in one year. You know, one thing I can say right at the top it's critically important as we've had fatalities and that really shifts the conversation and refocuses everybody on the issue of safety. We're dealing with human life. I mean, so obviously it needs to be right 99.999, you know, plus percent. It's all about intelligent decisions and being able to do that robustly across all type of operating conditions is paramount that mission critical. It's low motion, high precision, one to two centimeter accuracies to be able to maneuver in parking lots, be able to back up and drive ways. Those are very, very complex situations. Essentially these learning moments have to happen without the human fatalities and human cost. They have to happen in software and simulations in a variety of ways that don't put people in the public at risk. People outside the vehicle who haven't even chosen to adopt those risks. And part of the things of getting safety is being much more efficient on the vehicle because you have to do a lot more software in order to be safe across multiple different kinds of examples of streets and locations and weather conditions as well. Because of this case notion and these new kinds of cars, new range of suppliers are coming into play. We don't want piston rods anymore. We want electric motors. We need rare earth magnets to put in our electric motors and that's a whole new range of suppliers. Even before autonomous, there are so many new systems in the car now that generate data or consume data. If you think about a full autonomous vehicle out there driving not two hours a day like we are driving today, right? 20 hours a day. Suddenly the storage requirements are very, very different. You see statistics are out there one gigabit per second, two gigabits per second. Everyone's so scared of getting rid of any data, yet there's just tremendous data growth. If we don't design the future storage solutions today, what's gonna end up is that people are gonna pay much more for storage just to make a basic use case work. The reality is that are we taking care of the grid locks that are affecting our city? Are we moving around enough people? Are we solving the problem of congestion? I'll say no, we took a bus and we divided the bus in section. So you have a longer vehicle in peak time when there is high demand and shorter vehicle when there is a very low demand when you have just a few passengers. And the magic is that when those pods are connected one to another, they share them to another space. By the way, all of that can be done autonomously. Right. And we can start from tomorrow because we can have a driver when we begin using the system. And when the technology allows us to be autonomous, we're gonna run the autonomous operating system on that. And the cost is even lower than of us. In the human world we're used to when somebody crashes the car, they learn a valuable lesson. And maybe the people around them learn a valuable lesson, I'm gonna be more careful. I'm not gonna have that drink. When an autonomous car gets involved in any kind of an accident, tremendous number of cars learn the lesson. So it's a fleet learning and that lesson is not just shared among one car, it might be all Teslas or all Ubers. That's a super good point. The AV revolution will also require a revolution in the maintenance and sustenance of our road network. Not just in the United States, but everywhere in the world. The quality of the roads made all the difference in the world for these vehicles to move around. There's so many difficult problems to solve along this path that no company can really do it themselves. Right. And of course you're seeing big companies investing billions of dollars. But it's great because everybody's saying let's find people that specialize whether it's in sensors or computer or all the rest of those things. Get them in, partner with them. Have everybody solved the right problem that they're specialized and focused on. The technology is coming along so fast. It's mind-boggling how quickly we are starting to attack these more difficult challenges. And we'll get there, but it's gonna take time like anything. Right. We're kind of hoping nobody goes out there and trips up to mess it up for the whole industry because we believe as a whole this will actually bring safety to the market. Right. But a few missteps can create a backlash. As Elon Musk puts it, success is one of the possible outcomes. Right. But not necessarily the likeliest, but we're doing that right. Startups and large companies trying to solve not the thousands of problems, but the millions and billions of problems that are gonna have to be solved to really get autonomous vehicles to their ultimate destination, which is what we're all hoping for is it's gonna save a lot of lives. We're at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Event in Nopeas, California. Thanks for watching. See you next time.