 Good evening, everyone. And thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Shepard, director of events. And we're very pleased to welcome you to our program, The Future of Cars, Electric, Autonomous, and Coming Your Way, Watch Out. And we're very pleased to welcome a panel tonight from all different parts of the city to discuss the provocative issues around our EVs and autonomous vehicle technology in the Bay Area and how these new modes of transportation will change our lives and the urban landscape. But before we begin, I'd like to find out how many of you are new to the Mechanics Institute? Who's never been here before? Any newcomers? Wonderful. Thank you for coming. I'd like to invite you to come on Wednesday at noon and come for a free tour of the library and find out more about our history here in San Francisco. And also, consider becoming a member. We have this really amazing library. We also have our events and programs, book clubs, writers groups, author events, Cinema Lit film series, and, of course, The Chess Room hosts an amazing array of classes and tournaments on a weekly basis. So we hope that you'll join and just become part of our ever-growing and really vital cultural family here at the Mechanics Institute at 57 Post Street. So I'd like to introduce our moderator for tonight, who will then also introduce our panel. John Villasignore is a senior fellow of governance studies and for the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. He's also professor of electrical engineering and public policy and a visiting professor of law at the University of California in Los Angeles. He's also a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Cybersecurity and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His work addresses the intersection of technology, policy, and law. So please welcome John Villasignore. Thank you very much to all of you for being here. I know that there's many things you could be doing on a beautiful November. Try to make it worth your while. As all of you know, we're in the middle of one of the most fascinating technology inflection points that we will probably see in any of our lifetimes, which is this incredible set of changes that are occurring originally more in places like research laboratories, but more and more often on the streets and impacting our lives in transportation, and particularly the advances that we're seeing with respect to electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles and some vehicles that are both electric and autonomous. And so we're going to try to demystify some of those changes and explain some of those changes and talk about what they mean not only from a technology standpoint, but this is one of these technology inflection points that promises to really fundamentally change in many ways sort of the urban and broader social landscape. And we'll try to address some of those things as well. With me, I have a terrific group of three panelists who bring a set of really great and diverse perspectives to this. I'll introduce them in a moment. Before I do that, I want to give people a sense for the flow of the event. So I'll briefly provide an introduction for each of the panelists. Each of the panelists will then speak for three or four minutes just to give his or her perspectives on some of these issues. I've then got a set of questions relating to both electric and autonomous cars, which will take us through roughly 720 or so. And then we'll open it up to audience Q&A. We intentionally structured this event to provide ample opportunity for audience questions and answers because I'm sure that you have some very interesting questions that the panel could provide some good perspectives on as well. So that's the flow of the event. We'll wrap up no later than 7.50 PM. So just by way of introduction, immediately to my left, to your right, is Lars Peters. He currently serves as the senior zero emission vehicles advisor for the city and county of San Francisco. And his responsibilities include developing a citywide transportation electrification strategy, expanding the availability of charging infrastructure and developing policy and programs to support electrification. To his left, on the right for you, is Maureen Blanc, who is the director of Charge Across Town, a nonprofit organization with the mission to help reduce carbon emissions from vehicles in California by promoting the adoption of zero emission vehicles. Charge Across Town educates the public about electric transportation and advocates for the adoption of electric vehicles and infrastructure in California. And then last but certainly not least, all the way to my left and all the way to the right is Scott Nisbit, who is vice president of marketing for epilogue imaging systems. Scott has been working for over the last eight years in the auto industry in relation to technology to enhance driver safety and experience through connecting vehicles to a range of apps and services and making cars smart and connected to the internet of things. Last year, he helped found the autonomous vehicle camera division of epilogue, which is offering new vision technology that dramatically improves resolution and object recognition for self-driving cars. So it's a terrific set of panelists. And so I'll start again immediately to my left. Here are some perspectives from Lars. Thanks. Thanks, John. So looking at it from a city perspective, I think it's good to pry apart some of these transitions that increasingly are coming together. I think often when you go to panels like these, I think there's three different trends that disrupt the transportation industry overall. One is often called connectivity. So that's the internet and the way that that connects vehicles that has given us our bike sharing program. It has given us the right sharing lift and Uber that we see increasingly in our city and has enabled car sharing in a way that wasn't previously possible. So that's by now almost old, familiar technology for many people. But that's still kind of playing out there in the city. And there's a lot of policy challenges and things we need to work on and grapple with to address and make the best use of those technologies, to make them work for us and work for everyone. The second one, which is the closest to me personally when I work all day today is the electrification part. Now that doesn't, per se, change how you go around. But it does do most for our climate and for our urban quality and air quality. Now, like everybody here has seen that we don't. Transportation is the only thing that affects our air quality in the city, many other sources. But during a year, it's overwhelmingly the biggest impact and electrification for the first time in a very long time provides us a pathway to completely eliminate those local emissions as well, mostly eliminate them through the entire chain of transportation. Now, lastly, autonomous vehicles, I think there we are, it's early days. As a city, I think we're blessed with having a lot of innovators and a lot of people working out what can happen, what it means, and launching some of those technologies right here. So we're again at the forefront of this as well. From a city's perspective, we need to figure out, okay, how do we foster that? And at what point in time do we want to develop policies around making the best use of this kind of technology? But currently, all this unknown and it puts those policy makers always in a real perspective. Thank you very much, Maureen. Great, well, good evening, everyone. How many of you own a car? How many of you own an electric car? One, two, somebody back there? Wow, okay, I've got some convincing to do in this room. So I'm the director of Charge Across Town. We were founded six years ago, actually as a project for the city of San Francisco to help get San Francisco EV ready. And our goal at the time was to work with businesses and the development community to put in electric vehicle charging. And we came across a really interesting problem. The developers said, well, why should we put in charging when no one is driving the cars? So we pivoted and really focused on consumer education. And for the past six years, we've been working in San Francisco. We're the folks that bring you EV Week every year down on the Embarcadero, which is a free event to test drive electric cars. And today we work across the state of California. Our goal is to get people out of combustion engine or ICE cars and convert people over to cleaner, greener forms of transportation. So in the past six years, it's been a crazy ride. I believe and we believe that California is on the threshold of a major change in mass adoption of electric vehicles. And I say this in just all the work that we do across the state in talking to consumers. So to put that in perspective, there are only 700,000 electric cars sold in the United States. That's a drop in the bucket considering how many millions and millions of cars are sold every year. The good news is half of those are here in California. And 62,000 of them are sitting right here in San Francisco. So we are, the Bay Area is the EV capital of the country. And with the city of San Francisco and the mayor and many of the programs and initiatives that hopefully you'll hear from tonight, we will continue to do so. However, there's some key challenges that remain, which we hopefully will get into. But being only 5% of car sales, we have a long way to go. And as many of you may know, our governor, Jerry Brown, has a zero emissions vehicle mandate to have 1.5 million cars, electric cars on the road by 2025. So we're climbing that curve. We think we are coming up and we are very close to seeing massive market adoption. We'll talk a little bit more about that. Thank you very much for your interview. I'm Scott Nesbeth working now with Epilogue, which I'm fortunate enough to be seeing the autonomous vehicle industry from the inside because we're offering a vision system for autonomous vehicles so they can see further and better than they can now with the current vision systems and lidar systems. So we're trying to make these cars much safer so that everyone can feel comfortable getting their autonomous car. And that is gonna happen a lot sooner than you think. As John alluded to, we're at the cusp of a fundamental change in how our urban environment is gonna look because in a matter of years, you'll be able to walk outside and hail a car that has no driver in it. And that's going to happen and it's hard to believe, but another debate took place and I know we're gonna debate whether when it's gonna happen because I think it will be happening in three years. Other people think it'll happen 15, 20 years, but there's some fundamental differences to a normal change in technology like electric vehicles. We just saw in this room, one or two people have an electric vehicle and Marine was saying only a few hundred thousand here in the state of California. So that's a slow change. This autonomous vehicles is gonna be a quick, much quicker change. There is a massive amount of technology. More importantly, the companies that are doing it are not just regular startups. These are billion dollar companies that are throwing their mic in technology at this and much more likely and more effective is they're throwing a lot of money at the lobbying so that the rules change so that cities are perhaps guided, and I don't wanna say forced, to change rules to allow these autonomous vehicles to come in. And you can look at it. It's, you know, we're sitting here with all the streets lined with parked cars just sitting there all day not moving. You're probably getting here. You may have almost been hit by a car driven by a distracted driver. You just turn over your life to these things that are just roaming the streets. And when autonomous vehicles come, you're gonna be able to get some of that freedom back to walk safely on the streets. And if you think about this institution here, about probably 105 years ago, probably somewhere in those books, there's a record of a panel talking about, oh no, these things, cars, they're never gonna work. These horses are great. They'll never, you know, they don't kill as many people. These cars are dangerous. And probably right here in this building, there was a debate saying, oh, the cars will never catch on. What's wrong with the horse? But it did happen. And it seems so obvious that it would happen, but it wasn't obvious in that day. And the same thing is happening now. People are not selling their stock in buggy web companies now. The equivalent is, you know, this is changing. Uber drivers may be out of, and rideshare drivers may be out of business in terms of the amount of work they get, but their new jobs are created from this. And it's going to shift. And there are, and we shouldn't look at the current rideshare companies either, there are technologies and other companies that are going to embrace this that help drivers of today own perhaps a autonomous driving rideshare company. So anyway, this is, it's an exciting time and you will fundamentally change five years from now. I will predict that each of you, most of you will be in, you will have taken one ride in an autonomous vehicle in the next five years. Okay, well this is a great sort of initial set of perspectives. And so I'm going to, we're going to bifurcate the discussion a little bit. And our first question, we're going to speak about electric vehicles, which of course some electric vehicles are autonomous, but some are not. And just in terms of electric vehicles, will we reach a point where most of the vehicles that we see, when we walk out of a building like this and you look down the street and you see the cars driving down the street and parked along the street, will we reach a point where most of those vehicles of here in San Francisco are indeed electric vehicles? And if so when, and what are the challenges that we need to address to get to that point? And these are questions of course for anyone on the panel and any thoughts, more than welcome. Sure, well I can take a stab at it since I sort of do this for a living. We deal with consumers so I can give you the consumer perspective. We have been, as I said, working across the state of California, we survey people before and after they just drive a car. So most people come to our educational events having never even been an electric car. They have sort of a general idea of what they are. And we let them get behind the wheel and take them out for a spin. When they come back, we survey them again to see what kind of changes and attitudes. And what we see are people genuinely love these cars. They love the experience. They, we ask them what they like the most about it. And it's always surprising because the quiet ride always comes up as the number one reason people like electric cars. But basically people want more and more choice. So when we started six years ago, there were three cars on the market. Today we have 41 different electric cars. You can basically purchase a car for under $20,000, get a least used electric vehicle, state of the art, four years old. So I don't think there, it's a matter of not do they want them, but when we will see ubiquity across the landscape. There's also tremendous rebate programs, pushing consumers towards adopting electric cars. You've got cities and regionalities across the state of California offering up to $10,000 off the price of cars if you go electric. So with all of this policy and choice coming, we truly do think that it's gonna happen sooner than later. Any other perspectives on that? I think my answer is yes. The question was when? Oh, well, that's the second part of the question. Obviously. And we must, and we must do it as soon as we can. And I guess that gets to the when and why not sooner. So we need to do it because transportation emissions are over 40% of our emissions in the city. So to meet our climate action goals, we need to do it as a city because our air quality is actually worsening instead of getting better as it used over the years. We need to do it also at the same time reducing the total number of cars. Making everything electric will not do anything for congestion or safety, per se. So to me, I think the part of the chicken egg problem, the cars is solved or will be solved really soon. There will be cheaper, better on pretty much all aspects and there will be as much variety as one could look for in the very near future. So now I'm talking about within 10 years. Those models will be there. Then the challenges will be, can we make them available to everybody? Specifically, how can you get everybody to charge those and that's not easy here. About a fruit of our cars are housed on the street overnight. Another little over a fruit are in shared forms or in garages and those are big challenges and that's where the city has a role and to get our partnering with organizations as well as landlords and people that can help do this. Great, thank you. But I think that's good, it's the old model though because I do think that the autonomous vehicles and I do think the majority of autonomous vehicles will be electric and that will probably be the biggest category of new electric vehicles being utilized is autonomous vehicles. But when you have autonomous vehicles as a majority of cars on the street, the fundamental questions come on of, well, why would you own one? Why wouldn't you just have rideshare or shared use cars? And that's gonna change the environment. Park cars possibly could not be out there anymore. You could actually have ownership of the streets again. The cars would be moving, autonomous vehicles. This is one vision of the future, that there are no parked cars, there are no parking garages. These cars are just coming to move you, mobility as a service and everyone is enriched by this because you can get from A to B. Why do you need to spend the large resources to buy a gas car or electric car when you can just utilize them? And this is what's going to change. And one vision is that it will completely change the environment out there and there won't be this massive reliance on parking spaces and stuff and so a city. On San Francisco, of all the cities around there, they're gonna be leading the way. I think when they see this change is actually happening. And I'm, my opinion is it's gonna happen sooner than we think. Yeah, come see it please. I just wanna add a comment on infrastructure because one of the big hurdles that we see and we hear constantly is there not enough charging stations and I know you guys are dealing tremendously with charging stations in San Francisco which has this unique problem because many of us live in apartments where there's no access to electricity. But I think the consensus from what we're hearing and what we're seeing is that infrastructure is gonna be solved in the next three years. There's a tremendous amount of money being dumped in to California and to cities right now to put in charging stations. And you guys might be aware that PG&E is gonna deploy 5,000 charging stations here and in Northern California. 20% of them are gonna go into apartment buildings. 15% are gonna go into disadvantaged communities. But the biggest gain is gonna come from the Volkswagen investment plan and the settlement which you might have heard about and they're dumping $800 million into EV infrastructure across highways and small cities, streets, et cetera. So charging whether it's electric cars or autonomous vehicles is gonna get addressed pretty quickly in the next five years. I remember reading something, I may be wrong but I believe it was written by one of the founders of Lyft who pointed out that your car even though you think of it as a driving machine is more aptly described as a parking machine. Yes. Because that's really what it does most of the time. It's parked, parked, that's what it does. Okay, so move on to another question about what are sometimes called TNCs and for those in the business, this is an acronym for transportation network companies and more commonly known as companies such as Uber or Lyft. And many people suggest, not without reason, that there's a connection between TNCs and their broader impacts which we've all seen on cities and the growth in both autonomous and slash or electric vehicles. So what impacts do you see from the TNCs on the autonomous and or electric landscape and vice versa, what impact do you see the changes in vehicle technology and adoption having on the transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft and of course then on our experience and engaging with those companies. Any thoughts on that? I know you guys are doing that. You want me to go first on this? Yeah, so I think the impacts are out there for everybody to see. There is, in terms of electrification, there is a growing number of electric TNC cars out there, company named Maven owned by GM is very active in that field. I think you see the Chevy Bolts out there but you also have already for years folks that drive Nissan Leafs, et cetera. There's been a number of pilots, of course, other cities in US as well as in Europe that indicate that the problem so far is that the more affordable cars used to have a very limited battery capacity and for these kind of use cases it makes a world of a difference if you have 200 plus miles of range or as the older cars used to have under 100 miles and I think the signs are very hopeful that there now are the vehicles, they're still slightly expensive but there now are the vehicles that would serve a TNC driver for the full day and can do his entire shift, maybe during a lunch break, hit a fast charger and we need more of those, right? We don't have enough of them. So my perspective is that we have some catching up to do there but these fleets are professional drivers, they're coin operated, if you like, they're carefully at the economic incentives and electric cars can be cheaper in that situation so I think we'll see a quick change. I agree and I would even push a little bit further and say that Lyft and Uber are a problem and they need to get in this conversation and be at the table. Whenever I get in, I'll lift her in Uber which is rarely. I always ask the driver, how far do you go on your shift and they tell me, oh, anywhere from 100 miles or less, how many hours are you driving, oh, two to four and it's like, why aren't you driving an electric car? And part of it is just educating drivers that these cars are viable platforms for them to do their job and they can get out of a fossil fuel vehicle and really drive a bolt or a bolt or even a BMW i3 that go up to 100 plus miles and not always have to drive a fossil fuel car. So when we go and talk to Lyft and Uber about this, it's sort of not their problem and I think that getting them into this conversation is really important. As you guys have probably read, every morning 5,600 cars fled into San Francisco delivering people to work and it's impacting our air quality, its congestion. So I think it's a problem that's gonna be dealt with and I know I'm looking to my friend here because I know you guys are working on some solutions but I think they definitely need to be a bigger part of this conversation. Any thoughts on these cars? I agree. And I'll put the autonomous vehicle thing edge on it here in that these cars, we look at Uber and Lyft, they are investing heavily in autonomous vehicle research right now along with other stealth startups that are throwing billions of dollars at this and 90% of them are gonna be electric and these are very important because not only when the shift comes from the drivers choosing which car and it does make sense, as Marine said, that they should choose electric but those electric cars without drivers at some point will be so efficient and will definitely help the pollution in our cities here and there are the more society problems of okay, what's gonna happen when there's no drivers to these cars but that's another issue but I think that the trend, we ride on the back that the electric vehicles will be slowly taking over the ride share percentage of cars out there and then autonomous after that. Okay, so here's a broader question just about the impact of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles as we all know although it's such a profound influence that we don't even often think about it but the car has just had an incredible influence on our society and of course the transition from horses to cars a little over 100 years ago fundamentally reshaped America, right? The car was a large reason behind the growth of suburbs and the structure of our urban and suburban and rural landscape and in addition of course the car has had this fundamental sort of social impact on the conceptions of independence, it's had impacts in terms of work patterns and commuting patterns and literally the contours of the environment that we've all grown up in and so I guess the question for the panel is what are these, are we going to see changes as fundamental, if we fast forward, if we get past the transition window and we can argue about how long or disagree about how long that's gonna take but let's assume for the purposes of this question that we move to a world where most cars are electric and many if not most cars and vehicles are autonomous. How, what will that do? Physically to the urban landscape, to our social landscape, what impacts do you foresee? Number one, it will save lives. In this country about 38,000 people die a year and car crashes here in San Francisco. I believe last year's 16 pedestrians lost their life. Once you go autonomous, that's likely to go next to zeros. I'm sure there'll be people that throw themselves in front but that will go near to zero. Bicycle accidents, the roads can be, are shared much better with an autonomous vehicle than a distracted human vehicle and you're gonna save lives, you're gonna save money too because now and this is what's gonna change more than just the look and feel, it's gonna change the economy because what happens when you have cars not crashing each other is you don't have all those body shops, you don't have those car repair. Electric vehicles are gonna fundamentally change things because they take a lot less maintenance even when they don't hit anything and these are trends that are happening now. The insurance industry, the car insurance industry puts a lot of money into our economy and that is slowly going to change and fundamentally change and we don't know what's gonna happen economically and society-wise but going back to your physical environment I do think that the idea of there being less parking less, as John was saying, less cars just sitting around all the time on the streets, you can only imagine, I'm sure we've all been in Golden Gate Park on the Sundays when they don't allow cars and you go, wow, this is so amazing but that's how it was 105 years ago so we can return to that and that is one path. There is another view though which is like we're seeing that Maureen mentioned all these cars, ride share cars coming into the city that it could increase traffic if everyone is getting a ride from here to there and hops in their autonomous car all of a sudden is there more cars, more traffic maybe fewer park cars but maybe more traffic and that's why we need guidance from the city and other thought leaders to sort of structure the rules at the beginning here before the industry guys before the big billion dollar companies all of a sudden build us the equivalent of an embarked arrow freeway so Maureen, you've got something to say here. Sure, I think I totally agree with Scott I do think that our roads, our bridges, our highways are a mess and I think let's talk about the gas tax. We need to put some money into fixing California's infrastructure. We've delayed maintenance on roads for decades. If we're gonna have a transit revolution and introduce autonomous cars and really create dedicated lanes and really do this right we have to invest in fixing our roads and our infrastructure so I know that's gonna be a huge discussion in the next election. It's the gas tax, a good thing or a bad thing but someone's gotta pay for it and whether it's the private sector or the public sector we do have a I think a huge infrastructure issue that's gonna have to get dealt with. Any thoughts on you Lars? Yes, I think we're talking about like different orders of effects, right? There's the kind of what I would call first order of effect which is you get rid of the fatalities which made the cars electric you improve your air quality, et cetera. Then we get into second and third order effects second order effects now I don't need a parking garage anymore why would I own a car if I go by myself I get a small one I share it with my neighbor or not I go to the mountains it's snowing I got something that gets me there, et cetera. So that car ownership model I think can be because these economics can be so attractive can be shifted very very quickly especially also because of the cost of a parking garage or parking space in our city is very very high so you may even see this happen much faster here than in other places. The third order effects are hard to predict and then I'm thinking about how so far what's better and cheaper transportation has done often is incentivized or made it possible for people to live further and further away from the city and commute further and further and that gets into some folks call this kind of the heaven or hell scenario like you can use this technology to get this clean city with very few cars or you can get people that come very far away sleep in the morning in their very luxurious bed cars and let the car drive around the block all day to avoid having to pay for parking and then go back home. Now I don't think we'll I don't think we'll be able to see that if it trends throughout that direction but there's of course the reality will be somewhere in the middle and we need to think and collaborate even more closely here in the greater Bay Area. I think this is not something that we can control by city as well there's a lot of cars coming into the city every day as well as our residents take our cars to other places right and sometimes they can't get to those places by any other way. There's also new opportunities for transit like there's parts of the city. So for instance when I got here I got here by BART and how do I get to the BART station or to make it in time. I took a TNC to get to that station. I think that's an interesting option that's better than driving all the way right. So think about those kind of things especially if that TNC would have been cheaper to get me there because it's autonomous or it could have even more effectively shared something receiving the start of some of that really good really good kind of options that are out there. It's early days I think on the autonomous vehicle technology to ask for kind of a firm policy. There's a lot of thinking. I think I would have brought the private sector so far for very actively reaching out. There's a lot of reach out from big and small companies. Some in their infancy some very large to work with us. Let me ask a quick follow up question. Some of the answers about how things will be reshaped because we're in a dense urban core we tend to think of what will happen in a dense urban core but of course most Americans and most people don't live in dense urban cores. And so would you agree or disagree with the suggestion that the reshaping would be less dramatic in a suburb where garage space is cheap and it's not as easy to share with your neighbors because the economics don't make as much sense because I'm going 20 miles this way and my neighbor is going 15 miles that way. That's one pathway is that like the sleeper car now this is the danger perhaps of autonomous vehicles is now instead of the bedroom communities an hour and a half out in Eastern Stockton maybe now someone's commuting from Lake Tahoe because they can sleep three hours along the way. And that's a danger that is one view that could happen. And I think that with good guidance from government entities that can be avoided but we have to be careful. What's gonna matter is what's gonna drive this is savings and I wanted to go back that entities like Charge Across Town are so wonderful because just like she spoke to the driver and we did like why don't you have an electric car? It makes sense because people don't see what things cost and it took a long time for the car to catch on originally because people didn't see the value of a car until it was cheaper to own one than get yourself around our renting horses or lion horse and the same thing's gonna happen here. You're going to see that it's gonna be less expensive to either do rideshare or with an autonomous car or not and if you look at the true cost of it it's black and white now as Marine would say between owning electric vehicle and owning a big gas car because with less maintenance and the cost per mile it's maybe yet only one person in the room here has one. Right, the other perspective I'll add which is of course more cars all else be equal will be more traffic but one possible way to mitigate that is there are these technologies which some of you may have heard of called vehicle to vehicle communications where intelligent vehicles can collaborate and so instead of having thousands of vehicles all optimizing their own individual path to the city if there could be some global coordination that's an opportunity to smooth or reduce some of the congestion issues although certainly not eliminate them and I certainly would share the concern that was expressed that of course if you have thousands more cars generally speaking you're gonna have more congestion. So I'll just ask another quick question or two and then we'll move to some audience questions. What are some of the latest technology trends that you're seeing that might impact either from the traditional big automakers or the start-ups that might impact this accelerated move or help accelerate the move into either electric vehicles or autonomous vehicles? Anything that we wouldn't have already read about and anything less obvious that you're seeing that you can tell the audience about here? So I see we have meetings with a number of the large automakers and the start-ups that are well-funded and there's a few that are worth on paper a few billion dollars because they have this vision of the future of autonomous cars and it is very divergent their views not only technologically, some want cameras and light are on the roof, some want it hidden so no one can see it, you know ruin the design of their car. I wanna explain what LiDAR is. It's using lasers to see as opposed to camera technology and that can help you see in the dark and better and it's a technology that's a lot of money is going into and you'll see when you see the self-driving cars practicing around San Francisco, you'll see the dome on the top and that's a LiDAR system and that's just lasers coming out and seeing the landscape. It's one way, another way to have redundant safety measures so they don't hit anything. But technologically these things are coming a lot of money is going into it but they all are very different. It's maybe like the beginning of cars, some people thought it was gonna be steam power versus gas power and they didn't know quite how what the final form factor was going to be and that's what's happening now but unlike the beginning of cars these are billion dollar companies throwing money at these systems that are sometimes completely different vision and they also have different views of what the ownership of how they're gonna sell cars. Some of them think they're just gonna sell people are gonna have an autonomous car in their garage, okay. So it's very similar to today's ownership where you pay your $50,000 for an autonomous car and you sit in and drive but other people think that no one's gonna own a car it's all gonna be shared use either through rideshare companies or you're gonna be in a group of 20 people that own a car and then share it and that's another way or entities, governments will own cars and shuffle autonomous cars and shuffle people around. So the automakers as you look at them and I have to be generalize this I can't say the particulars but some of them just really feel that no one is gonna own a car it's gonna be shared and that is a fundamental shift of what is happening other ones don't expect anyone to own anything or getting into anything they just want to go from point A to B and these are amazing time you will not recognize the streets in 10 years. Any other thoughts on technologies over the horizon Sure I think battery technology which you guys probably have read about is just accelerating faster and faster so I tell everybody don't buy a car, lease a car because in two years you're gonna get twice the range turn it in and get another model and go faster but what we're seeing and what we're hearing from the car manufacturers are leaps and bounds and battery technology I started in the personal computer industry in the 80s and it reminds me on like steroids how PCs just went from luggables to portables to laptops this is gonna happen in a nanosecond and you're gonna see cars really going hundreds and hundreds of miles and that's a huge factor for adoption Absolutely and computer power is the other thing in the battery power and at the LA Auto Show which is going on right now every major car company is introducing electric it's called the Electric LA Auto Show and Jaguar just announced a car today I mean everybody's in the game so it's moving really fast and I think from a consumer point of view it's sort of like oh my god which car should I go electric, fuel cell, all battery, et cetera so there's a lot of education as a consumer that you need to do in order to really step up and figure out what you want So we'll move in a moment to audience questions I'll just close out this portion by re-emphasizing the safety issue which was brought up before I like to tell people sometimes you read about the terrible things that happened hundreds of years ago where the mortality rates for certain things were far higher than they were today and you wonder how in the world did people put up with that and I think 100 years from now people are gonna look back and say how did we think it was normal that 100 people every day in this country were gonna die in motor vehicle fatalities how did we accept that as normal which we have all come to do but it is largely preventable and we have the technology that can knock that number down if not to zero, a lot closer to zero than we are today so I think that's one of the and of course not only do we have 100 fatalities about every day but we have hundreds more injuries that occur every day on the roads most of those fatalities and injuries ascribeable directly to driver error or to terrible lapses in judgment like driving a drunken and so on and committing errors because people are drunk so that's putting aside even the convenience factors and the environmental factors all of which are important there's this incredible toll that we've come to accept as normal which we shouldn't accept as normal and we don't have to accept as normal so let me move now to some audience questions we have a roving mic somewhere here and so I'll just, I'll try to get to people I would ask that you try to get to the question sooner rather than later so we can hear from our panelists and I guess we had a gentleman right here in the front and then we'll kind of move around yes sir fascinating to say the least my question is for Mr. Scott but anyone can answer so so far I'm envisioning overdrivers out of a job marking attendance out of a job garage attendance and repair truck drivers too truck drivers possibly be uni are we solving one problem and creating another one by having all of those unemployed people who's gonna pay for their support thank you that's one way to look at it but five years ago so there were no Uber drivers no Lyft drivers no there was just taxi drivers so those are new jobs they are gonna change fundamentally but we don't know what jobs are gonna be created by this what opportunities are gonna be created looking on the optimistic side the world is gonna be completely different and just like when the horses were gone no more buggy whip you know makers no more manure picker uppers yes they lost their job but unknown jobs were created fixing cars that were wrecking you know those mechanic jobs those were just created and so we will have new jobs created and yes there will be transition from that and certainly the big companies the rideshare companies are investing billions to go to autonomous vehicles they make no secret of it so any other thoughts on the employment question I will speak on behalf of Lars cause you may not know this data point but the mayor's office is actually has recognized and is working with city college to teach college students how to repair autonomous and electric cars so you know a lot of these kids go through and study a trade they go out into auto repair and there's a program at city college to really start to shift these jobs over so it's gonna take efforts like that to really create the new jobs but your point is an excellent one and I think taking you know leaders like our mayor and you know other cities to really focus in on okay who are the folks being impacted and how do we retrain them into a new market I was just wondering why isn't any of the industry or any of the folks that are engaged in this transition not being more engaged in some of the policy and infrastructure decisions that are being made today that we won't even see like you know manifested for another 10 years or so and I'm talking about things like the most recent proposal by San Mateo city and county association of governments to widen the 101 there's a environmental impact right now where they're planning on spending 550 million dollars or half a billion dollars on widening the freeway from more cars and to me 550 million dollars is a lot of infrastructure for EVs it's a lot of transit it's a lot of a lot of other things that we need as opposed to spending it on something that by the time it's implemented is going to be obsolete correct and I if I may I agree that the industry the industry should do a better job of lobbying they have all these billions to lobby that should be one of them saying you don't need to spend this money it's just momentum of the highway making lobby uh... going ahead and spending more money they have gas money that has to be or gas tax money that has to be spent on highway improvement there's just this momentum of bureaucracy that's keeping it going because that's my opinion of it and once again back to autonomous commerce you don't need wider lanes in fact it'll be very compact transportation on the freeways of the future if I may generalize a little bit I'll shoot myself in the foot in the process it's uh... it's not just that right like we're building entire new neighborhoods and those neighborhoods are built with parking and I think it's uh... it's a very brave developer in person that would kind of bet and be as visionary to say oh we don't need that and still be able to sell the units and make the product uh... the project work so this is I think uh... part growing pains part existing momentum part you know uh... existing regulations I think we're moving away from in our city at least and I know all the cities are hopefully are considering from parking minimums to parking maximums many aspects here in San Francisco leading a country and I think our newer developments are around point eight point eight five you can still see like if if what folks are saying here comes true especially that happens quickly all of that will be uh... space for other uses to put it that way so will make some mistakes uh... I think it's uh... it's it's it's a very hard way to foresee the future and change everything we've done in the past there's a tendency to keep things going as they go my colleague from uh... uh... someday yesterday I said that he you know we we take try to take safe decisions and they're not always saying decisions in his mind you know it's good to have that possible future in there so if we build a parking lot and let's say we can foresee that potentially it could be used for something else you can build that in we're doing that in a sense that we're for electric vehicles where i think the pathway is clear and and more near term in my mind more predictable perhaps uh... we already mandate as of actually January 1st this year for all new parking if you build parking you have to ensure that it can be electrified or is electrified from the start electrified as in that there's a point to charge an electric vehicle again i guess what i'll just add uh... that i think a lot of the big automakers are engaged in the policy discussion it's a policy discussion is a very complex landscape because i'm sure many of you know uh... vehicles in general are regulated across multiple levels right to give one complex example uh... as you probably know it's federal law that mandates that cars have to have seat belts physically in the car yet it's state law which is where you decide you know do you have to wear the seat belt on what circumstances can you be cited uh... and so then there's also stuff at the county level and then of course at the municipality level so uh... with uh... autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles the entire regulatory sort of you know stack break it's impacted so it's a it's a very complex landscape and uh... from the stuff i do in washington dc i certainly see a lot of engagement on the regulatory uh... front uh... but it's a complex landscape there's there's safety regulations there's liability questions that come up it's a really complex we've got two questions here then we'll hop over there so i just want to know how you uh... proposed in increasing the uh... maximum electric range the maximum range in all electric vehicles and uh... whether you're going to focus on like uh... maybe uh... like direct battery swaps after i'm talking about driving from my here to l.a. or from here to you know new york or whatever is increasing the maximum range so i'm not worried about two hundred and sixty eight miles as such per vehicle uh... i can i can go without this actually uh... so the car industry kind of develops and and meets customer demand for those longer ranges right and then battery technology is going i suggest that is being a large part like for the same number of pounds or space for battery uh... i think the numbers are fifty percent more power ready of the last five years or so that that's a curve that's that's just uh... continues to raise me how quickly that's progressing that increases everything uh... also efficiency by the way now how to get to l.a. back or how to let's say drive like a new york cab driver like seventy thousand miles a year or something in an electric car the charging technology we haven't discussed that as much yet there is uh... the speeds that are common today there are technologies out there and you stand there it's uh... widely supported across the industry uh... that go seven and up to ten x those speeds so instead of having to wait for an hour uh... now you reduce that to let's say six minutes the charging technology is expensive there's not enough of it we're working with various private sector investors and partners are some of them that were mentioned here earlier uh... to get that also deployed here in the city so we'll see that soon but then the cars need to follow they need to be able to accept that that that it's more common for buses and so forth to accept that kind of power a lot of exciting stuff then it will be make it a lot easier specifically if you don't have a charger at home or if you drive a lot of long distance we're hearing from tesla drivers that there's lines now at supercharging stations uh... if you go from here to l.a. and you pull in to the tesla supercharging station there's two or three cars in line so as the adoption ticks up the uh... you know especially highway charging is definitely gonna have to be shorter faster and be able to take a six minute charge and not sit there for twenty minutes so i apologize if this issues are discussed but i was late because i took public transit in the wheelchair ramp was broken where i needed to get off and uber and lyft are not an option for me uh... and my question is partly policy and partly technology for either electric vehicles or autonomous vehicles is your technology compatible with my technology uh... irony is i'm an electric vehicle right this very minute and uh... people with disabilities and seniors who don't drive they would be highly motivated early adopters and speaking for myself i worked in software for twenty eight years but i see myself being uh... shut out of a lot of these new transportation technologies before they're even started policy and technology i'd like to hear about your designs uh... the autonomous vehicle industry groups are looking at that uh... obviously it's it depends on what sort of help you need to certainly technologically designs are there to allow access but there will always be of the possibility of having a person in the autonomous vehicle who's ready to help anyone who needs help in there that would be a special service that would be out there and available and that's what's being talked about but not now that's not the word then i do i do think that technologically there are possibilities and it's it's we need we need opinions we need advice uh... as as that and that they are being more open than they have been in the past as far as new technologies so i would encourage you to to reach out uh... and other people to the autonomous vehicle associations that are forming now there are there still too many of them to you know no one is one voice yet there's also uh... you know a lot of this falls under carb in sacramento there's an organization called valose v-e-l-o-z dot org and all the major car manufacturers are members they need to hear from you uh... when we started six years ago we got calls from the a-d-a and like-minded organizations wanting to know about sound issues about access issues about if you're in a wheelchair and you have a car and you want to charge it are there wheelchair charging stations so it's all been discussed but i don't think anybody's acted on it so you're absolutely right and i again agree with scott that you guys need to be at the table and helping create some of this so that you get what you need out of this there there's some initiatives on the way policy to mend the situation uh... in part i don't know for you personally but but but but but generally to to to uh... create more universal access options one is that there is now for the state of california as of january this year already a description of what it means to have an accessible charging station uh... for an electric car so some description on how to reach it how to move around the vehicle and so everything so a special description what those manage are that that didn't exist before and doesn't exist in most parts of the U.S. so that's for kind of public charging infrastructure we would see that automatically now being implemented now most of us out there right now it was not built according to the specifications here you'll see various enablements in the real world right now the future or we should see uh... better than that on the vehicle side i think this is where uh... that lack of variety that we used to have right this this idea like there's you know the electric car was kind of the smaller one kind of a sedan etc would not that there was no electric mini van is over there it's slow i would say but you're starting to see christ now has a version of the pacific out it's a plug-in uh... hybrid electric uh... that can be accommodated uh... for for wheelchairs which is a step in that direction we have our hope that therefore we can also electrify some of the of the accessible transit options perhaps you remember this but a year ago in november twenty sixteen muni was hacked what assurance do we have about autonomous vehicles not getting hacked i think anyone who offers assurance about cybersecurity is always proven wrong but i guess i would i would broaden the question and point out that regular but non-electric non-autonomous vehicles these days are highly connected and therefore with the many advantages that happens have risks as well so i think the cyber security issue is one that that is pervasive across the entire vehicle industry including of course and uh... i don't have a solution maybe right and many many you likely travel an autonomous vehicle right now in an airplane uh... it has a large percent of its life is uh... autonomous not controlled by humans and they're not too many headlines of uh... hacks there possible course like john said you can't guarantee it uh... but there are technologies and solutions that can make it and if you in general do the numbers no matter what these you know there will be accidents with autonomous vehicles but it's going to be far less than thirty-eight thousand people who were killed every year in the united states sixteen people i guess i'll say that i think the question is really important because it's not just security it's also privacy for example but to the extent that these these vehicles are collecting data uh... and that data could potentially be exposed and the data may not necessarily be physically in the car maybe in the cloud uh... which creates another potential exposure vector you know history demonstrates that uh... people don't get this right the first time right in the sense that there will you know you'd be crazy to predict with certainty that there will never be any hacking incidents you know relating to autonomous or electric vehicles that that would be proven wrong you know maybe by next week as far as we know uh... so the the and also i'm personally skeptical some people sometimes suggest that the government should somehow review all the software code and you know pack proof it but i'm not confident that you know that would be the right solution either so uh... you know i think there will be some bumps in that road but but even with those bumps you know to scott's point i think uh... i i would take a uh... this this the chance of a vulnerability uh... and that that could expose some safety issues i would take that any day over the the very real risk today of being hit by a drunk driver uh... and so i think we're still better off going to the autonomous and electric route but but there are going to certainly going to we're going to see news stories about hacks uh... hopefully small ones you know not the nightmare one where somebody in a basement pushes a button and all the cars breaks fail you know all over the country let's hope that never happens so as far as i've been able to tell all the autonomous vehicles that are being built right now are still equipped with steering wheels and gas pedals and all that sort of thing under the assumption that a human driver would have to perhaps take over in rare unusual situations and because of that my understanding is that even if the car is uh... very highly autonomous the driver will still need to have a driver's license as a person with a disability that's never been able to get a driver's license because of that when do you think when do you think that california's dmv will relent and allow people who don't have drivers license to use autonomous vehicles next year twenty eighteen so in arizona their autonomous cars driving on the street you will be able to get in my prediction into uh... fully autonomous car uh... service in twenty twenty here in san francisco so with no driver no steering wheel except your trust that it's going to get you from a to b so uh... conventional cars today are controlled by individual human beings and uh... there's not much you can do about how well they drive you can have driver training education so on hope that worked uh... you can uh... stop the car and site the driver uh... you with uh... autonomous cars uh... the car is controlled by code that was developed by developer to work station uh... continues to be developed by them that code might be open source might not uh... uh... but uh... what are some of the uh... uh... advantages of that how do you see that changing say regulation of cars uh... and how they behave and uh... whether they uh... you know pay the law let's say sounds like a question is both my pay grade but i i'm willing to attempt it anyway so there there is i think that to pass that a little bit i think there's a there's a legal question there around liability and so forth and responsible for this is the uh... service that operates at the license like this dmv is it the the city that says this car could drive there is this the oem that produce the car is there all the manufactured components in there uh... not very close to that that clearly feels it's like an unresolved question that that i i think people are really actively uh... studying right now i haven't heard of a great answer to one of my copeland is a third of of a direction this is going great here then there's a technical one uh... on that as well which you alluded to is around how you know should the code base be opened so that it's you know uh... can be inspected by everyone and there are some initiatives on the way that that do this and then there's other initiatives that uh... that guard everything in great secrecy though again and i see that talking to all the oems that some were very secretive can you say their name and some of them are very happy to be on panels and make press releases and tell you almost everything they're doing uh... and it just depends which one is going you know they're all going to move forward on this and uh... we'll see which resonates with the public most i'll just add that the question about obeying the law there's a whole incredibly fascinating session we could have which isn't this session on the ethics questions that arise you know one example i sometimes see is if you're if you have a road one lane in each direction and you're driving and there's a big giant tree branch which has fallen and blocked one lane but not the lane going the opposite direction it's too big a branch to move you know what we as people would do is we realize that we can't move the branch and if no one else is coming we'd go around it right but it wouldn't be very good if the autonomous car just stopped and waited two days until the road crew showed up right and then you can come up with all these ethical questions that you know for example if you know you're driving someone to a hospital who's having a stroke are you justified in driving five miles an hour of the speed limit most of us would say absolutely yes are you justified in driving a hundred miles of the speed limit well no and so how would an autonomous vehicle make encounter those decisions and there are these ethics questions about the trolley problem another one i'll briefly mention is if you know give you a scenario if you're driving towards an intersection with a light and someone runs the red light you've got the green light someone runs the red light and there's gonna be an accident as a person the only thing we might have time to do is just like realize it the same on the brakes but for an autonomous vehicle that one second say is an eternity and it can explore fifty different courses of action decide which of these different courses of action have different costs and you get these incredibly complex questions about who is the car really trying to protect is it trying to protect first and foremost its occupant or is it trying to protect society as a whole even if it might make a decision which is potentially suboptimal for the occupant right and so there's a fascinating set of questions we're not going to answer them here and i wouldn't even argue that the government should have a rule but it gets your question kind of kicks off a fascinating discussion uh... you've hinted at the answer to this question but i'll just ask it directly and that is whether there is any long-term planning going on city or regional or state level about uh... for a world in which electric autonomous ride-sharing services dominate the landscape and car ownership is disappearing that seems to have enormous implications for the city and regional infrastructure it's not clear to me that anybody's thinking about it in a coherent long-term from my perspective and from you know i think we're in this mass stage of experimentation right now you've got silicon valley bursting with startups and whether it's artificial intelligence or lidar radar all these technologies from one end of the car to the other we're in a massive mode of experimentation there's pilot projects going on around the world everybody's watching to see what's going on in arizona what's going on in london what's going on in philadelphia so i don't see either than this conference is galore popping up art you know autonomous vehicle conferences once a week all over silicon valley so and i'm not an expert by any means but from my perspective it feels like we're in this experimentation phase where it's way too early to weigh in yet but uh... there are and there's really no clear leader yet on the technology side or what the right approaches but i think all of this will happen and my feeling is we're looking pretty far out twenty thirty on the outside before we see this really have huge impact so i'm more of a pessimist on all the stuff that has to happen before we see truly uh... ubiquitous autonomous city i think we've got time for about one more question okay uh... two more for the quick that would be great uh... my it's a recently quick question i guess you've talked about that car ownership model of going the way of the horse and buggy and it's going to uh... it's going to evolve into this transportation as a service are people talking about using blockchain technology and this idea of share distributed ledgers cryptocurrency to pay for these this ecosystem of services the quick answer is yes uh... there are a number of uh... startups and even some of the big oe m's who want to bring that into into the solution uh... and it's still is as marine said just being experiments lots of lots of experiments going on uh... not only technically on the cars themselves but also how it's all paid for and trust and all that anyway it's it is happening no not yet although maybe someone will say they are but uh... no there's not like my premise it's just i'll make it explicit so you can disagree with it is that uh... congestion in san francisco is already bad and uh... yet even if we get rid of air pollution uh... and that uh... it will get worse with the less a fair approach to regulation so why not congestion tax why not do it today like london has a yeah london is fast to get around and by bus yeah i mean i if i can can uh... t u up that i was thinking that's so important now san francisco has the ability to lead this and not you know send off all the glory to arizona where they are right now trying to take the lead in autonomous uh... testing and and leadership in the regulations of it and it would be wonderful to see san francisco uh... as the home to so many of the startups here in the area uh... to show hey what about this way regulating times vehicles or or such and and there is a there is a way and and consumption tax you know to to tame the beast of the potential of having more congestion right now uh... would be great to see you know the beginnings of discussions from governments like san francisco marina yeah i i think it still comes back down to the tnc's and regulating how many of these cars are downtown and at what times and you know i heard from uh... that there's a hundred and sixty three thousand uber and lift licenses in the bay area i mean that's uh... you know we've got to do something about you know controlling who's accessing you know the city at what times of the day and whether it's a congestion tax or just licensing issue uh... i think that's where the city and you know the san francisco department of the environment really has to be the way a human driver tax perhaps so yeah a few comments i think is generally you know pricing things like the use of the road or the use of parking spaces were further with the parking spaces now we're starting think about introducing a flexible pricing uh... on on on street meters kind of the infrastructure is there smart we can we could do that already uh... so the actual use of the road space we're getting more congested that's a you know that they were uh... looking more and more like l.a. in some aspects uh... it's getting like if you look at any congestion index it's getting right up there uh... especially in the downtown area we're not the regulatory authority for tnc's i think that's important to remember so if you look at what the city like loman for instance is doing in uh... working with the tnc's to electrify them at a very rapid clip uh... that's here that's a statewide conversation too so that that that introduces on some challenges but i think you're you're right i mean our buses for instance right if they're stuck in the same traffic as everybody else uh... then it it takes away some of the positive aspects of me using that that box or let's say a shared vehicle or or you know fifteen person vehicle uh... whether that's different by human or uh... is fully autonomous and and clearly if autonomous vehicles may create uh... a bigger sense of urgency than ever uh... for tackling those uh... those issues well i'd like to close by uh... thanking our panelists uh... for their terrific comments and also thanking all of you for spending some time with us this evening thanks to all thank you