 From Milpitas, California, at the edge of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering autonomous vehicles. Brought to you by Western Digital. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Western Digital in Milpitas, California at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Meetup Get Together. I'm not exactly sure. It's 300 people. They get together every year around a lot of topics. Today's all about autonomous vehicles and really this whole ecosystem of startups and large companies trying to solve, as I was just corrected, not that thousands of problems, but the millions and billions of problems that are going to have to be solved to really get autonomous vehicles to their ultimate destination, which is what we're all hoping for. It's going to save a lot of lives and that's really serious business. We're excited to have the guy that's kind of running the whole thing, Derek Curtin. He's the chairman of the Autotech Council. Derek saw you last year. Great to be back. Thanks for having us. Well, thanks for having me back here to chat. So what's really changed in the last year, kind of contextually, since we were here before. I think last year 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 we're at the top, it's critically important, is we've had fatalities and that really shifts the conversation and refocuses everybody on the issue of safety. So, you know, there's real vehicles out there driving real miles and we've had some problems crop up that the industry now has to redouble down in their efforts and really focus on stopping those and reducing those. What's been really amazing about those fatalities is everybody in the industry anticipated who when somebody dies from these cars, there's gonna be the governments, the people are gonna be a backlash with pitforks and they're gonna throw the brakes on the whole effort. And so 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. But a few missteps can create a backlash. What's surprising is we've had those fatalities. There's absolutely some issues revealed there that are critically important to address, but the backlash hasn't happened. So that's been a very interesting social aspect for the industry to try to digest and say, well, we're pretty lucky and why didn't that happen and great to a certain extent. And obviously horrible for the poor people that passed away, but a little bit of a silver lining, right, is these are giant data collection machines. And so the ability to go back after the fact, to do a postmortem, you know, we've all seen the video of the poor guy going across the street in the dark and they've got the data off the one from the 10187. So luckily, you know, we can learn from it. We can see what happened and try to move forward. Yeah, it is obviously a learning moment, which is absolutely not worth the price we pay. So essentially these learning moments have to happen without the human fatalities and the 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. So it's a terrible cost and one too high to pay. And that's the sad reality of the whole situation. On the other hand, if you want to say silver lining, well, there is no fatality, it's a silver lining. But the upside about a fatality in the self-driving world is that 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. But something this serious and this magnitude, those lessons are shared throughout the industry. And so this extremely terrible event is something that actually will drive an improvement in performance throughout the industry. That's a really good, that's a super good point. Because it is not a good thing. But again, it's nice that we could at least, we could all see the video, right? We could all kind of make our own judgment. We could see what the real conditions were. And it was a tough situation. What's striking to me, and it came up in one of the earlier keynotes, is on one hand is this whole trust issue of autonomous vehicles. And Uber's a great example, because would you trust an autonomous vehicle? Will you trust some guy that you don't know to drive your daughter to the prom? I mean, it's a really interesting question. But now we're seeing, at least in the Tesla cases that have been highlighted, people are all in. They got 100% trust. They think it's level five. We're not even close to level five. And they're reading or doing all sorts of interesting things in the car rather than using it as a driver assist technology. What you see there is that there's a wide range of customers, a wide range of users. And some of them are cautious. Some of them will avoid the technology completely. And some of them will abuse it and be overconfident in the technology. And in the case of Tesla, they've been able to point out in almost every one of their accidents that where their autopilot is involved, they've been able to go through the logs and they've been able to exonerate themselves and say, listen, this was customer misbehavior. Not our problem. This was customer misbehavior. And I'm a big fan. So I go, great, they're right. But the problem is after a certain point, it doesn't matter who's fault it is. If your tool can be used in the bad way that causes fatalities to the person in the car and once again to people outside the car who are innocent bystanders in this, if your car is a tool in that, you have to reconsider the design of that tool. And you have to reconsider how you can make this idiot prove or failsafe. And whether you can exonerate yourself by saying the driver was doing something bad, the pedestrian was doing something bad is largely irrelevant. People should be able to make mistakes and the systems need to correct those mistakes. Yeah, but it's not to make excuses, but it's just ridiculous that people think they're driving level five cars. Well, people who are jumping in the back seat. It's just like, oh my goodness, really. Yeah, I mean, when I growing up, there was that story of the joke about somebody who had cruise control on the RV and so they went in the back to fry up some bacon. And it was a running joke when I was a kid. But you'd see that now people with level two autonomous cars are kind of taking that joke a little too far and making it real. And it's not, we're not ready for that. They're not ready. One thing that did strike me that is here today that Patty talked about, Patty Roth from Intel, is just with the lane detection and the forward-looking, what's the technical term? Well, there's forward-looking radar for breaking. Yeah, for breaking, the forward-looking radar. And the crazy high positive impact on fatalities, just those two technologies are having today. Yeah, and you see the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the entire insurance industry is willing to lower your rates if you have some of these technologies built in your car. Because these forward-looking radars and lidars that are able to apply brakes in emergency situations, not only can they completely avoid an accident and save the insurer and a lot of money and the driver's life and limb, but even if they don't prevent the accident, if they apply a brake where a human driver might not have or they put the brake on one second before you, it can have a tremendous effect on the velocity of the impact. And since the energy that's imparted in collision is a function of the square of the velocity, if you have a small reduction of velocity, you can actually have a measurable impact on the energy that's delivered in that collision. And so just making it a little slower can really deliver a lot of safety improvements. Right, so I want to give you a chance to give a little plug in terms of kind of what the AutoTech Council does. Because I think what's great with the automotive industry is clearly, you know, it was born in the US and in Detroit and obviously Japan and Europe does big automotive presences. But there's so much innovation here and we're seeing them all set up these kind of innovation centers here in the Bay Area where there's Volkswagen or Ford and the list goes on and on. How is the, you know, kind of your mission of bringing those two worlds together, working? What are some of the big hurdles you still have to go over? Any surprises, either positive or negative, as this race towards autonomous vehicles just seems to be just rolling down the track? Yeah, I think, you know, Silicon Valley, historically a source of great innovation for technologies. And what's happened is that the technologies that Silicon Valley is famous for inventing cloud-based technology, network technologies, processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning. This is all Silicon Valley stuff, not to say that it isn't done anywhere else in the world, but we're really strong in it. And historically, those may not have been important to a car maker in Detroit. And so, well, that's great. We had to worry on our transmission and make these ratios better and, you know, its softer transmission shift is what we're working on right now. Well, 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. The car makers are looking at self-driving technologies, you know, the evolution of ADAS technologies as extremely disruptive to their world. They're going to need to adopt it or the competitors will. They're just going to shift the way people buy cars, the number of cars they buy, and the way those cars are used. So they don't want to be laggards. No car maker in the world wants to come late to that party. So they want to either be extremely fast followers or be the leaders in this space. So to do that, they feel like, well, we need to get a shoulder to shoulder with a lot of these innovation companies. Some of them that are pre-existing. So you mentioned Patty Smith from Intel. Okay, we want to get side by side with Intel, who's based here in Silicon Valley. Other ones that are just startups, you know, outside I see a car right now from a company called Iris. They make driver monitoring software that monitors the state of the driver. This stuff's pretty important. If your car is trading off control between the automated system and the driver, you need to know what the driver's state is. So that startup is here in Silicon Valley. They want to be side by side and interacting with startups like that all the time. So as a result, the car comes, as you said, set up here in Silicon Valley and we basically formed a club around them and said, listen, that's great. We're going to be a club where the innovators can come and show their stuff and the car mays can come and kind of shop those wares. It's such crazy times because the innovation is on so many axes for this thing. Somebody used to, in the keynote care or case, right? So they're connected, they're autonomous so the operation of them is changing. The ownership now they're all shared. That's all changing. And then the propulsion and the motors are all going to electric and hybrid. That's all changing. So all of those factors are kind of flipping at the same time. We just had a panel today and the subject was the changes in the supply chain that Case essentially is going to bring. We said autonomy but electrification and a big part of that as well. And they have this historic supply chains that have been very, once it won't be as far as GM now. So GM will have these premier suppliers that give them their parts, brake stores, motors that drive up and down the windows and stuff and engine parts and such. And they've stick year after year with the same suppliers because they have good relationships and the reliability and they meet their standards. Their factories are co-located in the right places. But because of this Case notion and these new kinds of cars, new range of suppliers are coming into play. So that's great. We have all these suppliers for our piston rods, for example. Well, hey, they built a factory outside Detroit in Lansing real near where we are. But 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 that supply either motors or the rare earth magnets or a different kind of a switch that can transmit the right amperage from your battery to your motor. So new suppliers. But one of the things the panel turned up that was really interesting and specifically was it's not just suppliers in these kind of brick and mortar, these mechanical spaces that Karmic has usually had. It's increasingly partners and suppliers in the technology space. So cloud, we need a cloud vendor or we got to build a cloud data center ourselves. We need a processing partner to excel as powerful processors. We can't use these small dedicated chips anymore. We need to have a central computer. So you see coming to like NVIDIA and Intel going, oh, that's very, that's an opportunity for us. We're keen to provide. Exciting times. It's like you're in the right place at the right time. It is exciting. All right, Derek. We got to leave it there. So Derek, congratulations again on another event and inserting yourself in a very disruptive and opportunistic filled industry. Yeah, thanks a lot. He's Derek, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Western Digital Autotech Council event in Milpedes, California. Thanks for watching. See you next time.