Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / CES 2026 - Xiaomi Kebab

Transcript

CES 2026 - Xiaomi Kebab · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept
• 0:07
  sports bike rider hailing from California.
• 0:10
  He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and
• 0:12
  fast and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
• 0:35
  Good day.
• 0:36
  Good morning, good afternoon.
• 0:38
  It is John Summers the motoring historian.
• 0:40
  Today, CES 2026.
• 0:44
  The basics of what I'm gonna talk about today are, um, I'm a member of a
• 0:50
  journalist group, the Western Automotive Journalists, and, uh, a number of
• 0:55
  members, including the current chair, Charlie Vogel Heim had been to the
• 1:00
  event this year and did a little sum up for us, other members over Zoom.
• 1:05
  Really, really informative.
• 1:07
  Really, really interesting.
• 1:10
  I'm telling you guys, even if you're not that excited about this dein inventing of
• 1:15
  driving and cars driving themselves and all that kind of thing, e even if you do
• 1:19
  prefer the cars of the 20th century, and, and I do, there is still something really
• 1:24
  exciting about this move towards a clean, quiet form of transportation that doesn't
• 1:32
  idle pointlessly at traffic lights that.
• 1:35
  Can perhaps be sustainable by solar and and sunlight.
• 1:39
  There really is something exciting about this future transportation.
• 1:45
  You know, I feel like I'm a horse person and we can still have the horses, right?
• 1:49
  We can still enjoy riding the horses, but for mobility.
• 1:53
  These EVs are when we iron out, you know, the fires and some of the
• 1:59
  other, I would say teething troubles.
• 2:02
  Well, you know, range isn't awesome and they are too heavy at the moment.
• 2:05
  We're gonna do a lot better when we can pick up power.
• 2:09
  Like a, you know, scale extra car where we can draw power from the road.
• 2:13
  And of course that's gonna reduce our freedom even further because then
• 2:16
  we're only gonna be able to drive where there's power on the road.
• 2:20
  And, and I'm sure that's, that's coming along soon.
• 2:23
  But, but look, there's me peeking a long way into a, a Jetsons kind
• 2:28
  of sometime, maybe never future.
• 2:31
  Let's talk in today's presentation.
• 2:35
  About actual innovations, which real people have seen and touched.
• 2:40
  And let's begin with with a little anecdote that Charlie shared ar
• 2:44
  around some journalists who he'd met from Detroit, some of whom were
• 2:48
  gonna go to the North American Auto Show in Detroit, um, and others.
• 2:53
  Didn't feel the need to go, but they certainly needed to be on that
• 2:57
  plane out to Las Vegas for CES and I'm sure part of it's 'cause of the
• 3:01
  weather, but I'm sure part of it is because the interesting innovations
• 3:06
  are not at the auto show anymore.
• 3:09
  The interesting innovations are at the Consumer electronics show.
• 3:14
  So in my normal way with the rustling of paper signifies the, the taking
• 3:19
  up of my notes here that, that I made from, from what Charlie?
• 3:23
  Talked about when I first got involved with Stanford, Michael Shanks, who
• 3:29
  I was working with at the time, the archeology professor, but also like
• 3:33
  somebody who has a real feel for the built environment for things both in
• 3:38
  the past, present, and in the future.
• 3:40
  That's really what I would describe him as, sort of being an expert in.
• 3:45
  And he talked about what he perceived as as happening with cars at
• 3:49
  that time with three revolutions.
• 3:51
  That is to say powertrain from internal combustion to ev,
• 3:56
  and we've seen that happening.
• 3:58
  But at that time, we were also seeing the move towards autonomy, which in
• 4:04
  20 13, 20 14, you know, it looked like it was gonna be possible if
• 4:08
  you'd have said in 10 years time.
• 4:10
  Will everyone have autonomous cars?
• 4:12
  It seemed lightly at that time that they would.
• 4:15
  Now the, the co blockage there guys has been that it's a lot more difficult than
• 4:19
  the Silicon Valley software guys thought.
• 4:21
  And you know, as a car guy, you knew that the real environment was gonna
• 4:25
  be a whole lot more difficult than the theoretical environment where software
• 4:29
  engineers had been working in before this clean room kind of environment that
• 4:34
  they'd worked in in before, clearly.
• 4:36
  The environment and tests that cars and trucks face is much more severe
• 4:44
  than, than that, and driving is much more difficult than the software
• 4:49
  engineers initially believed.
• 4:51
  In 2016, the chairman of Ford said we'd all be driving autonomous cars by 2020,
• 4:56
  or they'd all be driving us by 2020.
• 4:59
  Well, it's now 2026.
• 5:02
  And Tesla's full self-driving, as we well know now, is not, I personally found a
• 5:08
  civic that I drove a couple of years ago.
• 5:10
  Pretty good at toggling in lane, but really it's, it's meant to support you.
• 5:15
  It's not meant to be the lead.
• 5:18
  You know, you were still driving the car.
• 5:20
  Full autonomy is still a long way off.
• 5:23
  So the three revolutions.
• 5:24
  Powertrain Electric, you can see it's coming.
• 5:27
  Autonomy.
• 5:28
  Are you driving?
• 5:28
  Is it driving?
• 5:29
  What's the line in between?
• 5:30
  That's the second revolution.
• 5:32
  And the third revolution that Michael saw at that time was around
• 5:37
  the ownership model because this was the rise and rise of Lyft and
• 5:42
  Uber and, and these kind of guys.
• 5:44
  I remember the first time I used a shared.
• 5:49
  Uber, it was $5 to ride from Santa Monica where we were staying
• 5:54
  up to West Hollywood, to the Whiskey a Gogo, where I saw vain.
• 6:00
  Really good show, really great band, and a really interesting experience
• 6:06
  because I went with somebody else.
• 6:08
  And it was a shared Uber and other people got in and out and we were all trying
• 6:13
  the shared Uber for the first time, and we all talked about the experience.
• 6:18
  It was very peculiar.
• 6:19
  Imagine riding the train and the other people on the train.
• 6:23
  Talking to you or about what it's like to ride a train, not just complaining
• 6:27
  about the seats or being late.
• 6:29
  There was a sort of, we're all trying this new thing together
• 6:33
  at that time, but of course the pandemic put paid to all of that.
• 6:36
  I do feel it will come back.
• 6:38
  And in fact, not to jump ahead a little bit, but one of the, the people
• 6:42
  who Charlie talked about, they were doing a, uh, car that was almost
• 6:49
  like a bus, but where it had like separate personalized compartments.
• 6:54
  So it worked like a bus in terms of, you know, it came and picked you up
• 6:58
  from a stop and all that kind of thing.
• 7:00
  But it was like a car in that you had your own private little cocoon.
• 7:05
  So it offered the best elements of the Waymo.
• 7:08
  Which we have in San Francisco now, and, and I've used for, I would say the last
• 7:14
  year or so, I would say it's not just an experience that I'm comfortable with.
• 7:18
  I would say it's an experience which is a premium experience, which I would pay
• 7:25
  a higher price for than Uber because, uh, most Uber drivers are kind of
• 7:30
  crap, especially when they're driving.
• 7:33
  Around the neighborhood that you know really well, they
• 7:37
  don't take the right route.
• 7:38
  They, uh, stoppy, starty.
• 7:40
  And sometimes it's obvious, you know, they're living in the car because,
• 7:45
  you know, maybe they live in one part of California and they've driven here
• 7:49
  to do, and I know the, the Lyft and the Ubers of the world are trying
• 7:52
  to cut down on this kind of thing.
• 7:54
  But the point is that the Waymo, partly because it's a Jaguar, this was a
• 7:59
  point that when we were discussing it.
• 8:01
  Charlie made the fact that it's a Jaguar, um, Jaguar I pace is the cars that
• 8:06
  Waymo, the platform that Waymo have used.
• 8:07
  That does make a difference.
• 8:09
  But it's also that in San Francisco, and it's been
• 8:13
  noticeable how they've done this.
• 8:14
  It always did drive well, but now they drive really well in San Francisco
• 8:19
  in terms of just the right level of, of aggression, just the right level
• 8:24
  of creeping out of intersections so you don't get that business of
• 8:28
  the electric car being bullied.
• 8:30
  There's that famous story of the intersection in Palo Alto and the
• 8:35
  the car sitting there for two hours because it was constantly waiting its
• 8:39
  turn, but at a four-way intersection.
• 8:41
  Everyone just walks and rolls.
• 8:44
  When there's a gap, they don't take their turn.
• 8:46
  And Waymo in San Francisco has overcome that.
• 8:50
  Now, I would say there has been this incident recently where there was a power
• 8:53
  grid go down and the cars just stopped.
• 8:57
  Like pull to the side.
• 8:58
  They didn't do all the things that you would hope a computer would do.
• 9:02
  It did the old fashioned blue screen of death and just stopped working altogether.
• 9:08
  So clearly the thing is not fully baked at the moment, but.
• 9:13
  In terms of when I'm on my motorcycle and I'm rolling up to an intersection
• 9:18
  and I see a minivan coming and I see a Waymo coming, I know which driver
• 9:23
  is more likely to have seen me.
• 9:26
  So yeah.
• 9:26
  So for shanks, what were three revolutions around?
• 9:30
  Motive power around ownership and around autonomy.
• 9:35
  You know who was driving those?
• 9:37
  Those were the three.
• 9:38
  Charlie Vogel characterized what he described as ACEs and as autonomy
• 9:46
  connectivity, electrification and shared mobility solutions.
• 9:53
  And he had some statistic that showed that since 2010 OEM, uh, the $866 billion
• 10:02
  has been spent, you know, he had like 213 going towards autonomy and, and 34 going
• 10:10
  towards connectivity and 343 million going towards ELE or billion going towards.
• 10:16
  Electrification, you know, so 225 towards shared, that was the, the statistics.
• 10:22
  What he was saying is, you know, is that metrics still a,
• 10:26
  a relevant metric in 2026 here?
• 10:29
  One thing he did say about that number that I thought was really
• 10:32
  interesting was that the vast majority of that money did not come.
• 10:39
  From OEM car makers, it came from outside institutions in, in other
• 10:45
  words, Tesla coming from outside of the market and disrupting BYD coming
• 10:51
  from outside and suddenly, seemingly overnight being the world's largest
• 10:56
  car maker that has come along as a result of investments from outside
• 11:03
  of the traditional automotive world.
• 11:06
  Kind of interesting, right?
• 11:10
  Let's talk about some, some specifics.
• 11:13
  Waymo had a, a sixth generation of their vehicle on show.
• 11:19
  They had a Hyundai, they had some kind of geely, which has got some kind of zr kind
• 11:27
  of name that does not appeal to, to, uh, am Americans or, or European consumers.
• 11:34
  So apparently this GI had been renamed the O High or something
• 11:38
  like that, but you know.
• 11:40
  Maybe I'll attach a picture if, if I can find it.
• 11:43
  One thing Charlie noted was that both these vehicles had
• 11:47
  pedals and a steering wheel.
• 11:49
  When you ride in a Waymo, it does feel superfluous.
• 11:54
  It seems as if there's an invisible chauffeur because like
• 11:57
  the steering wheels turning and the pedals are moving and it's.
• 12:01
  Kind of pointless.
• 12:02
  In fact, the whole layout of the car is a bit silly.
• 12:06
  'cause if you are in the front seat, you're like straining to look to the
• 12:09
  back and it's just not a sensible layout.
• 12:12
  Now back in, in the days of horses and carriages, you sat facing each other
• 12:18
  like you would in in a railway carriage.
• 12:20
  And.
• 12:21
  There was a body style called the vis-a-vis what we, British historians
• 12:26
  call the Ed Edwardian period.
• 12:27
  But before the First World War, I guess Americans call
• 12:30
  it the brass era, don't they?
• 12:31
  But in, in that era, before the first World War, before the Model T
• 12:35
  sort of made sure everyone designed cars basically along the same lines.
• 12:39
  Before those times there were people doing vis-a-vis kind of
• 12:43
  body styles and basically this is, I think, gonna make a comeback.
• 12:48
  So this Zika, Gilly O Ohio affair had suicide doors, you know, no be allowed.
• 12:55
  Doors to open in the middle.
• 12:58
  The point was made that that really does make them a lot more
• 13:01
  spacious to get in and out of.
• 13:03
  And I found myself thinking as I'm talking about the old Austin FX four taxi cab.
• 13:07
  That really was a lot easier to get in and out than a normal car was.
• 13:11
  And it's partly 'cause the roof was higher, but that is an easier
• 13:14
  vehicle to get in and out of because of how the, uh, the doors hinge.
• 13:19
  16 cameras, five liter, six radar, and two.
• 13:25
  Ears I put there.
• 13:26
  I'm not sure if that's, uh, exactly what I wrote, but anyway, a total of 29.
• 13:32
  Sensors.
• 13:33
  The Waymo system is rolling out to colder cities as we speak, and of
• 13:40
  course the colder city thing represents a couple of challenges there.
• 13:44
  There's the actual weather itself, you know, the.
• 13:48
  The snow being on the road and the car fighting it hard to grip or the
• 13:52
  snow being at the side of the road and the car having to know that that
• 13:55
  snow and it's okay to drive into it and all of the crap being on the road.
• 14:00
  So it all getting on the lenses of the cameras and all of that.
• 14:03
  So the car not seeing as well as it, it as not, maybe not all of
• 14:08
  its 29 sensors working properly.
• 14:11
  There's that, but there's also the lurking fundamental of the
• 14:16
  fact that batteries really do not do well with really cold weather.
• 14:21
  You get into a sort of vicious cycle when the weather gets cold that the battery
• 14:27
  doesn't perform properly, but you need to have the fan on to put the heat and
• 14:32
  the heater on, and the heated seats on, and the lights on, and the wipers on.
• 14:37
  Right when the battery's at, its very worst.
• 14:40
  So there's definitely gonna be implications for range on that, even
• 14:45
  in a new ev and even in in, you know, and even if the implications aren't
• 14:50
  serious, if you are in the office watching the snow coming down, thinking, hmm.
• 14:56
  I'm really gonna need to exercise the battery much
• 14:59
  higher, harder than I used to.
• 15:01
  You know, it's a different flavor on range anxiety, isn't it?
• 15:04
  I guess that's what I'm saying.
• 15:09
  Nvidia had a big stand.
• 15:11
  The adjective was they were everywhere.
• 15:13
  That everywhere was what I wrote down, like Intel Inside used to be, you know?
• 15:18
  It's that sense that this is the platform upon which this is, this is built on.
• 15:24
  Just to be clear, this what Nvidia have is an open source AI platform
• 15:30
  for autonomous car development.
• 15:35
  Apparently Uber have developed an autonomous vehicle based on
• 15:41
  the lucid gravity, and that's gonna roll out in 2026, and
• 15:45
  they're talking about 2000 units.
• 15:48
  To that end, one of the things that Charlie mentioned was he usually
• 15:52
  tries to get a flavor of, of, you know, these technologies in order
• 15:56
  to demonstrate the technologies.
• 15:58
  People at CS will pick different cars to, you know, put the technology on,
• 16:03
  sometimes do their own, sometimes well.
• 16:06
  He feels like there's usually a car of the show and, you know, a
• 16:10
  platform that most people have chosen.
• 16:12
  You know, this will be a cool, futuristic, yet practical way to reflect
• 16:17
  our cool technology kind of thing.
• 16:19
  You know, the, the platform of choice, there's a platform of choice each year,
• 16:23
  and he said he thought the platform of choice this year was the lucid gravity.
• 16:28
  You know, I think that can make sense.
• 16:29
  I think, you know, I'll add a link to my own test of, of that vehicle, but
• 16:34
  it did seem to have a, a nice dash of the futuristic and the practical laid
• 16:40
  together, al be it, it was trying to, you know, swagger like an E-Class, a MG wagon.
• 16:47
  It was, you were men of feel.
• 16:48
  It was cool like that, but it actually was kinda shaped like a Chrysler minivan.
• 16:53
  Um, and it actually reminded most of the Ford Flex.
• 16:56
  You know, I know people said they looked like her's, but they
• 16:59
  were cool anyway, weren't they?
• 17:00
  And you know, you can't judge a box judge a book by its cover.
• 17:05
  And, uh, you can't judge a two box SUVA two box minivan, um,
• 17:10
  simply by its two box shape.
• 17:12
  That would be my thought.
• 17:13
  I've yet to drive one, I went to the launch, but I've yet
• 17:16
  to drive a, a lucid gravity.
• 17:18
  Is that even relevant with electric cars?
• 17:20
  The driving experience anymore?
• 17:22
  I'm not sure if it is.
• 17:23
  I mean, if it's, if it's driving itself, it's not relevant, is it?
• 17:26
  If you don't like the way it handles, you can just pay for some over the
• 17:30
  airwaves upgrades to, you know, stiffen up the suspension or something.
• 17:34
  Can you?
• 17:35
  It's just very strange, this future world.
• 17:41
  Qualcomm had a stand as well.
• 17:44
  Apparently they used to be called quality Communications, which is
• 17:48
  obvious when you hear it, but I didn't actually never thought of that before.
• 17:51
  But the point is that what they had is actually a pretty eye
• 17:56
  popping piece of technology.
• 17:58
  They have got a DAS, so all of the automatic driving assistance
• 18:04
  systems and entertainment.
• 18:07
  All on one chip.
• 18:09
  I'm pausing here to just let that sink in because what we're talking about here
• 18:15
  is cars becoming really exactly like your cell phone, that there is no fixing them.
• 18:22
  There's one component and.
• 18:25
  You lease it 'cause it's much too complicated for you to ever want
• 18:29
  to take on the risk of owning it.
• 18:31
  And you lease it for a certain amount of time and uh, insure it.
• 18:35
  And if it goes wrong at any point in that time, you just send it back
• 18:38
  and, and wash your hands of it.
• 18:40
  Cars of the 1920s and thirties, I mean, I'll add a link to a recent Dave Freeberg
• 18:48
  I watched where he drove a model.
• 18:51
  A from LA to Phoenix, or at least attempts to drive it from Model A to Phoenix.
• 18:57
  The car's 96 years old and the amount of tweaking and fiddling and fiddling
• 19:02
  and the amount of you have to know, and let me call the old coup and the old guy
• 19:07
  say, that amount of oil drippings fine.
• 19:10
  The amount of that kind of.
• 19:13
  Dirt under the fingernails experience, having worked with more older, more
• 19:18
  experienced guys, it's an artisanal skill that's being demonstrated with
• 19:25
  that vehicle that is completely absent a hundred years later, completely absent.
• 19:31
  There's no artisanal skill here.
• 19:34
  If the stereo breaks, you throw the car away and if the lane change
• 19:39
  assist breaks, you throw the car away.
• 19:41
  It's like, I feel it's like a racehorse.
• 19:44
  It's like it's a bit lame.
• 19:45
  Take it out behind the barn and shoot it.
• 19:47
  It's a bit like that, isn't it?
• 19:48
  I mean, that's where, where, where we're getting to with it.
• 19:51
  But of course what that's also gonna mean is when we can bang
• 19:55
  those chips out very quickly.
• 19:57
  We're gonna be able to make mobility devices that have all of the
• 20:03
  functionality that we're used to at a very, very low price point.
• 20:08
  This enables the $25,000 ev.
• 20:12
  Moreover, it's not even that revolutionary because phone chips already have
• 20:19
  this kind of multiple functionality.
• 20:22
  On one platform, wasn't it?
• 20:24
  The E 67 series that like has enough wiring in it to stretch around the world.
• 20:31
  And then ever since that kind of time, they've been looking to like simplify
• 20:35
  the wiring and have can bus rather than individual networking and, and
• 20:40
  then this is like that on steroids.
• 20:47
  So during the pandemic there was a chip shortage.
• 20:50
  A lot of vehicles sat idle during the pandemic, there were like fields
• 20:54
  of F1 fifties that were idle 'cause you couldn't get certain modules.
• 20:59
  So, you know, if you wanted like certain cars without
• 21:01
  heed seats, you could get 'em.
• 21:03
  But if you wanted the ones with heated seats, you had to wait because the
• 21:07
  right chip wasn't coming out of the fact sheet or supply chain disruption.
• 21:12
  That was the story of the pandemic supply chain disruption.
• 21:16
  And in 2026, has it gone back to the way that it was before the pandemic?
• 21:21
  Sort of, but not quite.
• 21:23
  There are still some things that take longer to arrive than, than they used to.
• 21:27
  And if you go down the Amazon road.
• 21:30
  You dodge a lot of that, but if you try and actually support retailers
• 21:34
  other than Amazon, you do sometimes get very variable journey times.
• 21:39
  So in the pandemic, F-150 sat unfinished Tesla, if there was a chip
• 21:45
  missing, they could simply re-engineer around that missing chip because it
• 21:50
  was all a software platform so they could sell cars anywhere because
• 21:54
  they owned the whole software stack.
• 21:56
  So this XO me company that have recently done this supercar.
• 22:04
  You know, I'll interrupt myself and do a little thumbnail on
• 22:09
  the Xmi car pronunciation.
• 22:12
  I've probably got wrong.
• 22:13
  The important thing is, is this is a company who make all sorts
• 22:18
  of other appliances, cell phones, but also fridges and coffee
• 22:23
  makers and all that kind of thing.
• 22:25
  This is a company.
• 22:27
  That does all sorts of different things, but the important thing is, is that
• 22:32
  they own the whole software stack.
• 22:36
  That means that that things like engineering features, like using your
• 22:41
  phone to unlock the car or using your phone to start the car or turn the heater
• 22:46
  on 10 minutes before you get back to it.
• 22:49
  Those kind of features, which are a little clunky where the car makers are having
• 22:53
  to integrate with the cell phone maker.
• 22:56
  For ami, it's not like that because the car literally is just another cell phone.
• 23:02
  The componentry in it is just another selfer.
• 23:06
  And just to recap, there's a sea change there between the F1 fifties
• 23:14
  waiting for the widget to arrive so that they can be completed and sold to
• 23:19
  the way the, uh, software defined car.
• 23:24
  Even the Teslas of half a decade ago, the software engineers could just
• 23:29
  completely re-engineer around that issue.
• 23:32
  They could re rewrite the software so the software could talk to the hardware
• 23:39
  that actually was available forward.
• 23:42
  Couldn't do that.
• 23:43
  They didn't have that kind of of agility.
• 23:45
  This is kind of mind blowing stuff, isn't it?
• 23:51
  Tied to this notion of the car, the supercar as a sort of flex
• 23:59
  for any kind of business, uh, in China, any kind of electronics
• 24:05
  maker to sort of show their prowess.
• 24:08
  The Nebula NX one, these guys.
• 24:12
  Basically do robotic vacuums.
• 24:16
  That's their thing, but they've done a supercar that has 1,876 horsepower.
• 24:27
  So there's these, uh, guys, tensor shift based in San Francisco.
• 24:32
  I'd never heard of 'em before.
• 24:33
  I might need to investigate them further.
• 24:36
  It can be autonomous or not.
• 24:38
  It has a steering wheel which retracts into like their dash.
• 24:42
  It's based on the VIN Fast, and I guess one of the novel things about
• 24:48
  it is that the sensors are built in.
• 24:51
  They're not like bolted on in that weird way that they are.
• 24:55
  The Waymo's have them bolted on to the jaguar eye paces, and it's
• 25:00
  not that weird kind of roof rack.
• 25:03
  Deal, which, you know, the zoos for a long time have around San
• 25:08
  Francisco have had on the, it's like a normal Highlander carrying like
• 25:12
  a really heavy roof rack affair,
• 25:19
  comma ai.
• 25:22
  So this is for like a thousand dollars.
• 25:24
  It gives you level two a DAS.
• 25:28
  Automated driving and assistance, so it's like bolt on autonomy, put
• 25:33
  in parentheses afterwards, some questions and exclamation marks.
• 25:38
  Yeah, see, I'm not ready for that.
• 25:39
  This is like aftermarket autonomy that you can put into your existing car.
• 25:45
  I mean, I dare say some geeky types do it.
• 25:48
  Are these the equivalent of George Baris?
• 25:50
  You know, when Baris and what's he called?
• 25:53
  The guy out in the desert, whose birthday party I went to that time?
• 25:57
  Gene?
• 25:57
  Winfield.
• 25:58
  Winfield, with the Frenching in of the headlights and the lake pipes.
• 26:03
  I mean, is this.
• 26:04
  That version of that, that you buy your new car and then you
• 26:09
  buy this com AI platform and you have a higher level of a DAS.
• 26:15
  If you are, if you're using the adas and it crashes, like can you sue com ai or
• 26:21
  do you have to eat the cost yourself?
• 26:23
  Apparently Rivian customers have been doing it, but apparently you have
• 26:29
  to like take down the headliner or some kind of Tom foolery like that.
• 26:34
  But it works across all sorts of different OEMs and it's like community
• 26:40
  development, you know, all of that.
• 26:42
  You know, it was all talked about in the same way as they were talking about
• 26:45
  Linux, you know, with that same kind of like, oh, oh, it's the promised land.
• 26:50
  Oh, that people would have engineered types, would would've,
• 26:53
  when I was selling tech.
• 26:55
  25 years ago, and you were like, yeah, dude, it's like zip tied together.
• 27:00
  That was the problem with, with Linux.
• 27:02
  Like I remember asking city guys about Linux and them just being like, why would
• 27:06
  you, why would you go with the cardboard box and zip ties when, you know, you
• 27:10
  could just go buy a nice new plastic container if you've got the budget.
• 27:14
  I've got, you know, that was the, the thought of, yeah, so the, the community
• 27:19
  development piece, I'm not sure.
• 27:24
  Zoox, they were offering free rides in Vegas, so like publicizing,
• 27:29
  but it was a set route, so it was just kind of programmed to do it.
• 27:32
  So.
• 27:33
  Kind of a whatever there, but you know, we're, we're in a place still where
• 27:38
  in 2026, where my wife and I might be comfortable using Waymo because it's
• 27:45
  been in the city for as long as it has, but it's still like a tourist novelty.
• 27:49
  So many people in California will not have ridden in an autonomous
• 27:54
  cab in the beginning of 2026.
• 27:58
  You're very conscious that it's, we're a little bit like at the stage of the,
• 28:03
  uh, Paris to Madrid death race of 1903, where, you know, the car makers, those of
• 28:09
  us who knew cars, you know, we developed them and we knew that you needed to put
• 28:13
  the big engine with the high compression in the lightest chassis possible.
• 28:17
  And we also knew that that meant you could go faster than mile a minute,
• 28:20
  three times faster than any horse, three times faster than anything, anybody.
• 28:26
  Out in the countryside, in these little villages that you were
• 28:28
  blasting through had ever seen before.
• 28:31
  That's the shocking thing with it.
• 28:33
  And if you look at film of that era, you see people like strolling
• 28:38
  across the row do, do, do you know?
• 28:40
  'cause like obviously, you know, you think about the fastest thing you've
• 28:43
  ever seen is a galloping horse.
• 28:45
  Obviously if it's right down there, you can stand in the
• 28:47
  road and wait for it to arrive.
• 28:49
  It's like group B before group B almost.
• 28:56
  Hyundai, uh, were there with these like exoskeleton things, like
• 29:03
  leg braces to like help you walk.
• 29:06
  I wasn't sure if it was to help out, focus legs didn't work at all, or if it
• 29:10
  was like you're feeling lazy, it would help you like speed walk, uh, pills.
• 29:15
  I'm gonna investigate that a little more.
• 29:17
  BMW have got their noya class of vehicles there.
• 29:22
  Just bristling with new ideas.
• 29:24
  And really if we just stop and think about that because BMW have embraced
• 29:29
  this sort of techno ness, their brand is ready to take on all of these
• 29:38
  kind of futuristicy kind of things.
• 29:41
  Mercedes, were offering like level two self-driving.
• 29:47
  Two plus plus it's called, and this is nitsa.
• 29:51
  The government agency has classified various levels of, of self-driving,
• 29:57
  and so what we're saying is that we're sort of gilding the turd
• 30:01
  almost on being on the way to it.
• 30:04
  What do I mean by that?
• 30:06
  The vision is that you want to just be able to sleep, don't you?
• 30:09
  You wanna be able to.
• 30:10
  Get drunk sleep in the backseat of the car while, while it drives you home.
• 30:14
  That's what you want.
• 30:16
  But the reality is that these self-driving systems at the moment
• 30:19
  have all these things that kind of defeat the purpose of them.
• 30:23
  They, they make sure that you've got your hands on the steering
• 30:26
  wheel that makes sure you're looking in the right direction.
• 30:28
  It's like they want you to be pretending to drive, even though the car's driving.
• 30:33
  And, and that's all around the legalese, right?
• 30:35
  Because if you are in the backseat.
• 30:37
  Passed out drunk.
• 30:38
  You can't be responsible for the car crashing.
• 30:41
  Somebody else has to be responsible.
• 30:43
  And that means it's either the software writers or the car developers or
• 30:46
  the tires or the people that design the road or, or, or it's not well.
• 30:51
  So for those.
• 30:52
  Insurance implication reasons.
• 30:54
  For those reasons, you have to be mentis and and paying attention.
• 30:59
  So that's why we have this kind of absurdity of the car makers trying to NT
• 31:06
  driving and, and putting on more and more and more of these assistant features,
• 31:09
  which basically are self-driving, but insisting that we carry on going
• 31:14
  through the motions of pretending.
• 31:16
  To be driving the car.
• 31:18
  You know, the, the wage guys, Western automotive journalist guys who were
• 31:22
  there, Charlie Myron felt like the Mercedes thing didn't seem fully baked.
• 31:27
  Uh, they felt like they could drive better than the self-driving was doing,
• 31:32
  which I do not feel with the Waymo.
• 31:35
  Occasionally, there are some things that I might do a little bit
• 31:38
  differently, um, but to be honest.
• 31:40
  The only thing with the Waymo is 25 miles an hour, it follows the speed limit.
• 31:45
  And there's some streets in San Francisco where that's a bit of
• 31:48
  a holdup, but you know, you can't program it to speed, can you?
• 31:51
  So, you know, I find pulling out of intersections, that kind of stuff,
• 31:54
  it shows really excellent judgment.
• 31:57
  Doesn't hesitate.
• 31:58
  Yeah, I, I really have no complaints about the way the Waymo's driven me
• 32:02
  in San Francisco, and I would say I've taken, you know, more than 20 journeys
• 32:07
  in it and pro and around the city.
• 32:09
  It's only recently started going out to the airport.
• 32:12
  Waymo.
• 32:12
  You know, my wife's point around that, and it speaks to how people grow.
• 32:17
  Into familiarity with these kind of things.
• 32:20
  I've already said.
• 32:21
  For her it's a premium experience.
• 32:23
  To ride, to work in a Waymo over an Uber or an Uber is midway between, you know,
• 32:28
  riding the bus or, or driving herself in terms of a, a, of a premium experience.
• 32:33
  She doesn't like the idea of a Waymo out to the airport because
• 32:37
  you're just on the highway and if something happens, you can't tell it.
• 32:41
  Pull over and just get out.
• 32:42
  Which I had not.
• 32:45
  I thought with that much acuity about what it would be like.
• 32:48
  I was just like, awesome.
• 32:49
  I can get out to the airport, but all sorts of things.
• 32:52
  Where's it gonna, if you are at the airport and you're having it come and
• 32:55
  pick you up, if there's really bad traffic or if it has to circulate lots,
• 33:00
  is it gonna be able to do that properly?
• 33:01
  And Uber driver, even though he probably doesn't speak English properly, or it's
• 33:06
  not his first language, you can at least call him and try and communicate with him.
• 33:09
  You can text message him.
• 33:11
  You obviously, you can't do that with a driverless Jaguar.
• 33:18
  Yeah, so that Mercedes level two plus plus, I mean, it doesn't seem fully baked.
• 33:24
  I felt like I could drive better.
• 33:26
  They were the two bullet points, but the third bullet
• 33:28
  point was you can buy this now.
• 33:31
  I guess I'm underlining that because that's a state of the nation right now.
• 33:38
  That's what we can get right now.
• 33:40
  I mean, Lord knows how good this may be.
• 33:42
  Interest in going on the forums or the Facebook groups or, or whatever and
• 33:46
  seeing how good this comma AI thing is.
• 33:50
  I mean, I'm sure well, we're right back to French headlights, aren't we?
• 33:54
  And, and lake pipes and people who are really pushing the limit of
• 33:59
  what you can and, and can't do.
• 34:01
  Fascinating though, isn't it?
• 34:02
  It's like a subculture that you never knew existed.
• 34:09
  Sony and Honda have partnered to create this vehicle called the A feeler.
• 34:15
  It's sort of mobility as an entertainment opportunity.
• 34:20
  It's more than a hundred grand.
• 34:21
  And the general feeling apparently amongst uh, delegates was,
• 34:26
  was the fucking point of that.
• 34:27
  You know, it's a bit like the Wagoner, you know, it's like who needs a
• 34:31
  hundred grand SUV That's not that well made, like, just seemed weird.
• 34:38
  There's this company, they German guys who had remotely driven
• 34:43
  cars, so they were autonomous.
• 34:47
  But they were remotely driven, which on the face of it you are
• 34:50
  like, is that real autonomy?
• 34:52
  But if you think of it, you know, 200 bus drivers sitting in one
• 34:56
  room and they're able to drive buses for the whole of California.
• 35:02
  There need to be more than 200, but you understand there are potential
• 35:06
  economies there to people being able to do this kind of remote driving.
• 35:11
  And again, I, I feel like you need to look more closely into what they're doing.
• 35:16
  They VAY to really understand it because it does feel like it's one
• 35:21
  of these things that could be very incremental on the path towards autonomy.
• 35:29
  And what I'm thinking about with this is.
• 35:32
  Bens vis-a-vis that we were talking about earlier, you know,
• 35:35
  with this vis-a-vis seating.
• 35:37
  You know, that was the era of like hot tube ignition, and then
• 35:40
  it evolved onto magneto and you know, there's been a progression.
• 35:47
  The functionality which we see, which we saw evolving cars over a hundred,
• 35:53
  150 years, that functionality.
• 35:57
  Came about as a result of incremental improvements in many,
• 36:02
  many little technologies such as, you know, ignition technologies.
• 36:07
  And I suppose this remotely driven thing.
• 36:11
  It felt to me like a step on the road towards the full autonomy, right?
• 36:16
  Because if it's remotely driven, mostly it could be driving itself.
• 36:20
  But the person sitting there with their hand on the steering
• 36:23
  wheel, maybe that can be remote.
• 36:25
  You know, there are, there are.
• 36:26
  It's just interesting how it's taken, even though my initial
• 36:30
  thought was, what's the point?
• 36:32
  Now I'm revisiting it.
• 36:33
  I, I can see some, some points to it.
• 36:40
  The Leo flying motorcycle.
• 36:43
  This was the single coolest thing.
• 36:46
  They were like, it only hovers at 15 feet, but basically it's
• 36:49
  like a Star Wars speed bike.
• 36:51
  As far as I could make out.
• 36:52
  I just want to get hold of them and road test it.
• 36:56
  In fact, I think I might, you heard it here first.
• 36:58
  I wanna road test a flying motorcycle.
• 37:01
  I want to be a flying motorcycle road tester.
• 37:09
  So it's these guys donor, and this is linked D-O-N-U-T from
• 37:14
  Finland, Estonia, that's in, from that like neck of the woods.
• 37:18
  They have a solid state battery.
• 37:20
  They're probably thinking, well, what exactly does that mean?
• 37:23
  Really what it means is that it's like a battery that you can shape, almost like.
• 37:30
  It's like C four explosive, you know, like the model they had was, they had it on,
• 37:35
  uh, uh, where like the battery was hooped inside the rear wheel of the motorcycle.
• 37:43
  I'm thinking, wow, just, just imagine that all the weight is on the rear
• 37:47
  wheel of the motorcycle and the, you know, just, just such a cool.
• 37:53
  Kind of of thing.
• 37:54
  I will investigate that further and, and maybe do a extra insert and certainly I'll
• 37:59
  add a link to, to what they're doing here.
• 38:02
  The practical application that they were considering was how you
• 38:06
  could put that solid state battery.
• 38:10
  The wheels of 18 wheelers.
• 38:13
  So what you've got there is, and the thought that that I had was I didn't
• 38:18
  really understand hybrids until I was watching Toyota at Lamar and
• 38:24
  watching the onboards and watching the way the electric motor allows
• 38:29
  it to like launch out of turns.
• 38:33
  And before then, I'd not perceived the way electric motors could be used to talk.
• 38:37
  Phil.
• 38:38
  And I'm not perceived the way having a big gas motor on the rear axle and
• 38:43
  an electric motor on the front axle.
• 38:47
  I mean, it just means it gets outta turns and off the line like it was
• 38:51
  a four-wheel drive rally car It, I mean, it's just a scintillating thing
• 38:56
  to observe and experience and hear.
• 39:00
  If you've been used to the world of, you know, ice.
• 39:03
  Two wheel drive stuff,
• 39:08
  those agricultural stuff as well.
• 39:11
  A John Deere combine harvester that was AI powered Kubota doing AI powered
• 39:19
  bulldozers, and the thought was around.
• 39:21
  You know what the construction site of the future might be able to look like
• 39:26
  when AI is, is applied to it because they are a particularly difficult
• 39:32
  environment foris for an AI platform because they're continually changing.
• 39:38
  The machine needs to be able to adapt to really a very, very challenging,
• 39:43
  continually changing environment.
• 39:45
  If you, if you think about it, it's way easier to develop robots.
• 39:49
  Well, maybe not.
• 39:50
  I was gonna say way easier to develop robots to work in a warehouse.
• 39:53
  But if you think about it, uh, the robots in a warehouse have
• 39:57
  to be pretty turned on, you know?
• 39:58
  'cause that's a constantly changing environment as well, with shelves
• 40:02
  constantly being filled and emptied.
• 40:04
  By different robots that might be working on different infrastructure.
• 40:13
  Just jumping back to this sort of Qualcomm thing and this idea that you
• 40:18
  can have multiple system functionality on one chip, you don't need separate
• 40:25
  chips for just separate functionality.
• 40:26
  You can have multiple functionality on on one chip.
• 40:30
  It was this idea that therefore radar.
• 40:33
  And Leadar could be combined into a single piece of hardware.
• 40:41
  So let's step back and, and think about that then Supercars as a flex.
• 40:47
  That's kind of cool, isn't it?
• 40:48
  Still that supercars are a flex, even if it's a EO, before they built the gfo.
• 40:54
  Built fridges, didn't they?
• 40:56
  So kind of, why not?
• 40:58
  Kind of, it's in keeping with the way the supercars have always been.
• 41:03
  So, you know, David Brown made boring tractors.
• 41:06
  Lamborghini made boring tractors.
• 41:08
  They made great supercar afterwards.
• 41:11
  So you know when I'm not knocking Nebula for doing that and I'm definitely not
• 41:16
  knocking Xmi for Shami Xmi Shami kebab.
• 41:20
  I've written sharmi, like Sharmi kebab, but I don't think that's
• 41:23
  quite ripe for the pronunciation.
• 41:26
  Apologies, by the way.
• 41:27
  I mean, it's deeply patronizing, isn't it?
• 41:29
  To not even know how to pronounce Mercedes Mercuries Meade, how do you say it?
• 41:36
  I mean, it is a bit insulting, isn't it?
• 41:38
  So I'm sorry about that.
• 41:39
  But is it even a car?
• 41:41
  See, that's the thing.
• 41:42
  If it's a software stack.
• 41:46
  Which it is.
• 41:48
  It's just there.
• 41:48
  It's really weird, isn't it?
• 41:50
  It's not just driving, which is being de invented by this autonomy.
• 41:54
  It's cars as we know them.
• 41:57
  It's cars as being pieces of hardware, uh, rather than pieces of software.
• 42:03
  That's, that's what it is.
• 42:05
  They're turning into software defined vehicles, which is
• 42:10
  where we came in, isn't it?
• 42:11
  So is that ACEs measurement, is that still.
• 42:16
  Relevant.
• 42:17
  I think it is, isn't it?
• 42:19
  I think it very much is.
• 42:20
  I think we can see electrification coming, but with rocks on the road, I think we
• 42:26
  can see autonomy coming, but with rocks on the road and in specific applications.
• 42:33
  But just like electrification, the main thing holding up autonomy is
• 42:38
  gonna be our skepticism and our fear.
• 42:42
  You know, a lot of our fear, I'm, I'm reminded of those 19th century
• 42:46
  English doctors that swore that if trains went faster than 60 miles an
• 42:51
  hour, people would simply suffocate.
• 42:53
  They'd simply suffocate.
• 42:54
  You just can't breathe.
• 42:56
  Moving at that ta incredible speed of more than a mile a minute.
• 43:01
  It's just not possible to breathe.
• 43:03
  It seems reasonable, doesn't it?
• 43:04
  If you've never been.
• 43:05
  N never been 60 miles an hour.
• 43:07
  If you've never been faster than 30 miles an hour on a galloping horse, my God, 60
• 43:13
  miles an hour does seem unimaginably fast.
• 43:15
  Maybe you couldn't breathe.
• 43:17
  Thank you.
• 43:17
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