Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Hawkwind & The History of Lidar

Transcript

Hawkwind & The History of Lidar · 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 fast and
• 0:13
  not much reliable on his show.
• 0:15
  He gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old
• 0:19
  cars, driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
• 0:37
  Good day.
• 0:38
  Good morning.
• 0:39
  Good afternoon.
• 0:39
  It is John Summers, the motoring historian.
• 0:42
  So this is another one of those ones where I'm on my own and, um, and
• 0:47
  I'm talking about something a bit more serious than I might do when
• 0:50
  I usually prattle on with, uh, with Mark Gamow on most of these things.
• 0:53
  So obviously, I'm not going to, like, stay on topic like I was some kind of serious
• 0:58
  guy, but I'm at least going to, going to try and be a bit informative here.
• 1:04
  Um, so the topic is Lidar.
• 1:07
  And, and the presentation was, was by Lio, who according to like a scan,
• 1:13
  like under five seconds of research on Google, are like the third largest
• 1:19
  leader, pro provider, and, and, um.
• 1:23
  Maybe you don't know what LIDAR is, so I can't remember what the acronym
• 1:26
  stands for, but, but fundamentally, it is a way that autonomous cars are
• 1:32
  going to use to perceive the world.
• 1:34
  And I guess the, uh, uh, thing to understand is that autonomous cars
• 1:41
  going to perceive, perceives the world in a variety of different ways, right?
• 1:44
  It has radio, it has radar, it has cameras, it has, you know, GPS, it
• 1:52
  has all of these different things.
• 1:53
  And then, you know, so just like us, it has, you know, it can see, it can hear, it
• 1:59
  can, well, lidar is one of those senses.
• 2:03
  And I guess what's interesting is Elon Musk rejects it and
• 2:10
  says, you don't need it.
• 2:12
  The other makers have it.
• 2:14
  I don't know this for sure, if you were within the industry, this is one of the
• 2:17
  things you would definitely know for sure, but from the outside looking in, based
• 2:21
  upon this one presentation that I went to, it would seem as if the driver for Lidar
• 2:27
  development is automotive and therefore, you know, autonomy and, uh, the, each
• 2:34
  of the leading German makers has their own Lidar maker who they're in bed with.
• 2:44
  That's the way to think about it.
• 2:46
  So, in other words, Mercedes are partnered with one company, BMW
• 2:49
  with another, and, and Volkswagen, Audi with, with, with another.
• 2:53
  It amused me that when the guy was talking about where their factory was
• 2:57
  someplace, Vemking or something like that, but he described it as being 2
• 3:01
  hours from Ingolstadt or an hour from Ingolstadt, either way, you know, it was,
• 3:06
  it was like, everything was, you know, in the year of our, in the year of Audi.
• 3:11
  2024 kind of thing, a bit like a brave new world when they swear by Ford.
• 3:16
  This bloke's is, is he was structured in a by Audi kind of way.
• 3:20
  And the first application for, for this bloke's, uh, Lidar was,
• 3:24
  was the, the Audi A8 in 2017.
• 3:27
  But no doubt I will, uh, we'll see.
• 3:30
  We'll move on to that afterwards.
• 3:32
  So, so what was it that I'd gone to and how had I got invited to it?
• 3:36
  Well, um, it was a society of automotive engineers event.
• 3:39
  I was invited to it by a guy who, um, was associated with the revs program back
• 3:45
  when there was a revs program at Stanford sort of 10 years ago, something like that.
• 3:49
  Um, so I, I met him at that time and I'm not really sure how I
• 3:52
  stayed on his mailing list, but I stayed on his mailing list and I get
• 3:56
  invited to, to interesting events.
• 3:59
  Um, The upcoming one is, is with WISC, these people who are doing flying cars
• 4:05
  or jet packs or something like that, and apparently they're going to tell us
• 4:09
  how they're going to overcome the legal hurdles, which should be, that should
• 4:14
  be a good story, even if it's not true.
• 4:16
  It's like a story you hear from a bloke in the pub, even if it's a
• 4:19
  load of bullshit, you know, it's going to be super entertaining.
• 4:22
  Or maybe it's not going to be super entertaining, but I think in the past
• 4:25
  these things when I've been to, they have been, and this LIDAR event, see
• 4:29
  look I've digressed, I've tried to be you people that, you people that
• 4:32
  signed up to this thinking I'm gonna get some really good information on
• 4:36
  LIDAR, thinking who's this prattling bloody idiot, I'm sorry Tristram Shandy.
• 4:42
  Wiki up the book Tristram Shandy and then you'll understand the style of
• 4:47
  my pod if you're not familiar with it looks like this hapless bloke who
• 4:51
  who presented to us was this chap, uh, Raphael force, um, I say hapless.
• 4:56
  Actually, he was very skilled.
• 4:58
  I dare say he was Italian or Spanish.
• 5:00
  He had a, uh, a very, uh, Uh, you know, he's one of those
• 5:03
  people who just knew what clothes to wear to make him look good.
• 5:07
  Good kind of thing.
• 5:08
  And he had a really nice way of deflecting, um, the kind of question
• 5:13
  that he must have had a million times before about about price.
• 5:16
  So when they said to him, you know, where he was crowing on about how
• 5:19
  clever the technology was, and people were like, that must be.
• 5:22
  Bloody expensive.
• 5:23
  He responded by, by saying, well, it was all about value.
• 5:27
  But he had some like little laugh and joke before he made the, the value play.
• 5:33
  So he was there with a couple of his, his people, one of whom had a twirly
• 5:38
  mustache and only intervened when the conversation needed to go three levels
• 5:43
  deep on the engineering and, and the engineering and the science at that point.
• 5:48
  Um, Boggled my mind.
• 5:49
  The particular detail that he needed to help us with was how he was describing how
• 5:54
  the latest technology was able to pick up a single photon of light, which, uh, uh,
• 6:02
  boggled my mind anyway, whatever, right.
• 6:04
  So I I'm involved in it through Stanford.
• 6:06
  It was in Palo Alto.
• 6:07
  It was some little light research house thing.
• 6:11
  I I'll maybe include a photo, whatever I arrived.
• 6:14
  I, I guess I was in Palo Alto a bit early.
• 6:17
  So I.
• 6:18
  I've sat in a bar for a bit, and that really, um, not only for a single beer, I
• 6:22
  just, that isn't to add, but that really may put me in a relaxed frame of mind
• 6:28
  to learn about some new technology, but learn about it in this unique, perspective
• 6:34
  as a sort of contemporary historian that I, that I try and have, um, it's,
• 6:38
  it's, I think it was William Gibson, the writer who said, you know, the, the,
• 6:42
  the future is now, it's all around us.
• 6:45
  You just have to look carefully for it.
• 6:46
  It's just, you know, it's not reached everywhere yet.
• 6:48
  Um, and, you know, I, I definitely feel that that's true of, of people
• 6:54
  and ideas and things that I've bumped up against in Stanford in the past.
• 6:59
  And that's why I float around the environment now.
• 7:01
  And that's why when they invite you to a presentation called evolution of the
• 7:07
  first automotive grade of Lidar, you think to yourself, well, all right, you
• 7:12
  know, this is a little bit like, you know.
• 7:14
  country houses of the late 19th century, or, you know, Roman
• 7:19
  emperors of the early 200s, isn't it?
• 7:21
  It's that kind of, of, has that kind of feel about it.
• 7:25
  So I just said, uh, when I rocked up, I was one of the first to rock up,
• 7:29
  um, and there are only about half a dozen people there, but there were
• 7:31
  probably about 20 or 30 people there by, by the, uh, by, by the end of it.
• 7:36
  In presenting, Raphael positioned himself by, by saying, I
• 7:41
  still call myself an engineer.
• 7:43
  And the way that he was able to handle the questions, I definitely,
• 7:48
  he was, but he was one of the single, he was far more polished than any
• 7:52
  sales engineers I ever, I ever worked with, with, within my, in my career.
• 7:56
  And, and, um, he didn't position it like this, but I got the impression
• 8:01
  that he's just basically the country leader for, for, for value.
• 8:05
  And really, what does that mean in, in this country?
• 8:09
  If your business is in Germany, fitting bits to Audis.
• 8:12
  Um, well it's people, isn't it?
• 8:14
  And, and all of the car makers have people in Silicon Valley in order
• 8:20
  to sort of mingle and meet people.
• 8:22
  And just, uh, so, so, you know, when I, uh, we happen to be in line for the, uh,
• 8:27
  Pissoir, he and I, uh, I struck out, we, you know, we struck up a conversation.
• 8:33
  Um, and you know, his interest in, in you is, is what brings you here.
• 8:38
  So what, what brings me here, that contemporary history piece, we just.
• 8:42
  We just talked about, so yeah, so the first application was the Audi
• 8:46
  A8 and maybe this is the, the early stat before I, you know, take go deep
• 8:52
  as it were the, that early first gen could pick up 44, 000 points of data
• 9:05
  every second, the one that they're just launching can do two, it's editor John.
• 9:11
  It was 44, 000 to 12 and a half million every second.
• 9:17
  What that translates to when they had this as a demonstration going all the
• 9:22
  time, so they had the lead our device up in the corner of the room and it
• 9:25
  basically looks like a, it looks like a slightly oversized valentine one
• 9:30
  or, you know, escort radar detector.
• 9:33
  You know, about the size of a novel with that sort of black radio kind
• 9:39
  of screen on it that you would, you know, like an old fashioned remote
• 9:44
  TV remote control used to have.
• 9:46
  Um, so that's like looking at us and there's a big screen and on the big
• 9:49
  screen, there's a representation of us.
• 9:53
  i.
• 9:53
  e.
• 9:53
  it's picked up these data points and this is what it can can picture with us.
• 9:58
  So, um, 44, 000 to 2.
• 10:01
  6 million.
• 10:01
  What does that mean in, in real money?
• 10:04
  Shitty dot matrix versus actually A clear picture of what's happening.
• 10:13
  I'd say like 480p resolution.
• 10:16
  That's what you would.
• 10:17
  So it looks like film, just not very good resolution.
• 10:21
  So look, that's how far we've come.
• 10:24
  And that gives you a, an idea of how far we're going to go.
• 10:28
  But whilst I'm just doing this sort of top line thing, this leads me to,
• 10:32
  um, my sort of deeper perspective.
• 10:34
  The philosophical point about it, which is that everything that we're going to
• 10:38
  talk about here is the, the seeing device, but of course, where is all of these 2.
• 10:44
  6 million data points going every second well to the computer brain and
• 10:50
  what's driving the computer brain?
• 10:52
  Well, in video, in video, you know, I've, I've got.
• 10:56
  I guess one of the motorcycles that I have as a collectible piece out of
• 11:01
  a very token investment in NVIDIA, which happened when I guess the
• 11:06
  price fell below 120 at one time.
• 11:10
  And I thought, wow, this is clearly seeing value because every time I did
• 11:15
  any research about autonomous cars in the valley, the brain driving it was NVIDIA.
• 11:22
  To an extent that I actually was wandering around Stanford, have a.
• 11:27
  A lab called the used to be called the Volkswagen automotive innovation
• 11:33
  lab is right on the edge of campus.
• 11:34
  Anyway, I was wondering around there.
• 11:36
  I had a presentation.
• 11:37
  I was wondering around there and I got talking to one of the engineers.
• 11:40
  They can't remember.
• 11:41
  There was an official presentation and we were talking about,
• 11:44
  um, how they were doing.
• 11:46
  Um, they were using.
• 11:48
  You know, the brain that they were using to combine together all of these
• 11:51
  different feeds of information, the radar, the visual, the camera, the
• 11:56
  GPS to help the car make a decision in real time whilst it's speeding
• 12:00
  down the freeway at 70 miles an hour.
• 12:02
  The brain that was doing that compute for once wasn't an NVIDIA piece.
• 12:07
  And I asked why, and they were, they were like, because, uh, You know, AMD
• 12:11
  have lobbed a ton of cash our way.
• 12:14
  I can't remember if it was AMD.
• 12:15
  I may have spoken out of turn then.
• 12:17
  I can't remember if he named the chip maker.
• 12:19
  I may have just said AMD because I don't know chip makers or that field, um,
• 12:24
  particularly, uh, particularly well.
• 12:25
  But anyway, look, I'm digressing down a rat hole.
• 12:28
  The point is the.
• 12:30
  The center of this is the computing power, which helps the car make decisions.
• 12:37
  That's really what's going to deliver autonomy.
• 12:40
  What this presentation showed me was that once upon a time, we could only sense not
• 12:48
  very good, you know, dot matrix printer.
• 12:51
  Now we can sense pretty good.
• 12:54
  So the technology now, whether or not, you know, just because
• 12:58
  I can see it just because you me and the dog can see a picture.
• 13:01
  Does that mean the computers are really able to make decisions
• 13:05
  that mean that autonomy can come?
• 13:07
  I don't really know.
• 13:09
  And when people in the audience tried to ask questions about that, the blokes
• 13:13
  attitude was kind of like, you know, I'm just Designing the football boot.
• 13:18
  And so, so you might remember in the presentation we had about hydrogen
• 13:23
  trucks and this presentation sort of sits or this pod sits with the
• 13:26
  hydrogen trucks one really as a sort of new technology kind of thing.
• 13:30
  I developed this rather silly metaphor about David Beckham's football boot.
• 13:35
  I guess I should say Messi now, shouldn't I?
• 13:37
  Because I'm not, but, you know, it's a silly metaphor because I
• 13:40
  don't understand football properly.
• 13:41
  But the point is that to me, the skill is the player, Pelé, Messi,
• 13:46
  you know, bloody Matt Letizia, good lord, where did I pull that name from?
• 13:50
  But, you know, that is, it's the player, not whether he's wearing an adidas boot or
• 13:56
  a new boot or a, Oh, boo, or a green boo or one with a stripe or whatever, all of
• 14:01
  those things, they make a difference, but that's just the visual thing that you see.
• 14:05
  And that's just the part that connects with the ball before it
• 14:08
  sails in a beautiful curve into the, into the goal, the player, the leg.
• 14:14
  That's the important bit, the foot inside, it's the person that's important.
• 14:18
  So this is the metaphor that I'm developing for saying that I feel
• 14:21
  like this LIDAR device was nothing but David Beckham's football boot.
• 14:25
  I feel like these hydrogen trucks, similarly, they're the football boot.
• 14:30
  Even the hydrogen station is the football boot, because the
• 14:34
  real shtick is delivering the hydrogen cleanly to the station.
• 14:38
  So just as, as a historian, you always want to below the hood a little bit, look
• 14:44
  under the hood a little bit, because, you know, that's our value add, isn't it?
• 14:48
  Because the scientists, they're the ones that obsess with the details and
• 14:51
  Lord knows we need them to, if these technologies are going to work, but
• 14:55
  they struggle with, uh, you know, generally speaking, Pretty obsessive
• 14:59
  about that branch, let alone the tree, let alone the rest of the forest.
• 15:03
  And they need us to see the forest.
• 15:05
  So look, I'm full of silly metaphors today.
• 15:09
  Metaphors, John, come on, speak with a proper turn of phrase.
• 15:13
  Well, you've got the flat London, uh, London vowels.
• 15:18
  There was a slide show.
• 15:19
  Um, I might add some of them.
• 15:21
  There were sort of top Trump slides that, you know, showed whether or not
• 15:24
  the thing could, I guess, The old ones could only see 160 meters and these ones
• 15:29
  can see 200 meters usually and 300 meters most of the time or something like that.
• 15:34
  I mean, all of it is, All of it's a moot point, isn't it?
• 15:38
  Right?
• 15:38
  The other thing that we spent a lot of time talking about was like
• 15:42
  the angle of, I don't know, right?
• 15:44
  Some engineering term, but basically imagine there's a tire lying on the road.
• 15:48
  Can the car see it?
• 15:50
  Obviously the old ones couldn't.
• 15:52
  The new ones, they can like, you know, they could see a fucking ant
• 15:56
  crossing the road kind of thing.
• 15:57
  That's, that's the sort of, uh, no, nobody asks the thing.
• 16:02
  Everyone's like, I'm like, yeah, 30 miles an hour.
• 16:05
  Yeah.
• 16:05
  It's 70.
• 16:06
  Okay.
• 16:06
  But I I'm and you know, it's the German makers.
• 16:09
  So, you know, they will have asked the question.
• 16:10
  We'll carry to 150, which is obviously, you know, their,
• 16:14
  their design parameter, isn't it?
• 16:16
  But we know that they cover the cost of 155, right?
• 16:18
  So 150 would seem to be the measure.
• 16:22
  So, you know, Clearly, the technology, you know, what I'm saying is you're
• 16:27
  not going to find that if you drive 120 miles an hour, you outrun the Lidar
• 16:31
  in the way that I outrun my, outran my lights in the Mustang in Death Valley and
• 16:37
  crashed off the road that time, which I mentioned in, uh, in another pod recently.
• 16:42
  Yeah, no, not like that, right?
• 16:44
  This, the device is going to be properly developed.
• 16:47
  And, and, and that was that.
• 16:50
  Technology moving from early stage to being, well, at one point I wrote down
• 16:56
  ruggedized because that's what, when I used to sell tech products, that's what
• 17:00
  we used to tell people who were doing construction, you'd put like the, the
• 17:04
  PC would be like covered in rubber.
• 17:06
  So, you know, it wasn't like, or, you know, so it could be dropped and so on.
• 17:10
  And, you know, like our phone cases are now, you know, it's, uh, yeah,
• 17:15
  there's a lot of NVH I wrote down.
• 17:17
  You heard me turning my page over there.
• 17:19
  Didn't you?
• 17:20
  There's a lot of.
• 17:21
  NBH and, and Rafael is the amusing way he framed it was he said that we have 15
• 17:28
  years of experience building these things.
• 17:30
  So we know many ways to break a leader.
• 17:33
  I think he was Italian was a very Italian way of, uh, of, of expression himself.
• 17:38
  So, so look for 15 years doing it, 700 patents, 60, 600 engineers
• 17:44
  working on it, 220, 000 leaders on the road at the moment.
• 17:48
  That's some brawl.
• 17:49
  Valeo is unique in that they have a full stack proposition.
• 17:55
  We, again, that wasn't his phrase, but that was sort of what he was meaning.
• 17:59
  I think what the impression I got was, was that he was saying, you
• 18:03
  know, the other guys, they might only do the burger or the buns.
• 18:07
  We do the burger and the buns as well.
• 18:10
  I, I got the impression there might need to be relish and catch up and,
• 18:14
  and, and things like that as well.
• 18:17
  So what do I, you know, what do, what do I mean by that?
• 18:21
  I, I mean that there's hardware, software, and integration.
• 18:26
  I mean that what Valio do is they have a technology, which means that where
• 18:32
  when you're driving down the street, they not only recognize that an object.
• 18:39
  They not only, you know, have their many data points going out,
• 18:43
  but at a certain point they're able to say, this is a cyclist.
• 18:48
  This is a pickup truck, this is a cow, and therefore assign certain kinds
• 18:54
  of behavior to that kind of object.
• 18:57
  So that interpretation, that is useful for some of their
• 19:01
  customers and not for others.
• 19:03
  So, and this is one of the things that came out that I thought was
• 19:06
  quite interesting is some OEMs have no talent in this area at all.
• 19:11
  Other OEMs are like, sell me the sensor.
• 19:14
  All I want is the sensor.
• 19:16
  All of the system engineering, they're building in house,
• 19:19
  other guys aren't doing that.
• 19:20
  And I just thought that was interesting because I watched this video just
• 19:22
  recently that I'm going to link to.
• 19:24
  It's a YouTube video.
• 19:25
  I don't know how well researched it was.
• 19:28
  It just was a interesting idea that I'd never encountered before.
• 19:31
  It was a company called Foxconn, um, who I'd never heard of before,
• 19:35
  but they make mobile phones.
• 19:36
  They're contracted makers of smartphones.
• 19:39
  other devices.
• 19:40
  Your odds are, you know, you're probably listening to this pod on
• 19:44
  a device that these dudes built.
• 19:46
  Uh, the video, the, the YouTube that I, I watched about them made the point that
• 19:51
  they're moving into the automotive space.
• 19:54
  And it makes sense, doesn't it?
• 19:56
  Cause the car is becoming more like a smartphone when the electric motor
• 20:00
  on it or some electric motors on it.
• 20:02
  And a battery, you know, much more like a smartphone than like a traditional car.
• 20:06
  So, so the, you know, century of manufacturing experience that the
• 20:11
  major car make a century and a half approaching some of the bloody
• 20:14
  Mercedes Benz, uh, that counts for nothing right in, uh, in this world.
• 20:18
  And, and there were headwinds according to the video around Foxconn being able
• 20:24
  to, you know, achieve the kind of.
• 20:26
  Dominance in the market that they have, but yeah, so I'm not really,
• 20:33
  I think I made my point there.
• 20:34
  Didn't I?
• 20:35
  I'm not sure there's nobody to bounce back and say, yes, John,
• 20:38
  you made your point really well.
• 20:41
  And then gimme a moment to think whilst I'm coming up
• 20:43
  with the next thing, isn't it?
• 20:44
  But I suppose I could just edit properly.
• 20:46
  Yeah.
• 20:47
  Okay.
• 20:47
  So the original technology was, was, uh, uh, by, I, it was an
• 20:52
  I-B-O-I-B-E-O product, which, um, they basically licensed the
• 20:56
  technology into Scalia into what became, so it was the company's value.
• 21:01
  The product name is Scarla Scar.
• 21:04
  Chief Justice, isn't he?
• 21:06
  Scala is the name of the product.
• 21:08
  Um, the new one has nothing to do with the IBO, has no, none of the IBO.
• 21:13
  international property.
• 21:15
  Um, anyway, the original one was always small.
• 21:17
  He always looked like a valentine one.
• 21:20
  This new one's a bit bigger, actually.
• 21:22
  The original one really did look like a sort of valentine one, like
• 21:26
  smaller than an old VHS cassette.
• 21:42
  Interesting.
• 21:43
  This came out of a question.
• 21:45
  This is why it's so awesome to go to these events face to face, because some
• 21:50
  of the questions you're like, wow, I know more than that, because I was reading in
• 21:53
  Wikipedia when I was having a beer before I came here, which you're a bit like, wow.
• 21:58
  But then at the same time, you're like, oh, okay.
• 22:01
  Even in this environment, Society of Automotive Engineers, yeah.
• 22:04
  In Stanford, 30 people, you know, boss man of the company in the country presenting
• 22:10
  to us, even in this environment, there's still people who fundamentally
• 22:14
  don't understand how lead our work.
• 22:16
  So that gives you, it gives me a feeling my.
• 22:23
  Thoughts here are likely to be, I don't want to say, you know, cutting edge or no,
• 22:29
  but on the edge of the zeitgeist, right?
• 22:32
  I would say perhaps just based upon the questions that other people ask, right?
• 22:37
  But some of the questions people ask leave you feeling like, wow, you obviously
• 22:40
  work in the industry and then it gives you insight into what the industry is
• 22:44
  like, you know, the fellow with the The talking about how the technology
• 22:48
  can pick up a single photon of light.
• 22:50
  This is another one of those that made the question that, that,
• 22:53
  that led to me jotting down here.
• 22:57
  The, at the moment, remember I said that each of the makers has
• 23:00
  their own, like little partner manufacturer, each of the car makers.
• 23:05
  Each of the German car makers has their own little partner maker
• 23:08
  making this, this LIDAR tag.
• 23:11
  The data outputs are not standardized.
• 23:14
  That means you can't take like the Valeo Scala sensor and
• 23:20
  make it talk to the BMW brain.
• 23:24
  It literally speaks a different language.
• 23:26
  The protocols are different.
• 23:28
  So, the question was about standardization, because when
• 23:32
  standardization had come around, um, some other, like, autonomous
• 23:37
  vehicle technology, that's when leaps and bounds had happened.
• 23:41
  Um, and, uh, you know, our man said the only thing a bloke whose job it
• 23:46
  is to sell the technology said, which was, you know, when standardization
• 23:49
  comes, that would be a cool thing.
• 23:52
  But, you know, for the time being, we're living in this world where
• 23:54
  some of us are speaking French and some of us are speaking German and
• 23:57
  some of us are speaking Italian.
• 24:00
  And obviously there's a bun fight going on, right?
• 24:02
  Obviously there's, uh, there's, uh, uh, a war.
• 24:06
  Anyway, right.
• 24:07
  They started developing in 2010.
• 24:08
  It came to market in 2017.
• 24:10
  Um, only they and Velodyne were in the market at that time.
• 24:14
  Velodyne has since been bought by somebody else.
• 24:18
  And I, I mean, whatever with the cute corporate thing.
• 24:21
  I mean, who cares?
• 24:22
  Well, maybe you care.
• 24:23
  I don't know if you're some serious person.
• 24:26
  Probably if you were some serious person hoping to claim useful information
• 24:29
  from me, you'd have dropped out by now.
• 24:31
  You probably thought you came to the wrong place when you got stupid heavy metal.
• 24:34
  Anyway, the device lasts 8, 000 hours or, uh, 15 years.
• 24:40
  That's how long the device is made to last.
• 24:41
  So, um, he just told you the built in obsolescence of your new Audi,
• 24:46
  right there, 15 years, in line with the corporation's requirements.
• 24:51
  The device is going to last 8, 000 hours and 15 years.
• 24:54
  And I'll tell you why.
• 24:55
  If this bloke was engineering, you can bet this bloody thing is going
• 24:58
  to fail, you know, when it's built.
• 24:59
  15 and a half years old, I was impressed by him, um, as, uh, as an individual.
• 25:06
  So they had one slide that was a sort of like, what's the box,
• 25:09
  what's inside the box kind of thing.
• 25:11
  And then they even passed the bits round.
• 25:13
  So one of the features of these autonomous cars, they're like Waymo taxis or
• 25:18
  cruise back when they were allowed in, in San Francisco is the spinning.
• 25:23
  wheels.
• 25:23
  Well, that's the LiDAR.
• 25:25
  And, and what it is, is, is LiDAR's laser and the spinning mirror throws
• 25:31
  the laser all around to do the 360.
• 25:35
  So if it's one on the roof, it's a single LiDAR system.
• 25:38
  When you see the LiDAR, one LiDAR in every corner, it means the car
• 25:41
  might have five LiDAR systems just to perceive the area immediately around it.
• 25:47
  The other thing is, is the way that he explained it and the way that I
• 25:52
  understood it from reading on Wikipedia is slightly different, but fundamentally,
• 25:58
  the mirror fractions, the lead are up and the early ones only had four.
• 26:06
  Like laser beams, basically from the spin and then other ones at 16 and
• 26:10
  the current ones are 520 or something.
• 26:13
  I'll post in the link the photos that I took of the like the top
• 26:17
  Trump slides that they posted.
• 26:19
  If you're that interested in in the speeds and feeds, one thing about those
• 26:25
  speeds and feeds is is that, of course.
• 26:28
  It's all about what the manufacturer is ready to pay for, and that's all
• 26:32
  about what's affordable, and that's all about what the economies of scales are.
• 26:36
  So you feel like they could have developed a vastly superior
• 26:40
  technology if the market was there.
• 26:42
  A, you feel, you know, all of those top trumps all of the, all of the
• 26:49
  top Trump stats are variable, but you know, you can toggle 'em all based upon
• 26:54
  the amount of money that, that you, that, that you throw at the problem.
• 27:10
  Oh, this was interesting.
• 27:12
  He said, uh, on some cars, you might see two boxes, but don't be fooled.
• 27:19
  It's just like Audi's fake exhaust, right?
• 27:22
  On some models, they put two boxes in to make the front of the car look
• 27:26
  symmetrical, but there's one second box.
• 27:28
  One box is empty.
• 27:29
  One box is full, just like those big exhausts they put on the, um, nothing
• 27:33
  but, you know, plastic on the bumper.
• 27:35
  I don't like Audis for that, can I just say.
• 27:38
  That sort of fakey do ness.
• 27:40
  I mean, I don't really like modern BMWs for that.
• 27:43
  I don't know where modern BMWs have gone with the design style.
• 27:46
  I hate to be negative, but really, guys, you've lost your way.
• 27:50
  Like, anybody who's a designer at BMW now, just, like, don't.
• 27:54
  Go and get your hands on an E30 and just drive an E30 around the block
• 27:59
  and just shut your eyes and think about what makes that car what it is.
• 28:03
  You will be impressed by it, because nobody who drives E30s
• 28:08
  fails to be impressed by just how everything is just as it should be.
• 28:12
  And I follow on the school run one of these new electric cars.
• 28:16
  SUV, like X5 size SUVs.
• 28:19
  I mean, it's a, it's a piece of design, but in the same way that, you know,
• 28:25
  a cruise ship is a piece of design.
• 28:26
  You're just like, my God.
• 28:29
  Yeah.
• 28:30
  Completely, rarely has a company so Gone from being, I don't know, people
• 28:36
  still buy the stuff, don't they?
• 28:37
  I mean, what the hell, the prettlers and journalists and scribblers like
• 28:42
  me now, if it was up to people like me, we'd all be driving supercharged
• 28:46
  Lancia HP Volume Xs, wouldn't we?
• 28:49
  If, uh, if anybody can remember what they look like in there.
• 28:52
  Look, I've digressed completely and totally.
• 28:56
  Ponder had some work with traffic jam pilot with a product called
• 29:00
  traffic jam pilot around about the time of the pandemic scarlet
• 29:04
  to, um, problem with scarlet.
• 29:06
  One was it's like low down on the bumpers.
• 29:08
  So that really hurt how much you could see what they wanted to have
• 29:12
  was a Perceptor is like a much higher up, just like on your PlayStation.
• 29:16
  The bumper cam's hard to place the car.
• 29:18
  If you have that position where you're sitting in the car, or if
• 29:20
  you're up above the car, much better driving positions, you like hood cam.
• 29:24
  So they wanted the hood cam.
• 29:25
  They were like, dude, we're done with the bumper cam.
• 29:28
  We want the hood cam position.
• 29:29
  So they developed this flat one that looked a bit like a, you know, size of a.
• 29:33
  You know, traditional box of chocolates, basically.
• 29:36
  Um, and that was supposedly meant to go, uh, on, on the roof of, of the car.
• 29:41
  I guess it was going to go above where the driving mirror would normally
• 29:45
  be or, or something like that.
• 29:47
  The output of, uh, yeah, this is, this is where it went from form.
• 29:51
  Layers of lasers to 16 and the range went from 150 to 180 meters.
• 29:58
  But I don't know how they can measure that because apparently one of the
• 30:01
  problems Lidar has is it gets really confused if there's bad weather.
• 30:05
  Like if you, like, if it rains, my word, it's like California
• 30:10
  motorcyclists, it just cannot do it.
• 30:12
  I'm not joking, by the way, I don't want to ride on California roads in
• 30:15
  the weather, those bloody potholes and with all the stuff that comes
• 30:17
  out, you know, I'm not, you know, I am that California rider now.
• 30:20
  I'm just saying that, you know.
• 30:22
  It doesn't like bad weather.
• 30:23
  It's not like rugby, you know, the game doesn't continue.
• 30:26
  Wisconsin football.
• 30:39
  It could detect lanes.
• 30:41
  Scala 2 could detect lanes as well.
• 30:44
  So the things that he looks to toggle, this is these three levers
• 30:49
  that I was looking to toggle.
• 30:52
  Packaging, performance, and price.
• 30:55
  Interesting that packaging comes first, right?
• 30:58
  So that means not just the form factor of the device, but the output.
• 31:03
  Of the device and that bolt on that they have where they don't just send, they
• 31:10
  don't just send the dots out the back.
• 31:12
  They're like, Oh, these bunch of dots.
• 31:14
  That's probably a bike and those bunch of dots.
• 31:16
  That's probably a tire.
• 31:17
  You know, it like it gives some.
• 31:20
  A, it gives the, it gives the brain some, you know, the other systems, some agent
• 31:25
  interpreting what it's, uh, what it's looking at, obviously, I was going to
• 31:29
  say that, like, you know, that, that, you know, relish and mayonnaise and ketchup
• 31:35
  on the burger there, that is clearly where you're able to make a ton of money, right?
• 31:40
  Because that's all the consultancy and the setup.
• 31:42
  And clearly I feel like that.
• 31:47
  Kind of thing that's going to be crudely.
• 31:49
  Let's not beat around the bush.
• 31:50
  That's going to be the kind of thing that Mercedes are going to spend money on.
• 31:53
  And, you know, Chrysler probably aren't right.
• 31:57
  So there's that.
• 31:59
  I think if I was a German maker, I would be looking to achieve some
• 32:04
  kind of differentiation around that.
• 32:06
  Beyond the fact that I'm just first in the space and, you know, you can bet
• 32:10
  Mercedes know exactly how good Audi's is and Audi know exactly how good BMW's is.
• 32:15
  It's, it's, uh, so that was quite interesting seeing into that little silo.
• 32:30
  Valeo, their Scala 2 had a wash wipe setup that looked exactly like, you
• 32:37
  know, the wash wipe on Martin and Mark Gami's Ford Sierra 2 litre.
• 32:42
  Gear, they looked exactly like they like squid water and did a white, but
• 32:46
  you know, that, as I said to you, the bad weather can really mess it up.
• 32:49
  And if there's like, literally, if there's a fly in front of it, that's
• 32:54
  a huge blind spot, you know, that is, and, and if you think about
• 33:00
  the, that fly cause the car to make.
• 33:05
  A completely terrible decision.
• 33:08
  Yeah.
• 33:08
  So, you know, I don't need to drill into into that.
• 33:11
  So when it's icy, there's a heater as well.
• 33:15
  The other thing that they developed was, uh, what I wrote down here was
• 33:20
  it's too fucked for me to work kind of functionality, which is, in other words,
• 33:25
  when that bugs on there, if it does the wash, wipe and the bug still there.
• 33:30
  Maybe it's not a bug.
• 33:32
  Maybe it's taken a stone.
• 33:34
  That's why it can't see because the lens has got a big bash in it.
• 33:38
  Now it's now able to say, you know, hold up his hands and say,
• 33:44
  yeah, you know, my leg's broken.
• 33:46
  I can't work anymore.
• 33:47
  Previously.
• 33:48
  I don't know what the old one used to do, but we all know how computers work.
• 33:52
  So, you know, clearly they, for him to make, so, so that wraparound for
• 33:57
  customers that makes their product, you know, they like to toggle
• 34:01
  packaging performance and price.
• 34:04
  Those were the three things he said.
• 34:05
  They like to, the manufacturers, the OEMs like to, to toggle around on.
• 34:11
  And what I jotted down here was, uh, of course, because of Valeo's background.
• 34:17
  You know, , I bet you the wash wipe on pers on the Pergo 6 0
• 34:21
  4 of the 1980s was made by Val.
• 34:24
  You know, they're a bit like AC Delco or Motorcraft, or,
• 34:28
  you know, Lucas, aren't they?
• 34:29
  They're, they're, uh, they're one of those players that have been, uh,
• 34:32
  been been around for, for, for ages.
• 34:34
  So anyway, um.
• 34:35
  So it's way better in the inclement weather, and it's just
• 34:39
  more of a bait technology, right?
• 34:41
  That's that Scalia 2.
• 34:42
  So, so that came along in 2022 for Mercedes and for Kia, um, Scala 3.
• 34:51
  This is the new one with the 2.
• 34:53
  6 billion.
• 34:54
  This is the one that is now no longer in any way related to the IBO technology,
• 35:01
  which they have been using, you know, so not even their technology, right?
• 35:05
  In other words, when Valeo came to go into the space, they were like, we
• 35:09
  don't want to build this from scratch.
• 35:11
  Whose intellectual property should we, who's kind of been doing
• 35:14
  something like this before will buy their intellectual property?
• 35:18
  The This is now.
• 35:20
  So, so this is the, like the, this is, you know, this is like Kia no
• 35:24
  longer building knockoff Mitsubishi.
• 35:26
  This is them building their own car.
• 35:27
  This is their own, um, intellectual property.
• 35:30
  This, this scar, uh, three from 16 layers of laser to 520 layers.
• 35:38
  This spa.
• 35:40
  Technology, the P of the SPAD is this photon pickup.
• 35:45
  I, I missed exactly what the engineer was saying, but believe me, that was a
• 35:49
  rabbit hole that was just completely, you know, beyond, beyond my, beyond my scope.
• 35:57
  Cause what you're talking about is fractions of lasers being able to
• 36:00
  pick up, uh, uh, bounce back and pick up data points is really, uh, yeah.
• 36:05
  So as a scholar, two could do lanes, scholar three, you can see potholes.
• 36:10
  Yeah, in terms of a practical application, you know, the
• 36:13
  question hit there is a question.
• 36:15
  This, this illustrates where the debate is at the moment.
• 36:19
  You might be listening to this like 25 years in the future when
• 36:21
  the technology works really well.
• 36:23
  This illustrates even at Stanford, even in the Society of automotive
• 36:28
  engineers, somebody asked whether or not.
• 36:31
  It had the, if it could pick up a tire lying in the road,
• 36:35
  could it pick up a lane marking?
• 36:38
  And the guy went, well, maybe it could, maybe it couldn't, but it
• 36:41
  would pick up the lane marking based upon its reflectiveness by
• 36:44
  using one of each other's systems.
• 36:46
  And my first thought was, well, that's bloody obvious, what a stupid question.
• 36:50
  And then I thought, Actually, no, unless you thinking about unless you're in the
• 36:55
  world of thinking about how autonomous cars are perceiving the world, and
• 36:58
  you're aware that they have multiple sources, which maybe most people aren't.
• 37:02
  Maybe that wasn't such a silly question after all.
• 37:06
  But, you know, it does.
• 37:07
  It just illustrates the gap in terms of perception of where the
• 37:11
  technology Is and, and, and what it can do and, and how it works.
• 37:17
  So Stellantis and quote, a leading robo taxi company are going to
• 37:21
  be introducing it in Q2 of 2025 and an Asian maker in Q4 of 2025.
• 37:29
  Who could the leading robo taxi company be?
• 37:31
  If not Waymo, I just want to say.
• 37:43
  So there you have it, the evolution of Lidar technology.
• 37:48
  Having just talked through that, what further insights do I have that, look, we,
• 37:55
  we've moved from it being a non functional technology to it being a functional
• 37:58
  technology since 2017, haven't we?
• 38:02
  There are hundreds of thousands of these things, LiDAR systems,
• 38:07
  out on the road at the moment.
• 38:09
  The LiDAR system itself, the value of the LiDAR system, lies, yes, in
• 38:18
  the LiDAR device itself being able to tell the brain what it's seeing,
• 38:25
  but equally in the Lidar system being functional as part of this complete
• 38:32
  suite, which means the vehicle can work.
• 38:35
  So in, in other words, you know, autonomy is a cake and it needs the flour of
• 38:44
  LIDAR amongst the eggs and all of the, well, am I with the food metaphors here?
• 38:50
  But you understand what I mean that the LIDAR, the value of it is
• 38:55
  not just as an individual thing.
• 38:56
  Like it's not like an individual system.
• 38:59
  It's, it's, it's value as part of the system holistically and the
• 39:03
  system needs to work in a holistic way for any of it to have any value.
• 39:08
  So you can't look at it and be like, well, this sense is
• 39:11
  worth 500 or 5, 000 or 50, 000.
• 39:16
  If the Audi is worth 150, 000, it can't drive without it.
• 39:19
  You know what I mean?
• 39:20
  It's a, that's what we're, what, what we're talking about.
• 39:24
  about with it.
• 39:25
  I, uh, had my glimpse into the future and, uh, uh, went home and made arrangements
• 39:33
  to buy a 1986 Suzuki GSX R 750, a bike which when I then Subsequently went to
• 39:44
  pick it up, not only terrified me, but proved so reluctant to go into gear that
• 39:54
  it took me 10 or 15 minutes fiddling around in the garage here to be confident
• 39:59
  that I could actually be able to even faintly operate the machine, let alone
• 40:06
  ride it to anywhere near its potential.
• 40:10
  So, There, I just did this pivot from the Sublime to the Ridiculous,
• 40:16
  or maybe from the Ridiculous to the Sublime, I'm not quite sure which.
• 40:22
  That Suzuki's a 1986, it's hard to believe that it's that recent.
• 40:26
  It's so primitive and visceral and just such a, just such a Bucket of
• 40:33
  cold water in the face of a motoring experience is just incredible.
• 40:38
  This autonomous world we're shifting into, that was 1985.
• 40:42
  This is, give or given, give or take 2025.
• 40:46
  What, 60 years difference, so that would take us to 2085.
• 40:50
  I think we can see by 2085.
• 40:53
  We can say that these systems, by that point, by the middle of the
• 40:56
  century, these systems are going to be nailed down, aren't they?
• 41:00
  And if, if the systems are nailed down for, for ground transportation,
• 41:06
  and if we're able to utilize things like AI, to move us properly.
• 41:12
  I think those visions of flying cars moving us around, I think those are
• 41:17
  something which, uh, will come certainly before the turn of the next century.
• 41:23
  So look, with that prophecy that I wasn't, um, intending to
• 41:26
  make at all, I'm gonna end it.
• 41:29
  Thanks for your time,
• 41:53
  brother.
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