Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today we're continuing our series on consumer tech trends with an episode that pulse checks the state of autonomy in 2019. Where are we with autonomous vehicles right now? We also share some clarity on what levels of autonomy means there, including touching on regulatory aspects, and also discuss,

quite frankly, capitalism, what cars mean nationalistically, and what it'll take to bridge

the worlds of Silicon Valley and Detroit, which is why our special guests are Kazer Eunice,

former C.O. at Y Combinator and co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, and Peter Ludwig, CTO at

Applied Intuition, which builds software for the autonomous vehicle industry. Throughout the discussion,

we thread the analogy of mobile to autonomous vehicles, where it applies and where it breaks

down. Speaking of, be sure to also check out A6&Z.com slash autonomy for posts, decks, and videos from

Benedict Evans, Frank Chen, and others. But this conversation begins by cutting through the hype

on whether autonomous vehicles are coming soon or not. It's interesting. You can kind of read

publications and within a three-month period you'll hear where're in the early days, the hype site, we're in the trough of despair.

Or disillusionment, I think it's called, the Gardner hype cycle.

Yeah, you have pessimism. It's kind of all over the board.

And then you have people saying it's here tomorrow.

Yeah, exactly. And I think the probably a good analogy to think about where we are specifically

is that I like to use is where mobile was in kind of roughly 2005.

What we consider to be the modern smartphone isn't really there.

Because you're like, oh, look at this Motorola razor.

It's not that powerful.

And I can kind of extrapolate that maybe this BlackBerry will be cheaper,

but it's very hard kind of extrapolate that maybe this BlackBerry will be cheaper, but it's very

hard to really extrapolate. And so being more even more specific, if you look at kind of 2010,

2011, 2012, mobile engineers highly coveted in Silicon Valley. I had a mobile company. My last

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