Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter at the Automotive News.

This is Leslie Allen, editor of Shift magazine and Alexa St John covering

Tech and Suppliers. Joining us on today's podcast is Greg Brandon,

Director of Automotive Engineering and Industry Relations at AAA,

which recently came out with a report that showed how various automated driving assist systems work in real world scenarios.

And during 4,000 miles of testing, they found an issue once every 8 miles.

Greg will fill us in on the details in just a few minutes, but first,

Alexa, I wanted to ask you about a story you've been working on and following a lot this week,

which is the ongoing Uber lifts kind of quandary as to whether or not their

drivers will be classified as employees or remain as independent workers.

What's the latest and what have you learned during your reporting this week?

It really seems like this discussion has come to a head in recent months out there in California,

and some experts actually expect the conversation to continue

elsewhere in the country but you know for years these two companies have classified their

workers as independent contractors.

Obviously with that, they've been able to avoid having to provide full employee benefits.

And now, both Uber and Lyft are kind of campaigning for a ballot measure set for a vote in November

that would exempt companies like them as well as delivery companies from requirements of the state labor law that as economy workers as employees if they fall under certain stipulations.

And so obviously this is a massive threat to the business bottles of both Uber and

Lyft.

Both have vocalized even before going public that switching to this sort of model would be a major

threat to their operations. They've already struggled to sustain profitability in the past.

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