Hello and welcome to the Automotive News Shift podcast, where we bring you the latest on

automotive technology, trends, and transformation. I'm Molly Boygan, tech and innovation reporter

at Automotive News. Today's guest is Dan Hirsch, global co-leader of the automotive and industrial

practice at Alex Partners. He talks about an Alex Partner survey out last week that shows auto industry

executives fear for their jobs because of the sector's disruption. When you introduce a really

drastically different product that has different testing requirements, different development

requirements, different development cycle times, different skill sets, different speed to market.

It really upends what's important for running that business and the types of decisions that have

to be made.

But first, let's talk about the week.

For that, I'm joined by my colleague Lonnie Eiliff, who covers Tesla, Lucid, Rivian, Vinfast,

and Robotaxies for Automotive News.

Lonnie, you had a really interesting piece in last week's issue of automotive news about

Robotaxy crashes and safety.

So what did you find out?

Okay, what I found out is the Robo taxis are coming. They are going to be all over the United States.

Waymo is doing 400,000 rides and 4 million miles a week. Tesla wants to replicate them, smaller players like Zooks and Nuro.

You know, they'll get there eventually. So that's one takeaway. Two,

is they are going to have accidents. They are going to have robot human accidents. People are

going to get hurt and eventually they'll probably be a fatality. So three, the way people react

to those robot human injuries is going to have an impact on the industry and how fast they can roll out and public acceptance.

You know, you do see pushback by unions, by some cities, Boston, New York, not necessarily for safety reasons, but it can be used as an argument, right? And the Teamsters

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