Hi, everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. My name is Pete Bigelow. I am your host and reporter at the Automotive News.

My guest on the podcast today is Alex Roy, the Jack of All Trades, who is a co-founder of advisory firm Johnson & Roy, partner at New Industry Venture Capital,

founder of the Human Driving Association, Endurance Driving Record Holder, author, co-host at the Autonicast,

and much more. Alex and I are going to discuss the imminent Tesla Robotaxi launch and the state of autonomy overall.

If you want to be in the Robotaxy business, there's only two ways to do it.

You own the fleet or people contribute to the fleet.

Those are two completely different businesses.

First though, my colleague John Irwin joins me for a look at this week's headlines.

John, how are you today?

Doing well. How are you doing, Pete?

Doing good. It's certainly no shortage of headlines that your byline is right under.

I know that you have been closely following kind of an ongoing storyline about China's

restrictions on rare earth materials, how that is a major threat to American

automotive vehicle production. What is the latest there, John? Yeah, it's been something that's

been front of mind for a lot of suppliers and automakers, certainly the last couple of weeks.

It's kind of come to add, basically Basically, real short version, you have China

basically ever since April, early April after the U.S. implemented tariffs on Chinese imports.

China retaliated by restricting exports of rare earth metals that are important for the auto

industry and a whole sort of bunches of other sectors.

And yeah, basically since then it's sort of come to a head.

A lot of suppliers and automakers reporting downtime.

You know, we see Ford had to stop production at its Chicago assembly plant for a week,

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