Stanford E-Corner presents the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series.

On today's episode, we have Chris Gertes, Stanford Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

He was recently the chief innovation officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation

and is a world expert on autonomous vehicles.

Here's Chris.

I want to start off by taking you back to 1995.

That may be a pleasant trip down memory lane for some of you and others in the room may not have been born at that time.

But if we go back to 1995, we were using Windows 95 on our browser and it was a cool new thing.

Netflix, excuse me, Netscape had just gone public with their Mosaic browser.

That's how we were getting around on the internet.

OJ was on trial.

Jerry Garcia had just passed away, and some of us were actually working on automated vehicles.

But what we were looking at at the time wasn't what you think about as an automated vehicle today.

Instead, the concept was an automated highway.

We would have magnets in the road that the cars would follow, and the cars would follow each other at extremely close spacing.

So we could improve capacity, and we could reduce some of the aerodynamic drag.

So doing my PhD work at UC Berkeley, I actually worked with a set of Lincoln Town cars,

and my task was to make sure that these things could drive about two meters, about six feet

apart from each other while the cars accelerated or even had a heavy break and to make sure

that that distance remained constant. Now, at the time, that was sort of crazy science fiction.

And whenever anybody asked us, when do you think this is going to be realistic, we used

the typical answer that people have used for automated vehicles since about 1940, and

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