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

Hi, this is Leslie Allen, editor of Shift magazine. And it's Alexis St. John, covering

tech and suppliers. Joining us in just a few minutes on today's podcast is Manuela Papa Dappel, Chief Executive Officer at Designated Driver,

a startup providing software that provides tele-operation links for autonomous and human-driven vehicles.

But first, speaking of human-driven vehicles, Alexa and Leslie, a lot of news this week that I found pretty interesting in the realm of new

Innovation new safety features coming to human driven cars. We had the JD Power study that kind of measures the many drivers from an affordability perspective.

Alexa, what did you make of some of that?

Yeah, I mean I thought the news this week out of JD Powers

20 Tech Experience Index was really interesting, exactly what you said.

Drivers do really appreciate some of the new technologies that are coming with today's vehicles, but they're still, you know,

wanting to keep some sort of sense of control. So it's, you know, assistance through things like

cameras and such definitely is appreciated according to

J.D. Powers findings. But at the end of the day, there is some point where they're not quite liking all of the assistance and so I think

it's very much so finding that balance in today's vehicles and you know to your point affordability is key has been for quite some time

always a discussion I think that we've had in shift and in the mobility report and on this podcast is, you know, with all of these new things going into vehicles,

higher amounts of technology is affordability.

You know, Alexa, you do make a very good point and there's also some

long-term implications for automakers when technologies go wrong. I remember a few years ago Ford had suffered some initial quality issues

with its my Ford touch system and because technology is so important and other vehicle functions are generally in very good shape.

When something goes wrong with technology that can really drag your satisfaction scores down.

You know, at the same time, I think it's so interesting that some of these technologies,

if they are introduced in a way that consumers adopt and accept them, can really be life saving.

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