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

My first podcast guest of 2025 is Naveen Verma, the co-founder and CEO of Encharge AI, an artificial intelligence startup that's accelerating

AI deployments from edge to cloud and offering solutions that address AI's big energy problem

for the auto industry and beyond.

But first, we have a look at this week's headlines.

The big one, I think, has to do with an orange triangle that

in some way threatens the practicality of self-driving trucks. While many of us were enjoying

the holiday break, the Biden administration's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

issued a formal rejection of a petition from Waymo and Aurora to use a cab-mounted hazard beacon

instead of the traditional orange hazard triangle that's placed behind the truck stopped along the side of a road.

The traditional way, of course, requires a human being to place that triangle behind the truck,

and autonomous trucks will someday soon ostensibly have no human occupants aboard.

So you can see the problem here.

And Aurora, in fact, has plans to start driverless commercial service by the end of the first

quarter here in 2025, which raises the question of how exactly the company plans to

meet the federal requirements to deploy warning triangles within a certain specified time

period of the truck pulling to the side of the road. Aurora and Waymo had filed that petition

to use the cab mounted lights as an alternate two years ago. And it took,

it took two years at long last to officially get the rejection that arrived within the last week.

So this is officially a problem for the self-driving truck industry, probably, you know,

in a more meaningful way once the likes of Aurora and others

reach a certain scale that remains a few years away. But now this will have to be undone at the very

...