Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm your host Pete Bigelow. Hi, it's Leslie Allen.

Welcome back from Thanksgiving. Hope all of our listeners had an enjoyable holiday.

We're back in the office today and joining us on the podcast is

Gautam Noreng, CEO and co-founder of self-driving truck startup Gattick.

I really think this is going to be a very hot part of the industry.

Mostly when you hear about autonomous vehicles, of course, the public, you hear about

rubble taxis, you hear about vehicles that are for passengers.

And I know there's been some news on that front,

especially out of California.

That's right.

Last week, California's Public Utilities Commission approved two new programs that pave the way for autonomous vehicle operators to not only launch

Rubot taxis in the state, but charge fees for their services.

And that's a big change from the kind of current regulatory setup.

So another kind of big development or maybe a small development but a milestone nonetheless on the

on the long road to deploying driverless vehicles at scale.

What I think will be interesting, Pete, is to see what form these robot taxis are going to take,

at least the ones that appeal the most to the public, you know, whether it will be the multi-passenger vehicles or smaller,

smaller form vehicles such as you would get if you just took an Uber or a lift, because, you know know there have been studies and I think there was one

recently that we'll get to later that people are still a little skittish about writing around with other people so we'll see what form this takes.

I mean, do you know whether or not,

we're talking about completely driverless vehicles

or are these vehicles that would have a safety driver?

...