How Driverless Cars Will Actually Work
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode April Glaser talks to Chris Urmson, CEO of Aurora, a company that builds the technology for self-driving cars. Urmson offers a timeline for when we might see autonomous vehicles on the road and lists the different hurdles the industry still needs to overcome. According to Urmson, driverless cars shouldn’t require a lot of extra infrastructure or government funding. Instead, they should work within our existing system.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future. |
| 0:05.2 | I'm April Glazer. |
| 0:13.1 | Hey, everyone. |
| 0:14.3 | Welcome to If Then. |
| 0:15.2 | We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. |
| 0:21.6 | We recorded this interview on the afternoon of Friday, June 7th. |
| 0:25.8 | For today's show, I took a field trip down the San Francisco Peninsula to interview Chris |
| 0:30.0 | Ermson, CEO of Aurora, a company that builds the technology for self-driving cars. |
| 0:35.8 | I visited his office in Palo Alto to learn what's on his mind |
| 0:39.1 | when it comes to our driverless future. Like, how do we test autonomous vehicles safely? And what |
| 0:44.3 | changes will we have to make to our existing infrastructure to make way for robot cars? So here it is, |
| 0:49.8 | my interview with Chris Ermson, one of the pioneers of self-driving car technology. |
| 1:00.8 | Today we're interviewing Chris Irmson, the CEO of Aurora, a company that builds the technology for self-driving cars. Before Ermson co-founded Aurora in 2017, he led Google's self-driving car |
| 1:06.9 | team, a project he piloted from its earliest days, which has now spun off to its own company |
| 1:12.2 | called Waymo. And even before working on Google's robot cars, Ermson was a professor at Carnegie Mellon, |
| 1:17.9 | where he led the team that participated in the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge. That was when |
| 1:23.3 | university research teams competed to build cars that could drive themselves through a 132 mile |
| 1:28.1 | race through the Mojave Desert, all without drivers, of course. Aurora announced earlier this |
| 1:32.9 | year that it raised 530 million in venture funding. We're thrilled to be joined by one of the |
| 1:38.2 | leading innovators in autonomous driving about his thoughts on where the technology is headed now |
| 1:42.8 | and how it's going to potentially |
| 1:44.3 | change how we organize our cities and our lives. I'm in Palo Alto, California, at the Aurora |
... |
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