the whole issue of distracted driving gets to the heart of this.

Is the equipment in your car there to make your use of the car better?

Or is it a way to make you feel better about being stuck in your car?

Unfortunately, the car business has gotten to a kind of unhealthy place around

and then sort of U.S. culture more broadly around sort of what are you doing when you're behind the wheel?

Yeah. and then sort of US culture more broadly around sort of what are you doing when you're behind the wheel? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Ed Niedermeyer.

Ed is the author of Ludacris, the unvarnished story of Tesla Motors, and a co-host of the

Atonacast.

Now, if you are a regular listener to the show, you will be quite familiar with Ed because

he's been on a number of times

to talk about Tesla, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and so many of these other topics over

the past number of years. But there's a lot that's been going on with Tesla lately, especially

after Elon Musk left the White House, but also in the wider electric vehicle industry. And I figured

this was worth having Ed back on the show to dig into in a bit more depth because I think there are some really interesting things happening that we need to be paying attention to. So we talk about some of the recent litigation that Tesla has been facing and what that might mean for the autopilot and self-driving systems that is trying to sell. We talk about Tesla as a company more broadly that seems less and less interested in actually

making and selling electric cars and more interested in these big ideas like robots and

things like that, that we're both very skeptical of whether they're actually going to work out.

But then beyond that, of course, Tesla is not just the only electric vehicle

maker in the world anymore. There are many other companies that are competing on this front.

And I wanted to talk to Ed about what we're seeing in other parts of the world and from other

automakers when it comes to electric vehicles. And often that is a discussion about China and

BYD in particular. And certainly that comes up in what we're

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