Hi everyone welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter to the

automotive news. Leslie Allen, editor of Shift magazine. And Alexis

St John, covering tech and suppliers. Joining us on today's podcast is Kristen Colage, Executive Director of Human Machine Interface and Driver

Interaction at JD Power.

We'll get to Kristen just a minute or two, but as a precursor, Leslie and Alexa, we talked

with her a lot about some of the issues with terminology in the driver assist and fully autonomous realm and this development happened after our

conversation with Kristen but I wanted to get your your thoughts on it the

AP style book has has new entries and revisions for for the terms we should use to talk about

self-driving and the ones that should be avoided what what do you think? Well, you know, for people in the listening universe who are not

journalists, a style book is just a guide for journalists and other writers and broadcasters etc for how to

phrase things in a uniform way. So the Associated Press for years and years has put out sort of this Bible of style called the AP style book.

And they just revised an entry on autonomous vehicles and it's a lot, it's very helpful. I mean, you know, it just starts off, you know, with a

description of what autonomous vehicles are and you know, we can also call

them self-driving, but it says, for example, the term driver less should not be used

unless there is a human backup driver.

And as of 2020, there were no autonomous vehicles for sale to the public

although many were being tested on public roads and then it makes a

distinction between vehicles with driver assist systems and saying

that those can be referred to as partially automated.

So you get the idea, basically avoid the term semi-autonomous yada yada.

But I think this is pretty good and it's just sort of an example of how pervasive these terms have become in society.

And we use terms every day that may not really be accurate to describing what these vehicles can do.

...