Hi everybody. Welcome'm your host,

I'm your host Pete Bigelow.

Hello everybody and I'm Leslie Allen editor of Shift magazine.

Joining us on the podcast today is Don Burnett, CEO and co-founder of Kodiak robotics, the

self-driving truck company that recently received funding from Bridgestone and BMWI ventures.

Leslie, self-driving trucks obviously are the big thing right now.

I think in the autonomous driving space,

they've supplanted roboanted robot taxis for sure. We've seen a lot of news

from competitors of Kodiaks like Plus and too simple Weymo and Aurora are

emphasizing their truck operations.

It seems new, but obviously this goes back

at least a few years.

What do you remember from the early days of self-driving trucking?

Oh gosh you're making me sound old here Pete. What I remember most is before I became editor of Shift I worked on automotive news TV so I did a lot of

scripts and we had a script one time that I really enjoyed writing and this was about Daimler. Back in 2015 I believe

Daimler drove an autonomous truck across Hoover Dam.

And Daimler also received the first autonomous vehicle

license for a truck in Nevada.

So that was pretty interesting.

And we've seen these experiments sort of accelerate over the years.

About a year after Daimler drove the truck across Hoover Dam,

we heard about this autonomous beer delivery by Otto, OTT, which, as I understand it, has some relationship

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