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Learn more at auto news.com slash Pace Pilot. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Leslie Allen, mobility editor for Automotive News.

And I'm Alexa St. John, Tech and Suppliers Reporter for Automotive News.

And Pete Bigelow, who normally hosts this program, will be back with us next week.

But in his absence, we have a wonderful program for you today.

We are going to be delving into the issue of how states and municipalities can help further autonomous vehicle research and research into automated systems of all kinds, driver assistance systems.

And I think this is really quite timely

because we're seeing more and more of these announcements

Alexa that are coming through.

Just I believe you did a story back in September where we talked about the the US Department of Transportation which funded eight projects in seven states and all of these projects are meant to help further the integration of autonomous driving systems.

Yes, we're seeing more and more states kind of play a role in advanced development of these technologies and we're also seeing

quite a few universities gear their interest in this as well. That is terrific and

I know one of the states that we're not going to be talking with them today, but we have extensively covered this in automotive news to state of Florida for example under Governor Ron DeSantis. I mean, they've been really going great guns on trying to make their state a leader in transportation R&D.

So hopefully someday we'll be able to get some people from that effort on the show.

But today, we're going to be focusing on a couple of states that are pretty close to home.

We're going to be focusing on Michigan and Ohio. And I think that's relatively

timely because Michigan, Ohio are not exactly friendly when it comes to certain sports activities.

And we have an upcoming game coming up between Ohio State,

...