Hi everybody welcome to shift a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter at the Automotive News.

Hey everybody's Leslie. Work with Pete. At Automotive News, I am the editor of Shift

the magazine.

Big news in the last week or so, as many of you may have seen the self-driving delivery

company, Neuro, received the first ever exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

to put automated vehicles on the road that don't conform to federal motor

vehicle safety standards.

Joining us to talk about that is Nuro's chief legal and policy officer David Estrada.

He will be here in a few minutes, but Leslie, this is just the one example of a lot of news that's come in the last week or so in the automated vehicle front.

You know, I've kind of lost track on the number of autopilot related investigations that the NTSB has now done but here is just like you know compiling more cases in which autopilot likely played a role in a crash.

In one of these cases is very similar

to the first one that we saw years ago

in Williston, Florida, where there's a truck going across the, you know, across a highway and

autopilot is not designed to sense that. So I think that this overall just means there's mounting pressure

for the federal government to do something to kind of prevent these

accidents from continuing to happen. And speaking of the federal government, there were

other developments last week. Yeah, that includes a congressional hearing where you have some

trade groups who came in and they talked about the need to finally get some kind of legislation on autonomous vehicles, you know, to kind of, you know, bring together some of these safeguards and things like that because right now we just have

voluntary standards and there have been some exemptions including one we're

going to talk about a little later. That's right and you know in the hearing it was

interesting Gary Shapiro from the Consumer Technology Association was one of the panelists who was testifying.

And he was really warning that China was about to lap the US on self-driving technology.

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