Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your

host and reporter at the Automotive News. I'll be joined on the podcast today by Andrew Poliac,

the chief technology officer at Panasonic Automotive.

It's a bit of a continuation of our CES storyline surrounding software-defined vehicles.

Andrew's going to give us a ground truth on where automakers are really at with that

transition and kind of detail how it trickles down to be important to consumers.

But first, a big welcome to my colleague Molly Boegon, who's here to help me sift through the mobility

headlines of the past week.

And Molly, they're kind of disconcerting.

What do you think?

Yeah, yeah, some tough headlines this week out of the mobility space.

First of all, active pulling back from Motion from emotional which is sort of the latest

blow to the roboo taxi industry you know this is a joint venture between

active and Hyundai active is pulling back shortly after GM announced earlier this week

that it was cutting a billion dollars in funding for Cruz,

the embattled robot taxi company that ceased operations a couple of months ago. So really just a tough

landscape and even further back, you know, in 2022, Ford and VW pulled back from Argo AI. So it's bleak out there for robot taxis and I'm wondering what you think is next promotional.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it kind of comes down to what will Hyundai want to do with the company, right?

And or will emotional find other investors to kind of make up for what they will no longer have with active. So it certainly puts a big question mark there.

I personally kind of expected that they would have had a big splash at

CES a few weeks ago.

Being in Vegas, which is where they intend to start,

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