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

I'm so excited to say that Ralph Nader is our guest on the podcast today. My colleague, Molly Boygan, talked to the preeminent consumer advocates, General Motors critic, one-time presidential candidates, and member of the Automotive Hall of Fame, and we'll bring you her conversation with Ralph in just a minute.

The industry is trying to innovate too fast when it comes to autonomous cars.

And it was never the problem years ago. It was

technological stagnation. First, we have a look at this week's headlines from around the

mobility realm. And for that, Molly joins me now. Molly, how are you today? I'm doing well,

thanks, Pete. How are you? I'm doing good this morning. Yeah, so we have some headlines actually from the shift podcast. We are breaking news here today. Is that what we're doing? I guess so. Yes. Well, I guess we have some news to share and that's right that I do want to share it or I don't. It's a swirl of emotions on my end.

But do want to let our listeners know that after seven years at Automotive News,

I'm moving on to a new opportunity in a few short weeks.

So, you know, hosting shift has been a really rewarding experience.

That's probably an understatement. I've loved

having these conversations with our guests. I've loved when our listeners have reached out on

LinkedIn or email and just really appreciate those connections after a long time.

Yeah, you've been a great steward at the helm of the podcast and, you know, someone will have big shoes to fill.

It's a huge loss for auto news, but we're happy for you and we wish you the very best in your next chapter.

Thank you, Molly. I really appreciate that. You know, it's kind of funny to think about shift because it started here in the fall of 2019, spring of 2019, I guess, in our first episode.

I'm thinking of all these things that have happened over many years, but our first episode was at South by Southwest in Austin.

And I think it must have been the first time that any of us actually used Zoom, or at least for me. And Jim Adler from Toyota Ventures was our guest. And I just remember he was very, very patient as we, you know, ran through a gamut of technical glitches. And I don't remember exactly why. Like, there's probably an echo or something. But, like, I ultimately had to, like, leave the conference room and go stand in the hallway to, to ask questions so that we could make it work and go, how far we've come. Yeah. So how did the shift podcast to get started? Yeah. We, you know, it's just kind of like at the dawn of, maybe not the dawn of the AV era,

but AVs were kind of a hot topic, but still pretty niche.

And EVs were coming along right behind that.

And even though they were small topics at the time, like we saw that they were growing

and heading in that direction. So we were looking to at the time. Like we saw that they were growing and and heading in that direction.

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