Hello, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter at the Automotive News.

Leslie Allen, editor of Shift magazine. And Alexis St. John, covering tech and suppliers.

Joining us on the podcast today is Ashley Nunez, a researcher, writer, and commentator who holds appointments at MIT and Harvard.

He's a specialist on transportation safety,

regulatory policy, and workforce production.

Perhaps most importantly, I think that his research

is often a reality check on automated vehicles and the

grand mobility future that we hear about so often from the industry. But before we

get to Ashley, Alexa, I wanted to ask you about some of the big news in the industry this week. Mercedes-Benz leaving its partnership with BMW and joining a new one with Invidia,

tell me about what's going on there.

Well, just this week, Pete,

it was kind of a very big and well- announcement from NVIDIA here.

They announced that they are going to be joining forces

with Mercedes-Benz on their 2024 fleet, so their entire

entire lineup beginning in 2024 will essentially have this advanced

technology that can continuously be updated over the air and it's you know

effectively assuring that their vehicles won't really become obsolete as

as new and more and more advances hit the

market on both the 8-S and an automated technology front. So it's it was a really

exciting announcement and as you mentioned just a few days

after Mercedes and rival BMW ended their alliance to develop automated driving functions.

And Mercedes has said that their partnership with BMW,

...