Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Jordan McGillis. He's City Journal's economics editor and an adjunct fellow at the Global

Taiwan Institute. It writes about energy, technology, economic progress, and geopolitics for

City Journal. His work has also been published in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg,

New York Post, and cited by the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Defense Department's

Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Today, though, we're going to discuss his extremely interesting

new essay, Accelerate Autonomy, which appears in our winter issue, and it looks at

autonomous vehicles' potential to improve mobility in American communities, especially for the elderly.

So Jordan, thanks very much for coming on 10 blocks.

Thanks, Brian, and thanks for that extraordinarily lengthy bio

you just gave. What was so fun about this piece is that it was really personal and how I talked

about my mother-in-law's mother, so I really enjoyed writing this piece that was close to home.

Yeah, well, just to give some background for listeners, you know, currently no fully autonomous vehicles are sold to the public, to consumers.

Yet AVs, driverless cars, they've logged now millions of road miles in the United States.

So they're big tech companies like Google, but also general

motors. You know, they've invested billions to develop these ride hailing, you know, autonomous

ride hailing vehicles or autonomous vehicles generally. Some companies are already offering service

in several major cities. I wonder, so just to give a breakdown, what's the distinction

between an A.V and an electric vehicle, and how has the technology advanced in recent years,

and how many cities are using these now? Okay, let's start with that important distinction that

does sometimes get blurred, the AVs versus EVs.

It happens to be the case that most autonomous vehicles that are out on the roads these days

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