So in this case, the truck is trying to make a lane change over, and for some reason, somebody sees a big self-driving truck and it's like, I'm just going to cut in anyway.

I don't know how many you drove here today, but I expect you had an experience like this today.

It just happens on the road, often with BMW drivers.

It strikes me that...

I guess there goes that partnership. I guess there goes that partnership.

Fully autonomous vehicles are closer to commonplace than you might expect, as cars and big rigs gain the ability to operate safely on our streets

and highways. As one of the pioneers in the field, Chris Ermson has been there almost from the

beginning, competing in the landmark DARPA Grand Challenge before going on to lead Google's

self-driving car initiative. Now he's following through on the vision as the CEO of Aurora, which is developing self-driving

technology for use by a variety of car and truck manufacturers.

I'm GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop.

On this episode of the GeekWire podcast, we're playing highlights from my conversation

with Chris Ermson at the recent Geekwire Summit,

starting with his explanation of Aurora's approach.

So we founded Aurora about six years ago with the mission to deliver the benefit to self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly.

And what we're building is the driver technology. So we don't

want to build trucks or cars. There's people who do that really well. We don't want to go and

build Uber or FedEx or any of the carriers. There's people who do that well. We want to just

build the driving technology to power those businesses. The driver we've built uses a combination

of different sensors. So again, LIDAR radar camera.

We use our special high-definition maps.

We've got our proprietary first light LIDAR,

...