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

reporter at the Automotive News and your host.

And I'm Alexa St. John, covering tech and suppliers.

Joining us in just a few minutes on the podcast today is Steve Gersky. Steve is the managing partner at

Vecto I. Q. Board member at Nicola Corp. and the former vice chairman of

General Motors.

He is going to walk us through the new appeal of special purpose acquisition companies

in the Transportation Technology world.

As many of you know he just led the successful merger with

Nicola. Really exciting stuff I am happy to have him on the podcast today but

first Alexa a lot of busy, a lot of news this week in the automated

vehicle realm. We had the Automated Vehicle Symposium, the annual kind of gathering this year virtual

of some of the, you know, most important people in the industry

in academics and government to discuss the state of affairs.

I know you tuned into that.

What, what did you learn?

Well, I had some good takeaways, as you said,

you know, we had a fairly diverse group of panelists this year in terms of some representation

from US DOT, venture capitalists, others in the industry.

I was, I think most interested in the VC conversation

that we listened to on Tuesday.

We had some venture capitalists talking about what sort of challenges they're facing,

...