Shift is brought to you by Eaton. We make the Electric Revolution work. Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm your host Pete Bigigolo. Hi it's Leslie Allen, editor

Shift magazine. Everyone, thanks for listening. It's Alexa St John covering

tech and suppliers. Our guest on the podcast today is Raquel Urdison, the artificial intelligence

expert who just founded a new company Wobby to pioneer self-driving trucks.

But first along those lines Leslie I want to pioneer self-driving trucks.

But first, along those lines, Leslie,

I wanted to ask you about this idea of self-driving trucks

because that seems to be the big topic of conversation

rather consistently in the automated driving industry right now.

We're talking a lot less about robot taxis, a lot more about trucking.

What do you make of that?

You know, it's really curious.

I'm wondering why that's happening.

I don't have a definitive answer for that, except that perhaps the autonomous vehicle technology providers see the over the road

trucking as a good way to scale up their technology versus trying to get this to work on a practical level in personally owned vehicles.

So it looks like we're going to see these autonomous trucks which have defined routes I think we'll see those quicker than we will

personal AVs on the road. Yeah Leslie I think you're. I think there's additionally there's a business case to be made for it that there's there's immediate cost savings. Highway environments are a little easier to operate. Of course, that does bring up the questions

and concerns from a lot of corners about labor.

Right now, there's ostensibly a labor shortage

in the trucking industry, but there's lots of people who are leery about

displacing jobs. Alexa what do you think about that? Yeah I mean I think that's a great point and I think

we've seen a bit of a shift too about this in the sense of there has been a lot of conversation about displacing jobs and concern about what this technology could do for all these really critical trucking workers and employees out there.

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