we could certainly be taking more than we are if we were doing food seven days a week and i had got more staff so we could put the facilities out there. we are not putting the tables out on monday and tuesday at the moment, purely because i haven't got the staff to do so. it is even worse for this award—winning restaurant. trading is on pause. they have struggled to get staff since brexit and covid. the owners are now abroad, trying to hire chefs and waiting for a special government licence to bring them over. many sleepless nights. this business is a family business so it is me and my partner, so this is our only income. this is all really we live for, and to be closed is really heartbreaking, to be honest. there is no shortage of customers in this town — just staff. across the uk, there's something like 176,000 vacancies in hospitality.

that is double the number before the pandemic. so this is a mock—up restaurant. you won't find a customer in here. the boss of this suffolk hotel chain shows me the training centre he started in march to help recruit and retain staff. you have to do something about it yourself because no one is going to give you these people, and if you want them to stay, you have got to give them the skills and the confidence to be with you. labour shortages now, but could that tide be about to turn? at the alex cafe, they are open all week — three days only, though, upstairs. but the owner is in no rush, with rising energy costs for him and his customers. i've done the job for over a0 years and it has never been like this. you know, you have always been able to see a path, however steep that path is, or how difficult. at the moment, it is almost like an abyss. we could be looking at £100,000 per year extra — extra — on energy. you know, that's £2,000 per week. he is trying to keep it simple in a sector that is bracing itself

for bumpier times ahead. emma simpson, bbc news, felixstowe. now it's time for a look at the weather with elizabeth rizzini. hello, good afternoon. all change weatherwise into the start of next week. it will be unsettled with thundery showers and also feeling cooler. but one more day of that extreme heat and the met office weather warning which extends all the way up to northern england and into eastern areas of wales. it is valid until midnight tonight, the heat uncomfortable for many, of course. some thunderstorms around today but wet weather out towards northern ireland and scotland, some flashes of lightning already, but for most, the heat and sunshine continues, high cloud in the south,

temperatures for some could get as high as 34—35. 0vernight tonight, still warm and uncomfortable for sleeping. some showery rain in western wales and the south—west of england, otherwise dry, temperatures dipping to the mid— to high teens for many. so, a warm start again tomorrow morning. but more showers around on monday, the thunderstorms particularly across england and wales will be hit and miss, some places are staying dry. quite high rainfall totals could lead to some localised surface water flooding. now on bbc news, it's the future of cars. applause hello and welcome to the science museum. i am kevin fong and this is the engineers: the future of cars. i am in the information age gallery, sat in front of an object called the rugby tuning coil and 100 years ago this big wheel of copper wrapped

in wood was the most powerful transmitter in the world. so it is an appropriate place for us to have this broadcast which brings in an audience from five different continents through the magic of our video link, as well as a large audience here in the gallery for a programme that will be broadcast on bbc world service, on radio and television. the climate catastrophe and the sheer weight of traffic on our roads and the horrific rate of accidents that they cause has forced a revolution in the way we think about cars. with me today are three engineers who are at the forefront of that revolution. we have arjo van der ham from the netherlands who is the chief technical officer at a company called lightyear. he has developed the world's first family—sized solar powered car. jamie shotton, an expert in al and in autonomous vehicles. he is the chief scientist at a company called wayve and he is here to tell us

about autonomous driving vehicles and, last but not least we have linda zhang from the united states. she is the chief engineer for the f150 lightning and has managed somehow to electrify one of america's most iconic and brilliant cars. pleasejoin me in welcoming them today. applause linda, let's start with you. people outside the united states probably will not know what an icon the f150 is. yes, it is. f series is such an iconic brand and it's responsible for $112 billion of revenue so that is 17 million units on the road pretty much at any given time since 2020. and it's a bit of a gas guzzler, you get, i think, eight kilometres a litre out of it and your role in electrifying this vehicle has made you woman of the year according to usa today and put

you on the cover of time magazine. were you expecting all the fuss? for myself, personally, definitely not. i was not expecting any of that, because it's just surreal. for the vehicle itself we expected a lot of fuss because of the fact that it is f series and because of it basically being an iconic vehicle that is, in a way, a tipping point for the industry. because of what it represents. in a way, if you think about what this product is and how people use it, it's notjust electrifying this vehicle but also changing the way that people may perceive what an ev can be. trucks are generally known for being masculine and work oriented and being able to get things done. so, people use it almost as a tool whereas an ev, people think of it as an eco—vehicle. those two things don't always

go together perfectly. many people told me that it is an oxymoron, you can't have an ev truck. so much of it has been trying to convince people that it can be tough and that this technology of electrification with the batteries as well as the motors actually can be more more tough and in many ways a better tool for the customer. let's move on now to arjo. arjo, you work in engineering solar cars and again, no less groundbreaking. i want to talk about how you got drawn into that as the thing that you wanted to do. i understand there is something called the solar vehicle race across australia. tell me about that and how you got into this field. back in 2012 we were studying at the technical university in eindhoven and we founded this solar car team to participate in the world solar challenge but for the first time in 2013 when we competed for the first time, it was the first time they introduced a new class for vehicles that notjust have

to arrive from darwin to adelaide as fast as they can but that were also scored on how many people you take, how practical the car is and how much external energy you still need from the grid. so we took a year to design and build stella, the world's first solar—powered family carand raced it3,000 kilometres through the desert of australia, and that set us up for the next adventure, for lightyear, so a few years later after we finished our studies and we took the car all over the world and we had hoped to inspire the industry, to show that it is possible to build a car that drives only on the power of the sun and is efficient and lightweight, but it din�*t really happen so at some point we figured if we want to get this to the market, we will have to do it ourselves and that is when we founded lightyear, six years ago. and in this race that you took part in at the start of all of this,

you're racing across the australian desert in a solar powered car. desert in a solar—powered car. this is not vehiclesjust creeping along the desert for weeks on end is it? how fast do they go? 3,000 kilometres in about 5.5 days, average speed of 70 kilometres an hour, top speed around, it depends a bit but between 80 and 90. that is impressive. jamie, we heard about electrification and we heard about solar panels. you are in the field of ai and autonomous vehicles. there is a lot of interest here, a lot of hope. why has this become your thing? i've been interested in machines from an incredibly young age. my interest started to seriously grow in artificial intelligence when i started studying my phd in computer vision. that is where you take images from a camera and you try and understand what is in that image. that then led to working at microsoft in their research labs and started working on products using ai, the original kinect for xbox 360, for example, where we had a little camera that

would track your motion so you could stand up in front of the camera and move around and the algorithms, the ai systems that we built started to understand what you were doing with your body and then translate that into a representation that the xbox and the game could understand and use to control. and that interest has evolved ever since and the field of ai in general has really advanced over the last 20 years. everyone with a phone in their pocket will have all sorts of ai algorithms improving the quality of your photos and recognising text, et cetera. linda, let's come back to the iconic f150 pickup truck. the vehicle is very much about power, a huge pickup truck with a huge footprint, huge petrol engine, diesel engine underneath that you put electric innards into. but it still retains the power. tell me how that works and how much power you can deliver out

of electric motors and why that was a problem for you. absolutely. the power on this vehicle is actually great. 775 foot—pounds of torque which is the highest out of any f150 and it is 580 horsepower. it's also the quickest f150 that we have ever built. dbut many people have a hard time even etting to that point because they view it as "it's electric" and that is partly why we had to really work through changing some of those concepts. your initial power is, actually, really magnificent. it's near instant torque of 775, whereas with a traditional gas vehicle you have the engine combustion, you have the gears and the transmission and that torque actually has to grow. so you have a very different torque curve in a way. the difficulty with the ev is maintaining towing, in this case, on a truck, over time.

that longevity, that fatigue is something that we had to work through with the cooling system and really making sure that the cooling was designed adequately to be able to tow and haul and do all the same things that current truck customers can do. moving on from that point, what i want to know, arjo, the netherlands is lovely when the sun is shining. when it is cloudy out there, what sort of range on average can i expect out of your vehicle in northern europe? it's an electric car. you can still charge it so you want to drive at night it has a battery and you can drive yourself 625 kilometres just on the battery and the solar panel continuously trickle charges the battery and on a single day if you are in full sun and in a good place you may add up to 70 kilometres of range from the sun that does not sound like a lot compared to the 625 but in practice

we don't use our car every day we don't use it every day for very long trips, while the solar system is always on so the way to look at it is how much do you get in a year. so, in one year, even in the netherlands, which is like 5% worst countries in the world in terms of solar radiance, you get up to 7,000 kilometres per year, so more than half of the energy that the car needs for an average driver, actually comes from the sun. thank you, arjo. so, jamie, autonomous cars. i can imagine they are great in north american cities with a grid—like structures set up like a chess board. here in london, less so. you're absolutely right. there is a huge challenge to solving autonomous driving in the kinds - of unstructured, complex and busy environments that we have - here in london and in many cities across the world, indeed. - the traditional technology stack uses three main pillars. - one is mapping. so, for the system to work you send

vehicles, much like google sends i vehicles around the streets to map out street view images _ so we can navigate ourselves, j but for a vehicle, autonomous vehicle, this needs to be done at a much higher precision. i we need centimetre—level detailed maps of entire cities. _ which is actually - a remarkably solvable which is actually _ a remarkably solvable a remarkably solvable problem but very expensive to do and even worse to maintain. there is another limitation - with current approaches in terms i of the sensors they get used a veryl expensive sensors, something called i lidar which is a way of sending out| beams of laser light and measuring the time for that light to reflectj back and that gives you a sense of how far things are away. it's a wonderful sensor, i i love depth information, i used it in my previous work. but it is expensive and difficult to integrate in a vehicle.

the third one is how the - intelligence for these is setup. today, most approaches to autonomous i driving are based on a very modular. system where you sort of first try and detect all the cars _ and the pedestrians and the traffic lights and whatever else you thinkj you need and then you'd have some | handcrafted rules so you would say| if this happens then i would do |this, if this happens i do this. | if you think about the complexities i of urban driving and the number. of things that are going on, | thatjust becomes incredibly unwieldy very, very quickly. so, these three areas of, i think, they have really held back - so, these three areas have, i think, they have really held back - the industry and at wayve we are rethinking this- with an alternative approach. so, we've decided that we want to go after, although it is a harder- problem in the short term we believe it is much more scalable, _ so to avoid the need for maps, we will avoid the use of very .

expensive sensors and relyl on cameras which are easy, relatively inexpensive and easy - to integrate and, you know, we drive with these two eyes every day. finally, we're going to use a more | holistic, what we call end—to—endj machine—learning approach - where we really teach the machine to drive by example rather - than trying to code those rules in by hand. thank you so much, jamie. now, arjo, we're going to come to you and you've made such great strides with your prototype model of the lightyear solar car. it's expensive. what i really want to know is when am i going to be able to afford one? when are we going to get to a commercially viable, affordable, family—sized solar car? so, it's a very fair question, right? we were founded with the mission to provide clean mobility for everyone. and obviously the lightyear 0 that we are selling now for 250,000 euros, it's clearly not for everyone. the way to view this,

this first car is really a technology demonstrator, we're building it in a limited series and this is the main reason why this first car is so expensive. so, the key is in scaling up. that's what we've planned on the roadmap for 2035. on the roadmap for 2025. we plan to look launch the lightyear 2 with similar specs in terms of efficiency and range and how far you can go and the solar panel. but that one is going to have a starting price of 30,000 euros. we also have to look notjust at the purchase price but the total cost of ownership of a car like this. if you start with electrifying the vehicle, the fuel costs of actually having to charge the car, they come down by the factor of 3—4. what we've done on top of that is make the electric car about twice as efficient as most electric cars on the road today. then we create half of the energy

the car needs for the average person from the solar panels. with that, we're getting into the range of what a medium family in europe could afford. jamie, i think the challenge for you is different, isn't it? in many ways, it's overpromise, really. a lot is said about autonomous vehicles, about what we can hope to have. they're not even legal in most countries of the moment. so, you're the chief scientist at wayve. set some realistic expectations here — what can i realistically expect to see in the medium—term future before we get to the bit where the robots take over the world? so, you're absolutely right. there have been many unrealistic expectations set by names that l you will all have heard of, - saying it'sjust around the corner, it's just around the corner. that is simply not how it's i going to be, it's going to be a gradual transition and it will take time. _ i would liken it to the transition between the horse and cart - and the automobile 100 or years ago or so, right? — it happened pretty quickly -

in the grand scale of things but, incrementally, day on day, - it was sort of a gradual process but accelerated as the economics land the safety and all the otherl things that came with such a transition came to bear. i it will certainly be - a multi—yearjourney, but i would very much hope and expect strongly that. by the end of this decade, we will be seeing this- in very mainstream use. end of this decade, i will come find you and find out. arjo, what's your perspective of this? perspective on this? so, i'm going to go back to the mission statement of lightyear again, clean mobility for everyone. we talked a bit about the cost of ownership of a car that you buy and the biggest factor we know of is the purchase price, and i think that is where autonomous driving is really going to help. because the key to getting the cost down is sharing, making sure that we use the car with a lot more people, �*cause it's standing still 90% of the time, and the key to making sharing

convenient, i think that's where autonomous driving comes in, by making sure the car acts like an uber without a driver, that you call and and within two minutes, it's in front of the door and you go there. if you want to bring your drywall panels, an f—150 pulls up, and if you want to take the entire family and all your kids, a minivan pulls up. and if you're just by yourself, maybe a super—small, super—efficient thing pulls up and that way, we can drastically reduce the cost per kilometre of actually driving. so i think that's where autonomous driving comes in but it has to progress before this happens, it has to progress to the point where we price autonomous driving based on its cost and not on its potential value because i think the first companies who are going to be able to offer this service of autonomous driving, they are going to say, we're replacing a taxidriver, a taxidriver costs x cents per kilometre, so we take 10% off and we can make a hell of a lot of money

because we need to earn back the $100 billion we invested, so until we get that cost down, really, to what it actually costs to operate, plus a small margin, then i think we will start to see this autonomous mobility on demand really being a lot cheaper than owning a car, and a big switch. and that should enable our mission again, if we make sure those cars are electric or running on solar. thank you, arjo. now, linda, of course, electrical vehicles in general help with emissions and help even more when they're powered with electricity from renewable resources. all this is great, but the batteries are a problem, aren't they? they contain a lot of rare earth metals that need to be mined at scale. for example, lithium is a key component and you can get that out of mines say, for example, in chile's atacama desert. is there a plan in place to mitigate those sort of environmental threats that come from electric vehicle technology? yes, absolutely.

i think mining responsibly is very important and it's one of the things that ford were very attuned to. we've joined some of the coalitions to help ensure that we are mining responsibly. and i think you're absolutely right, that electric vehicles in general are better and more sustainable for the environment. a recent study out of the university of michigan actuallyjust went through some of the data and for north america, evs, from a life—cycle perspective, cradle to grave, including all the manufacturing, the lithium in batteries, still result in a 64% less of harm to the planet than a traditional gas vehicle would, so i think there is definitely improvements there and we, as companies, and we, as individuals, need to make sure that we do it

responsibly, and as we get into cleaner energy too down the road, that 64% of an improvement will obviously increase and that needs to increase very quickly. thank you so much. now, who in the audience would like to ask us a question of any of our amazing panellists today? my name is suki. i have a question — i have more than one — but linda first of all, you said about the fuel cells. ijust have question because i know with ford f—150, how much of a big vehicle it is, how are you able to get people to really adopt the use of electric in places like rural pennsylvania, upstate new york, where we are very much a hunting environment, where we put beers, we put deer and everything else into the back of the vehicle. how are you able to get that uptake? well, so i think a lot of it is really about making sure

that the truck does exactly what a truck needs to do. so, an f—150 lightning can tow, it can haul, it can do all the same things that a gas f—150 can. but in addition to it, we actually offer a lot more. for one, we're leveraging the battery to provide electricity for customers, particularly in roll—out, in electrical outage situations, we can actually use it for our home, for multiple days at a time. also without the engine, we're able to take advantage of that space up front and basically turn it into a front trunk. and then, of course, performance in the vehicle isjust outstanding. with an ev, you get that near—instant torque that we talked about earlier which gets you up to 0—60mp in mid—four seconds. i mean, it's fast, so... we've got a question from gilbert in lebanon now, coming in from the video link.

if you can unmute your microphone and give us your question. my question is. why— was the lightyear 0 released so late when it was expected much earlier? so, thorny question there for arjo. why was the lightyear so late? so, we set out to build this production car six years ago when we founded the company but we were five guys straight out of college. we didn't have any money, we didn't have any experience so besides having to engineer the car, we also had to build the company, and we've been trying to do the engineering of the vehicle and building the company at the same time in a way that we are set up for success for the future, so we weren'tjust engineering a car, we were also engineering all the processes and all the systems behind it on how to keep track of this, how do you actually make a car such that the next time we do it, we have a clear process flow, and we know how to get there. along the way, we met a lot of challenges.

it's been, uh, well, we talked about one on the solar panel, we've developed motors that are directly in the wheels. we haven't seen those on production vehicles yet, so a lot of testing and effort went into getting those reliable and working. so, overall, i think the fair question is when we first started the company, when we were five inexperienced guys, we hugely underestimated the challenge of getting a car into production. maybe that's a good thing �*cause if we hadn't, i don't know if we would have started it. it's really hard to start a car company. i think that's the best answer to your to your question. one last question in the room here. i'm going to look around, i think lady at the left here, thank you very much. hi, i'm jane from the royal academy of engineering. i've got a question forjamie about al. we heard this week in the news about sentient, self—aware ai, concerns about that. do you think as capability of ai increases, we might actually get bored of driving?

well, ithinkthat's- a fascinating question, a rather philosophical one, perhaps. the way that al systems today work, and will work for the foreseeable - future, is, they're essentially... what a neural network is, - an artificial neural network is, is essentially a bunch _ of multiplications and additions. that's all that is, literally, all it is. j so, you know, the gpu, - the graphics processing units that are used to evaluate these artificial neural networks, i theyjust sit there, - churn all day doing very, very basic mathematical calculations and out comes the answer. - so, you know, unless there are sort of fundamental changes in how - these systems operate, _ which is entirely possible in terms of research breakthroughs, - there's no chance, in my mind, that these things will get bored, .

in that sense, because they're just doing the job that they're...they're just executing again and again - through these multiplications. love that question, which brings us perfectly, really, to the end of this programme. we've heard about everything from the future of solar and electric vehicles and ai, and even touching on the first ai strike, ithink, there. on behalf of the bbc world service, whether you'rejoining us via the internet around the world or here with us in this fabulous information age gallery, pleasejoin me in giving a warm round of applause to our brilliant pioneering engineers — jamie shotton, arjo van der ham, linda zhang. applause.

hello, good afternoon. all change weatherwise into the start of next week. it will be unsettled with thundery showers and also feeling cooler. but one more day of that extreme heat and the met office weather warning which extends all the way up to northern england and into eastern areas of wales. it is valid until midnight tonight, the heat uncomfortable for many, of course. some thunderstorms around today with a bit of wet weather out towards northern ireland and scotland, some flashes of lightning already, but for most, the heat and sunshine continues, high cloud in the south, temperatures for some could get as high as 34—35. 0vernight tonight, still warm and uncomfortable for sleeping.

some showery rain in western wales and the south—west of england, otherwise dry, temperatures dipping to the mid— to high teens for many. so, a warm start again tomorrow morning. but more showers around on monday, the thunderstorms particularly across england and wales will be hit and miss, some places this is bbc news. the headlines at 4... a group of charities and community organisations has called the rises in energy bills a "national emergency," as labour is to call for the energy price cap to be frozen in october. but the energy minister say their plan won't work. i think we have to be a little bit careful in some of these — labour's seemingly magical solution to just wish it all away, that will have consequences. the son of author sir salman rushdie says his injuries

are life changing but that his feisty and defiant sense