>> i am caroline hyde. this is bloomberg technology. we are showcasing the innovation, diversity, and power of the regional tech economy. hour, up in the next boston has become a standout city for testing self-driving car's, and we are at opti mus rides.

autonomous driving technology improves rapidly. how are they factoring in safety? we will hear from the toyota research interest to -- institute. and our interview with tom kennedy, explaining why boston remains one of the best areas of talent in the world. to our top story. in the race for autonomous vehicles supremacy, it is a handful of u.s. cities leading the charge to test self-driving car is buried in 2017, they launched a testing program on public roads in the seaport district, where lyft kicked off timus rideber and optimistop kicked off. >> this self driving vehicle

startup is on a roll. the company is optimus ride, a play on the transformers robot, and it's located in boston's seaport. test vehiclest of -- us city.ll it optim we are able to reconfigure the track by changing the lane markers. we can figure this to any type of intersection we want. a typical four-way intersection, stop signs. >> the ceo and cofounder says optimus ride is different from other startups in that they are not focused on long-distance but on the last mile of transportation. at a now, they are testing nearby housing development, driving residents to the local train station. this is different from companies such as uber, which are testing

autonomous driving for longer trips. the recent pedestrian death in arizona shutdown testing in boston. optimus ride restarted after safety reviews. >> there is a goal of educating the public. whenever you have a new technology, you have to educate the public. when you start in the medium speed environment, it's much better than going to a high-speed vehicle that is autonomous as well. adoption has to start at those type of speed regimes. >> this m.i.t. spinoff has about 60 employees, and he expects to grow to 150 by mid-2019. they plan to expand their fleet of electric vehicles to 50 by the end of this year. >> we also expect the growth to be nonlinear around engineering. specifically in the areas of robotics, machine intelligence. >> with more than $23 million from investors, optimus ride is searching for more partners. >> we are adding more partners

as we go, so one of the big partners we have is nvidia. they make the top gpu's for self driving, so they are a great partner for us. they build all the computers and our vehicles.to the school for the blind is a big advocacy group for equitable mobility. >> optimus ride plans to remain private. they will have competition to release self driving cars. not just manufacturers like volkswagen and hyundai but also google and bloomberg boston. caroline: joining us now for more is the ceo of optimus ride. we were hearing that competition is on, ryan. who will be first to actually make money with this? where in the food chain do you fit?

>> we are already deploying. we are deploying at union point here in massachusetts. we believe it's actually the world's first revenue-generating provides us validation not only in technology, but also markets. they are moving people autonomously on the site. that's important for validating that market. for a scum of that market segment itself being able to deploy in these medium speed environment where we can provide and solve the first and last mile is a real problem that almost all cities have. caroline: the problem that all cities have that the governments are having to invest in, infrastructure for making the congestion ease, they are investing billions. should governance be -- governments be investing more money? governmentsically, have. the u.s. government gave a lot of funding to darpa in the early days for the original testing and development of autonomous

vehicles. this is literally hundreds of millions of dollars 10 years ago. the industry took those ideas and ran with it. we need continual investment. the right policies enable autonomous vehicles to be deployed. there are different policies in different states. how do you get uniformity across that? we see singapore push very hard for this, and that is where government can play a big role to provide the environment or framework for autonomous vehicles to become commercialized. caroline: would this be a better economic bet? that we have as a company is that self driving is the key disruptive technology for the story first century. if you are able to deploy autonomous vehicles, you solve many problems. he saw a lot of carbon emissions problems and a lot of the other issues of too much parking in cities by enabling shared autonomous electric economy to happen.

those are the things you're able to actually do right away once you have that system working. aboutne: you talked infrastructure needs and regulatory harmonization. are they the blocks to seeing more revenue-generating pilots that we have already got? >> i don't think so. the way we can deploy, you can do it in these locations like we have already by working with the right kind of groups. in fact, when you have those in place, you create a showcase for regulators to come and see we have a system that works in massachusetts. you can come and see the system work and that lubricates the environment for you to begin deploying in other locations. caroline: how much of a setback was the death we saw in arizona with the uber car, and has it -- you had to stop for a day or so. how much harder is it to win hearts and minds, do you think? ryan: a day or two is not a big

deal cannot not be testing. we talked to the city and state regime and howng we create lots of redundancy. we have bank test operators on the vehicle, and we talked a lot about how we recruit and train our drivers and all that. that was important for setting the stage on what we do in terms of functional safety. once you have that in place, people feel confident about that. the other key part is education. how do you educate? how you get people to adopt? the best ways to deploy through pilot. a ploy and getnd actual users, and they feel the system works well and is solving a problem, that spreads. that is really -- build it and they will come sort of attitude around deployment. caroline: where are you taking the revenue cut? ryan: sorry? caroline: where are you taking the revenue cut? how are you being paid for the software you are building? ryan: what we do is provide mobility as a service. the client, in this case the developer of union point, is basically providing amenities,

self-driving mobility amenity, to the tenants of the development. the passenger does not pay but the client does as an amenity. if you were to go to any university campus, students don't pay for the shuttle. but the university does. you are providing a b to b model for self driving and it is starting to validate itself through the number of clients we are already deploying or starting to negotiate with. caroline: you are working with partners. what other partners would you want? you already said nvidia is providing the chips. who, eventually, makes the most money out of this? everyone is going to be fighting for the data. the car companies want the data, the tech companies want the data. ryan: hopefully self-driving , companies are one of the key winners. that is going to be important. the other key players are the car companies themselves. right? oem's, tier one suppliers. our company is vehicle agnostic. we focus on developing the software and integrating the sensing into the vehicle to make it drive autonomously. caroline: did you want more vehicle suppliers to come to you?

ryan: i mean of course. ,why not? we can take any vehicle and integrate our technology. and make it drive. we have built sel- driving trucks, self-driving sedans, self-driving forklifts. we have built all vehicles of various sorts, scales, and even powertrain. so being vehicle agnostic is pretty important, because the market will dictate what kind of vehicles you actually want to have. caroline: talk to us about your vision now for optimus. we know that you have raised money through the november close, $18 million. is more money needed to continue to scale, to continue to see more of these vehicles? ryan: it is obvious you need more money to scale. every major business needs to do that. if you look at the funding that has been raised for other self -driving companies, there is much more money needed to be able to scale, that's for sure. but from our point of view, scalability is proven through pilots. and once you have that, it is very easy to build the capital

you need to do this. caroline: you don't need any more money? ryan: there is a need for more money always, whether institutional, strategic funding. it's all part of the whole ability to be able to scale. and once you have minimal viable product, as they always say, you are able to seek the right capital that you need in order to scale. and for us we think we have a , very scalable product because we are not only vehicle-agnostic, but the environments we have are everywhere in the united states, everywhere internationally as well. every city has a problem of the first and last mile. every city has challenges with -- every community has challenges with congestion. if you can solve those through one example, the whole world can see it and you can export that. caroline: thank you very much. wonderful. thank you for hosting us as well. ryan chin, ceo of optimus ride. meanwhile, shares of cisco are falling in after-hours trading . this after third-quarter revenue

came in at $12.5 billion. that's versus estimates of 14 $14.4 billion. earnings per share were $.56 versus estimates of $.65. cisco also gave an upbeat forecast for fourth-quarter sales, a signal of healthy demand for equipment and software. for some context, cisco shares are still up 18% this year. in other earnings news, china's most popular social network, tencent, posted quarterly earnings that beat estimates, income jumping 61% and users exceeding one billion. tencent owns the giant wechat messaging platform. coming up, he stood before american lawmakers, and now facebook ceo mark zuckerberg is , getting ready to face the music on the other side of the atlantic, next. and if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio. you can listen on the bloomberg radio app, bloomberg.com, and in the u.s. on sirius xm. , this is bloomberg.

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caroline: welcome back to a special edition of "bloomberg technology," live from the optimus ride headquarters in boston. now facebook ceo mark zuckerberg , is preparing to head to europe to answer european lawmakers' questions about how the data of as many as 2.7 million europeans could have ended up in the hands cambridgeing firm analytica. for more, let's turn to sarah frier.

are you surprised by this decision they will accept europe's invitation? next week is a very important week in europe, because that is the week gdp are r goes into effect, the privacy regulation that has caused facebook to make a whole bunch of changes to privacy settings for users, not just in europe but around the world. and so zuckerberg is going at a , time when he really needs to be on the good side of this division of government. caroline: interesting. so timing is everything. 25, when the general data protection rules come in. what about the fear of missing out being felt by the u.k. politicians? we got some angry tweets. sarah: that is such an interesting back-and-forth. that committee has been asking zuckerberg to appear over and over. and yesterday, facebook responded to their questions at length but was very evasive about the idea that zuckerberg

would come testify, and actually said he has no plans to go to the u.k., and they were disappointed in the government that they did not find facebook answers to be sufficient. which i just felt was a strange thing for a company that has been under investigation to say that they are disappointed. here is a tweet today from that committee. i will read it out to you. "we remain open to mark zuckerberg of facebook giving evidence via video link or in person. him not appearing before us is not just a snob to the comments, but more importantly, a snub to the u.k. and millions of facebook users who deserve answers." so that pressure is not going away despite zuckerberg's intent to smooth things over with the e.u., which i should mention, is going to have a behind closed -- going to happen behind closed doors. caroline: fascinating what the damien collins mp has been saying, who leads that

committee. sara, talk to us also about the news we are getting not only from mark zuckerberg from facebook, but also the keen whistleblower who drew this to attention with regards to cambridge analytica and the data scandal. it seems to be revolving around russia. sarah: so wiley in front of congress said it is possible that the facebook data that was given to cambridge analytica could have been shared with russia, in part because it was so easily accessible. this story is not going away. facebook says there are 200 other apps they're looking into that could be similar -likeidge analytica situations so we will see what , happens. caroline: fascinating the reaction today. thank you. now coming up, our exclusive , interview with tom kennedy. we discuss why the company has stayed in the boston area for

decades. this is bloomberg. ♪

caroline: welcome back to a special edition of "bloomberg technology" in boston. now racien is a global leader in , technology driven solutions. being a global technology with more than 64,000 employees, we asked ceo tom kennedy about the decision to remain headquartered in boston. tom: numerous universities, you have m.i.t., harvard, boston university, university of massachusetts, tufts, a whole set of universities that provide the technical skills required to work in the industry and help to develop the next generation systems and solutions that will be able to compete in a global marketplace. caroline: what are the next

generation of system and solutions? what things are you seeing being built here? tom: the whole area of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and how you apply them to your product solutions is a whole new wave of capability we are looking at significantly and putting those type of products into our solutions that we provide customers. caroline: 3-d printing? tom: 3-d printing we call it , additive manufacturing, which opens a new door for companies relative to their supply chain. they build those products within their company or do they have them than outside? -- done outside? so it is a whole new dilemma in terms of figuring that out. and if manufacturing is going to change the way we do manufacturing in the future. one of the things that has changed in terms of technology, is for years, we thought we were on a linear curve in terms of technology. one of the aspects was called moore's law, so every 18 months you double your processing speed. in today's world, we are on an exponential curve. we are right at the knee of that

curve right now. some of the technologies, one of them additive manufacturing, but also machine learning, artificial intelligence, and something called nanotechnology. all of these technologies are coming together at the same time that are really going to change the way we live and work and do business in the world in the future. caroline: you as a business leader, how do you ensure you are ahead of the curve and the startups? tom: we hire the best people, and the best people are in boston. we hire from the best universities there are, and those best universities are in boston. caroline: what about the talent diversity? so much focus on the fact that , yes you need the best talent, , but you need to ensure it is the right sort of working environment as well, women, ethnic minorities. how are you focused on that? tom: we find to get the best product development, it helps to have diversity of thought and having a diverse team putting those products and solutions together, because our customers are diverse. so to be able to provide the right solutions, it helps to have a diverse team developing a solution.

the issue we are facing -- and it's not just raytheon, all technology companies -- is how do you get a diverse workforce in today's environment when there are not a lot of women coming out of universities with science and technology and engineering degrees? and so that is an area where , companies are working to drive that solution and six that solution. -- fix that solution. caroline: how are you helping drive it? tom: we are heavily involved in science, technology, engineering, and math activities. for example one program we just , started is with the girl scouts of america working with , them on stem initiatives and a , so if they do that they wind up with a stem badge , for the girl scouts. caroline: where are finding talent pools by regional perspective? china is producing more and more great talent. are they coming here to study, to live? are you putting parts of your business and other parts of the world to ensure you can harvest that talent? tom: we are global company, folks in the united kingdom, london, scotland, folks across

europe, and the asia-pacific region. we have a landed company in australia, raytheon australia, and we also have activities in the gcc in the middle east. so we do have a global level of talent around the world, but the united states has some of the best universities in the world. in fact many of our employees , worldwide have attended universities in the united states. and boston is a key area where a lot of the schools provide that background and talent capabilities to help any business go to the next level in a global marketplace. caroline: how can boston make sure it remains a number one talent pool? tom: well, i think it needs to ensure it is business friendly. in the city of boston, as it grows we continue to work , transportation issues relative to getting people into and out of the city. and that we continue to maintain the university structure that provides affordable and high-level education, especially in the sciences. caroline: you talked about cyber -- a.p. previously and the fact that that sometimes is a concern for us about cybersecurity

concerns and protection. do you feel the focus at the moment in terms of the u.s. on ip, particularly versus china is , the right way to look at it? tom: i think we have to protect our ip. to run a business, you have to be able to protect your inventions, your new technologies to compete in the , international marketplace. if folks are stealing that ip and replicating our technologies and undermining you, it impacts the business. caroline: and when you say your presence in gcc and the middle east, i mean a topic of , conversation at the moment has to be geopolitical risks. how does that affect you as a business? tom: well we operate worldwide. , every day i am constantly becoming a geopolitical expert relative to what is going on in the world, because what is going around the world impacts me for day-to-day business activities. caroline: that was our conversation with raytheon ceo tom kennedy. now coming up, we will talk , about the path forward for self-driving cars in boston and around the world. we will cover the waste improve -- cover the ways to improve

vehicle safety for autonomous technology. and later, how can technology improve the transportation in -- infrastructure of a city? we discussed the boston's transportation commissioner. this is bloomberg. ♪ mom, dad, can we talk?

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caroline: welcome back to "bloomberg technology." i am caroline hyde. and we are broadcasting in boston all this week and have set up shop today in optimus ride's headquarters. most of this hours, we have been we have been discussing the fastest-growing industries, autonomous driving. many predict that the majority of cars will have self driving capabilities sooner than you think. will the road be safer if humans are no longer behind the wheel? for more, john leonard, toyota research institute vp of automated driving research. wonderful to have you here. so will humans not be , interacting with vehicles?

at the moment, you are working with a jewel sort of project. john: so i am an m.i.t. professor, and i have been involved in this technology my whole career. and i have the opportunity to work with toyota, who chose boston as a place for its new research laboratories, for access to talent and the technology network. and so we are pursuing a dual , strategy, something we call chauffeur fully self driving, , but also something called guardian, which is a human driven car but an autonomy system in the background ready ready to jump into take over to try to improve safety. caroline: so, does that mean it would just be a step toward fully autonomous vehicles? would the interim period be that there would always be a human behind the will with access to that wheel? john: it's a great question. i think there are many paths. self-driving is the space race in tech of the 21st century. we have the traditional oems,

startups, the tech giants. there are many different hats. -- paths. it is clear to me we will have human cars for a long time. the average cars on the road for at least 10 years. the interaction of humans and machines opens up a whole new space of interesting challenges. caroline: do the humans inherently make them less safe? john: that's a great question. a lot of accidents are due to human error, but human skills are actually very complementary to ai technology. humans are bad at sort of monitoring an autonomous system for a long time. if a car can do 99% of the job, you have to be ready to jump in. whereas technology can be vigilant and help the human in an unexpected situation. t -- house so -- how so? john: i think about making left

turns. i have a teenager learning how to drive in the boston area and we have challenging intersections. the question of how you get the experience to make decisions, is it safe for me to go? but also the social interaction problem. a lot of times you have to way at other drivers. those are challenging for machines to solve. caroline: how will the ai inherently nudge the human to say, ok, now you need to step in? some drinking your coffee stop , listening to music. john: timmy i believe driving is , something we should be paying attention all the time. it should be a full-time job. current technology like automatic emergency braking, a car can kind of step in and slow the vehicle down. imagine a more broader set of capabilities where the car might take evasive maneuvers. stay on the road, don't hit things, don't get hit, you could probably dramatically reduce accidents. so going back to the left turn, , across traffic let's say , teenager or elderly driver went to go when there was a car coming. the autonomy might step in and prevent them from going. it might have a perceptual awareness, 360 degree view that

, can help a human who is looking back and forth, trying to say, is it safe to go or not? caroline: so what is your view in terms of when that will become ready and in use on the road and when we will have full autonomy? john: so that question of when is so hard to answer. i tend to be more on the side.r contrarian i think it will be longer than other folks. toyota is pursuing all product opportunities. i can't say any specific dates. it is not so much a question of when, where. there are limited deployments happening, for example arizona, trials here in south boston. technology might be -- and some folks have commented, some journalists, think of an early cell phone coverage map. initially they might only work in big cities in overtime grew to larger areas. autonomy might relate slowly out -- percolate slowly out of urban centers, but it might take longer than people think. caroline: is regulation the hurdle here? john: i think regulation is an

issue. but i'm not really an expert on regulation. just purely the technology aspects, things like interacting with police officers and dealing with snow that we get in boston. and across much of the country. there are a lot of technical challenges, road construction. so there's plenty of technical challenges that need a lot of work if we are going to achieve the equivalent of the 2018 cell phone coverage map of the u.s. for full autonomy. it could take a long time. caroline: what about the infrastructure, 5g? john: so vehicle to vehicle infrastructure and communications are not part of our current mandate. we are thinking about machine learning, artificial intelligence harvesting data, , and interacting with people. toyota has recently announced it chips inucing the dsrc all vehicles soon. i want every tool in the toolbox. i think if cars can communicate and help each other out of

tricky situations, maybe we can get a social good will emerge. perhaps unfriendly boston drivers, their cars will be friendly and help each other navigate. caroline: friendly cars to each other. it is great to have you here. thank you for talking us through the technological challenges, john leonard with the toyota research institute. now, the united states senate has voted to restore the obama -era net neutrality rules. the vote was 52-47 in favor of rules that would keep internet service providers from throttling speed and favoring their own content. president trump's appointed fcc voted 3-2 along party lines to roll back the regulations late last year. however wednesday's victory for , net neutrality proponents may be short-lived. the house is not expected to take up the vote, and even if they did pass the bill, it is expected that president trump would veto it. now coming up, what you need to piageo.bout

a boston-based startup that is shaping the future of transportation, not on the road, but the sidewalk. later, it is not just a plane, it is a car. we speak to the ceo looking to take you from the tarmac to the clouds. this is bloomberg. ♪

caroline: in the race for the future of transportation, one startup is focusing not on driving but on walking. piaggio fast-forward, a boston

division of the italian company known for a vespa scooters, is developing a robot to carry cargo and follow a pedestrian. >> meet gita, a robot designed to identify and follow you. >> gita is a personal mobility assistant. has a cargo bay which holds approximately 45 pounds. >> gita was created by the ceo of piaggio fast-forward. >> our goal is really to enable pedestrian-based lifestyle, allow people to walk more, better, further, and faster. with gita, you throw the goods into a vehicle and start walking. >> the company is a boston-based subsidiary of piaggio, the italian creator of vespa motor scooters. >> our brief was to invent something new, a vehicle you have not seen but that could be the equivalent maybe of a disruptive vehicle like the best vespa was in 1986,

but in 2018. >> the target consumer is similar. >> we are looking at a consumer buyer as our target, the kind of buyer who would want to have a vespa motor scooter. >> the price tag to start, around $3000. >> one of the defining features of the way cities are being redesigned and have been redesigned over the last 30 years is the growing importance of pedestrian-only areas areas , not accessible to cars and trucks. we think that is a trend that is going to expand over the coming century. and gita is a vehicle designed precisely for those environments. >> piaggio fast-forward has a fleet of prototype vehicles and expects to complete its first generation production models this summer. the ceo predicts 10,000 vehicles will hit the market by early 2019. >> we also think gita will have extremely useful applications in suburban-type environment as well, where people sometimes would like to walk that the distances are sufficiently great

as to create a resistance, or they often involve moving around with kids. and so having fleets of these , kinds of vehicles could also allow people not to have to reach for the keys to the car. >> gita's competition is limited , but there is a growing number of companies working on delivery robots. and not everyone is on board. san francisco banned those robots on sidewalks last year. >> they're only competition inasmuch as we are both interested in sidewalks. but the reality is their robots are designed in a different way for a different set of use than ours are. our motto is autonomy first -- autonomy for humans. and what autonomy for humans means to us is a focus on human -centered design, in other words creating vehicles that don't , replace human functionality but expand them. >> the company is expanding, too. >> currently around 35 full-time employees.

we are expecting by the end of the current calendar year to be somewhere closer to 100 total. so we are in a very active growth phase right now as we move towards essentially moving gita into production and out onto the market. >> bloomberg, boston. caroline: you want one? let's cover the bigger picture of initiatives, roads, and public transportation in boston. we caught up with the city transportation commissioner and first discussed how the tech industry is helping to improve transportation throughout boston. >> we have a great environment for testing new technology, for identifying really cutting-edge ways of enhancing mobility. we released go boston 2030, a cutting-edge mobility plan for long-term growth for the city. a hallmark of that is how we engage the public in helping to form what future mobility will look like.

caroline: paint the picture. what will it look like? what is the technology underlying it? gina: a lot of the technology is around connecting points of mobility and using data in a really smart way to help inform how we shape transportation policy decisions, whether it is around enhancing our public transit system or utilizing adaptive technology to communicate with vehicles and with mass transit vehicles, buses, and trains, and certainly autonomous vehicles part of the mix. caroline: talk to us about autonomous vehicles. because the self-driving car testing program has been put on hold since the tragic event with an uber killing a woman back in march. where do you see that coming back online? is it still the right decision to have it on hold? gina: sure. in boston, we did take a pause for testing.

band we have three companies that are actively testing with us now in the seaport location where we are. after that incident, we paused testing. we regrouped with our partners who are testing, and we really make sure they are adhering to some of the safety protocols. so we actually have resumed testing. and they are really great partners for us in terms of being transparent about what those testing protocols are and making sure that as we roll them out, we are forward-thinking and safety is our number one priority. caroline: what sort of key elements did you want to see to enhance safety? gina: we wanted to make sure they're adhering to the protocol we established, which is there is a safety driver in the vehicle at all times as well as sort of a system person gathering data on how the system is performing. so there are two separate

functions, and they are always making sure the vehicle is operating in a safe mode, adhering to all the normal driving protocols, whether it is signal notification and adhering to speed limits and crosswalks and things like that. so, they are required to submit reports to us on a regular basis, which is all available to the public. all of our testing protocols are out on the city's website, all the information you want to know about how boston has taken the lead on this is on our website. caroline: why do you want boston to take the lead on this? gina: it's important to make sure your mobility systems are not only functioning optimally for current conditions, but also take into consideration what the future landscape will look like. and in boston, we have great partners here with our universities. autonomy and optimus and active. and we have a very fertile environment for encouraging that sort of creativity.

caroline: what about the environment for bike sharing? this is an area with a program like blue cross. it is interesting, in other cities, we're seeing a rise in dockless bike sharing, which can be efficient but can cause chaos. how are you managing that? gina: any program that improves mobility options for folks, whether it is riding a bicycle, walking, public transit, is a terrific thing. we have hired an active transportation director a couple years ago in boston. and she is responsible not only for the bike program but all -- also all things active transportation, ensuring we incorporate mobility options into the street design. that said, we have a great program with blue cross blue shield, which sponsors our bike share system. and that is a dock system and we have been really thoughtful and strategic in how we provide opportunities for bike share in

all of our neighborhoods in building out a network so folks in downtown boston can visit our outlying neighborhoods and that those folks have access to bike share. caroline: that was transportation commissioner gina fiandaca. coming up, taking to the skies. just how soon will it be from when you pull out of your garage and wind up in the clouds? we find out next. this is bloomberg. ♪

caroline: welcome back to a special edition of "bloomberg technology," live from the

optimus ride headquarters in boston. and speaking of rides, there is one bit of future tech we have been promised for years, and our next guest is racing to make it a reality. the flying car. that's what a massachusetts startup is working on. are they flying cars, or drivable planes? how will they be regulated and how soon will it be before the rubber no longer meets only the road? i welcome the ceo of terra fugia. welcome. so first flying car to the , market, still aiming for that? >> we should be delivering our first product to customers the middle of next year. caroline: and what are they like? are they a driving plane or flying car? >> yes that particular product , has wings that fold up, so you park it in your garage, drive it to an airport, unfold the wings, and take off to wherever you want to go. caroline: how do you ensure the pilot is harnessing safety, is focused on safety going

forward? this is a whole new area that needs to be regulated. chris: we need to meet the regulations by the national highway safety transportation group as well as the faa. the person driving has to be a licensed driver in the u.s., and when they are behind the stick when they are flying, they have to be a licensed pilot with the faa. we built in the safety aspects. they are a bit of a challenge for us because they need to have the automobile safety aspects, seatbelts, airbags, all the crumple zones, and all of that is part of our testing process and requirement. when you're in there, we need all the things that go with that, including a parachute. when you are in the air, the last resort is to pull the parachute and come straight down and land safely. caroline: how are the regulators about this? is it easy to negotiate with them? are they looking forward thinking? chris: we were one of the first to be in this space and will certainly be the first to have a road-able aircraft.

a flying car that's in production. so there were some challenges along the way. in some cases, we need to get the regulators to compromise. for instance, an aircraft windshield is an acrylic piece of equipment and an automobile , one is safety glass. but if a bird strikes the windshield when you are in flight, the safety glass means you can't see. so we needed to have the faa and highway safety folks compromise to allow us to use an aircraft -quality windshield in an automobile, and they did. caroline: we are seeing pictures of the vehicles. the transition, i believe is the , one that is coming on as soon as next year. but what about the tsx aircraft? this is one that goes far faster, for further. how does that change the rules of transportation? chris: it is a much different design. in fact for that design, it is a , tiltrotor kind of vehicle, a different development, actually much more challenging to come up with that one.

and honestly what we have done , now is we have decided that the second product we will produce is going to be an urban air mobility vehicle, a flying taxi. in effect, right? tfx, thee put the small tiltrotor vehicle on the back motor for the time being, because we see a real opportunity with urban air mobility. caroline: you have just been to the elevate even to that uber put on. this is getting a crowd in space , next? chris: it is. i think we are in a unique position. at the top of the boeing and airbus, clearly excited and interested that this is likely to be a new market for them. they have actually acquired some of the startup companies and are fully funding them. at the other end of the spectrum there are lots of small , companies that are startups struggle for funding every year. we find ourselves in a different situation. we are now owned by the largest manufacturer of cars in china, who are fully funding us, but we don't have the other aspects of

the big companies like boeing and airbus, so we are very agile. caroline: you can be nimble. the chinese company, how much money does it take? chris: it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars to get you fully developed into this process. caroline: what about autonomous? when is that? chris: it is different for cars and aircraft, but in some aspects, similar. both have been under development for a long time. we're taking an approach that says, we are going to start with pilots in the vehicle, something the faa can certify immediately , that we can put into the air space right now. with the aspect of autonomy in the vehicle so we can demonstrate that capability. when the faa is ready to accept that, or the other agencies around the world, then we can take the pilot out. in order to get into the market we are taking a different , approach. next, our urban taxi, a four passenger and one private -- pilot vehicle. when we are ready, we will call

-- pull the pilot. caroline: dates when that will come on tap? chris: we are flying the first prototype next year and looking to deliver around 2023. caroline: thank you for making time for us. that does it for this edition of "bloomberg technology," live from boston. tomorrow, we will be at the historic fenway park speaking with none other than boston red sox president sam kennedy. also, the boston celtics president. that is all for now. this is bloomberg. ♪

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