tv The Communicators CSPAN November 14, 2016 8:00am-8:31am EST
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>> host: hype will only set false expectations with an undecided public, and that's when it comes to driverless cars. what did you mean? >> guest: ing that's exactly what i meant. it's quite straightforward. if you read a lot of the headlines, you see a lot of the proclamations that automotive executives are making and, look, in the automotive business we're used to a lot of hype. and i think when it comes to everyday matters, a little bit of marketing hype is okay. when it comes to matters such as this, i think it's a little bit disingenuous because words are flippantly thrown around.
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when so and so says autonomous, so and so says self-driving. a consumer thinks i come out of my home, i hit a button, and that car will take me anywhere in america at any time under any conditions, and that's not the case. if you go to some of the tests that are being run in pittsburgh, the headline says fleet of autonomous cars roaming pittsburgh. it doesn't tell you there's two engineers in the car and there's at least four to five interruptions that are there. these things are fine. it's new technology, it's emerging, it's coming on. but if we overhype it and overstimulate it, the customer's going to have an expectation, and when that's not met, there's going to be a lack of trust. and i think this is true with the consumer and also with the government. and, of course, the government's point of view if we start to see we're making these proclamations that aren't true or manifest themselves in the marketplace, you're going to have an issue. and, of course, what we want with this technology is we want
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the technology to match customer expectation aligned with government regulation, and then you have it. and the reason i'm sensitive to this is i think this is breathtakingly cool technology. i mean, when i entered this business in 1993, 1994, never could i have imagined in my wildest dreams -- as i have been the last seven or eight years -- inside a car that's blasting around a race track with no one behind the wheel, driving from stanford to las vegas, almost 600 miles fully i awe on autono. it's here. we just have to communicate and build the expectation of what's real, possibilities are and how long it's going to take. my fear is overhype is we'll curtail its full potential. simple as that. >> host: where is audi on the trail to fully autonomous cars? >> guest: i think a number of things. i think, first and foremost, we are a crazy, pioneering company, and on this aspect we've been that way.
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audi didn't just wake up yesterday and decide to get into the autonomous business. it started in 2005 with stanford and an autonomous challenge which we won back then. it then led to 2009 where we're racing in the desert, 2010, went up to pike's peak. we've been around race tracks at high speeds, so it's been a long effort. if you want to really look at where i see the world, it sits in two camps to try to dine it. there will be -- define it. there will be a camp that is continuing to it rate and bring more advanced technologies into the marketplace. so the society of automotive engineers, they look at this combination of assist to automation from 0-5. zero has absolutely nothing on it. level one is assist technologies. we have had these technologies on a car for probably 15 years, adaptive cruise systems, brake
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guard systems. customers buy them. you know, if you look at our a6 and a7, 60-70% of the cars we sell have these level one technologies on them. now, we just launched six, seven, eight, nine months ago an a4 and a q7. this is level two. and there are other manufacturers that have level two as well. and our definition is you have all of those assist features, you have some beginnings of getting into autonomous features. and right now we call it traffic jam assist. it's intended for traffic jams. you still have to be piloting the the car, you still have to be sitting behind the wheel, and it lets you in the right circumstances take your hands off the wheel for approximately 15 seconds. so i admit this is just the start of the technology. but on the q7s which we sell, approximately 25% of the q7s, customers have this technology on them.
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and this, to me, is what the automotive business does. we bring technologies, we promote them to the consumer, and the consumer pays based on whether they see the value. now, our next step is going to be a8 which will be coming potentially next year, and this will be what's called level three. and the simple definition of that is you're going to get the speeds up to approximately 35 be miles per hour, you're going to be allowed, in the right conditions, to have your hands off the wheel for dramatically longer than 15 seconds. this is what we call traffic jam pilot. again, still below 35 mules per hour -- miles per hour, and this is where you're going to see what we call adaptation. the second phase is what i'll call the kennedy let's go to the moon moonshot phase, and this is level five. fully autonomous in almost all circumstances. in parallel fashion, we are also working on that as well. i think those applications would
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probably confine themselves to more of a restricted urban environment at least at the beginning, and that's the two worlds. we're going to continue to bring the consumer along on this technology. level three, we'll be the first manufacturer with that in the a8 and also work on what we call the moon item shot, fully autonomous. no one behind the wheel, just someone getting around in this vehicle. we believe 100% in this technology which is why we're so aggressively pursuing it. >> host: now, some car companies have said 2020, 2025 for a level five. >> guest: yeah. >> host: is that optimistic? >> guest: i think 2025 is too bad. i think 2020 could be optimistic. again, what exactly they're talking about usually has a lot of wiggle room in there. but in our minds, look, sometime in 2018 we'll bring level three. we think we'll be able to bring let's call it a level three plus which would allow higher speeds, that would probably come in a, you know, 2020, 21 window.
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you could see a space in 2025 where you have fully autonomous. but my definition of fully autonomous would be in a confined area. let's name the city of san francisco or the island of manhattan. i don't see 2025 anywhere in america anytime hit a button, i can go there. i think there's far too much complexity, mapping, a lot of roads in america, and on and on. but i think the important thing to look at and the way i view it is everyone is always pressing to what i'll call the .02% scenario or .03% scenario. the truth of the matter is what people don't like about driving is congested areas in major city, rotting in traffic. ands that is what we are attacking right off the bat. we see a lot of people that like to drive on open roads, like to cruise around their neighborhood, like to do those types of things, and that's why we feel this is the way to go. let's address the major issues. and the major issues is traffic
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and what comes of traffic as we all know? like all human endeavors, humans get bored, they get easily distracted, that's when they grab the phone, and that's when something bad happens. and the other thing i like to think about is, you know, you could drive a car to your commute an hour and 15 minutes each way, and for one hour, 14 minutes and 48 seconds, you can be dialed in, hand behind the wheel, dialed in. one second, one-half second, one split second, you can look away, you can look at a phone, and you can pay with you and your family's lives. and why would we not be taking of these technologies that are there? we can bring them. we can mitigate that, and that's what we're looking to do. >> host: you mentioned a revel two package on this a7, $2400 is the cost. >> guest: yep. >> host: are you recouping your investment at that cost, or is
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there a subsidy there? >> guest: you know, i think truth with told what happens in the automotive business is, obviously, you have a lot of high invest up front, and, of course, you get that back as you're able to scale it over a host of models. so right now on this car at 400, probably -- 2400, probably not. as the q7 morphs into an a5, here it covers 20,000 units, next year 100,000 units, so the answer is, yes. it's going to give you this competitive advantage, and then you scale the competitive advantage. but back to your original question, you can only scale the competitive advantage if the consumer wants the technology. so this is a bet we're making. we believe the consumers do. so far they do and we feel good about it. the other thing i think is crucial though, and this is a nice advantage we have being in the luxury session isn't and being audi is we do command price premiums, we do command higher pricing. the type of people who purchase
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be our cars are highly educated. these are people who are affluent, and these are people who want the latest and greatest technology. so it's a little bit easier for us being many our position with our demographic and the mindset. we are really a creative class brand, if you will. audi's mantra sort of high-tech meets high design, so it works for us. a volume-oriented brand with a more prague pragmatic, strictly value-oriented customer, it's going to be a little tougher, without a doubt. >> host: in nhtsa's recent guidelines on autonomous vehicles as we go into that direction, data recording and sharing. is that something that audi supports? >> guest: yeah, look, if you look at their latest guidelines, it was 116 pages and a lot of governmental kind of stuff in there. this is not a criticism, but it's a hot to digest -- a lot to
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digest, so i'm going to zoom up at the higher level and, of course, like all government things, you like to pick out the things you agree with and like. so if i take the high level stuff, which i think was quite good. first and foremost, the government could have said let's stop this, and they did not. so we like that. the second thing they said is we want to get behind innovation, so we love that. the third thing that's crucial for us that they did write in there, it would be really helpful to get federal regulations aligned with independent state regulations on this issue because, of course, our desire, of course, is to launch one car with one technology set, with one regulation and sell that car throughout the 50 united states. and if you look at it right now, as you know, you have examples like new york that say you always have to have one hand on the wheel, for example. when we did our test in florida and did our state test in nevada
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and did our states in california, we had to get a distinct and different license for each one of these states. and be, of course, as you're a consumer, there's no way in the world you want to be driving a semiautonomous vehicle and have a different license for every state that you cross. the final piece of the puzzle has to do with the campaign and a little bit of america in general, let's say, is we do need to invest, no joke, in the infrastructure. in my strong opinion, the better the infrastructure, the greater leverageable advantage america can take in this technology. and we can position ourselves that this is the place where autonomous and piloted is coming to life. this will bring the new business models, the high-tech jobs, all the things that we theoretically all want, republican or democrat. so we need well paved roads, well lit roads, well divided roads, labeled, marks, all the types of things consumers want which bring jobs and all that, but it also has the knock-on
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effect of making it a more hospitable place for autonomous driving. i did see that in the 116 pages. of course, there was a lot more details in there, but i think it is heading in the right direction. we do applaud and recognize what the government just did. it's moving forward on this, which is cool. >> host: you just spoke about infrastructure. does that lend itself to connected cars? >> guest: obviously, it does as well because when you start to talk about infrastructure, you can give a more expansive definition of infrastructure. when you get to what you're saying, there's the hard infrastructure which is the road and the markings and all of that. but once you start to connect infrastructure be and a simplistic example, we've shown a technology, we've demonstrated a technology called traffic light online. it's a pretty slick piece of technology that in your mmi or instrument cluster, if you will, you can see the light, you can see when it's going to turn red, when it's going to turn green, how many seconds it's going to take to do that. now, this is simple type of stuff right now, but fast
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forward to where this could go, let's say it's linked to your autonomous car. it can start to slow down the car knowing there's a red light pending. this can save fuel, it can also be much more efficient on traffic flow. being someone from long island who grew up on the long island expressway, one brake tap whether it was due to looking at a phone or being distracted can spiral back to 70 cars. and you'll get more traffic just from inefficient flow and brake tapping. all of that stuff could go away when you start to get to the infrastructure. i think the other future state -- and, again, we're looking way out -- is the connect to not only the infrastructure in the city, but also from car to car. not just audis, all cars. and imagine the level of intelligence that could come if all that information was put up into a cloud and then accessed where applicable? you want to talk about traffic reports, you get a traffic report from 400 million cars out there on the u.s. roads.
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that would be one reice traffic report. you'd -- precise traffic report are. again, it can get there, but that's a connected data world that can make things a lot smarter. another example, and again it's futuristic, but it's there if you look at cities and you look at the issue with parking, think how bloody inefficient it is to go to park. you come in, you might have just passed a spot that's going to open. you circle around five decks of parking, burning fuel, wasting time, co2, then you come around, that's maybe taken. then you go back up. if you get into a connected world, you know exactly where that parking spot is, you're going to go directly there. the other thing is get yourself out of the car. you'll get 30-40% tighter parking in these things, more cars because you don't have to open doors and need all the gap for that. so there is a lot of opportunity with technology. so, again, i'm optimistic.
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>> host: what's going on in germany with autonomous conducted cars or connected? >> guest: i think very similar things. i think honestly what happened is a lot of the technology, particularly for audi and i think a lot of brands, you experienced it with uber in pittsburgh, people experienced it with the other manufacturers. a lot of the work is happening here because, frankly, a lot of the sensors, a lot of the chips, a lot of the companies in silicon valley, obviously, doing what silicon valley does brilliantly, they get a piece of technology, they invest, ask they move quickly. develop, develop, develop. so it's happening here. i think the rest of the world, obviously, has been catching wind of all of the demonstrations and press announcements, and now europe is starting to come onboard. i think they have a very similar thing as well. they have lots of, let's say, government regulations that were written some of them in the turn of the 20th century, some of them updated in the 1950s. this really needs a thorough looking at.
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and i think if you look at the european union, obviously, it gets more complicated, as you know, because the individual states. so as con so louised -- coso are suited and complex as it can be here, i would put america in the lead here. i think the second thing is the american consumer is open to these types of thicks. -- things. and hopefully, we get a government -- and i think we do -- that gets on board. i think there's an opportunity to blend this stuff and put america in the lead on something. but china is heading here as well. this is the holy grail. a lot of people are heading there. >> host: so is audi working with other car companies on this technology, or is this audi-centric? >> guest: oh, this is audi-centric. i think where we would work with the car companies is particularly on the regulations and infrastructure, because let's call that a common area
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where we all mutually agree that it needs to be there. most of the technology we're adopting on our own. the only one where we do have a partnership for the most part is a mapping company called here, and it's jointly owned by bmw, audi and mercedes benz. and if you look at the digitized future, as you can imagine, extremely accurate maps are going to become the holy actually. and this is something for one company to invest in probably would have been a little bit too expensive to scale it up and make it work and then only scale it to one brand. so it's where the three brands got together. i think there are examples that make sense and are smart, and i think if you look at a lot of the chip technology, certainly some of that is shared whether it's coming from the invidias or mobile ayes of -- mobile eyes of the world. right now we're adopting this because this my mind this is going to be a competitive enterprise like the automotive business is. someone is going to come into a showroom and say i want the best
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piloted or i autonomous car there is, who hases it? we want audi to be at the top of the list because i think these technologies are going to cause a little bit of a reset in the marketplace. people wants to buy a luxury car, someone could come this and say i want an autonomous car, and that's going to cause a reset. and if you don't have one, you're going to be off the list, and if you do have one, you're going to be on. >> host: you write: software companies actively aim to fail fast. they experiment in the real world to work out kinks as they go. this makes sense for those developing a smartphone operating system, but fine tuning on the fly isn't feasible in the real world. >> guest: obviously, i wrote it, and obviously i agree with it. the automotive business sometimes gets a bum rap. people say it's a little
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bureaucratic, it's a little slow to advance and to move, but the truth be told, there's a lot of government regulation in the automotive business, which there should be, and the stakes are extremely high. number one, we have people's lives, we have people's futures, we have people's families, they're moving in vehicles that are going 65-70 miles per hour. everything has to be right. and, actually, everything has to be right each and every time, all the time for a long time. and that sounds overstated, but it's not. when you hit that brake on a car 15 years from now in the middle of iowa with 120,000 miles on the car, those brakes need to work. when a crash happens, those airbags need to go off 100% full stop. now, if you just downloaded the latest ios software and your e-mail jams up or you get a flash code, okay, reset, no problem, get it back to life. no problem.
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there's no real, major life-altering this that's going to impact that. in the automotive business, there is. so, yes, it may make us perceived as cautious, it may make us perceived as a little bit slower, but we've got to be right all of the time, and that's what we want to do. >> host: cybersecurity and privacy. we've all seen the reports on hacking and cybersecurity. what about with these cars as they develop more and more technology and more and more software? >> guest: without a doubt, this is a massive and big and robust issue. i do not think we have all of the answers, and, you know, without a doubt that is a top priority on our list. and our 100% stated goal is to bring technologies that are embraced by customers, embraced by government regulators and secure and safe. now, certainly i'm not going to go into specifics about what we are and are not doing, but we certainly recognize the challenge, without a doubt.
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>> host: how did somebody who majored in comparative literature -- [laughter] end up at a car company? >> guest: that's a very good question. i majored in comparative literature. my ideal at the time was i was going to become a journalist for "the new york times" working in latin america. that was my goal. i speak spanish, i wrote my thesis on latin american authors and, of course, life takes a lot of turns. one of the turns that it took in my career path was to get an opportunity to work for another german car company, and i remember saying to myself, i was living in new york city at the time, and this company was up in new jersey, and i said, well, you know what? i'll just work there for one year. it'll look good on my resumé, they were looking for somebody in the digital space, and lo and behold, 24 years later, here i am as president of audi. but one of the things i like to say about my father who's now 80, 81, 82 years old.
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he bought an audi in 1971, 1972, and at the time having a 100ls in the streets of america with all of the, you know, camaros and dusters and and be country squires and javelins and all the other cars out there, this car was a spaceship. andi always thought, man, what was my dad thinking? and i loved the car. loved him and it's just something ma got in my -- in my mind with this brand and very proud to be here. >> host: have you found so far the federal government to be relatively passive when it comes to developing this technology? >> guest: i wouldn't say passive is the right word. i would say highly engaged. i know you had -- >> host: encouraging? >> guest: for me encouraging? absolutely 100% encouraging. i know you've had mr. rosekind on your program. we've had him in our office, we've had a number of conversations with him, we've had a number of meetings with the regulators, and i think it's clear. obama said, and he wrote in his
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op-ed -- by the way, i was in "the wall street journal," and he was in the pittsburgh post gazette, but he said we embrace this technology 100%. and the government regulations, if you simplify them, they said we want to move forward. so i am encouraged, and i have no reason yet to be discouraged. this is a technology if you take all the noise and drama aside, 90-94% of every accident that happens out there on the road is caused by human error from distraction or miscalculation. a whole lot of that can be alleviated with this technology. sensors are always on, radar is always on, they're not looking at cell phones, they're not 17 years old holding their girlfriend's hand, they're not talking to jimmy about what's happening at the party. these sensors don't do that. there's no high school prom for them, there's no twitter, there is on. and so i think that is the upside. and if you look at it and it's quite, you knowing troubling,
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accidents and fatalities are up, i think, 10%. there was just an article in "the new york times" the other day. how can that be when we have all these technologies in the car? yet fatal todays are up -- fatalities are up? granted, or there's slightly more miles being driven, but certainly i they're higher. so something is going on, be i think this technology is a big, big help. no debate. >> host: finally, this is the end of your "wall street journal" op-ed. whether you develop software or bend metal, we're all automakers now. [laughter] >> guest: well, this is a little ode to it seems to be the trendy thing now that everyone wants to get into the car business. uber, obviously, the rumors of apple pending, whatever they're doing with project titan, and google, of course, with an autonomous car and a host of other people. frankly, in my mind we love this, you know? the automotive business was sort of or ma ginnallized -- marginalized to the automotive
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page, now we're on the front page with technologies, with government regulations, we're on the front page of conversation. and if you look at the big three that's causing that, primary, number one is the conversation we had on autonomous and piloted. the second one, of course, is the regulationed and the emergence of battery and what that'll lead to, and the third is a changed business not el. the uber ors and the lyfts, a subscriber-bassed model versus what we've been used to. so you are going to see a profound amount of change in the automotive business over the coming years. that's why i reference ared so many players coming in. but i think basic truths won't go away. you need to have a strong brand, you need to embrace technology like crazy. don't defend the old world with, embrace the new world, and that's what we're doing here even if it is a little challenging sometimes. >> host: scott keogh is president of audi of america. "the communicators" has several recent programs on car technology. if you'd like to see those and
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programs on other communications and technology topics, go to c-span.org. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was create as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. ♪ ♪ >> we're asking students to participate in this year's student cam video documentary competition by telling us what is the most urgent issue for our next president, donald trump, and the incoming congress to address in 2017? our competition is open to all middle school and high school students grades 6-12. students can work alone or in a group of up to three to produce a 5-7 minute documentary on the issue selected. a grand prize of $5,000 will go to the student or team with the best overall entry.
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$100,000 in cash prizes will be awarded and shared between 150 students and 53 teachers. this year's deadline is january 20, 2017. that's inauguration day. for more information about the competition, go to our web site, studentcam.org. >> now a look at the fight against isis. middle east experts talk about how the terrorist group is responding to recent attacks in mosul and the challenges facing other parts of iraq that were once under isis control. from the atlantic council, this is an hour and 20 minutes. >> want to, first, introduce our panelists before i begin to give a lay of the land and sign post our conversation today. sitting to my immediate left, your right, is hassan as san, he's a resident at the tahrir institute and the co-author of isis: inside the army of terror. and next to hasan is jessica
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mcveigh lewis, director of trade craft innovation at the institute for the study of war, and also on the far left is howard jatts, whose latest publication is called foundations of the islamic state. and we're going to, rather than have sort of set, prepared speeches today, we're going to have this more of a discussion format about current related events related to the islamic state, but also building upon that a lot of the history, its foundations, where it came from and what we can learn from that for perhaps future policy operations for the next american administration after the election. so i think it's actually best to start with hassan and jessica as we look forward, as we start here. obviously, in the news we have the battle for mosul going on. it began, i believe, about two
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