impeded the segregation of neighborhoods. sunday at 8 pm eastern on the presidency. a symposium on first ladies with scholars discussing why first ladies have such powerful voices and how they wield power. exploring the american story, watch american history tv this weekend on c-span 3. >> up next on american history tv, historian dan albert talks about his book "are we there yet? -- the american automobile past, present, and driverless". in which he chronicles the history of the u.s. auto industry and argues against driver-less cars. the smithsonian associates hosted this event in 2019. >> tonight we are joined by historian an automated 1

the program. please, without further ado, jordan in welcoming him this evening. [applause] >> thank you so much. that was really lovely. thank you, amanda. generous and sweet and rejection. i thank everybody for being here, otherwise i'd be up here by myself. i especially, amanda has told

me the smithsonian associates people have reminded me how engaged these audiences are that come for these events, so if you look i have to be kind of up on my toes and really give you my a game to take this seriously and be a little intellectual, be a little heavy, if you will, talking about the past, present, and future of the automobile. there is material in the book, a lot of depth right there. everything from teaching my daughter to drive, to a 14 analysis of henry ford. but i can capture all of that tonight. but i thought i would do is try to talk about the early period of the automobile and a little of the theory about how one understands that. and the reason i'm doing that is to put us in the present moment where, as some of you may have heard, journalist cars are on the horizon. at the end of the day, i want

to talk about cars, i am both a lover and a hater of cars, for a variety of reasons. and i'm looking forward to hearing from you about your experiences with the automobile. without further ado, let us get started with cars! i mean, i had to show you this. how many people know this machine? and have gone to see it? okay, gone to see it? keep your hands up if you stayed and listen to the entire soundtrack? a couple. how many of you want to the gift shop afterwards and bought the final record and brought it home and plated? nonstop? oh, well, these two. pretty much me. as long as we are raising hands, i did a thing in brooklyn, like going on about cars, you know.

i realized halfway through it, i said, how many of you own a car, drive? i think three. can i get a quick show of hands, how many of you own a toyota? how many own a mercedes? how many own an american car? how many of you don't own a car at all, or rarely drive? okay, interesting. diverse audience, that's exciting. we aren't going to talk very much about trains. we are going to talk about cars. and this is the museum of history and technology, national museum of american history as it was back in 1974. that's sort of me, you know, and throttled. i grew up, and we would come all the, time anytime i guess from out of town, relatives, whatever, go to the museum.

you know, maybe the castle building and see airplanes, but mostly history and technology, because, what else? i hear there's art museums? but i don't know about them. that sort of me, it's not actually, me i was much fatter back then, but this is a stop photo from the smithsonian collections, and i want to get a sense of it because i want to talk about how that exhibition has changed, and talk a little bit about what that exhibition tells us about how we think about technology. the very hard part, as we face the prospect of driver-less cars, is understanding the process by which they are coming to us or coming up on us. or invoking them. when we look at this, it's like an exit clip media it's not really saying anything about how technology develops. it's got a collection of

objects, label simply say this guy invented it. it has this performance characteristic, very straightforward. that's how i experienced it as a kid. as i studied further and further, and as i thought about different ways of understanding technology, i realize this has got an implicit story behind it. and that story is a technological evolution, sometimes called technological determinism. technologies are invented, machines are, invented and ping-pong their way through our lives and change them, right? guttenberg invents departed pressed, people learn to read. iphones invented whatsapp what happened to us? we don't think about the other way of doing things. that is very much our lived experience.

technology shows up, we buy, it and we don't really think about the story behind it. but that is also reinforced here. this exhibition opened in 1964, and of cold war. there is an implicit understanding that technology is important, that technology advances, becomes more efficient overtime. bigger cars, faster cars, and i want to show you quickly, i think you can see things clearly enough here, c-span is making things bright. now i can see better. on the back wall you can see a high wheeler poking out from behind, they're old fashioned by school before the bike chain was invented, then we work our way from the right to left to more modern bicycle. as they get better, they get better. you can see in the far left corner in the back, horse and wagon, horse and wagon, more advanced car, more advanced car, more advanced car, and even you

could see gas pumps there from very early hand pump gas pump to the later one. and the centerpiece, the race car. the pinnacle of automotive capability. that is the ultimate machine. we don't know much about what was it like to drive it or where was it born? where did it live? how did people experience it? did people go to the races? was it something that happened on the side? so, some may, now 2009, i think it, is america on the move. the exhibit. now it's the general motors transportation hall, up lifting things happen. the railroad, the 14 oh one is in that hall because they are never never moving that train again, right? it's a gorgeous train, isn't it? want to go back?

but there is an intentional purpose importing trains and the bicycles and other vehicles all together. and that is to stop thinking about them and stop organizing them in terms of technical differences. there's no point in putting a four cylinder engine over here.

again old-school this is a 1950 buick, somebody can correct me, i'm pretty sure that tell by

the rims that there are gorgeous, the three holes on the side up there, you can see those are classic buick symbols. you'll even notice here, they don't even do anything, but you noticed them on modern books. that's it, that is a gorgeous car. there's a lot of interesting things to say about it. notice all the wheels are inset, and how far the body hangs over those wheels? it's an effort to make it look heavier. this is a vehicle with very low pressure tires and you just flown along, you undulate along. it's a magic carpet and a lot of ways. the problem is of course you have to go to a car dealer to buy it, and i feel terrible for these poor people here. they are in for eternity going to be negotiating with the car salesman.

and a car salesman here? one of the most disruptive things about that is that they've been able to avoid car dealerships. there's an interesting history about cardio ships and mechanics and our trust of them. leaving that aside, there's actually a very inconvenient and very 20th century way to buy something. you have a thought, you touch your phone the thing arrives. why does not happen with cars? some companies are trying to do that. for, me i see a lamborghini i touch my phone and the next thing i know, i was on drops a box. but, for the car dealerships, that's what they want to get. that purchased process is really not in the system, it's a real problem for conception of the automobile.

so that's kind of the way i want to frame this. i don't want to look so much at buick although i do want to look at a lot obviously, i don't want to understand so much the buick except in the context of what it meant for people and how it interacted with people's lives. how did the family use it? what was it like when you taught your daughter or your son to drive in a bullet? what was their first experience? what was it like to have three in the tree and all of those things? what was a like to buy it? it was a like to get it fixed? what was it like when you finally got it, all of those things. that goes to the way we think about the process of innovation in the process of invention.

again, you think about driving this cars, they're being invented. but in fact, they have been invented many times. by the same token, i will show you the automobile has been invented many times in history. if i asked you off the top of your heads, when would you say the automobile was invented? i'll give you a couple of things. 1900? 1910? 1890? a very specific years. want to give me a month? there you go. there you go. i'm going to prove you all wrong. the question is not so much birth, it's adoption. because it is born many times, i'll show you how that happened. the real questions i have are two, one, not why was it invented, but why was it adopted? why did the invention act succeed when it did? and also, what was it really?

kind of think, on immediately, get in the car you go, it's a machine for getting to places, a transportation device. obviously when the driver lost car people think about it that's what they think about. they're not thinking about tail fenced, are not thinking about how it's gonna sit in a driveway for your kids to learn about what it's like to be around and automobile. that's kind of a strange question, what is an automobile? by the same token, i think you would be surprised perhaps to learn that tribalist cars have been invented many times. fought about and technology in the thirties, tested in the 19 fifties, and proven quite viable by government testing in the 1990s. two things are important about that. again, we had them, why didn't we pursue them? and it turns out as you look at

a little more, deeply he say those are drive a list cars but they are very different, and driver-less cars are coming next. we will look a little but what does driver those cars were like and what they are like today. all right, so you are all wrong, the automobile was invented in 16 72. the sky is verb east, i think he was a jesuit monk, he was a missionary, he went to china, went there to turn the emperor into a christian, trying to bring him to christiana to, so we got a car to bring him to christianity. made this car. it's kind of cool. you can see that there is a ball, and a fire right below, very simple, very straightforward. seeing driven out of it, spins a turbine. turbine drives a couple of wind

wouldn't gears, wheels go, and off you go. the big wheel in the back here is for steering and i don't quite see how that works in the drawing but i'm sure they had it figured out. this was actually only big enough to carry around, but the question is not -- it didn't work very well maybe in, we don't really know. but so what? why didn't somebody look at it and go, and is a good start, let's do that some more? imagine if over the last 400 years, the chinese had decided to pursue rat cars. we would have pretty good rap cars. but really, we see that it was invented and we can't quite say that it didn't work, but we can't say it wasn't adopted. this is a fascinating one. this is 1790, a guy named

nathan reid who patented a steam powered self propelled road vehicle. a car. at the time there was no u.s. patent office, which is hilarious. i think actually on the pageant was george washington signature. had mean invented yet. but he had this idea, he got a pageant and what did he do with it? he didn't start selling steam carriages in 1790. no capital available, no interest. let's look at a couple of others. this is one of my favorites. i call this the first amphibious car. oliver evans, very accomplished engineer, he did a lot with process innovation in making flower, bread mills if you will. he was building for the city of

philadelphia about that goes out and digs up the mud, so boats can get through. but he was also interested, once you have this pretty lightweight steam engine in collecting capital for the car business. so rather than getting some guys in a wag and, he says i'm gonna put some wheels on it and show it off. maybe we will call that the first amphibious car. 1805 no, cars yet. this is one of my favorites, and i'll show it to you in a second another version. this is 1853. dozens steam wagon. two things are interesting about it. this is 1853. that car burns in a fire, the boiler sat in the middle, people sat on either side, it was essentially like a mini bus. he ran a very successful

business running people out to long island from new york city. it did about 30 miles per hour. by comparison, for multi came out around 1909, it did about 40 top speed. perfectly fast, perfectly viable. not picked up. also his reason for developing the car has nothing to do with what you might think it is. it's not about transportation per se. he said he wanted to and the fearful misery of horses. this is something that is developing in this period, this aspca sensibility towards animals, thinking that they are not machines to be abused but creatures. very quickly, here's another version of it. this is 1866. i show it to you because it is in the smithsonian collection. it is not on display.

where are the curators? it should be on display. it's just a great machine to look at, and it really does tell us something about road transport, and i understand, i was a curator -- now here is my most interesting one. this is also in the collection it's a little model, a pageant model. so different times in history had to produce not just drawing but a physical model of your machine. 1879, this is patented by a man named george sultan, the patent attorney in upstate new york, rochester. he was very smart on. lightweight, it describes everything we think about the early automobile, lightweight, hardship carbon explosion engine, original combustion engine. able to deal with any reasonable incline, all kinds

of other basic details. 1879 the vehicle is not produced. because he's a very smart patent attorney, he kept filing amendments, so there's different ways you kind of extend, that any patent attorneys in the room? if you can kind of extend it, so you're locked in because you have patent pending. you can do various things, he waits till 1895, because in 1895, the automobile has arrived. the automobile has been borne for hundreds of years and was certainly quite viable by the mid 19th century, or the 18 seventies, but it's not into the 1890s that it's picked up. here we are about 1900, and i'm just gonna digress for a second, because i know people want to know about electric cars. also, how many of you drive an electric car? , one, two okay.

fault, tesla? vault. so one of the questions of people asked is why do we get gas engines not volt collect traumatic engines. they're about -- >> as you can see steam and electric outpaced the internal combustion engine. the early historians look at that and say look, internal combustion car is better. but you really have to ask yourself a more complicated questions. what do we mean by? better as a goldfish better than a pigeon. i don't know. pigeon can't fly way, i got that wrong. pigeon can't swim, gold flush can't fly.

as a goldfish better than a pigeon? right? in fact, the electric vehicle had a very good business model, and was very viable for urban transportation, as early automobiles were. and was also cleaner, quieter, they would be classed in at a time when gasoline and automobiles couldn't really gas. the glass would crack. the other thing is the electric car at a business model different than the one we think of over the last hundred years, of cell cars to people, and make our money, build more cars. the electric vehicle company developed, and i want you to

think about uber or lift, that's what they were. in 1899, they had a fleet of hundreds of taxicabs, most in new york city, and you could get a taxi ride, you could rent the vehicle for a week or a month. you could buy the vehicle, relatively expensive, but you could buy one. what they found is they had a hard time providing taxi service because so many people were at leasing them or holding them for long periods of time. it was a viable business. the webb killed it. there's a couple things culturally all talk about and minute. in terms of a business, one of the things that killed it was an attack on monopoly. if you recall your history, theodore roosevelt, the trust buster, this is 1890s, turn of the century, trusts are a bad thing, standard oil, and so forth.

a particular guy, a big supporter of the gasoline automobile, referred to them as the lead cab trust. and it rapidly expanded. and in fairness, like uber left or an electric company you need to have a monopoly. you need to have a large enough network. what good is it if you only have three lifts and you want to arrive? forget about. it the whole point is to have lots of them. and that sense, it was true. they were providing mobility as a service. they weren't interested in selling you have vehicle. they're interested in selling you a ride. it worked -- what killed them, in terms of business, they expanded. this may sound familiar, expanded rapidly. they kept increasing the capitalization, and they got into a bit of a scandal, where they had done a fraudulent loan, and stock price went, went wrong kind of thing.

let me talk now about but the automobile is when we get to the 18 nineties, 1893. again, we can talk about what's the first automobile, there's a bunch of other ones. i took out electric car because it was complicated. i will show you two of them here. 1893, also in the museum's collection. that's the motor wagon, that's massachusetts. they had a real winning car. very lightweight, very straightforward. you see there is the steer, the stick. they want races, and they were very durable. they did hill, climbs long distance runs. so good car. stanley's gamers, those are not cough drop guys. those are the stanley twins,

and between 1905, a little earlier, sold about 2000 of those vehicles. in 1897, they sold 200. it was a very viable machine. it accelerated easily, it was quiet, and all these things. popular. the problem is, those were not the first cars that really captured the attention of the people who could afford cars. the people who could afford cars where the rothschild, vanderbilts, the astors, the top ten of the 1%. and what they, did and you think of them as americans, but they married europeans and would cruise back and forth to europe on the liners. meanwhile, in france, there is 1893, let's look at this up on the top. notice, help you could see it here, it's got lights, little

gas lamps. that's a real car! they were producing them, and they were selling them. a place for your lunch basket right there. this is not like a try sickle. a bicycle, four wheel bicycle. this is a serious car! 1893. the french eat this up. but they don't eat up in the sense of transportation. these are rich men's toys. young men, especially even who inherited wealth. this -- sorry, that's a different model! i got messed up. but this is maybe one of the most significant vehicles. notice that these vehicles have the motor located under the seat.

this vehicle has the motor right here. seems simple enough. as the motor gets bigger, there's no place for it back here. this is a system, and why engines are out in front of once they are out in front they can get bigger and bigger and bigger. this really creates the modern architecture of the automobile, engines can get bigger, and these were powerful and they were fast. and they were fun! again, i think we've got some lights. more luxury, but a lot more power. and we have a quote. this is new york times. france has pay the most attention, yet late in the beginning, very american pride, laden beginning we will make up lost ground and when -- then we will lead the world as

we do in this, and about all other things. we are number one, right? the other one i love, from the same article, reviewing the 1900 automobile show. the reporter from the times says, fortunately, none of these cars and america had adopted that foreign freak the wheel. they are so excited about the killer, and meanwhile over there, they've got steering wheels. it's not as simple as taylor versus steering wheel, it has a lot to do with the steering system. there is a major engineering advance. let me keep moving. a lot of things about the automobile that i could talk about, why it comes in in the 18 nineties. it has to do with demographics, verizon immigration, particularly immigration from places like southern italy, where you have much catholics coming in, and jews coming in, from eastern europe and so

forth. not the good immigrants from the 19th century, but a little soiree of immigrants that seem not so nice to hang around. you get these wealthier, and i say that in the context of how the wasps native born could consider them back then. this is not commentary from me. but there is an effort to get out of the city. city is also becoming more congested, industrialization is happening, you have this throng of new people. the idea of getting out of the city is a new and exciting thing. the automobile is going to let you do it, partly before the automobile there was electrification of the street car. well into the 18 fifties, cities where basically as good as you could walk across. a couple of miles. in about a half an hour, you could walk in a radius. with the electric street car, it looks to expand, and the idea is the automobile will come in before. that i'm going to focus on one

of the many elements, and that is the bicycle. now the by school and automobile is thought of as enemies, and certainly they are. it rides a bike on the street. but in a lot of, ways the bicycle established the car culture. huge bike craze in the 1890s. you can't begin to imagine bike races with huge grounds. bicycle fashion, bicycle advertising. playing cards, with the bicycle on the back. that's from that period. that's what it's about. and just to show you a couple examples, this i love. this is a very sociable bicycle. there are all kinds of different ones. and you can't see it, here but i don't think she even has a wheel under there. i think it's sort of like a sidecar, and kind of is balanced. i have to look into that. it's a great way, you know,

take a day, take the wagon, take the wife, you're going to want to have for their! if anyone has written a tandem, it's like, what? they get no view, right? this is a guy named major taylor. an interesting guy. number one racer in the country. african american at a time when african americans racing against whites wasn't typically done. the fact he made a career in the business is incredible. on the other hand, when they travel, he had to go to certain hotels. here is what i want to touch on more quickly. a lot of these women's clubs, women spiking clubs, and they were part of suffragettes and women's empowerment period. one of the things you will notice is they are wearing long skirts.

those had bike chains. and it will be biked with a long skirt? even when your pant cuffs, i'm always stuffing them into my sock, right? you've got to do this. let's have one of those straps. and you get to the office and you are like, you finally get to lunch and someone pointed out, and you are like, jesus. but this doesn't work. what did they do? let's see if i can tell you what they do. let's see. bloomers! women start wearing bloomers. oh, my god, look! you can see the ankles! cover that up! right? this is a pretty big deal. people had moral panics about these kinds of things. rock and roll, oh my god. they have a moral panic about bloomers. they have a moral panic about women being on bicycles. women out by themselves on bicycles. right? you can see this given the

context back in the day, you get baseball cards, gum, which i don't know if they give you gum anymore. but cigar packs, cigarette packs would come with a card, people would collect them. you have this way up in the corner, you can see a lady on a bicycle. obviously this lady has a bicycle. but look at all these legs shown, right? even some over there. i mean, wow, right? but today say? if women start dressing like that, what is next? they are going to start smoking cigars! could you imagine, women, smoking cigars? manly thing? turning into man? oh! there is this moral panic, but there's also this period of women's empowerment. let me show you more about the bicycle culture and connected to the car culture.

that's about the sex appeal, but also about empowerment. i think i had another slide i want to show you. danger and speed. here, bikes, not your typical with the chain. these are called high wheeler, 's came farther if you are in england. the bigger the wheel, the faster you go. simple physics, peddling here, bigger diameter. the higher your wheel, the faster you go. by the time you are up it's five feet in the, air and you are going pretty fast. you look like a kosik on a horse coming at you. they refer to them as scorcher, 's speed or, is racing through town. now it's on track. that's okay. 1901, speed and danger. this is henry ford, racing alexander. the idea henry ford who is a failed businessman at this

point beat the best racer with the biggest car company in the country was a huge deal. kind of spluttered in the race, and he lost. people went wild. i love this line. one man threw his hat up in the air when it came down, he stomped on it. and another man was so excited, i wanted to see this. so excited, he hit his wife on the head to keep her from flying off the handle. that description -- i don't know. you know thing with the egg? anyway. okay. another cyclist. this is barney, celebrity cyclist, much like major taylor. henry ford got him to do his next racer. a few years later. it's called the 999, in 1902. this thing is insane! he is sitting in what amounts to a drawing room car, a drawing room seat.

they pulled it off, pulled the legs off, and took it out of claire ford's bedroom, and put it on there. and he is steering with a flat bar, with two handles on it! the engine is huge. sucked in like five gallons of air with every stroke. a huge amount of air. huge huge amount of force power. amounts of air 90 miles an hour. there's no seatbelt, no airbags, there is no dashboard, the crank case is open for those of you who don't want to be real car guys, crank cases down at the bottom drenched with oil, and the oil just sprayed everywhere. it's nuts! this was ford, we're gonna make is a light is as possible. here's the beauty of it, he had no idea how to drive. they just said, hey you're a bike racer, he said yeah i'll try it! part of the reason i think there's this instead of this -- he said what's the steering wheel? he didn't know.

that was all very exciting. people rushed out to these races, 1896, cosmopolitan magazine through a race in new york, crowds were so thick the police had to come and everything. people loved it. what people didn't love was when the rich folks started tearing through cities. and they were killing children, and they were basically colonizing the streets, driving people out of the way. you can see over here, people dodging out of the road. this by the way is called the crusade of the 500, i'm sorry the charge of the 400. so back in the day, there was a socialite list, the astors, and everyone was listed on it. so that's the joke. this fellow willie vanderbilt the second american, was the most notorious one of these

guys. but the ones who really got into it were young men of inherited wealth. the fathers had made a fortune. made of money. vanderbilt told a reporter's, thought maybe he was his analyst, but he said wealth is a certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality. in other words, he had nothing to excite him in life, life was too easy. and so, the automobile shows up and off he goes. there's also an interesting op-ed. vanderbilt wanted to build a, and some of his buddies wanted to build a raceway on long island, private raceway, no other cars, no other people on it. the times editorialized and said they don't want that, because the fun of racing for them seeing how close they can

get to pedestrians without killing them. okay. so let me turn now to how we deal with this problem. the problem in the city. we begin to try to control the chaos of traffic. one of the latin phrases is used order from chaos. hopefully i can get this to work. i'm gonna show you a pretty remarkable scene. it is 1906, four days before the san francisco earthquake. a company that did these films tour -- on the front of the street are, cable car, cranking away on a camera. you'll see people turn and look at him, because this was a pretty amazing thing, just riding down market street. when i want you to do is look -- i might add there is no sound

in the original, but the film historians thought it would be nice, and they did a very sympathetic and thoughtful job of adding sounds, so you do get a hope that works for you, a sense of the sound. so will just look at a few minutes of it. you can see them running right down the track. a (streetcar bell clanging) (engine noise) (horse neighin)

(music) so >> i'll just go a little further. okay that will be our stop. it's funny, just quickly, you see a bunch of cars in their, but if you look at it closely, they are the same cars. and so, i'm pretty sure he hired these cars to drive through. there weren't that many cars in san francisco at the time. but it does give you a sense of

what is happening as motor vehicles come in. they were little bit faster, little bit crazier, weaving in and out. but as you can see, there are no rules of the road, it's chaos. it does work. there are certainly accidents, people are certainly rundown by street are, stomped on, kicked by horses, but it does work. it's a functional space, and it's a multi functional space. you'll see not on market street, it's a big boulevard, other streets kids playing, pushcarts, the street is a multi functional space. over time though, as the automobile comes in, there is a concern -- there develops a concern about traffic crashes. this starts very early, but i'm going to jump ahead for just a second here. because in 1935, it was very much a pivotal year, for a couple of reasons.

one is there is a spike in automobile traffic deaths. if you look at a pulp public health prophesy the number of deaths per million miles traveled just keeps going up and release spikes in the middle of the depression. also though, there was an article that came out in 1935 that essentially said you're saving a few minutes and risking your life. another word, slow down and drive carefully. right if her? that was different was, nobody had done a full on blood and gore story. he talks about, i he goes in visits actual accidents right after they happened. i he talks about bone sticking out, he talks about a woman's face to so full of blood all you can see is a whole where her mouth was.

really gruesome stuff. that was in order to shock people out of complacency, herring about death statistics and so forth. it does have an impact. does not make people drive safer. but it makes people go, oh my god, and a moral panic. gallup pulls, say there should be more policing of drivers. they don't mean them, they mean the bad drivers. so right at this period it's interesting, 1935, aaa comes out with driver pamphlets, 1930 16 shorts industry comes out with his first drivers ed textbook, and the traffic engineers, traffic police and a group called the traffic psychologists. i'll touch on them later. actually, psycho technologists. and this is the 19 thirties in the period were in general period is considered silent science. we're in a period where science is generally on the senate, the

expectation that science can solve problems. let's see how that all plays out. i'm in a talk about fixing the driver, fixing a road and fixing the car, running it mostly fixing the car out of the picture. for those of you that are familiar with it, ralph nader wasn't just a presidential candidate, he wrote unsafe at any speed unsafe at any speed. and from 1960 seatbelts airbags, all the things that we know and love this automotive cocoon that we drive. but a fact in the 1930s following publication and sudden death i, the auto industry did get involved at least in the rhetoric of driver safety, and they actually began to advertize their vehicles with safety components. they would say we have better breaks, we have a safer roof,

so it won't crush i. so, you know, the auto air companies -- the american auto companies i where the worst, gm, safety got, seatbelts, airbags. at every turn we can talk about that if you want. but the really was in the 1930s, research into crash survival and some of that research made its way, particularly with studebaker, a guy named paul austin, but he turned that over to something called the automotive safety foundation. that's different in the 1960 solution. okay, so what are we gonna do? this is 1903 on the right. this is the first set of traffic rules set up in new york city. a little guy named william phelps, the beard, and very patrician, he recalled an 1867 getting caught and blockades.

this is of course with wagons. he was a very wealthy guy, never drove, this is before automobiles, but he did not like the chaos of the streets as we just saw. this blockade and he was a child at the time, he said wait there are only 12 wagons here, this is nuts! we must be able to do something. so in 1903, he convinced the police department to institute a set of rules. there it is. they posted these rules. these are things we take for granted. state of the, right turn of the left the other car has the right of way, in those kinds of things. that spread various state and local agents come together, particularly in the 1920s and begin to create a uniform code. because one of the problems was used to be driving from mississippi to alabama and the rules change. and also on the left as a traffic light. this is fascinating to me.

come to an intersection, there is the traffic light, you have to stop. running a red light is one of the most dangerous things that can happen. a red light cameras are supposed to stop the. but a rotary, i'm not talking about two pant circle, i'm talking about modern traffic rotary's. as anyone been on a new-ish rotary? have you noticed them showing up? they are going to be more and more of them. they are safer. , even if you dump into somebody not to do what they call a t-bone, you gonna be safer, you're not going to die. but the traffic light is the solution at this time, and it's focused on let's behave, let's make sure people behave, and if people don't behave, we have a problem. what do we do if we have a problem? it's called the term policing. policing are out there surveilling, keeping an eye on everyone. you may recognize, essentially

they have younger kids i, what's it called the book? the hate you give, this is the movie. it centers around the shooting of a young black man, unarmed young black man by policeman. on the right i is the shooting of flannel castile. he was unarmed a. i've gone through the whole transcript air, wrote in article recently about it. was it justifiable? was it not? we can argue about that but to me that's not the story. he was pulled over something like 40 times in the previous six months of the year that year. but statistics show that african american men are not necessarily shot more than other people who were pulled over, it's just that they're pulled over so much more.

they are searched way more i air. encounters with police often and badly. the reality is we are breaking the rules all the time right? i, you're good, you're all good drivers and you know, you always signal. right? and you never rolled through a stop sign ice, and you never have a break laid out. of course, we all, do i don't. what we really have is a set of rules now, and it starts in 1903, which allow the police, no matter what they really think of pretextual traffic stop it's called. maybe they think you're a gang member in the wrong part of town, and you if you feel a signal they can pull you over. they can even arrest you. but they can even haul you into

jail in most states. that's weird. so i like to say -- we talk about driving while black, because of the way we have decided to improve the safety of motor vehicle traffic, we are all driving while black, we are all susceptible to what was called a general, warren please have general discretion. this is an excerpt in the nineties, supreme court decided, that sobriety checkpoints were constitutional. what happened? mothers against drunk driving got a hold of president reagan's ear and said our children are being killed by these drunk drivers. you've got to check and get them off the road. a lot of problems with that. the methods they wanted to use her ineffectual. most -- most children who die in drunk driving accidents are writing with the drunk.

inebriated. the driver. they were sued and as a fourth amendment search and seizure, the legal search and seizure. they said there's 25,000 people a year being killed by drunk drivers. and therefore this is okay. very strange decision. there were not 25,000 a year being killed, and that is to me one of the most interesting things completely separate. but the statistics were used to talk about this. another element of fixing on the driver. very strange. 1930s, i did some dissertation work on. this recorders -- detroit recorders court traffic psychopathic. you've got a few tickets, too many, or got into a crash, or did something the judge thought was a little weird in the courtroom, they send you to the

psychologists. they would do a full work up. i tests, attitude tests, intelligence tests and these, which this is the reactor graph, and as you see, this is a famous psychiatrist who wrote textbooks and everything. he thought this was so important, he was going to work with this court clinic. as you can see, i don't know what he is doing. this is a staged photo, i'm sure, for detroit news. he's like dialing in. let me get this right, this is an objective measurement. none of these were objective. here is his assistant. these two ladies must be other psychologists, or secretaries, or whatever. i don't think those are patients. that's what they were called, patients. as i say, i did my dissertation, my doctoral work on this. the idea was we find that drivers, bad risks as drivers.

we correlate that with an outcome. in other words, they do a psychiatric test, the site of a bad attitude, maybe you are crazy, senile, whatever, and they tell the judge take his license away. maybe they think you are a bit of a sociopath and take your license away. i correlated these values, coalitions, regressions, all of that. it has nothing to do with whether or not you are a good driver. has to do whether you are black or white, woman or man, an immigrant, typically from places like syria, age you. that would correlate very well with the outcome of your disposition of case. let's keep going. i'm going to do this quickly. another way to fix the drivers, drivers education. how many if you want to drivers education? keep your hands up if you did a public school? thank you. public school drivers

education. here is the local government paying for you. it's changed a little bit, but paying for you to learn to drive. isn't that strange? isn't that strange? why is that part of the curriculum? what is it really about? it turns out the easier it got to drive, the double clutching is gone, we have automatic. the textbooks got bigger and bigger because they were just about driver training. it wasn't about how to operate the vehicle. it was about a lot of other things. citizenship, becoming an adult. it was about some other things that i am going to try and show you. this is the 1930s. they would have these safety parades, and different cities would get awarded each year as the safest city. i think this is kansas city, but i'm not sure. this is the school children safety parade going for the

reviewing stand. i want you to notice it's hard to see it, it's not a great image. there is the school kids, and you will notice the sign, america first, safety always. that seems to be a bit of a -- watch and i say? conflating a couple different ideas? right? don't want to take that too deeply, but i've always been fascinated by that. for a long time, i thought these are pictures of hitler in the back, but they are traffic lights. now this is a getty image short film, but it is a march on washington, if you will. a parade of school safety patrols. i was a school -- sorry! let's go back. we've got to get those two run by doing that. there is jamal geo, he is -- let's see if we connect this big. fairly unclear, but this is -- you see those helmets?

the marching? we learn to march in step? and if you had this? we had the orange belts, wonder around here, and shoulder strap, and your job was a bit of authority, right? they're like a brown shirt, a bit of authority. boat for safety. right? eyes and ears, lives more years. where do you see the guys with the shields? a quick pause, if i can. that's dekalb county, georgia. in the 19 eighties, dekalb county, georgia was the side of the biggest study of george occasion. and the reason was the government were getting more interested in driver education, and if it worked. they found it didn't. they found it cost children get

their license at a younger age, therefore there was more traffic involvement, in other words driver education in this period is counterproductive. let's watch more marching. i wish we had the music. look at that! what is that about? always be careful. you know, you've got to give them the southern flag, that's okay. confederate soldiers, that's okay. look at this! there they are, against accidents, right? the flags, the white dresses, okay. let me see if i can do this, right very complicated. don't go a!

sorry! we've got to be president again. come on, help me out. everybody relax. all going to come together. here is what we are going to do. we will get to review everything really fast. here we go. a problem with those slides, those videos. talked about engineering, the driver, some of the weird ways we tried to do it and obviously the ultimate solution we seem to have now is eliminate the driver. let's see if we can engineer a better road. again, pivotal year, 1935, this is grant would painting, most famous for his pitchfork lady, pitchfork man and his wife.

i didn't go to the art museums, i told you. this is called death on the ridge road and the response could have been, hey, slow down. don't pass, don't rush past another vehicle. don't speed! that's a two lane road. that's a bad idea. you are a bad driver. look what happens, beautiful bright red truck, people are going to die. it's going to be gruesome. so, a lot of people looked at that and said we need more, laws need to get bad drivers off the road. others elected and said let's get rid of the ridge in the road. and that's why they began to do. we think of the interstate highway system as 1956, eisenhower, the suburbs, tail, fence potato chips, depths, barbecues. the planning begins in the 19 thirties and begins in this

context. it's all of the things you would expect. it is about work, everybody is out of work. a lot of shuttles to build off the highway. it's about safety. even today, leader state highway system is twice as safe as other roads. it's about getting rid of those cars, the references to vehicles running willy-nilly over the landscape. we need to control them. instead of it being a symbol of freedom or maybe a symbol of freedom, but really about freedom. it is about controlling traffic, and i like to think of it as a railroad. a concrete railroad with rubber tires. he never miss your exit it just like missing your stop on a subway. you go to the next one have to turn around to take the train back. you get on, you get off in

certain places. that's what makes it work. the other element of it is urban renewal. it's a great quote -- i should, say it's on the front page for the original report describing the interstate highway system, the national freeway system. delivered to fdr and he tries to get it funded, as a very hard time but also, i'm sorry, 1939, to 90 56. not a huge distance of time because you've got the war in between. it's also about urban renewal. a lot of people think, okay, highways come in, that's bad. but really the purpose of these highways was not let's destroy the city! paint the city! it's almost untenable occupied by the humblest citizens, they fringe the business course. these are the slums around the

center of the city, friend the business district and form the city slum, a blight near it's very core. we are going to come in and use highways as a way to rebuild the city. and this, of course, is what they did. this is, if you want to the world's fair in 1939, you've got that pin, i want one of those. i actually wanted in the future, but -- no friend of general motors, this is the gm hall called going as a young kid, walking with his parents, holding his hands, and rushing up and yelling, gm! he was so excited about this exhibit, and lots of people were. this was the idea. look at how wide that is. i was eight planes, right? they go right through the city. you turn the city into this vertical super block of power. you see it again here.

by the way, this is what you do. he wait in long lines, like 25 million people under the sink over the course of 1939 to 40. he would sit in something called the carry round. it would rotate around this dire am a built by some traffic engineers, but mostly norman delegate ease. how are we doing on time? am i getting boring? are we okay? we have a little ways to go. stick with, it it's brilliant. it's really going to get good! let's look at what happened with those highways. those highways were doing fine, out in the sticks, there is nobody to bother them. this is washington d.c., the 1950 layout for the freeways through the city. very quickly, here is the inner beltway. you could see the district

lines here, this is inside the district. you have a beltway. 66 will come, and do this ramping, keep going, right? this is now three 95, i'm guessing? that seemed like a good idea. i know if i was going to cut across here, something called the three sisters bridge. just take that how it right across the river. right through the city. because again we want to revitalize the city, get rid of all those slums! turns out people lived in those slums. this happened all around the country, but i'll tell you a little bit about it in d.c.. it's a fascinating story. i have been thinking about this lately because i don't know any of you have been following the hogan's plan to widen up the highways? putin dynamic tolls, and that's

just a very high tech solution, but the reality is what are we talking about? we are talking about adding high lane highway lanes! but got me was the rhetoric. peter khan, who is his secretary of transportation who, by the way, his last job was working for a company that built the highways. he got in trouble, but anyway. and people are against this. he complained about a very active vocal minority opposed to reducing the regions congestion. he insists we need more highway lanes. larry hogan said there's a bunch of pro traffic activists where they plot to keep the roads filled with traffic.

that's not as bad as what happened in 1968. here's a quick quote from angela bruni who is one of the leaders of the highway result. she recalled fbi harassment and noted this newspaper -- sorry, the washington post, quote call this everything from communist to that little band of discontented people. that engagement, or that conflict is there. and it's still there. i'll try to keep it going. these are fascinating guys. this is sammy abbott, old school, looks like mr. magoo, but he was an old school labor right. union organizer back in the thirties. he knew how to organize people to get things going. this is reginald booker, he was a president. the reason why i think he's a

president is because they adopted the slogan. white men's roads through black mans homes. all right? if you look across the country, that was very much, true some mayors even said that's why we want to do this. we want to racially segregate this town. we want to tear up west cincinnati and throw in a multi lane exchange. in reality, in d.c., it wasn't quite that way. these were white and black neighborhoods people were going to go through. using that slogan really captured the moment. i think it's interesting. i think it's interesting we are facing that again. let's keep moving. let's talk about driverless cars. okay. why driverless cars now? what kind of cars? we are getting save and simple electric cars back in 1890, we've got gasoline cars. we are not getting mobility as

a service in 18 nineties, we got sell a card to people and have them set with a dealer and buy it. that's not what is going on now. what has changed? why driverless cars now? two things. one if you look at the right healing companies, they are not making money. in fact, they are losing hand over fist. one of the biggest problems is they have to pay people to drive cars. that is -- the tried to crush that labor and squeeze the payouts. i rode over here on uber, and he said he drives for lyft because uber kept squeezing him. as far as the auto company is concerned, you can't make money selling cars. i'll talk about that in a second. there were, as i said, the automobile itself, driverless

cars in the past. when i talk about what is a driverless car, is i mean what kind driverless of are we getting now? how is it different than in the past? i think there is a simple way to think about it. humanitarian versus libertarian. in the past, infrastructure, market solution, general motors, working with the government, for example. now, the less involvement from the government the better, as far as these driverless cars companies are concerned. not building infrastructure is better for them. >> so, driverless cars were invented many times. since 1958, these ads appeared in magazines, they were for electric companies trying to keep the government off the electric grid, trying to stop nuclear power from being developed by the federal government so they could make money selling electricity, perfectly reasonable thing to do. this on the right, if you searched on the internet, and

look for driverless cars, every other article uses this image. no one point where it comes from. it comes from these electric companies, and what you will notice about it is it's got no connection to current driverless cars. there is the lane marker. that car is going right down the center of the lane! it's not driving between the lanes. that's kind of weird. the other thing, as a side note, all of the silicon valley roads who are telling us driverless cars are coming, we are geniuses! many of them brand from google and others are pursuing driverless cars. this is part of the ad campaign. they aren't pursuing driver less flying saucers, these things would make a racket. like safer helicopters. this is what i want, right? puppy in the back, groceries, mom at the wheel, nice big

steering wheel, a little bit of an air event. a dome. it is a flying saucer! i want that! notice there are two flying saucer families, right there, right? this is what electricity will bring me. but this is utter science fiction. this, in 1958, is science fact. and there it is. 1958, or cia, cutting edge electronics, translators, all that good stuff. they test driver less cars. this is on a test track, you could see the guy on your right, he's not sitting at the steering wheel. there is no steering wheel. it's a little joystick steering wheel. they are following, i'm sure that is an impala, like a 58. the thank you! i was hoping somebody here. don't get me started on mustang, it will be terrible! there it is, driverless cars.

it works, that actually works! i'm going to show you -- first, i'm going to tell you why not? why did jim pursue this? in 1958, gm was the most powerful, largest, profitable company and the country. also, this was required cooperation with people who made the roads, the government. some may be familiar with a quote, what is good for america is good for general motors, and vice versa. that connection between the government and general motors is very much there. here is the, way and i hope it'll be big enough for you, here is the way general motors also plated, okay? this is the firebird to, there were three of them. i urge you to look up firebird two and three.

keep going. back! we'll see if it'll play. >> using great power and small packages. the generator, exhaust heat is no longer a problem! the experimental car of tomorrow has a science fiction appearance, it's practical and used in every design. even electronic safety highway is feasible for the future. tomorrow's driver might just push a button and the car would literally drive itself. its electronic receivers would pick up various impulses and rolled through long and complete safety. inside the car, a tv screen reveals britain into travel information and gives highway and weather reports. >> tv screen in the car? right? that's there. this is quite viable. now i'm going to show you a real thing. being done in 1997. called the intelligent vehicle highway system. there was considered to be a

problem. this is right at the end of a building of the interstate highway systems. there is going to have to be some kind of reauthorization. are we going to build more? whatever going to do? people said we can't do that. let's see if we could make our existing highways more efficient. how could we do that? let's squeeze more cars onto the roads, and also let's reduce congestion, which is caused by crashes. evolve and stuck behind a crash on the highway. moderated vehicle systems will be able to steer around obstacles, avoid them, if the driver misses them. it will be moral axing because you will be self-driving. cars can drive inches apart. let's look at this. 1997, it's kind of vhs quality and government production. take a good look but it will show you two different things. we will see a pontiac swerving,

and a bunch of buick behaving like, what? like during the army. here we go. >> flip the camera. here we are! driving with no hands. we are coming up to this obstacle up here, but this is pretty. cool and wonder about the other traffic things. it sees the barrels and a swerving. and we are around it! no hands! ♪ ♪ ♪ >> the concession calls them scenarios. these scenarios demonstrate the technical feasibility of various types of automated highway technology is, and how they will increase safety and decrease traffic congestion. >> we will be showing platoons of vehicles, several vehicles based closer together that will show us -- >> so, i find it hilarious. pontiac's slogan is rebuilt excitement. and buick as, well they are

buick. they march along anything. they worked. required infrastructure and it was advanced by the government. now i'm going to wrap up quickly, talking about those same things as we are now seeing with what i called a libertarian charmless car. here is elaine chao talking about driver-less cars. and she mixes metaphors here. because of different technologies. it's a future time spent commuting is drastically reduced. the major factor in 94% of all fatal crashes is human error. advanced driving systems, this is important, will help solve that. we have 80 us. abs is maybe some habit on their nice new cars. self emergency breaking, right? you forget to break with something in front of you, lane keeping assist tells you when

you are going out of your lane, helps tuesday in it. safety. here is elon musk who insists his cars are fully self-driving, or will be next week. every year that we delay this self-driving, more people die. now he was attacking journalists who are complaining about the stock. he said if and writing some article that's negative, he effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you are killing people. he's like henry ford. anthony levandowski was involved in the school uber suit, for those who don't know that. when she car better than the driver, it's almost irresponsible, right? and kyle boyd who founded cruise automation which is now part of general motors, part of what's driving him, the backed some 33 million --

33,000 americans are killed by highway accidents every year. 90% of the time by human error! oh! it makes me so mad. they want to eliminate the driver because we are bad drivers. it's not true. this is the 94% fallacy. they all read this document, which says 94% of accidents are caused -- no, i'm sorry. this is the critical reason for ... the critical reason for crashes investigating a motor vehicle crash causation survey. it doesn't say who causes the crashes. you have to read it. right notes! nobody reads the footnotes. although the critical reason is an important part of the

description of events leading up to the crash, it is not intended to be interpreted as the cause of the crash, nor the assignment is a fault of the driver in the vehicle. the driver is always, i'm surprised it's not 100%, the driver is always the last link in the chain. the driver can always avoid the accident. no matter how bad an intersection, and we know there are about intersections, and labeled dangerous intersection, people go through the millions of times, without crashing. thousands of times without crashing. therefore it must be my fault. it's only my fault because i could've stopped it, but they could've stopped it long before, and the way to stop it is not to get rid of me. the way to stop it is to fix the roads, fix the infrastructure, so we are using our vehicles less, driving them slower, and more safer. and the roads are safer.

so, i think i'm almost done. what are these driver less cars? part of the reason they exist the way they do, is they came out of defense research project. the idea was to come up with self-driving pickles because they had to keep sending home notes to people who died, and send the and saying priest over. the priest over. this was bad right? particularly the poor boys who were just contractors driving these fuel trucks to fill up their tanks. they were getting blown up. can't put a wire on the road in iraq, the things in iraq blowup. but you need something that operates on its own. here are some of the real reasons. again, going back. uber, hundred and 20 billion was their last evaluation, now they are at 68 billion. the market kept out at 68 billion.

the plan when they heard about self-driving cars is, we are gonna take all of that 30% and we are going to keep it. they wouldn't take the entire affair, that means billions more in revenue. the projects code name is a dollar sign. there's a new book out right now by mud michael isaac's a, put it on the list right there for you. he describes that. you can't make money selling cars. but if you start with that quote on the bottom, auto companies are less than the cost of capital, and most companies destroy value. disguise a professor, finance let me put in simple words. building cars is a money losing operation globally. what to the car companies want to do? what is uber want to do? they want to get rid of the drivers. they want money and someday they will be profitable. what is general motors wanted

to? they want to become like the facebooks and so forth. general motors has a market cap of 57 billion, less than uber. price to earnings ratio, in other words the stock price, 5.4. 47.1. uber, they lose money so they don't have one it's still amazon, 75, facebook 35. that's what they want to be. they want to have the cost of capital to go down so they can really make money. last thing i will leave with you. there are no driver list cars. there are no driver-less cars. this has been a real problem. there was a columnist for the new york times, actually i should start with one of the bottom there. when your self-driving car is not autonomous. he was in the fall of all but,

it's not like he can sit in the back scene let the thing go. but my favorite is from the drive -- terrify new york times columnist confuses volatile with magical driver-less car. people are dying. the first death a completed the report was the death of a man named josh brand, who is driving his tesla, and using it on autopilot. we talk about the operational domain and all of that. the ntsb studied it, they found that calling this thing driver -less, autopilot was the problem. adding to the problem is the moniker autopilot. they say the people may conclude from the name autopilot, that they need not pay attention to the driving task because the autopilot is doing at. that's exactly what josh, brown was doing he was not paying attention, he drove right under the back end of the semi

trailer, and shaved off the top of his car and his head. but there have been four of these that we know of. one in china, josh brown we mentioned, walter wong in california. jeremy banner. then also elaine heard spurred. she was killed by uber, myself driving test car. the safety driver was paying no attention. so these things do not work, and they are certainly not safe. that's what i have to show you. this is the end of my road trip. that's my sob. and i really thank you, you've been very patient. i think i went on very long, i could go on forever about this stuff. but you know more than loving talking is listening, so i would love to hear what you have to comment, on say, questions you have, and a thing you want to know, if you want

to know how to change your oil or tire, i will help you. car buying advice, anything. stock tips. no. thank you. i (applause)bhhad one the society of automotive historians, excuse me the society of automotive engineers

developed something called the levels of driver-less cars, and they start with zero, which is what i drive. they work their way up from controlling the brakes and the gas to steering. they say when you get to five, it is full self drive. that's not full self-driving, here is what full self-driving is. when i don't have to pay karen sure it's, and a car company pays the car insurance, to me that is full self-driving. now, what is happened recently, with these tesla crashes. there is a sudden out -- there to suits, at one and china won here. the argument is, they have this little thing in the manual that says by the way, you have to keep your hands on the wheel. but there are all kinds of ways that that doesn't work, and the anti espy when they study this saw that.

so far, nobody seems to be holding these vehicle companies or vehicles responsible for the crashes. yes sir? >> do you see or envision a time when it becomes mandatory to do a a -- driving? >> i can imagine not to be honest with you. if the argument is about safety you really have plenty of an safety systems that already make driving very, very safe. what i can see is things like keeping cars out of cities, make it very expensive to go into a city, where you have pedestrians and so forth. there are a lot of things, he will talk about this much, so for example 10,000 of these deaths of 30 or 40,000 are about alcohol related. we have the technology to keep

people from driving drunk and it's not that far. but the idea that the government is going to come in and say this is illegal is, ridiculous because the government has had every opportunity to solve problems like speeding. the european union has just instituted all new cars will have speed governors. in other words, if you are in a 55, 100 kilometer road, the car won't go over 100 kilometers. if you are on a 35 kilometer road and, will go over 35 kilometers. we have gps and we have the technology, it is not hard. i could see that coming in, but i think that's different than saying you can't drive. people want to drive. >> when two drivers licenses become not required? >> when they become required? it happened in the thirties mostly. it spread from more populous

states, denser populated states and to places like north dakota. interestingly, early on, it will go to the rv or dmv on, and they would, say are you insane? and you get a license if you said no. so driver testing did not commit really until the 19 fifties for the most part. so very, very late. people drove without licenses for a long time. >> you showed an 1895 patent. who did the patent holder so? i >> so, not to sell the book, but i talk about this quite a lot a bit. sullivan had a pen, george sell an 1879, kept going till 1895.

he then sued the largest auto v■(ku■?w patent trolls. that comes out of this little history of henry ford. they had become known as patent trolls.

they eventually had most of the automakers part of this association and it did a lot of good things. for example, there were about 8000 different bolt sizes for cars. 8000 different -- they consolidated that, they made standards. on the other hand, they were a monopoly. they said who couldn't could not be part of it. henry ford tried to join, and he was rebuffed. he left in sudan. the pedant fight went on for years and years. in the end, the pattern was declared valid but only for that particular type of engine in the pan so it was essentially thrown out, and by that time it had about a year's run. it's a fascinating story. but one thing if you're interested in following it up, i'm really proud of the way i treat it in there because so many of the other stories are just based on henry ford. does that answer the question?

maybe too much? >> a month your presentation makes it sound like autonomous vehicles are inevitable in the u.s.. i'm interested in your opinion about the timing. how long would it be before the majority of vehicles are autonomous vehicles and how long do you think it will be until virtual all vehicles are autonomous. >> i guess i say two things. one is, i don't want to come these things and say everybody, i'm nats, never going to happen. i do think that there is that possibility. it's clear that we are finding this much harder. part of that is, how bad the roads are and how drivers keep getting lane. turns out it's hard to drive a robot car, it's hard for robots to negotiate it. i see it is very long time

before any sort of majority. there are more cars then drivers in the country, licensed drivers. 240 million or so? we sell about 17 million new cars, average new car average cars about 12 years old. what does that? me even if all of them were self-driving tomorrow, we probably looking at two decades before we all bought them, assuming you could buy them. the second thing is the cost of these vehicles because of the sensors and computing power is very large. and then finally, they don't work. (laughter) right? they speak about edge cases, but it's all about educators. i certainly seething been used on a campus or in a small area or to get around in a small

city. but i think we are very far away from this idea of outlaw driving and it all being autonomous. these are great questions. >> are we at the point where we can drive 500 miles an electric are across the country. >> the 500 mile one is a tricky one, that's more than the range of a gasoline car. there are two possibilities for the technology. you get 250 to 300 miles, but you also need to be able to charge in six minutes. that is a very tricky business. pour says they're coming up with something like this. less than the 500 miles, very fast charging that works. but the weirdest thing now is okay you have to sit and wait for half an hour. but what if you show up and somebody is already sitting there for half an hour, it's a

real problem. so i do think there are solutions tobkykykykm0 that, mat just the 500 miles, but i think we are getting there. i'm sorry, yes. >> i have a question. it seemed like in your presentation we went from the advent of the car to drive ellis and the things that are happening now where there is actually talking between the vehicles. what do you think about that and where we are going with that? >> what you are talking about is referred to his v. tv or v two acts, which is very cool. this is something and what it means basically flick that 1958 impala i showed you where the technology is fairly simple. it's radios, it's sensors and the most basic way to put it is it tells the cars not to be in the same place at the same time. it has been -- the radio spectrum to do this was allocated in about 2000,

maybe a little earlier. auto companies have been fighting at a long time, they are not excited about it, and they've been fighting in a long time. they say they don't want to get stuck with an old technology, they want to use 5g cellular instead, and they are not convinced it works. that's what they said about seatbelts, that's what they said about airbags, safety office, that's what they said about etc, etc. the pattern of behavior worries. any on the other hand, the 5g idea, it tries to do the same thing. the reason they are excited about that is once you have 5g in a car, all of this delicious data comes in. amazon can sell you things and facebook and so on. i think that is what's going on. there's no reason not to have it. localities have invested it, put it in traffic lights and all of, that so it's a shame it hasn't happened, there is a lot

of good stuff, and it's in the book. i'm happy to stay in top. yes? >> i'm sorry. i was reading recently that in canada, there are researchers that are developing morality software for their driver less cars so that the car knows that if grandma is riding a bicycle and a squirrel goes across the road, it is okay to hit the squirrel but not okay to hit grandma. (laughter) do you see any challenges with developing that type of technology? >> that is an excellent question. i love this part. so i argue that that is a kind of totalize-ing conversation. in other words, what they are trying to do is say, the automobile, the driver lists

car is a new kind of moral actor. it enters a space which is going to force it to make decisions a that human beings make now. and the reality is, it doesn't have any clue what's in the road or you, know who is, driving. but there has been a lot of coverage of that, and i have a -- i call it the immorality of robot cars. it's up on the web, one plus one.com. there is already a moral framework in the automobile driver road system. for example, traffic engineers don't think about safety and mueller then mobility, they think about mobility in and

safety. that is a moral choice. i think other than the fact that these philosophers are trying to make a living, it's an absurd conversation. i will just read you very quickly -- and at some level at sea is full exercise because, you have these kids in college who are learning the program, they should think about this stuff. there is this guy lynn who has written a bunch of things. computers can decide who lives and dies in a driver-less car. here's a terrible idea. robert robot cars with adjustable ethics. but here's the real problem. there is a scenario where the car is following a truck, foxes following the truck, she swerve right -- or's were left because, this guy's not wearing a helmet, he kind of deserves to die. consider the problem of a car barreling down the street or a cripple boy, should car swerve

left to avoid the buy, and risk killing the driver? or should it just slam on the brakes and hope for the best? i imagine the corridors, and i hope you know your python code here, if kid isn't street is greater than 16, line print -- kill kid in street. line print, we are sorry for your loss. a welsh collapse in porsche, line print, servia right schmuck oh. the real question is not which way should the porsche turn, the real question is why is the power going so darn fast in the first place? the porsche should not be in that situation. it should not be tailgating attracted drops boxes off and has to swerve. that's the problem with the driver's car. sorry, i get excited. as i say i can take more questions the clearly we need

to wrap up. thank you so much. (applause)

detroit has been the motor city of the world since at least 1915, when there were a lot of companies making cars, and 75 companies making parts. we built lots of cars. prior to 1900, detroit area enjoyed a wealth of strong manufacturing on, a lot of it based in the bu