of the u.s. auto industry and argues against driverless cars. the smithsonian associates hosted this event in 2019. >> tonight we are joined by historian and automotive journalist dan albert. dan has spent a career writing and teaching about the history and culture of technology. his articles can be found in n plus one magazine, popular science and the journal for the history of behavioral sciences. he holds a ph.d. in history from the university of michigan where he also taught in the college of engineering. dan also served as the curator

of vehicle collections at the national museum of science and industry in london. he is the author of "are we there yet, the american automobile past, present and driverless" it's available for sale and signing at the conclusion of the program. so, please, without further adieu join me in welcoming him this evening. [ applause ] >> thank you so much. that was really lovely. thank you, amanda. really generous and sweet introduction. i thanked everybody for being here otherwise i would be up here by myself. i especially, you know, amanda has told me that smithsonian associates people have reminded me how engaged these audiences are that come for these events so i feel like i have to be kind of up on my toes and really give

you my a game to take this seriously and to be a little intellectual, be a little heavy, if you will, talking about the past, present and future of the automobile. there's a lot of material in the book, look at that, it's right there. everything from teaching my daughter to drive to a freudian analysis of henry ford, but i can't obviously capture all of that tonight. so what i thought i would do is try to talk about the early period of the automobile and a little bit 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 driverless cars are on the horizon. but at the end of the day i really 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. so without further adieu, let's get started with cars. yeah, well, i mean, i had to show you this. how many people know this machine and have gone to see it. yeah. okay. how many -- keep your hands up if you stayed and listened to the entire sound track. a couple. how many of you went to the gift shop afterwards and bought the vinyl record and brought it home and played it nonstop. oh, well, yeah, these two, i know them. yeah. pretty much me. as long as we're raising hands and i did a bring in brooklyn and we were going on about cars and, you know, then i realized halfway through it, i said, how many of you like own a car, drive? i think three. so can i get a quick show of hands, how many of you own a

toyota? how many of you own a mercedes? how many of you own an american car? how many of you don't own a car at all? or rarely -- add this, airily drive. okay. interesting diverse audience. that's exciting. so, yeah, we're not going to talk very much about trains, we're going to talk about cars. 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, just enthralled. i grew up in colesville we would come anytime, anytime a guest or relatives come from out of town, go to the museum. you know, maybe the castle building and see the airplanes, but mostly go to history and technology because what else -- i hear there's some, you know, art museums, but i don't know

about them. so, yeah, that's sort of me. it's not actually me, i was much fatter back then, but this is a stock photo from the smithsonian collections and i want you to get a sense of it because i want to talk to you 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 driverless cars is understanding the process by which they are coming to us or coming upon us or invoking them. so when we look at this, the first thought is, well, that's like an encyclopedia, right? it's not really saying anything about how technology develops. it's got a collection of objects, the labels typically say this guy invented it this year, it this performance characteristic. very straightforward. but as you begin -- and that's

the way i experienced it as a kid, but as i studied further and further and thought about different ways of understanding technology, i realized that this is actually got an implicit story behind it. and that story is of technological evolution or sometimes called technological determinism. technologies are invented, machines are invented and they kind of ping-pong their way through our lives and change them. right? guttenberg invents the printing press, people learn to read. iphone is invented, i don't know what's happened to us, but that we don't think about the other way of doing things. and that's very much our lived experience, right? a technology shows up and we buy it. you know, we don't really think about the story behind it. but that's also reinforced here. this museum exhibition opened in 1964, we are in the cold war,

this is an implicit understanding that technology is important, that technology advances, becomes more efficient over time, bigger cars, faster cars. and i just want to show you quickly, i hope you can see things clearly enough here, c-span is making things bright. now i can see better. if you look back on the back wall you can see there is a high wheeler poking out from behind there, old fashioned bicycle before the bike chain is invented, then we work our way from the right to the left to ever more modern bicycles, they get better, they get better, they get better. you can see hopefully in the far left corner all the way in the back horse and wagon. horse and wagon, more advanced car, more advanced car, more advanced car. you can see gas pumps there from a very early hand pump gas pump to a little later one. and then of course the centerpiece, the race car. so the pinnacle of automotive

capability, that's the ultimate machine. but we don't know like 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 just something that, you know, happened on the side? so 2009, i think it is, america on the move exhibit. right? now this is the general motors transportation hall, a couple of things that happened, the railroad -- the 1401 is in that hall because they're never moving that train again, right? a gorgeous train. do you want to go back and look at it? no. but also there is an intention and a purpose in putting trains and even bicycles and other vehicles all together and that is to stop thinking about them

and stop organizing them in terms of technical differences. there is no point in putting a four cylinder engine over here and a six cylinder engine over there because that's not the point. the point is how do we use them? we look, for example, at this. i meant to get over there today but i believe that's a '55. somebody correct me later, don't do it now, i think it's a '55 country squire wagon. that wooden paneling calls for it, a history back when station wagons had wooden bodies, the white wall tires, all of that is beautiful but what else is there? there's people, there's context. i wonder if they're even moving because the kid looks a little unhappy here. you also have a girl with a bicycle. what is a bicycle about? it's about the rules of the road, learning to be a road user, learning in a sense to drive. by the same token if you look up there at the little red car,

what is that? that's a kiddie car. what does that tell me? tells me two things. kids like toy cars, no way it's genetic, but more to the point it is children rehearsing what their parents do, right? toy kitchen, toy car. you learn how to be an adult. so that was very much part of american society and culture and that's the way that automobile fits into our society. so there's loads of these mannequins in the exhibition. again, old school. this is a 1950 buick, again, somebody can correct me, i haven't been over there, but i'm pretty sure you can tell by the grille. these grilles are gorgeous, that's so key. the three holes on the side up there, you can see those are classic buick symbols. you will even notice here they

don't even do anything but you will even notice them on modern buicks. so that's it, that's a gorgeous car. a lot of interesting things to say about it. notice how far in the wheels are set and how far out the vehicle body comes over those wheels. an effort to make it look heavier. this is a vehicle with very low pressure tires and you just float along. you undulate along. it's a magic carpet in a lot of ways. the problem suf to go to a car deal for buy it and i feel terrible for these poor people here. they are in for eternity going to be negotiating with a car salesman. any car salesmen here? one of the most disruptive things about tesla is they've been able to avoid car

dealerships. there's an interesting history about car dealers and mechanics and our trust of them, but leaving that aside it's actually a very inconvenient and very not -- sort of 20th century way to buy something. we don't -- you know, you touch -- you have a thought, you touch your phone, the thing arrives. why doesn't that happen with cars? and some companies are trying to do that. for me, god forbid i should see a lamborghini and touch my phone and the next thing i know amazon drops a box, but for the car dealerships that's where they want to get. that purchase process is really not in the system, it's a real problem for consumption of the automobile and auto mobility. so that's kind of the way i want to frame this. okay? i don't want to look so much at the buick, although obviously i do want to look at it a lot, but

i want to -- 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 the buick? what was their first experience with it? what was it like to have three on the tree and the double clutch? all of those things. what was it like to buy it, what was it like to get it fixed? what was it like when it finally died? was it sad and allof those things. that goes to the way we think about the process of innovation and the process of invention. so, again, you think about driverless cars, okay, they're being invented, but, in fact, they've 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 will give you a couple -- 1900? 1910. 1898. very specific years. do you want to give me a month? >> july. >> there you go. there you go. yeah. i'm going to prove you all wrong. anyway, so the question is not so much birth, it's adoption. because it's born many times, it's often stillborn, i will show you how that happens. so the real questions i have are two, one, not why was it invented but why was it adopt snd why did the invention succeed when it did? and also what was it really? we think automobile, you get in a car, you go, it's a machine for getting places, transportation device and obviously, you know, when the driverless car people think about it that's what they think about it.

they are not talking about tail fins, they are not talking about how it's going to sit in your driveway for your kids to learn what it's like to be around an automobile. so that's kind of a strange question, but what is an automobile? by the same token i think you will be surprised perhaps to learn that driverless cars have been invented many times. thought about and technology described in the '30s, tested in the 1950s 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 it a little more deeply, we can say, oh, those are driverless cars, but they're very different than the driverless cars that are coming next. so we will look a little bit about what those driverless cars were like and what the

driverless cars are like today. all right. so you are all wrong, the automobile was invented in 1672. this guy is ver beast, he was a, i think, jesuit monk, he was a monk, he was a missionary, went to china, went there to turn the emperor into a christian, try to convince him about -- you know, bring him to christianity so he got a car to bring him to christianity, made this car. it's kind of cool. you can see there is a ball, the hose and a fire right below it. very simple, very straightforward. steam driven out of t spins a turbine, the turbine drives a couple of wooden gears, the 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 from

the drawing, but i'm sure they had it figured out. this was only big enough to carry a cat, but the question is not, okay, so there it is. it didn't work very well, maybe, we don't really know, but so what? why didn't someone look at that and go that's a good start, why don't we do some more. manage inn if over the last 100 and some years the chinese had decided to pursue rat collars. we would have pretty good rat cars. so really we see that it was invented and we can't say that it didn't work but we can say it wasn't adopted. this is a fascinating one. this is 1790, a guy named nathan reed, he 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 patent is george washington's signature. so the patent office hadn't been invented yet, but he had this idea, he got a patent, but 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 km others. this is another one of my favors. i call this the first amphibious car. oliver evans, very accomplished engineer, he did a lot with process innovation in flour mills and making flour, bread mills, if you will. he was building for the city of philadelphia a harbor dredge, a boat that goes out and digs up the mud so that boats can get through but he was also interested once he had this lightweight good steam engine in

collecting or attracting capital for a car business. so rather than getting some guys on a wagon to drag the thing down to the water he said i'm going to put some wheels on it and show it off and that's exactly what he did. maybe we will call that the first amphibious car. i don't know. 1805, though. no cars yet. this is one of my favorites and i will show it to you in a second in another version. this is 1853, dudgen's team wagon. this is 1853. that car burned in a fire, but i will show you in a minute a later one. the boiler sat in the middle, people sat on either side and it was essentially like a mini bus. he ran a very successful business running people out to long island from new york city, did about 30 miles an hour and for comparison a ford model t came out around 1909, 1908, it

did about 40. so 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 end the fearful misery of forces. so this is something that's developing in this period, this sort of aspca sensibility towards animals, thinking of them not as machines to be accused but as creatures. >> just quickly here is another version of this. this is 18 of 6. i show it to you because it's in the smis sewnian collection. it is not on display. we are the curators. it should be on display. no, it's just a great machine to look at it and it really does

tell us something about road transport. and i understand, you know, i was a curator, it's not easy. now, see is my most interesting one. also in the collection, a patent model. you had to produce not just a drawing but the physical model of your machine. 1879 this is at that bented by george selden, a at that tent attorney, upstate new york, i think rog ster. he was very start, it describes everything we think about of the early automobiles. lightweight, gasoline engine, able to deal with any reasonable incline. all kinds of other basic details we just think of as a car. 1879 the vehicle is not produced because it's very smart patent

attorney kept foiling amendments. there's ways you can tend. i don't know, patent attorneys in the room? you can ex tlend. you're locked in because you have patent pending. he waits until 1895 because in 1895 the automobile has arrived. the automobile has been born for hundreds of dwreer and certainly has white miebl by the middle of the 19th century. so here we are about 1900 and i'm going to digress for a second because i know people want to know about electric cars. and also, oh, how many of you drive an electric car or own an electric car? one. two. okay. tesla, bolt? tesla. uh-huh. okay. so one of the big questions

people always ask is why do we get gasoline cars and not electric cars? you could ask the same question about steam cars. if you look up at the top there there were about 4,000 vehicles in the country in 1900 and as you can see steam and electric outpaced the internal combustion car. early historians look at that and they say, well, internal combustion car is better, but you really have to ask yourself a more complicated question, what do we mean by better? is a goldfish bitter than a pigeon? i don't know. pigeon can't three but a goldfish -- well, i got that backwards, right? pigeon can't swim, goldfish can't froi. is a goldfish better than a

pigeon? >> the electric vehicle had a good business model and was very viable for urban transportation which is where the early automobiles were and was also cleaner, quieter, more sensible. they would be glassed in at a time when gasoline automobiles couldn't really have glass, they spoke and the glass would just crack and so forth. the other thing is that the electric car had a business model that's very different than the business model we think of over the last 100 years of, okay, we will sell cars to people and we will make our money, we will build more cars. the electric vehicle company developed and i want you to think about uber or lyft. that's what they were. so in 1899 they had a fleet of hundreds of taxicabs, most of them in new york city and you

could get basically a taxi ride, you could rent the vook vehicle for a week or a month, you could buy the vehicle, we were they will tifl expensive but you could die dye one of. it was a viable business. so what killed it? there is a couple of things culturally i will talk about in a minute, but in terms of growing concern in terms of a miss one of the things is that killed it was an attack on monopoly. if you were your history, theodore roosevelt, the trust buster, this is 1890s, turn of the century, trusts are a bad thing, standard oil and so forth. in particular a guy horseless age who was a big supporter of the gasoline automobile referred to them as the lead cab trust

and they were rapidly expanding. in fairness just like uber or lyft or an electric company, you do need to havemonopoly, you do need to have at least a large enough network because what good is it if you don't have three lyfts and you want to arrive. forget about it. the whole point is to have lots of them n that sense it was true. they really were providing moment as a service. they weren't so interested in selling you a vehicle, they were interested in selling you a ride. it worked. so what killed them in terms of business? they expanded rapidly, kept increasing their capitalization then they got into a bit of a scandal where they had done a fraudulent loan and the stock price went and enron kind of a thing. okay. let me talk now about what the automobile is when we get to the mid 1890s, 189 #.

3. we can talk about what's the first automobile, there are a bunch of other ones, i took out an electric car because it was complicated. i will just show you two of them here. 1893, also in the museum's collection, that's the durrier motor wagon. springfield, massachusetts. they had a winning car, lightweight, straightforward, you can see there is a tiller to steer, stick. they won races and were very durable. they did hill climbs, long distance runs so good car. stanley steamers, those are not the lewden cough drop guys, those are the -- those are the stanley twins and they between 1905, maybe a little earlier, '03, '07, sold about 2,000 of those vehicles. in 1897 they sold 200.

it was a very viable machine, accelerated easily, was quiet and all of these things. a popular car. 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 were the rothchilds, the vapder builts, the asters, the top tenth of 1%. you think of them as americans, but they inter married with europeans and they would cruise back and forth to europe on the liners. meanwhile, in france -- so there's 1893, let's look at this peugeot up on the top. notice -- i hope you can see him here, it's got lights. it's got little gas lamps. that's a real car. in fact, they were producing them and they were selling them a place for your lunch basket right there. so this is not just like a

little tricycle or a bicycle, you know, four-wheel bicycle. this is a serious car in 1893. the french eat this up but they don't eat it up in the sense of transportation, these are rich man's toys, young men especially of inherited wealth. this, the -- e oh, i'm shower that's not the peugeot. my text got messed up. but this is maybe one of the most significant vehicles, the pan hard livassor. my french. notice that these vehicles have the motor located under the seat. this vehicle was the motor out here. seems like simple enough, but as the motor gets bigger there is no place for it back here.

this becomes called the system pannard and this is why engines are out in front and once they are out in front they can get bigger and bigger and bigger. so this really creates the modern architecture, if you will, of the automobile. cars can get bigger -- engines can get bigger and also these were powerful and we were fast and they were fun. again, i think we have some lights, a little more luxury, but mostly have a lot more power and we have a quote, this is "new york times." france has paid the most attention, yet they're late in beginning -- and this is very american pride -- though late in beginning, we will make up lost ground and then we will lead the world as we do in this and about all other things. we're number one, right? the other one i love is this is from the same article, this is reviewing the 1900 automobile

show, the reporter from the "times" says fortunately none of these cars in america have adopted that foreign freak the wheel. so they're still excited about the tiller and meanwhile over there they have steering wheels. and it's not as simple as tiller versus steering wheel, it has a lot to do with the steering system and it really is a major advance, engineering advance. all right. let me keep moving. so a lot of things about the automobile that i could talk about, why it comes in in the 1890s it has to do with dechl graphics, a rise in immigration, collateral immigration from places like southern italy where you have a bunch of catholics coming in and jews coming in from eastern europe. not the good immigrants from earlier in the century, but the swarthy immigrants that seem not to nice to hang around. so you begin to get these

wealthier -- and i say that in the context of how the wasps, native born considered them back then. this is not commentary from me. but there is an effort to get out of the city. the city is also becoming more congested, industrialization is happening, you have this throng of new people. so the idea of getting out of the city is a new and exciting thing and the automobile is going to let you do it, partly, though, before the automobile there was the electrification of the streetcar. so well into the 1850s cities were basically as big as you could walk across, a couple of miles, in about half an hour you could walk a radius. with the electric streetcar that begins to expand and then the idea is the automobile will come and fill that. but i'm going to focus on one -- one of the many elements and that's the bicycle. so now we think of the bicycle and the automobile as enemies and certainly they are, anybody

that rides a bike on the streets knows, but in a lot of ways the bicycle established the car culture. huge bike craze in the 1890s. you can't even begin to imagine bike races got huge crowds. bicycle fashion, bicycle advertising. playing cards, right, with the bicycle on the back. that's from that period and 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. i don't -- and you can't see it well here, but i don't think she even has a wheel under there. i think she's just sort of -- it's like a side car, kind of balanced. i have to look into that. right? but it's a great way -- you're going to take a date, take the while, you will want to have her there. none of this like anybody has ridden a tandem you're always like this, what?

what? and they get no view, right? this is a guy named major taylor, a new book out about him, very interesting guy. number one racer in the country. obviously african-american at a time when african-americans racing against whites wasn't typically done. so the fact that he made a career in the business sin credible. on the other hand when they would travel he had to, you know, go to certain hotels and so forth. but here is what i want to touch on real quickly. so there were a lot of these women's clubs, women's biking clubs, and they were part of sort of suf row jets and women's empowerment in the period. one of the things you will notice, though, is that they're wearing long skirts. those are bike chains. anybody biked with a long skirt? even with your pant cuffs, i'm always stuffing it into my stock, right? you have to do this unless you

have one of the straps and you get to the office and somebody finally at lunch points it out to you and you're like, oh, jesus. right? but this doesn't work. so what do they do? let's see if we can tell you what they do. let's see. yeah. bloomers. women start wearing bloomers. oh, my god, look, you can see their ankles. they should cover that up. this is a pretty big deal. people who have moral panics about these kind of things, you know, 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. so you can see this, gives you the context. back in the day now you get baseball cards and gum which i don't even know if they give you the gum anymore, it's never any good, but cigarette packs, cigar

packs would come with a card and people would collect them. let's look at what this one has. way up in the corner here you can see a lady on a bicycle. obviously this lady has got a bicycle. but then look at all these legs showing, right? even some over there. i mean, wow. so what are they saying? well, if women are going to start dressing like that, what's next? they're going to start smoking cigars. can you imagine women smoking cigars, that manual thing, they're turning into men. so there really is this moral panic but there's also this period of women's empowerment. let me show you a little bit more about the bicycle culture and connect it to the car culture. you know, that's about the sex appeal, but it's also about empowerment. i think i have another slide i'm going to show you. danger in speed. here are bikes that are not your typical with the chain and

everything, these are called high wheelers or penny farthing if you are in england. the bigger the wheel the faster you go, simple physics. so the higher your wheel the faster you go. by the time you are up at 5 feet in the air you're going pretty fast but now you look like you're on a horse coming at people and they refer to them as scorchers, speeders, basing through town. that's on a track so that's okay. 1901, speed and danger. this is henry ford racing alexander winton. the idea that henry ford who was pretty much a failed businessman at this point beat the best racer with the biggest car company in the country was a huge deal. winton's car kind of sputtered in the race and he lost, but

people went wild. i love this line. one man threw his hat up in the air when it came down he stomped on t another man was so excited, i wanted to see this scene, 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 that thing with the egg -- any way -- okay. another cyclist. this is barney oldfield, celebrity cyclist, much like major taylor. henry ford got him to do his next racer, this is a few years later, this is called the 999, 1902, just a year later, you saw those other cars. this thing is insane. he's sitting in what amounts to like a drawing room car -- a drawing room seat, they probably pulled the legs off and took it out of clara ford's bedroom and put it on there and he's steering with a flat bar with

handles on t the engine is huge, sucked in like five gallons of air with every stroke, huge amounts of air, huge amounts of horsepower, did 90 miles an hour. okay? there is no seat belt, there is no air bags. there's, you know, no dashboard. the crank case is open for those of you who want to be car guys, the crank case is down at the bottom, drenched in oil, it was open, the oil just sprayed everywhere. it was nuts. this is ford, he was like we're going to make it as light as possible. here is the beauty of it, they had no idea how to drive. part of the reason i think there's this instead of this is, you know, he's like what's the steering wheel? he didn't know. okay. so that was all very exciting. people rushed out to these races, 1896, and cosmopolitan ran the

race and the crowd was so thick that the police had to come. people loved it. what they didn't love is when the rich folks started to tearing through the cities and killing children and basically colonizing the streets and driving people out of the way. you can see here the policemen are even dodging, dodging the roads. this is by the way called the crusade, is it? the crusade of the 500 or the charge of the -- the charge of the 400. so back in the day, there was a socialite list, and the after, and everybody was listed on it. so that is, that is the joke there. and this fellow, willie vanderbilt ii, willie k. vanderbilt ii was the most notorious of the guys, and the ones who got into this is the man in the inherited wealth, the scion, and they had wealth and they did not need any money, and

vanderbilt told him that they told the reporter that maybe he was the analyst, and, well, wealth is a certain death to ambition as cocaine is to immorally, and so he had nothing to excitement him, and so the auto wheel shows up, and off he goes. there is an interesting op-ed, and vanderbilt wanted to build, and some of his buddies wanted to build a raceway on long island and no other cars and no other people on it, and at times he editorialized and they said that is no fun, because the fun of it is to see how close they can get to pedestrians without killing them.

and now we try to deal with the traffic and the chaos, and there is a latin phrase used, order from chaos, and we need to bring order from chaos, and hopefully we can get this to work, and i will show you a remarkable scene 1906, and four days before the san francisco earthquake, and company who did these films, the guy is on the front of the streetcar, the cable car cranking away on the camera, and you will see people turn and look at him, because it is an amazing thing, and riding down market street and watching traffic, and looking at the traffic, and let me add that there is no sound in the original, but some film historians thought that it would be nice, and they did a sympathetic and thoughtful job of adding sounds, so you will get, i do hope, that you will

get a sense of the way that this sounds, so we will look at a few minutes of it, and you can see them running right down the track.

it is funny you see a bunch of cars in there and it is funny, because they are the same cars. there is license tag, and i'm pretty sure that he hired the cars to drive through, and there were not that many cars in san francisco at the time, but it is a sense of what is happening as the motor vehicles come in and faster and they weave in and out, and as you can see, there is no rules of the road and it

is chaos, and it does work. and certainly they go up and down the road, and people are kicked, and it is a multi functional space, and not on marketplace, but lots of streets, kids are playing and push carts and it is a multifunctional space, but over time though as the automobile comes in, there is a concern -- sorry, one sec, yeah. -- and i will jump ahead, but there is a spike of automobile deaths, because if you are looking at the miles traveled,

it spikes in the middle of the depression. also though there was an article that came out in 1935. it essentially said that you are saving a few minutes, but you are risking your life. so slow down and save your life. so we have heard that, right. but nobody had done a full-on blood and gore story. he talks about going to these scenes and seeing bones sticking out, and blood coming out of a woman's mouth, and this is to shock people out of complacency of statistics and it does have

an impact, but it does not make people drive safer, but gallup poll says that they want more policing of the drivers and not them, but the bad drivers. so right in this period, it is interesting in 1935, the aaa comes out with driver's ed pamphlets and the insurance industry comes out with drives rules and there is also psychotechnologists coming out. and this is the 1930s where in a period where eugenical thinking is on the way of science solving problems, and we will look at how that plays out. i am not talking about fixing the driver or the road or the

car, and i will leave fixing the car out of the picture, but for those who are familiar with it, ralph nader was not just a presidential candidate, but he wrote "unsafe at any speed." and in 1960s we got airbags and seat belts and everything that we are living in this automobile cocoon that we drive. but back in the 1930s following the publication of "and sudden death" the automobile industry did get involved in the rhetoric of driver safety, and they began to advertise their vehicles the safety components and they have better brakes, or a turtle top of safer roof so it won't crush when you rollover. so, you know, the autocompanies were terrible, and gm was the

worst and lead glas and safety glass and we can talk about that, but not in the 1930s, research into the crash survival and some of the research made the way to studebaker and a guy by the name of paul hoffman and he turned it over to the automobile safety foundation, and this is different from the 1960s solution, and this is what we do to fix the foundation, and this is the right of the set of traffic rules set up in new york city, and a little guy named william phelps and a little beard and patrician, and he called getting caught in a blockade, and this is horses and wagons and he is wealthy guy, and another scion of the rich family, and he never drove before automobiles, but he did not like the chaos of the streets that he saw. this blockade, and he was a

child at the time, and he was like, wait, this is like 12 wagons and this is nuts. so as we were older, and in 1903, and he convinced the police department to introduce a set of rules, and there were things that we take for granted, and turning the other way, the right-of-way, and those kinds of things. that spreads various state and local agents come together particularly in the 1920s and begin to create a uniform code. that is one of the problems that you can be driving from, you know, mississippi to alabama and the rules change, right. and also on the sleft the traffic light. now, this is fascinating to me. you come to the intersection and there is a traffic light. you have to stop. running a red light is one of the most dangerous things that happened.

redlight cameras are supposed to stop that, but a rotary which, you may see it coming in, and i'm not talking about dupont circle, but modern traffic rotaries and anybody been in a new ish rotary and you have seen them showing up? there is more and more of them, and they are safer. even if you bump into somebody, you will do a t-bone and you are not going to die unless you do something crazy, but the traffic light is going to be the solution, and it is let's behave and make sure that somebody behaves, and make sure that you do something which is called the deterrent policing. police are out there surveillancing to keep an eye on everybody. you may recognize especially if you have younger kids, what's it called? the hate you give -- this is the movie. it centers around the shooting

of a young black man, unarmed black man by a policeman. on the right is the shooting of ferlando castille, and was it justifiable or not, and we can argue about that, but to me, that is not the story. he was pulled over something like 40 times in the previous six months or year. the statistics show that african-american are not necessarily shot more than other people who are pulled over, it is just that they are pulled over so much more. they are searched way more. encounters with the police often end badly.

the reality is that we are breaking the rules all of the time, right. yeah, you all good drivers, right, and you never forget to signal, and you never have a brake light out, and i know that you don't, and i have done and i'm the best driver, but what we have now is a set of rules starting in 1903 and expands which allow the police no matter what they really think of pretextural traffic stop it is called and maybe they think that you a gang member in a wrong part of town and you fail to signal, they can pull you over, and they can even arrest you, and it is a pain, because it is too much paperwork, but they can haul you into jail in most states that is weird. so i like to say that we talk about driving while black, but because of the way we decide to improve the safety of motor vehicle traffic, we are aling w

all driving with the perception of general warrant. this is an excerpt in the 1990s that the supreme court decided that sobriety checkpoints are constitutional, and mothers against drunk driving got a hold of president reagan's ear, and said that our children are being killed by the dastardly drunk drivers and you have to check to get them off of the road, and the methods that they want to use are ineffectual, and most of the children who die in drunk driving accidents are actually riding with the drunk or inebriated driver, and so they were sued, and you know, as a fourth amendment search and

seizure, and rehnquist said that there were $4,000 people a year being killed by drunk drivers -- there were 4,000 people a year being killeded by drunk drivers and that is not true, but those are some of the statistics that we use. so, this is 1930s and i did some dissertation work on this. the detroit recorders court who thought that you did something weird in the courtroom, they would send you to the courtroom, and do a full work up, eye test,

intelligence test and these are the reactive graph, and this is a famous psychiatrist who wrote textbooks and so important that he was going to work at the court clinic, and this is, i am not sure but a staged photo for detroit news and he is like, dialing in to get this right, because this is going to be an objective measurement. none of this is objective, and this is allen canty, his assistant showing a film, and these are his secretaries or assistants and these are supposed to be his patients, and that what they were patients. so i did my dissertation and doctoral work on this, one chapter and we find bad drivers and bad risks as drivers and we correlate that with an outcome. so in other words, they do a psychiatric test and decide you have a bad attitude or crazy or

senile or whatever and tell the judge, take his license away or maybe they think that you are a little bit of the socio path and take this away, and p-values and correlations and regressions and that, and it has nothing to do with whether or not you are a good driver, but black or white, woman or man, immigrant or not, from syria or a jew and that would correlate with your case. so, let's do this fairly quickly, this is another way, driver's education. how many of you went to driver's ed. in public school? yeah. so thank you, public school. drivers education. now, here is the local government paying for you, and now it has changed a little bit, but paying for you to learn to drive. isn't that change?

isn't that change? why is that part of the curriculum? and what is it really about? it turns out that the easier it got to drive and the double-druching is gone, and the cars were easier to drive, the textbooks got bigger and bigger and not just about driver training or how to operate the vehicle, but it was about citizenship and other things that i will show you. again, this is 1930s and they would have the safety parades and different cities would get awarded each year as the safest city. this is kansas city, but i'm not sure. this is the schoolchildren's safety parade going before the reviewing stand. i want you to notice, and it is hard to see, because it is not a great image, but so there's the car in the school, and there's the school kids and notice this

sign right here. america first, safety always. that seems to be a bit of conflating a couple of different ideas. right. you don't want to take it too deeply, but i have been fascinated by this. and for a long time, i thought that these were pictures of hitler in the back, but they are traffic lights. now, this is a getty imagined short film, but it is a march on washington school safety patrols. it was a school safety -- whoops, go back and you have to get this to run by doing that. there is joe dimaggio, and see if we can make it bigger, and again, fairly unclear, but this is, you can see the helmets and the marching and the learning to march in step. we have this belt, the orange

belt going around here with the shoulder strap, and your job is a little bit of authority, right. you are a little bit of the brown shirt and vote for safety. right. eyes and ears and the guys with the shields. so, now, a quick pause, if i can. that is dekalb county, georgia. in 1980s, dekalb county, georgia, was the site of the biggest driver education and the reason was nhtsa and the federal government was interested in driver education and if it worked and they found that it didn't and it caused children to get the licenses at a younger age, and therefore more traffic involvement and in other words more driver education and in the period it was counter productive, and so, let's look at this marching.

i wish we had the music. oh, look at that -- what is that about? always be careful -- and you have to give them the southern flag and the confederate soldiers, and that is okay. look at this. there they are. against accidents. the flags, the white dresses. okay. so let me see if i can do this right, and very complicated, and now, go away. sorry, wait. we have to present again.

come on. help me out. everybody relax. all going to come together. okay. we will get to everything fast. the problem with the slides and the videos. okay. we are going to talk about engineering the driver and some of the weird ways that we tried to do it, and obviously, the ultimate solution that we seem to have now is to eliminate the driver. but let's see if we can engineer a better road. again, pivotal year, 1935, and this is a grant wood painting and best known for the pitch fork man and lady, and i can even go to the art museums, i told you. this is called "death on the ridge road." and again, the response could have been, hey, slow down, and

don't pass, and don't rush past another vehicle, and don't speed. that is a two-lane road, and this is a bad idea. you are a bad driver, and look at what is going to happen. the limousine is cresting, and beautiful bright red truck, and people are going to die and it is going to be gruesome. so a lot of people looked at that and, well, we need more laws to get the bad drivers off of the road, and people looked at that and said, let's get rid of the ridge in the road. so that is what they began to do. we think of the interstate highway as eisenhower and the suburbs and ruffle chips and dips and barbeques, but the planning is beginning in the 1930s and in this context and all of the things that you would expect. it is about work, right. everybody is out of work. hey, a lot of shovels to build a highway. it is about safety.

even today, the highwayses are twice as safe as surface streets, and so it is about getting the references to the vehicles going willy-nilly over the landscape. we need to control them. instead of being a symbol of freedom and maybe it is a symbol of freedom or about freedom, it is about controlling traffic and i like to think of it as a railroad, and a concrete railroad with rubber tires. if you ever miss the exit, it is just like missing the stop on the subway, right? you have to go to the next one an turn the train around and come back. you get on and you get off only in certain places, and that is what makes it work. the other element of it is urban renewal. and 24 is a great quote. this is, i should say, the front

page for original report describing the intrastate highway, the national freeway system delivered to fdr and he is trying to get it funded with a very hard time. but, also, and oh, also, in 1939 to 1956 is actually not a huge distance in time, and of course, you have the war in between, so, it is also about urban renewal, and a lot of people think the highways come in and that is bad, but the purpose of the highways was not, oh, let's destroy the city, and hate the city, but it is almost untenable, and occupied by the humblest citizens and they fringe the business core, and these are the slums of of the city, and fringe the district, and form the slum of the blight near the very core. we are going to come in and use the highways as a way to rebuild

the city, and this is of course exactly what they did. okay. this is, if you went to the world's fair in 1939 and you got that pin -- i want one of those -- and they had one in "back to the future" and ralph nader recalled going as young kid and yelling "gm, gm, gm" and this exhibit and lots of people were. this is the idea. look at how wide those lanes are. you turn this city into the super block of towers, and that what you do, waiting into the long line and so this is the course of things in 1940, and you sit in something called the

carry-go-round, and built by a diorama -- and how are we doing? are you bored? do you need to breathe? stick with it, because it is going to get good. so let's look at what happened with the highways. the highways were doing fine when they were outt in the sticks, because there was nobody to bother them, but this is washington, d.c., and this is the 1950 layout for the freeways that is going to go through the city, and very quickly here is the inner beltway, okay. you can see the district lines here. this is inside the district that you will have a beltway. it is going to work out good. 66 is going to come in, and do

this round thing, and that is good. this is now 395 i'm guessing. is that right? yeah. that seemed like a good idea. and i-95 is going to cut right across here, and there is going to be something called the three sisters bridge and take the highway right across the river and through the city, because we want to revitalize the city and get rid of those slums, but it turned out that people lived in those slums. and this happened all around the country, and i will tell you about it in d.c., because it is a fascinating story. i have been thinking about this lately, because i don't know if any of you have been following the hogan's plan to widen the highways, and put in dynamic tolls, and that a high-tech, you know, solution, but the reality is what are we talking about? we are talking about adding highway lanes. and what got me is the rhetoric.

so peter khan who is his secretary of transportation who by the way was the last job building dynamic highways and he got into trouble, but anyway, people were against this. so, he complained about a quote very active vocal minority opposed to reducing the region's congestion. he insists that we need more highway lanes. larry hogan said that there is a bunch of pro-traffic activists in town with a plot to keep the road filled with traffic. now, that is not quite as bad as what happened in 1968, and here is a quote from angela rooney who is one of the leaders of the highway revolt, and she recalled

highway harassment and noted that -- sorry, in the "washington post" and quote called us everything from communists to pinkos to that little band of discontented people. that engagement or that conflict is there. and it is still there. again, i will try to keep moving there, and these are fascinating guys. this is sammy abbott who is an old school, and he looks like mr. magoo, and he is an old school labor quite. he is union organizer back in the '30s, and he knew how to organize people to get things going. this is reginald booker who is also, and he was the president, and part of the reason that i think that he was the president is that they adopted this slogan, white men's roads through black men's homes. which, if you are looking across the country that is very much true, and some mayors even said

that is why we want to do this and racially segregate this town, and throw up a multi lane exchange through cincinnati, and in d.c., it was not quite this way, because it was white and black neighborhoods that they were going to go through, but using that slogan really captured the moment. so, i think it is interesting, and i think it is interesting that we are facing it again. okay. we will keep moving, and talk about the driverless cars. okay. why driverless cars? we are not getting safer cars in this 1890s or cars to sit with the dealer and so what has

changed? why driverless cars now? two things. one, if you are looking at the ride hailing companies, they are not making money. in fact, they are losing money hand over fist and one of the problems is that they have to pay people to drive cars. they tried to crush the labor and the payouts and i rode over here for uber and he only drives for lyft, because uber was squeezing him, but as far as they are concerned, you cannot make money driving cars, so the concern with the automobile itself, driverless cars in the path. so when i talk about what is a driverless car, and what kind are we getting now and how is that different than in the past? so i think that there is a simple way to talk about it,

communitarian and libertarian. in the past, general market solution, and general motors working with the government for example and now the less involvement from the government the better the driverless companies are concerned and not building infrastructure is better for them. so, driverless cars were invented many times. this is about 1958 that these ads were in magazines and they were for electric companies trying to keep the government off of the electric grid trying to stop nuclear power from being developed from the federal government so they could make money selling electricity which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and here, every other article uses this image and nobody points out where it comes from, and it actually comes from these electric companies, and the thing that you will notice

from it, it has no connection to the current driverless cars. it has a lane market, and that car is going right down the center of the lane. it is not driving between the lanes. well, that is kind of weird. and the other thing, it is as a side note, all of the silicon valley bros who are saying that driverless cars are coming and geniuses, and many of them from bryn and google and others from driverless cars and this the same campaign, and they are not pursuing driverless flying saucers, and these things that are making a racket like a safe helicopter, and this is what i want. and puppy in the back. and groceries, and mom at the wheel, and nice big steering wheel, and little air vent, and now, it is a flying saucer, and that i want. notice, a two flying saucer

family there. look. this is what electricity is going to bring you. but this is utter science fiction, but this is in 1958, science fact. and rca, the cutting edge of electronics and transistors and that type of stuff, and this is on a test track, and you can see the guy on the right, and he is not sitting at the steering wheel, and in fact, there is no steering wheel. there is a joystick, but there is no steering wheel, and i am pretty sure that is an impala and a '68. >> yes. >> a ha! i was hoping there would be somebody here. don't get me started on the mustangs, because i am terrible. yeah, so there it is. driverless car. works. actually works. now, i am going to show you that first, why not? why didn't gm pursue this?

in 1958, gm was the most powerful and largest profitable country -- not country, but company in the country, and also, this is required cooperation with the people who made the roads and basically the government, and some of you may be familiar with the quote what is good for general motors is good for the government, and that is very much true. so hoping that this is big enough for you, and here's the way general motors also played it, okay. this is the firebird ii and there were three of them, i urge you to look up firebird ii and iii and nevermind, and oh, wait, ah, back. we will see if it will play. okay. >> using great power in small packages. >> that is the image of it. >> and using generator, and

exhaust heat is no longer a problem. though the experimental car has a science fiction appearance, it is practical and usable in every design, and even the electronic highway is feasible for the future, and here the driver tomorrow will push a button and the car tomorrow will drive itself, and the car will pick up various impulses, and roll it along in complete safety, and tomorrow, the car has pertinent safety and gives weather reports. >> a tv screen in the car. so that is there. and this is quite viable, and i will show you the real thing. done in 1997, and this is something called the highway system, and there was considered to be a problem right at the end of the building of the internet system, and there is going to be some kind of reauthorization, and are we going to build more highways and oh, wait, we can't

do that, and this is the existing highways more efficient. so how can we do that? let's squeeze more cars on to the roads and also, let's reduce congestion which is caused by crashes, right? you have all been stuck behind a crash on the highway. so, automated vehicle systems will be able to steer around the obstacles and avoid them if the driver misses them, and it is going to be more relaxing, because it is more self-driving, and cars can drive, you know, inches apart, and let's look at this. this is 1997, and it is kind of vhs quality and government production and take a good look, but it is going to show you two different things. pontiac swerving and a bunch of buicks behaving like in the army. okay. here we go. >> and here we are. we are driving with no hand, and

coming up to the obstacle up here, and this is pretty cool. i wonder what the other traffic thinks. it is seeing the barrels and the swerving. and we are around it. no hands. >> the consortium calls them scenarios, and these scenarios demonstrate the technical feasibility of various types of highway technologies and how they will increase safety and ease traffic congestion. >> they will show the platoons of vehicles that are closely spaced together. >> okay. so that is going to be hilarious that the pontiac's slogan is that we build excitement, and buick is that they are buick, so they march along. but, again, it worked. it worked and required infrastructure and advanced by the government. so now, i am going to wrap up quickly and talking about those

same themes as we are now seeing with what i call the libertarian or the ann randian driverless car, and this is anita cho talking about mixing up metaphors. it is a major factor of all fatal crashes is human error. advanced driving systems, ads, and it will help solve that. we have ads and that is maybe some of you have it on the nice new cars, and self-emergency braking, right? you forget to brake and something is in front of you, and lane keeping assist is going to tell you when something is going out of your lane and keeps you in it. safety. and here is elon musk who insists that his car is fully self-driving or will be next

week. every year that we delay this self-driving more people die. and now he is attacking journalists who are complaining actually about the stock. he says that if in writing some article that is negative that you dissuade people from using autonomous vehicles, you are killing people. he is like henry ford. anthony lewandowski who was involved in the google uber suit. and it is irresponsible to not have them there. and kyle voyt who founded cruise automation which is part of general motors and part of what is driving him is that some 33 million -- 33,000 americans are killed by highway accidents every year. 90% of the time by human error. ugh, that makes me so mad.

they want to eliminate the driver, because we are bad drivers. it is not true. this is the 94% fallacy. they all read this document that says that 94% of accidents -- no. this critical reason for crashes investigated in the national investigation motor crash survey, and it does not say who causes the crashes, because you have to read the footnotes. nobody reads footnotes. although the critical reason is an important part of the description of the events leading up to the crash, it is not intended to be interpreted as the cause of the crash nor is the assignment of the fault to the vehicle or the environment.

the driver is always, and i'm surprised it is not 100%, but the driver is almost always the last link in the chain. the driver can always avoid the accident, no matter how bad the intersection, and we know there are bad intersections, and they are labeled dangerous intersections, and people go through them millions of times without crashing, thousands of times without crashing, an therefore it must be my fault. it is only my fault, because i could have stopped it, but they could have stopped it long before, and the way to stop it is not to get rid of me, and the way to stop it is to fix the roads and to fix the infrastructure so that we are using vehicles less, and driving them slower and they are safer, and the roads are safer. so, i think that i am almost done. so what are these driverless cars. i call them irandian and part of

the reason to come up with driverless cars because they had to come up with notes to send the priest over, and this is bad. and particularly the poor guys that were just driving the fuel trucks to fill up the fuel tanks were getting blown up. and you can't put something in road in iraq, because they blow up. so you need something that operates on its own. and so these are some of the real reasons again going back. uber, $120 billion was the last valuation and now $168 billion. their market cap, yeah, $68 billion. and when he heard about the self-driving cars, he said that we will take all of the 30% giving to drivers and we are going to keep it. they would take the entire fare, and that means billions upon

billions of revenue and the project code name is a dollar sign. there is a new book out by mike isaac, and it is called "super pump" and he describes that. you can't make money selling cars. if you are starting with that quote on the bottom, the auto companies collectively earn less than the cost of capitol and most companies destroy value, so let me put it in simple words. building cars is a money losing operation globally. so what do the car companies want to do? what does uber want to do? they want to get rid of the drivers, and maybe one day they will be profitable. and what does general motors want to do? they want to be like the faangs and the facebooks and so on, and they want a cap of $70 million and uber at the diminished state price to earnings ratio, and the

stock price of 5.4, and ford is 7.1. uber, they lose money, so they don't have one, but still. and amazon is 75, and facebook is 35. so that is what they want to be. they want to have the cost of capital to go down so they can maybe make money. last thing that i will leave with you is that there are no driverless cars. there are no driverless cars. this has been a real problem. there was a columnist for "the new york times" and i should start with the one on the bottom, "automotive news" said when your driverless car is not driverless. so it is not like you can sit in the back seat and let the thing go. and my favorite is from "the drive" terrified new york times columnist confuses the volvo

with the magic driverless car. and people are dying. the first death that completed the report was the death of a man named josh brown driving the tesla, and using it on autopilot, and we can talk about the operational domain and all of that, but, the ntsb studied it, and they found that calling this thing auto pilot was a problem. adding to the problem is the moniker autopilot and joe and susie public may not be paying attention to the driving task, because the auto pilot is doing everything, and so he paid no attention and drove the car right underneath the back end of the semi trailer and shaved off of the back of the car and his head. but four of them. one in china, and josh brown,

and walter wong and also elaine wurzberg who was killed by an uber a self-driving test car, and the safety driver was not paying attention, and these things do not work yet. they are certainly not safe. so that is what i have to show you. this is the end of my road trip. that is my beloved saab. and i really thank you, because i could go on forever. and you have been patient. but more than talking is listening, so i would love to know what you have to comment on and questions that you have or anything that you want to know. if you want to know how to change your oil or tire, i will help you. and car buying advice, and anything. stock picks? no. thank you. thank you. [ applause ]

every time i give a talk i have a hard time getting questions. yes, sir. >> with the liability, have they really sorted out the liability in some of the crashes, because there a driver in the vehicle, but you know, the software was developed by somebody, and the vehicle itself was built by somebody and so, where are we at with the assignment of the blame and -- >> assignment of blame is a huge and interesting question. i say a couple of things. one is that the society of automotive historians. the society of automotive engineers developed something called the levels of driverless cars, and they start with zero which is what i drive which is, you know, and they work their way up from controlling the brakes and the gas to steering.

and they say that when you get the five, it is full self-driving. that is not full self-driving. here is what is full self-driving is when i don't have to pay car insurance, and the car company pays the car insurance, and to me, that is full self-driving. what has happened with the tesla crashes is a suit in china and one here where the argument is where in the manual it says that you have to keep your hands on the wheel, and so there is a thing in the ntsb that it is not held thus far, and so nobody is holding the vehicles responsible for the crashes.

yeah. yes, sir sir. >> can you envision a time of autonomous driving? >> i cannot envision it, because if the argument is safety, you have plenty of safety systems that already make driving very, very safe. what i can see is keeping cars out of cities where there are pedestrians. and what we have not talked about is where there are 35, 40,000 deaths a years, and 10,000 alcohol-related and we have the technology to prevent people from driving drunk. and we have the technology and you can put it in old cars, but we don't. so somehow the government is going to be coming in and saying that is illegal, i find it hard to believe, because the government has had every opportunity to solve problems like speed, and quickly, the

european union has just instituted a new, all new cars will have speed governors, so if you are on a 55 or 100 kilometer road, the car won't go over 100 kilometers or if you are on a 35 kilometer road, you won't go over 35 kilometers, and we have gps and so i could see that coming in and it is not that hard, but that is different than saying that you can't drive. people want to drive. yeah. >> when do driver's licenses become required? >> when do they become acquired? >> when. >> it happened in the '30s mostly, and it spread from more populist states and denser states and places like north dakota, and interestingly early on, and you would go to dmv and

they would say, are you insane, and you would say no, and you would get a license. are you blind is another one. so testing, and the driver testing did not come in until really the 1950s for the most part. and so very, very late. people drove without licenses for a long time. >> and you showed -- >> sorry, say that again. the patent? >> yes. >> and not to sell the book, but i talk about this quite a bit. so, celadon had a patent, and this is late 1935, and he sued wynton who was the largest carmaker in the country, and then he fought for a while, and then he settled, but what he

settled for was 1.25% of the royalty of the sales, and now celadon was part of a consortium that included the electric vehicle company, and they had bought the patent, and so he got a piece of it, and the electric vehicle company got a piece of it, but another part of it went to alam, the automobile license association members. i probably have that wrong, but you get the idea. they were essentially an industry group, a trade group. they are often referred to as patent controls, and it comes out in the historiographies out of the history of henry ford, and they were patent trolls. so they eventually had most of the automakers as part of the alam and the trade association, and they did good things like 8,000 different bolt sizes for

cars. and you know, 8,000 different bushings, and so they consolidated that. on the other hand, they were in a monopoly and who could and could not join it, and henry ford tried to join, and they rebuff and he let them sue him. and so in the end, the patent was declared valid but only for the particular kind of engine in the patent, so it was basically thrown out, and by that time it had a year to run. it is fascinating story of the celadon patent story, and if you are interested in following it up, i am proud of the way i treat it in, there because so many of them, and so many of the stories are based on henry ford. does that answer it? yeah. maybe too much.

okay. >> your presentation makes it sound like autonomous vehicles are inevitable in the u.s., so i am interested in your timing of it, and how long until the majority of the vehicles are autonomous, and how long until virtually all vehicles are autonomous? >> two things, and i don't like to come to do these things where i tell everybody, nah, it is not going to happen. i do think that there is that possibility. it is clear that we are finding it much harder and part of it is the roads. i talked about how hard the roads are and the drivers are blamed, but it is very hard for the robot to negotiate, so two things that i would point out is that i see it a long time before any sort of majority, and there are more cars than drivers in the country, and licensed drivers and 240 million or so, and we sell about 17 million new

cars, and average cars is 12 years old, and the average car is 18 years old, so even if all of them were self-driving tomorrow, it is two decades before we all bought them. assuming that we could all buy them, and the second thing is that the cost of one of these vehicles because of the sensors and the computing power is still large and then finally they don't work. and so -- [ laughter ] right? so they speak about how they work except for the edu cases. so i see them used on the campus or a small area or the get around the city in a small pod, but i think that we are a long way from this idea that we will all be driving autonomous. these are great questions. okay. >> will we get tot the point of an electric car that is 500

miles between the charges to drive across the country and not be too worried about running out of power? >> the 500-mile one is a tricky one, and that is more of the range of a gasoline car. there is a possibility for the technology to get 250 to 300 miles, but you need to be able to charge in six minutes, and this is a tricky business. porsche says they are coming out with something like that, and so less than 500 miles, but very fast charging and charging that works. excuse me, charging that works. the weirdest thing now is that you have to sit and wait for half an hour, and what if you show up, and somebody is already sitting there for a half hour. that is a real problem. so i do think that there are solutions to that and maybe not the 500 miles, but, yeah, we are getting there. sorry, you -- yes. >> i have a question.

it seems like in the presentation, we went from the advent of the car into driverless and the thing that are happening now where there is actually talking between the vehicles, and what do you think about that and where we are going with that? >> and a what you are talking about is v2v or v2x and it is very cool. it is very much like the 1958 impala that i showed you, right? where the technology is fairly simple, and radios and sensors, and the most basic way to put it is that it tells the cars not to be in the same place at the same time, right. it has been the radio spectrum to do this was ale located in about 2000 and maybe earlier and the auto companies have been fighting it time. they're not excited about it. they say, i'll give you what they say, which is, they don't want to get stuck with an old

technology. they want to use 5g, cellular instead and they're not convinced it works. that's what they said about seat belts. that's what they said about air bags, safety glass. that's what they said, et cetera, et cetera. the pattern of behavior worries me. on the other hand, the 5g idea tries to do the same thing. the reason they're excited about that is one you have 5g in car, all this data comes in. all this delicious data. amazon can tell you things. i think that's what's going on. there's no reason not to have it. localiies have invested in it. put it in traffic lights and all of that. it does a lot of good stuff many the book. i'm happy to stay and talk. >> yes.

>> i was reading in canada, there are researchers developing morality software their driverless cars so the car knows in grandma is riding a bicycle and a squirrel goes across the road, it's okay to hit the squirrel and not grandma. do you see any challenges with developing that type of technology? >> it's an excellent question. i love this part. i argue that is a totalizing conversation. in other words, what they trying to do is say, the automobile, the driverless car is a new kind of moral actor. it enters a space which is going to force it to make decisions that human beings make now.

the reality is, it doesn't have any clue what's in the road or whose driving. there's been a lot of coverage of that. there's already a moral frame work in the automobile driver road system. for example, traffic engineers don't think about safety and then mobility. they think about mobility and then safety. that's a moral choice. other than these philosophers are trying to make a living, it's an absurd conversation. i'll read you very quickly and

some level it's a useful exercise. they should think about this stuff. here's a terrible idea, robot cars with adjustable ethics. here is the real problem. it's a scenario where a car is following a truck, boxes fall off the truck. should he swerve right and hit the mini van full of kids or swerve left. this guy is not wearing a helmet, he kind of deserves to die in this accident. consider a car barrelling down a street with a cripple boy crutches break. should they swerve left to avoid risk killing the kid and kill the driver or slam on the brakes and hope for the best. i imagine the coders, and i hope

you know your python code here. if kid in street is greater than 16, line print kill kid in street. line print we are sorry for your loss. line print, serves you right. the real question is, the real question is not which way should the porsche turn. the real question is why is the porsche going so fast in the first place. the porsche should not be tailgating a truck that drops boxes off the back and has to swerve. that's the promise of the driverless car. sorry, i get excited. i'm happy to take more questions. we need to wrap up but thank you so much for coming. [ applause ]es a class on

roadways. she talks about how the innovations were used in the development of america's freeway system. >> today we are looking at the development of roads. you probably know that you don't know a lot of landscape architects who do roads. it's not something we appreci