on c-span 3. working with cable affiliate and visiting cities across the country. this past september, the national highway traffic safety administration mentioned guidelines for autonomous vehicles. experts and consultant sat down to talk about driverless, shared and electric vehicles and the future of transportation. this took place at common wealth club of california in san francisco. good even aeng welcome to tonight's meeting of the common wealth club of california. the place where you and we are all in the know. we are on-line, at commonwealthclub.org, on facebook, twitter and check out the common wealth club youtube channel. i'm janette shaw. ceo of techolicy and your moderator for autonomous vehicles and the future of transport. i've been in technology for over 30 years. techolicy provides stake holder engagement to meet the needs of the individual sector such as autonomous vehicles. prior to techolicy, i worked for a fortune 500 company and chosen by kleiner perkins to establish tech net, otherwise known as technology network, an national tech focused toek until ji organization. and this evening, i am going to be honored to introduce such a wonderful panel and once i introduce the panel, we're going to go ahead and review the definition of what an autonomous vehicle is, so we'll set the stage and then each panelist will have three to five minutes to talk about their vision and what the landscape looks to them for autonomous vehicles. following the panelist openings, we'll then have q and a and that will include audience questions that you'll have written on the cards and will be passed up. so with that, i'd like to start with and introduce emily castor. emily is the director of transportation policy at lyft. emily has been on the front of ride sharing policies since the birth of the industry. that's a long time. >> it's not so long. that's what's scary. >> in dog years maybe. she leads lyft's work with transportation agencies to integrate shared mobility and measure its impacts. emily believes lyft is a critical tool to expand transportation access, reduce car ownership and cut carbon emissions. emily is an advisory board member at the institute of transportation studies at ucla on the sharing economy advisory network and on the leadership council of the national center for sustainable transportation among many other board positions. i also had the opportunity to ask each board member panelist about a fun fact about them and emily's fun fact is that she has a hidden talent for saying the alphabet backwards very, very fast. we need to have you do that at the end of the program. >> after-party. >> there we go. and she's also addicted to ice cream and can recommend at least five recommended ice cream shops here in san francisco. i think can i list a few. ice cream bar, mitchell's, mr. and mrs. miscellaneous, buy right and smitten. next is clair. she's at auto recently purchased by uber. she brings robotics to the team. after graduating from epsi in france with an ms in computer engineering, clair worked on autonomous cars and robots for tempura, stanford research and gostay. and several companies including next to robots, robotics valley. and most recently, a staff software engineer for google where she led several innovative robotic projects. i can only imagine what that would have been like. would be fun to be a fly on the wall. and a fun fact about claire. when she was younger, choosing between veterinary sigh answers computer science, and despite her love of nature, she actually ultimately chose computer science and thankfully because we have a robotics project today, so welcome. >> thank you. >> our next panelist, no stranger to the autonomous vehicle world is lauren isaac. the manager of sustainable transportation at w.s.p. parason springerhof. and involved in advanced technology products that can improve mobility in many cities in 2015, awarded the william barkley parsons fellowship for driving toward driverless. in addition, lauren maintains the blog driving towards driverless. that's got to be a full-time job. and on this topic in more than 30 industry conferences. she recently did a ted ex talk and it published in forbes, new york times and the chicago tribu tribune among other publications. a master of engineering degree in operations, research, and industrial engineering and bachelor's degree in the same discipline from cornell university. the two engineers in the center of our panel. and the fun fact about lauren as well, congratulations, just got married a few weeks ago. and she was on a mission to get a driverless vehicle at her wedding. emily was recently engaged, i think you'll have to do the same. at least you'll get there by lyft. and despite having multiple companies and people in the industry working hard to make it happen, seems she might have been just a little early. so a couple of the companies though, thankfully, have promised her a driverless vehicle at the one-year anniversary celebration. and then our final panelist introduction is lindsey willis, the director of external affairs at contra costa transportation authority and lindsey is responsible for directing communication, advocacy, and community engagement efforts. her leadership has produced award winning public engagement, programs at international recognition for the innovative utilization of technology and if you haven't been on contra costa county authority transportation web site, i recommend it because the technology is amazing that lindsey has put together. lindsey is responsible for increasing brand awareness for the 1.3 billion in transportation programs including directing the launch of go momentum station in concord, california, the nation's largest secured connected vehicle in autonomous vehicle test bed. got to be an amazing place to sit and watch. some people watch airplanes. i think could you just watch autonomous vehicles go by. in prior to 2013, developed strategic partnership for the capital corridor joint powers authority. fun fact about lindsey, lindsey's first introduction to transportation other than sharing the backseat of a station wagon with her three sisters, had to have been exciting, was a train trip from california to vancouver for the 1986 world fair. many years later, her first job in transportation was with the capital corridor train service which is here in california. that is our panelists. so at this time, ook, so what is an autonomous vehicle. it has other names too such as driverless vehicle, self-driving vehicle, highly automated vehicle, a new term we recently have seen from the federal government or robotic car. do you think of johnny cab in total recall, featuring former governor, arnold schwarzenegger, when you hear autonomous vehicle? that sometimes comes to my mind. so what is it? an autonomous car is a vehicle that's capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human interaction. they can detect their surroundings using a variety of techniques including radar, sensors and communication networks. so now i'd like to go down the line starting with emily and if you could paint a picture of how to define and what you see in the future of autonomous vehicles looking alike. >> sure. well, i'm really excited to be here and share a little bit about lyft's vision for autonomous vehicles and i think it's easy to imagine an entry point into that because ride sharing that started to lay the groundwork in that recession and mobility and next few years, autonomous. if you think about it, it's the beginning of a major transition away from the relationship with vehicles being one of ownership toward a relationship of transportation as a service. so lyft has taught people to have that kind of relationship over the last few years as we've rolled out on-demand mobility through a digital interface, tap a button, have a driver show up and there's not a huge difference between that behavior and the behavior of tapping a button on our phone and having an autonomous vehicle show up. you're not driving it, you're not owning it. you're accessing that when you need it and only when you need it. so we're excited about the fact that the network we built laid the groundwork for what can later be layered on top as autonomous technology becomes available. and our founder, john zimmer, spoke recently and published his thoughts recently about what we see as this coming transportation revolution. first, the country experienced was the development of trains and canals that facilitated interstate commerce and the second is the one that we're all living in now and grown up in of the automobile. interstate highways that cut up our cities. and really change the relationship of people to the urban environment and what many might say was a negative way and what we experience now on the cusp of is an opportunity to reclaim the urban vitality we've lost to restructure our environment so it's no longer centered around car ownership and can take the space, devote it to new more productive uses. if you think about the parklets that proliferate on the streets here in san francisco, and are wonderful in restoring common spaces, that's a small taste of what we expect we'll be able to enjoy as cities, urban dwellers in the future as the need for parking is eliminated. the need for car ownership is eliminated and use it to build green space and this can be toward leveraging autonomous in many ways and a new mode that's available on top of lyft's existing platform and not an adrupt transition for our users. instead it can be gradual. in environment where is this is something we believe we can test successfully in the early deployments, there may be corridors, fixed routes or zones extensively mapped and monitored for the quality and capability of the infrastructure in the locations to make sure they're appropriate for autonomous in the beginning and generate consumer acceptance and then gradually expand it to the point where it's available anywhere and do so in a way you might associate with wireless networks online and slow edge data connection and then it just dropped on to your phone. you didn't have to go out and buy new technology. this is something could you tap into. and something we're excited to see seeing to democratizing access to. this is a cost of getting a lyft comes down with the very significance of autonomy. i guess i'll leave it at that. >> all right, why don't i start talking about truck instead of cars? so what is an autonomous truck? well, an autonomous truck would be like is baysically like the old truck that we all know with a lot of censor, able to perceive the environment like much bigger than a human would do. just because we see with laser, we see with radar, we see with cameras, we see where a truck with gps and with all this information, the truck get a very like where it is and surrounding environment. so that what we put in the cars. this is why uber decided to acquire auto to transfer technology and to basically send like a dimension and push the av space forward. so there is a lot of potential. and this is not like the car to imagine without a driver and look at the road and so we already started. the current car that we already have, we call them aid assistance to driving. but we accumulating little by little, technology called bricks that are essential to make a vehicle fleet, so like a gradual process. there is a lot of things that have to evolve around the vehicle. like when you think about the word, the word was designed for humans. everything we see was designed for humans. like stop signs. lights. the pedestrian. everything for the human. but if we want to make an autonomous vehicle, like the mass market, the autonomous vehicles, we will also have to change faster and to adapt it to make it more meshing friendly, i would say. so that the robot can adjust in the environment easier. so that would be the technique. i talked a lot about social impacts. i will let the panel give they're point of view. >> okay. thank you. so i come at this from a different angle. a piece of what we do is consulting for government agencies on advising them on transportation and infrastructure projects. i've been in this space my whole career and about 2 1/2 years ago i started reading about driverless vehicles. and what was clear at the time is the technology was advancing quickly but our clients, the government agencies, were really at that time not very aware of that technology and if you look at the headlines from back then, it was all about, you know, who's putting the most test miling on the road but almost nothing about what the government is doing so that's about when i started my research about what government can do to plan for driverless vehicles. i'm happy to say, fast forward to where we are today, government has been involved. jeannette just talked about the federal policy. i've been really interested in focusing on the local and state governments can do partially because we see the technology out on the streets now but if you look at most agencies long, short, and long range plans from five-year plans to 40 and 50 year plans, over 90% don't acknowledge that driverless vehicles are coming. so when you think about that, when you think about the impact that they can have on society, those positive and negative. there's a lot of impacts there are going to be really symbiotic and improve safety, mobility for different populations like elderly and disabled people but there's also some risks and i think it's really important that government agencies start to become aware of what these are. if we have a society where lyft and uber don't end up with the other automakers and doing more but if we see a society similar to what we have today with a lot of vehicle ownership and single occupancy vehicle trips and then with what driverless vehicles present which is zero occupancy trips being allowed, we have a risk of a huge increase in vehicle miles traveled and i'm one of the biggest fans of driverless vehicles and i can't wait to see them proliferate in society but i think government has an important role to play. in terms of managing the benefits. making sure we reap the benefits of them but also mitigate the risks. >> so when i first met lauren, her question to me was why is a county government agency involved in driverless vehicles? what do you guys have to do with this? i want to give some background for those of you who don't know who the contra costa authority is or maybe not as famous as the other companies that i'm sharing the stage with tonight. so in 1988, voters chose to tax themselves with a sales tax to pay for transportation and our agency plans, funds, and delivers those transportation improvements, that the voters voted for. and in california, there's actually 20 counties that tax them through sales tax to help pay for transportation or the bay area. san francisco is one of them and they play a critical part in keeping california moving. they invest about $3 billion to $4 billion a year into the transportation system and infrastructure. so how that kind of rolls out, fast forward to 2004, that 1988 measure was about to expire, went back out to voters to ask them to decide to renew the sales tax for another 25 years and you may be able to get people to choose to tax themselves once but if you're not delivering on the promises, they're not going to give you another chance to do that and i'm proud to say 71% of voters in contra costa decided to continue that tax and continue to fund transportation improvements. and our job is to make this happen and in addition, to making the improvements happen, part of our responsibility involved being the congestion management agency for the county so finding ways to mitigate traffic and the long range planning agency so staff of only 20 people, we're pretty busy. but those last responsibilities led to the interest in autonomous vehicles. as lauren mentioned, not many agencies kind of look forward as they develop their long range plans, the tendency is to take today's technology and embed it into a plan for the next 25 years. if you think about the fact that the iphone is less than 10 years old and how much that revolutionized how we work and travel and communicate, it seemed really foolish to just assume that technology was going to remain static. it's changing so quickly. we decided that we really needed to pay close attention to what was happening in the technology and transportation space so that as we build our long range plans for the county, we can really be prepared and responsive to the new technology that's coming online instead of just being reactive. so as part of the effort, we helped cofound the station in concorde, california, which as jeannette said, is the largest secure autonomous and connected facility. and it's really a partnership where auto manufacturers can come and test their vehicles and test their technologies in a secure location that's not a city but has city street technology upgrades. because it's a former navy weapons station, it has stripings, tunnels, buildings, sidewalks, so it's a really great place to kind of reenact scenarios that take place in the real world in a really unique setting and what it does for us as a government agency is gives us the ability to talk to the folks testing and see what they're testing, look at the technology and figure out what does it need and what do we need to look to upgrade our infrastructure over the coming years to make sure they can help get you where you need to go? >> terrific. well, that was an excellent set the stage for the viewpoints and i know we've talked about autonomous trucks, autonomous vehicles. what are the benefits and then i'd like to ask, what kind of negatives but what are the benefits to, let's say, community to a city for autonomous vehicles? >> there are quite a few. the biggest one and certainly from a government perspective, the interest around safety but this is what the auto makers and technology developers cite first and foremost. 90% of accidents on the roadways are due to human error. so distracted driving, drunk driving, speeding, so in theory, if we eliminate the humans from the driving equation, we'll eliminate over 90% of the accidents. that in itself is huge. i mentioned before additional mobility for elderly, disabled use. that is really exciting. another one is a rethinking of the land use, so driverless creates a potential for reducing parking requirements or relocating them. if we have a shared use society where people aren't purchasing as many vehicles but that they are sharing them, we potentially can reduce the land use dedicated for parking. and in cities, that can be around 15% to 20% of the land, so try to reimagine san francisco streets without that dedicated land. i mean, it's really, you can see the potential for bike lanes, adding more pedestrian space. that's my utopian perspective, and the other side, even if we have more of my nightmare perspective of more people owning vehicles, it could still result in relocating parking spaces where they could bring people to work in the morning, say, and then the vehicle goes and parks itself in a remote parking lot 15 minutes outside of a city which is amazing from a land use perspective but terrible from a congestion, travel time reliability perspective. and another piece is the ability to have improved acceleration and deceleration. less impact to our roadways. vehicles to drive more closely together. especially if it integrates with connected technology. hopefully that gives a flavor. >> that certainly does and what about, emily, would you like to take a stab at what are the negatives? the aspects where it may not be as positive and areas where technology can improve that. >> yeah, i mean, i think, really, if you talked to a lot of experts, the fulcrum is whether these are shared vehicles, lauren pointed correctly that most of the ills of private auto ownership and frankly of the unsustainable transportation system and land use impact that we have today, the vehicles are poorly utilized and sitting idol, 20% in motion on average that's a lot of empty seats and underutilized asset we pay to store and use precious land to store. and then think about how that then telegraphs into an autonomous vehicle world. probably something magnified. the ownership route and efb owns their own autonomous vehicle, it magnifies the negative impacts. maybe not with parking, but vehicle miles travels. underutilization if everyone owned their own but if you look on the shared side of the equation, very significant reductions that are possible. actually, fascinating research from a couple of different groups recently looking at lawrence berkeley laboratory. a guy there named jeff greenblat put out a study finding that shared electric autonomous vehicles use in a platform that dispatches them on demand like lyft does could actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 90%. this could eliminate petroleum 100% in our system. this might be like pollee anna unbelievable expectations. another report came out with very similar conclusiones from the rocky mountain institute. with an enormous possibility for reduction of greenhouse gases as well as costs and the expenditure of operating and i think there's an argument for why it will happen that way. and why we should believe the fact that urban car ownership days are numbered. if you think about an individual making a decision about how they want to get around on a monthly basis, if they compare the car with the lease and the car payment or insurance cost, parking perhaps in an urban environment, and then comparing it to a greatly reduced cost of transportation as a service, walking, biking, on-demand autonomous electric, lyft, transit, combined together, that package on the shared side is going to be much, much cheaper than what the cost of car ownership is. it will be a much more dramatic difference and i think that's what will precipitate from car ownership and bring the benefits rather than the potential negatives into the realm. >> i want to add one thing because i totally agree. i want to point out the distinction between autonomous technology and electric technology. they're entirely separate and so the benefits, if we go entirely electric for autonomous are huge. however, not all of the auto manufacturers that are developing with technology are testing driverless with electric, so it's not an assumed thing. i think it's wonderful that lyft is. >> i think the majority of them are though which is a really interesting thing and i just want to comment briefly why that might be the case. maybe people haven't thought about financially why that would be the case, but the cost of operation of vehicles over the life of that car is much lower with electric vehicles at least at the current cost of electricity versus petroleum and then the cost of operating the vehicles as combustion engine vehicles so it makes financial sense as long as operational, there's significant access to charging which is something policy makers should be paying attention to. there is a strong business case. especially with the advanced battery rei battery like with the bolt coming on-line soon. >> absolutely. that was one of our audience's questions as well about the impact. claire, i wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about the benefit of trucks. >> benefit of av? >> of av. >> right now in the u.s. we have a short age of drivers because it is a painful job. you have to be on the road for long hours and for a long time and extended period of time. and one benefit of autonomous technology is basically you, like, i mean, i would say like i'm not going to jump into the future where we don't have a driver because that's not going to happen, from just tomorrow. that's going to be gradual. so the first step is like we see the plane, you know? the pilot is here to do like the landing and the takeoff. but during the flight, the plane is driving autonomously, so the pilot can do other stuff and like basically have time to do something else. same thing applies for trucking. when you look at the highway and see the cars going by, looks like a train or railroad and like the driver would like, the truck driver would just like bring the truck to the entrance of the highway and let the truck operate from there. and drive by itself until it reach a destination. 2,000 miles autonomously, the driver a lot of time to do something else in the meantime. read a book, watch tv, learn something new. drink a beer. it's like, it would, the truck driver would be more than actually having the hands on the wheel. trying to keep focus for long hours without like anything changing in the landscape or happening. so that would have a tremendous impact because with the driver, we can do, they can spend all of this time to do something else. i mean, i don't know. file their tax. spend time with the family. it could be completely different and long-term, in like, say, i would say it's hard to give them an idea on the time but let's say 5 to 7 years and let's say that we worked very hard with the government and that it's very safe and equipped and could guarantee the 99.99% no problems on the road. so highway would be very safe. well, in that case, it would probably mean you don't have to get a driver in this but we can just let the car go by itself let the truck go by itself. like sheep to the next arrival. and with uber, driver like the truck out of the highway like to a warehouse. so it would mean, right now, one of the reasons why we have big trucks is because we don't have a lot of drivers. and make sure we put everything in the single convoy. we minimize the number of drivers. the minute you don't have a driver anymore, you have a smaller truck. also less dangerous. and even more power efficient and you can rethink the logistics. also rethink so you don't have to put like to belong just because of the driver issue. you can be smart and plan differently how to go one place to another one. and when you start digging around the sufficiency and you start by putting the logistics and the change and how goods are transferred from one place to another one, you can see that there would be a tremendous impact on how efficient we would be in the future. how efficient good transportation can be in the future. and i think even more than passenger because passenger is so easy. you like your cars. sure, a relief of like bringing you to one place to another one, but when you have a nice car, don't you like driving? like on the highway? and gives you pleasure, right? because like, it actually is linked everywhere into our economy. like every single you see here was brought by a truck. every single detail was brought at some point buy truck. so when you think you can make this more efficient, it's tremendous. you can come up with even more just by looking at how the -- >> i think claire stole most of my thunder. right after safety, efficiency is something that transportation professionals really have to look at. that's the efficiency of the whole system. not just the passenger vehicle. that's how you move freight and transit. and i think one of the big promises for autonomous vehicles is that you can move more things, more people, more cars, more goods through the existing system safely and faster. if you think about it, if you've ever been stuck on i-80 or i-6/80 in bumper to bumper traffic, your car could follow a safe distance behind that's much closer than you might be able to follow as a human driver, you could get more cars through the stretch of freeway faster and smoother and that's something we're very interested in looking at. you know, the current highway capacity caltrans publishes, i think about how much more efficient that system would operate if you could bump that up by an extra thousand cars per lane per hour. smooth out the entire system and make it more efficient for everyone trying to get where they want to go. >> terrific. i'd like to remind our radio audience that this is the commonwealth club of california and we're talking about autonomous vehicles and the future of transport. emory caster from lyft. lindsey wolf, director of external affairs for contra costa transportation authority. lauren isaac at wsp, parsons waker and then clair, cofounder of software engineering at auto. common wealth club programs are on the radio. you can see our program videos on youtube. our program videos on youtube. catch us also on our website as well as facebook and twitter. we've got it all. i am ge net morgan. with that -- we've gotten a number of audience questions about jobs. in particular you may recall that the gardner research director says that vehicles will create new companies. they'll enable a new value proposition in business moldels. we have questions will drivers who drive for ride sharing companies will they be able to drive and what is the risk if this technology creates unemployment? >> this is a great question. this is something that we really approach really seriously at lift because frankly we've differentiated in the market because we care about our drivers and we believe it translates to the passenger experience and that's at the core of what we offer. we've wanted to be transparent in the fact this is coming, but this is is something coming to our society whether it's freight or public transit or private transport or automotive companies to be the netflix in this situation rather than the blockbust blockbuster. we have to remain competitive. that being said, it's not going to be an abrupt and immediate transition away. first of all, it's important to understand how people participate in lift driving. the vast majority of people who participate as drivers do it on a 85% basis. those folks who are doing it on a more full time basis, they aren't necessarily doing it for a long period of time. it's a rather transient population that are saying i had a job loss, i need extra income right now, i'm in a life transition. i'm seeking an opportunity for flexibility in my life right now. life driving does not have the structure of a permanent job. there's a lot of lead time for people to absorb this transition that's coming and to make plans for their future. we expect in the near term the demand for lift drivers will increase on our platform as automation rolls out. that sounds counterintuitive. there's going to be an explosion in the market size of businesses like ours, but all of a sudden people will be able to use lift more often and they will look at that calculation of whether or not they want to own a car and more will say we don't want to own a car so we want to use lift more than before and sometimes we're going to be able to get an automated lift because we'll be in a place where that's available. other times we'll take a lift with a human driver. that market size is going to grow in the near term. ultimately it will taper off as the technology becomes more available and that's a transition that will be very transparent with our driver community. >> i know in the career i live in with career technical education and science and engineering and mathematics i've seen a huge increase in individuals who are being contacted by companies to go into learning how to do coding or software or engineering. so there's a whole host that we get contacted of companies, we can't describe what the positions are, but there's a host of companies looking for new opportunities to train individuals for new jobs. i'd like to pass it on to lindsey. >> i was going to say i think one of the places where we hear a lot of concern about the coming of automation is in the transit world. there are quite a few folks employed, your bus driver, bart driver, the folks who help you get to where you need to go and they're worried about what the transition to driverless means for them and we have to be cognizant the state has some ambitious climate goals and there's things we're trying to achieve and one thing is to encourage people to share vehicles and travel together and reduce greenhouse gases and we encourage people to use autonomous vehicles to get themselves to transit. these are great solutions for that first and last mile trip. how many times you have driven your car to try to park it at the station at 8:30 and you're circling and nobody is leaving and you end up driving to your ultimate destination. if you could get a shared ride to that particular location, then maybe you would be more inclined to use public transit because it would take out the aggravation of trying to find parking. when you think about autonomous vehicles, these are large fleets. they need to be maintained and monitored. those are jobs that are still going to have to be done by someone, potentially with transit or transportation experience. there may be some opportunity to kind of retrain some of the existing workforce to take on some of those new duties, but i do think that transit kind of as we know it is really going to benefit from autonomous vehicles. i think a lot of the first trips that you'll start to see are going to be short trips to and from transit stations or to and from schools or business centers. those trips when you have to take your mother to the hairdresser and you don't want to drive her, you can put her in a car and let her do it yourself. when you don't want to flip the coin about who is going to drive grandma to the senior center, you have your solution. you're going to start to see those short trips happen first. although claire might be giving us a run for our money with long term hauling. >> i think it's going to be -- i think it's going to be gradual. i don't see it happening from the day from like just tomorrow. i know it's very exciting technology, but there's a lot of challenges that have to be solved and a lot of things -- i mean, like that sets a good reflection -- a very good mirror. it's about companies who are operating in the public space or like companies -- with consumers. we were targeting a very dedicated problem. there's like a lot of issues in the future that we need to plan and think about, so there is like such a huge problem and if you by itself touch a lot of different aspects like the way we leave -- lead life in cities and -- cities to cities. so i think it's going to take -- it's actually -- for all these reasons to make it right and to make it the right way, it will take a lot of time. it's also for these people slowly to be graduating and train in other areas, like all these jobs that are around and how do -- what it means it would have to be created. we will still need places to recharge the cars or still need places to put the car at some point at the end of the day. we still need public transportation because you have four seat cars, then you're still going to take much more space on the bus. we have a fleet of like things to be coordinated together. things happen slowly and gradually and like people other areas of interest and just because like -- if a car drives better than me at some point, i'm going to be bored anyway. it's like it's not very fun. remember the market -- stock market. we have at the beginning was super exciting to sell like stock in everything and to be like a trader and to be at the state of technology and everything, but then slowly, gradually, artificial intelligence takes a step on it and it became more efficient than people. so at some point if you compare yourself and you see that it's a better trader than you, it removes the fun out of it because you cannot compete. it doesn't carry any weight. >> i'll add one thing because it's a little bit different lens on the equity impact piece. the labor question is not the only equity question. another one is about mobility access. that's actually what i think is one of the most exciting benefits that can come from this. but it definitely is also hinging on shared versus owned as being the model of how this rolls out. transportation is a huge economic barrier right now in our counter especially with the reurbanization. it has pushed people out to the areas that have been least well served by transit and given them a huge transportation problem for the most vulnerable populations. people have these super commutes where they're trying to piece together bus routes in areas where it's not efficient to operate buses where point to point transportation saves people hours in travel time a day and yet these are family that can't own the $9,000 a year cost for owning a car. shared transportation can be affordable enough that it can be something that's accessible for those folks and making it possible for more people to benefit from this technology would wouldn't be able to buy an autonomous car. there are all kinds of technological pathways to make this available. these are things we're working on with lift. there's sort of this elite lens at which we can look at this in terms of technological advanceme advancement, but there's a real impact on people's lives and problems we can solve. >> lauren, you look like you were -- >> i always have something to say. >> i know. i agree it's not going to happen overnight. i agree there will be job loss that comes from this technology as is what happens with any disruptive technology, we've seen it with countless independe industries, i think through stem, getting more of the younger generation that are going through college and getting them educated in the right fields. things like data science is such a rich field right now because this technology is going to create a tremendous amount of data. from the government's perspective, the government wants the data. emily hears this all the time how much government wants the data, but they need to be able to do something with it. you need to have the right skill sets available. so there's this -- there's a transformation that's going to happen with the skills needed and as the job loss happens, there will be as many retraining opportunities and the need to switch. we're seeing it right now actually amongst the auto makers we're seeing -- and the technology developers all the companies are buying out each other and establishing partnerships and quite a few of them are citing the reason they're doing it so to acquire the talent in these companies. i think we're going to see more and more people getting into the right field and hopefully as the community colleges and colleges keep up with what the technology and company requirements are, we'll see that many more jobs created in this space. >> absolutely. and other news is the hacking. there's a fear that my car can be hacked. that's come up a number of different times in your industries. emily, do you get lots of questions? >> it certainly is something that we have to be very cautious of. i think claire is smarter than i am on cyber security, but clearly that has to be a top priority. if you think about it, there's an increasing integration within the different stack of technologies that's deployed in this when you have an auto maker manufacturing a vehicle, then you have the self driving system and then you have the consumer network. all of these are participating at some level in what the operation of that service will be so there needs to be focus at all of those different levels to ensure there's security. do you want to comment? >> sure. i think the security is like -- would be -- some precaution for securing your phone, your computer or your car or any piece of technology can. i think that's a way to protect ourselves from hacking and i don't think there's like -- like amazing ways to do incredible hacking i would say or most of the time if your car gets hacked it's not going to start. it's going to sit there on the sidewalk and like not start. so well it's very inconvenient and then people say i probably have a solution for that and take your car somewhere to fix it, but like any other piece of technology there's ways to ensure that the technology is safe. so i think it's just a matter of like working with government and cities to make sure to define what is an acceptable behavior and what happens if like you have a problem with a car or like a problem even with a se e sore or something like that. >> i think there's an opportunity for career technical education. that's another career field that's ripe for opportunity. lauren, i know you also -- >> i don't have too much to say on this. the one really positive i think is that this is very much on the radar of not just the federal government, but every technology developer in this space. this is super important. it's an issue on all sides. no one wants to see a cyber security issue. so at the federal government level they actually just put out policy guidance that was really exciting. it covered more than just cyber security, but they put out federal guidance around driverless vehicles. this literally came out about a week ago. cyber security is one thing that's addressed. it's not in the level of detail -- first of all, i don't know of us would want to know the level of detail to address that, but it does -- it does start to address it and what we're seeing is coalitions form amongst competing technology developers and auto makers that are trying to address this as an industry. so it's very much at the forefront of the av discussion narll nationally. >> you raised the recent regulations at the federal level that were discussed. there's been some legislation in california. will federal law premt state law? >> i think we're all really excited to see the federal regulations come out because up until this point different states, even down to different jurisdictions were putting in place their own laws and their own way of thinking about how autonomous vehicles could operate on their roadways and we're starting to inch closer in the long term toward a situation where if you're driving your car from california to nevada, nevada has different rules than california, you don't want your car to stop at the state line because nevada doesn't allow it. i think it's really wonderful to see these federal regulations because they kind of set the framework for how states should be thinking about putting in place policies and california's policies very much closely follow the federal guidelines and i think a lot of states will follow. in fact, part of those guidelines included a model state policy for states to consider adopting or basing their future policies on to encourage there to be some sort of kind of level playing field or a platform across the united states so that auto manufacturers and different technology companies didn't have to do something different for every single state or every single jurisdiction. i know that they so far i think people are really happy with them and i think it kind of remains to be seen how they get rolled out. right now they're just kind of guidelines and they're letting everybody read them. they're going to take comment on them. the same with california. i think the state is hosting a workshop on their proposed policy in a couple of weeks, but i really think that in terms of kind of the state versus federal, that the state will choose to follow the federal guidelines a little more closely than the ones they've developed. >> that would be terrific. i would hate for the cars to stop at the boarder. >> and then there's lift on the other side of the line. >> you'll be right there waiting. we have so many wonderful questions. one that keeps coming will an autonomous vehicle or truck have a steering wheel? >> as of a week ago, california was requiring that driverless vehicles had a steering wheel and it was actually very controversial. the california laws require that driverless vehicles had a steering wheel, brakes and a licensed driver behind the wheel. really this policy, which is truly precedent setting around the kroercounte counter country world, it was limiting the development of the technology, the testing of the technology and really not allowing am so of the communities that would benefit most greatly from it to reap those benefits. but as of now, a week later, federal policy's out. california's changed their guidelines or draft form, but actually eliminated the need for the steering wheel. a very relevant question. >> any other comments? >> certainly the benefits that i described of bringing down the cost of the service will not come if they are not fully driverless vehicles. that's really our focus in what would be a transformative business model. in terms of the design of the hardware, it's one of the most exciting things is the opportunity to reimagine what this experience is like. having it be a hospitality experience, a service you can have and maybe customizations of what that is depending on who you are, what kind of service you need or even what experience you want in that moment. i think that's where you'll see some of the brand differentiation come. a lot of people talked about how auto makers are going to be commodityized and they're going to loose that brand relationship they have now with the customer because there's going to be this intermediatary of the customer instead of the car company. i think there are new opportunities for creating consumer value and differentiation in that market and it's something that we're excited to experiment with moving forward. >> we're excited to see it. >> we'll get you that. >> we also had a number of questions of should i buy a new car soon or should i wait until the autonomous vehicle is out? so why don't you -- lauren, why don't you start with this and then talk about time frames. >> don't buy a car. i'm pretty sure you agree with me, right, emily? >> i'm signed on that one. >> and don't buy a truck. >> so pretty much every auto maker and technology developer is promising a fully driverless vehicle in the 2018 to the 2022 time frame with the exception of porsche. there are countless forecasts out there of when we're going to actually see the proliferation of driverless vehicles, but if i was going to generalize it it would be in the 2030 time frame. that's where the forecasts glam around. should you buy a car now, it's the same question of should cities build parking garages now. do we need to keep increasing our capacity. obviously it's unique to people's situations. what's exciting today is we're seeing more and more options coming out and we're seeing more creative solutions. companies like uber and lift have transformed how we get around cities and then you add in all the different mobilities of options, car sharing, ride sharing, car pooling and all the information that supports it with apps that tell you how to leverage a combination of them. the more that we can reduce car ownership now and the more we can encourage people to really do that ride sharing behavior today, it's going to be that much more important when we have driverless vehicles out on the roadways. in theory selfishly we want to have a driverless vehicle that takes us wherever we want to go. it's like having a personal shoefr. i'm like why would i want to go in a shared vehicle when i could have my own personal vehicle back there. i think it's important that we wrap our heads around this shared vehicle behavior just because we don't want to be in a society of just parking lots everywhere we go. >> i'm going to take a bit of an opposite view from lauren. i love being on stage with lauren because we rarely agree. i would say i agree. i think most of the major car companies have said they could put autonomous vehicle for sale in the next five years. what we have to think about is the regulations and policy that govern you being able to use that are not going to move that quickly. as much as we want to see them tomorrow and as much as we know their tremendous benefits, government does not move as fast as the private sector and i don't foresee that changing any time in the next year or two in order for everything to catch up and you will be able to buy an autonomous vehicle and roll it out on the street. if you're not able to take advantage of a shared network, if you live in a county that has rural areas or car dependent, my advice is buy a new car because they are getting smarter and smarter every year. as claire mentioned your car can now do things for you. it can autonomously forward brake and it can park itself. it can help keep you in your lane. some of the newer cars can even tell if you're starting to get sleepy and alert you that you need to pull over. we're putting the pieces in place to get those cars to become autonomous and there are cars being manufactured that could drive themselves, but unfortunately i don't think the regulations are ready to let you flip the switch in the next couple of years. >> we have so many more questions. so clearly we need to have a series of panels on autonomous vehicles, including cars and trucks. we are at the point where we've reached the point in our program where there's time for one last question. do you have advice to give to our presidential candidates, what you want them to say about autonomous vehicles? one sentence or less. you want to start lauren and we'll work to lindsey and claire and emily. >> sure. i think it's super exciting what technology is presenting to us today and i think it's only going to grow with the ideas and the potential, but it's also very important for government at all levels to be involved so we need to have enabling funding, policy, supportive regulations, nothing that slows it down, but yet still maintains the safety of our traveling public. >> i would say fund transportation to its fullest in all forms, including autonomous vehicle research because that's the way we're going to get to this scenario where you're able to ride an autonomous vehicle if there's kind of a collective effort and enough research for everyone to feel that it's safe. >> so autonomous vehicles are coming. it's going to be a new class of vehicle and transportation is not going to be like anything that we know right now. it's going to change everything and private sector cannot do it alone. it needs to be like -- with everybody on board, private and governments. >> i would say the most important thing that government can do is focus on permanence-based policies because it's very hard to prescribe the how, the mechanism of something that you don't understand and have an experience before. i think the best thing they can do is to let the private sector innova

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