>> Announcer: From Milpitas, California, at the edge of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube. Covering autonomous vehicles. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at Western Digital in Milpitas, California at the Auto Tech Council, Autonomous vehicle meetup, get-together, I'm exactly sure. There's 300 people, they get together every year around a lot of topics. Today is all about autonomous vehicles, and really, this whole ecosystem of startups and large companies trying to solve, as I was just corrected, not the thousands of problems but the millions and billions of problems that are going to have to be solved to really get autonomous vehicles to their ultimate destination, which is, what we're all hoping for, is just going to save a lot of lives, and that's really serious business. We're excited to have the guy that's kind of running the whole thing, Derek Curtain. He's the chairman of the Auto Tech Council. Derek, saw you last year, great to be back, thanks for having us. >> Well, thanks for having me back here to chat. >> So, what's really changed in the last year, kind of contextually, since we were here before? I think last year it was just about, like, mapping for autonomous vehicles. >> Yes. >> Which is an amazing little subset. >> There's been a tremendous amount of change in one year. One thing I can say right off the top that's critically important is, we've had fatalities. And that really shifts the conversation and refocuses everybody on the issue of safety. So, there's real vehicles out there driving real miles and we've had some problems crop up that the industry now has to re-double down in their efforts and really focus on stopping those, and reducing those. What's been really amazing about those fatalities is, everybody in the industry anticipated, 'oh' when somebody dies from these cars, there's going to be the governments, the people, there's going to be a backlash with pitchforks, and they'll throw the breaks on the whole effort. And so we're kind of hoping nobody goes out there and trips up to mess it up for the whole industry because we believe, as a whole, this'll actually bring safety to the market. But a few missteps can create a backlash. What's surprising is, we've had those fatalities, there's absolutely some issues revealed there that are critically important to address. But the backlash hasn't happened, so that's been a very interesting social aspect for the industry to try and digest and say, 'wow, we're pretty lucky.' and 'Why did that happen?' and 'Great!' to a certain extent. >> And, obviously, horrible for the poor people that passed away, but a little bit of a silver lining is that these are giant data collection machines. And so the ability to go back after the fact, to do a postmortem, you know, we've all seen the video of the poor gal going across the street in the dark and they got the data off the one, 101 87. So luckily, you know, we can learn from it, we can see what happened and try to move forward. >> Yeah, it is, obviously, a learning moment, which is absolutely not worth the price we pay. So, essentially, these learning moments have to happen without the human fatalities and the human cost. They have to happen in software and simulations in a variety of ways that don't put people in the public at risk. People outside the vehicle, who haven't even chosen to adopt those risks. So it's a terrible cost and one too high to pay. And that's the sad reality of the whole situation. On the other hand, if you want to say silver lining, well, there is no fatalities in a silver lining but the upside about a fatality in the self-driving world is that in the human world we're used to, when somebody crashes a car they learn a valuable lesson, and maybe the people around them learned a valuable lesson. 'I'm going to be more careful, I'm not going to have that drink.' When an autonomous car gets involved in any kind of an accident, a tremendous number of cars learn the lesson. So it's a fleet learning and that lesson is not just shared among one car, it might be all Teslas or all Ubers. But something this serious and this magnitude, those lessons are shared throughout the industry. And so this extremely terrible event is something that actually will drive an improvement in performance throughout the industry. >> That's a really good, that's a super good point. Because it is not a good thing. But again, it's nice that we can at least see the video, we could call kind of make our judgment, we could see what the real conditions were, and it was a tough situation. What's striking to me, and it came up in one of the other keynotes is, on one hand is this whole trust issue of autonomous vehicles and Uber's a great example. Would you trust an autonomous vehicle? Or will you trust some guy you don't know to drive your daughter to the prom? I mean, it's a really interesting question. But now we're seeing, at least in the Tesla cases that have been highlighted, people are all in. They got a 100% trust. >> A little too much trust. >> They think level five, we're not even close to level five and they're reading or, you know, doing all sorts of interesting things in the car rather than using it as a driver assist technology. >> What you see there is that there's a wide range of customers, a wide range users and some of them are cautious, some of them will avoid the technology completely and some of them will abuse it and be over confident in the technology. In the case of Tesla, they've been able to point out in almost every one of their accidents where their autopilot is involved, they've been able to go through the logs and they've been able to exonerate themselves and say, 'listen, this was customer misbehavior. Not our problem. This was customer misbehavior.' And I'm a big fan, so I go, 'great!' They're right. But the problem is after a certain point, it doesn't matter who's fault it is if your tool can be used in a bad way that causes fatalities to the person in the car and, once again, to people outside the car who are innocent bystanders in this, if your car is a tool in that, you have reconsider the design of that tool and you have to reconsider how you can make this idiot proof or fail safe. And whether you can exonerate yourself by saying, 'the driver was doing something bad, the pedestrian was doing something bad,' is largely irrelevant. People should be able to make mistakes and the systems need to correct those mistakes. >> But, not to make excuses, but it's just ridiculous that people think they're driving a level five car. It's like, oh my goodness! Really. >> Yeah when growing up there was that story or the joke of somebody that had cruise control in the R.V. so they went in the back to fry up some bacon. And it was a running joke when I was a kid but you see now that people with level two autonomous cars are kind of taking that joke a little too far and making it real and we're not ready for that. >> They're not ready. One thing that did strike that is here today that Patty talked about, Patty Rob from Intel, is just with the lane detection and the forward-looking, what's the technical term? >> There's forward-looking radar for braking. >> For braking, the forward-looking radar. And the crazy high positive impact on fatalities just those two technologies are having today. >> Yeah and you see the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the entire insurance industry, is willing to lower your rates if you have some of these technologies built into your car because these forward-looking radars and lidars that are able to apply brakes in emergency situations, not only can they completely avoid an accident and save the insurer a lot of money and the driver's life and limb, but even if they don't prevent the accident, if they apply a brake where a human driver might not have or they put the break on one second before you, it could have a tremendous affect on the velocity of the impact and since the energy that's imparted in a collision is a function of the square of the velocity, if you have a small reduction of velocity, you could have a measurable impact on the energy that's delivered in that collision. And so just making it a little slower can really deliver a lot of safety improvements. >> Right, so want to give you a chance to give a little plug in terms of, kind of, what the Auto Tech Council does. 'Cause I think what's great with the automotive industry right, is clearly, you know, is born in the U.S. and in Detroit and obviously Japan and Europe those are big automotive presences. But there's so much innovation here and we're seeing them all set up these kind of innovation centers here in the Bay area, where there's Volkswagen or Ford and the list goes on and on. How is the, kind of, your mission of bringing those two worlds together? Working, what are some of the big hurdles you still have to go over? Any surprises, either positive or negative as this race towards autonomous vehicles seems to be just rolling down the track? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Silicone Valley historically a source of great innovation for technologies. And what's happened is that the technologies that Silicone Valley is famous for inventing, cloud-based technology and network technology, processing, artificial intelligence, which is machine learning, this all Silicone Valley stuff. Not to say that it isn't done anywhere else in the world, but we're really strong in it. And, historically, those may not have been important to a car maker in Detroit. And say, 'well that's great, but we had to worry about our transmission, and make these ratios better. And it's a softer transmission shift is what we're working on right now.' Well that era is still with us but they've layered on this extremely important software-based and technology-based innovation that now is extremely important. The car makers are looking at self-driving technologies, you know, the evolution of aid as technologies as extremely disruptive to their world. They're going to need to adopt like other competitors will. It'll shift the way people buy cars, the number of cars they buy and the way those cars are used. So they don't want to be laggards. No car maker in the world wants to come late to that party. So they want to either be extremely fast followers or be the leaders in this space. So to that they feel like well, 'we need to get a shoulder to shoulder with a lot of these innovation companies. Some of them are pre-existing, so you mentioned Patti Smith from Intel. Okay we want to get side by side with Intel who's based here in Silicone Valley. The ones that are just startups, you know? Outside I see a car right now from a company called Iris, they make driver monitoring software that monitors the state of the driver. This stuff's pretty important if your car is trading off control between the automated system and the driver, you need to know what the driver's state is. So that's startup is here in Silicone Valley, they want to be side by side and interacting with startups like that all the time. So as a result, the car companies, as you said, set up here in Silicone Valley. And we've basically formed a club around them and said, 'listen, that's great! We're going to be a club where the innovators can come and show their stuff and the car makers can come and kind of shop those wares. >> It's such crazy times because the innovation is on so many axis for this thing. Somebody used in the keynote care, or Case. So they're connected, they're autonomous, so the operation of them is changing, the ownership now, they're all shared, that's all changing. And then the propulsion in the motors are all going to electric and hybrid, that's all changing. So all of those factors are kind of flipping at the same time. >> Yeah, we just had a panel today and the subject was the changes in supply chain that Case is essentially going to bring. We said autonomy but electrification is a big part of that as well. And we have these historic supply chains that have been very, you know, everyone's going as far GM now, so GM will have these premier suppliers that give them their parts. Brake stores, motors that drive up and down the windows and stuff, and engine parts and such. And they stick year after year with the same suppliers 'cause they have good relationships and reliability and they meet their standards, their factories are co-located in the right places. But because of this Case notion and these new kinds of cars, new range of suppliers are coming into play. So that's great, we have suppliers for our piston rods, for example. Hey, they built a factory outside Detroit and in Lancing real near where we are. But we don't want piston rods anymore we want electric motors. We need rare earth magnets to put in our electric motors and that's a whole new range of suppliers. That supply either motors or the rare earth magnets or different kind of, you know, a switch that can transmit right amperage from your battery to your motor. So new suppliers but one of the things that panel turned up that was really interesting is, specifically, was, it's not just suppliers in these kind of brick and mortar, or mechanical spaces that car makers usually had. It's increasing the partners and suppliers in the technology space. So cloud, we need a cloud vendor or we got to build the cloud data center ourselves. We need a processing partner to sell us powerful processors. We can't use these small dedicated chips anymore, we need to have a central computer. So you see companies like Invidia and Intel going, 'oh, that's an opportunity for us we're keen to provide.' >> Right, exciting times. It looks like you're in the right place at the right time. >> It is exciting. >> Alright Derek, we got to leave it there. Congratulations, again, on another event and inserting yourself in a very disruptive and opportunistic filled industry. >> Yup, thanks a lot. >> He's Derek, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from Western Digital Auto Tech Council event in Milpitas, California. Thanks for watching and see you next time. (electronic music)

hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we're at the mill pedis at an interesting event is called the auto tech council innovation in motion mapping and navigation event so a lot of talk about autonomous vehicles so it's a lot of elements to autonomous vehicles this is just one small piece of it it's about mapping and navigation and we're excited to have with us our first guest again and give us a background of this whole situation just Derick Curtin and he's the founder and chairman of the auto tech council so first up there welcome thank you very much good to be here absolutely so for the folks that aren't familiar what is the auto tech council autofit council is a sort of a club based in Silicon Valley where we have gathered together some of the industry's largest OMS om is mean car makers you know of like Rio de Gono from France and a variety of other ones they have offices here in Silicon Valley right and their job is to find innovation you find that Silicon Valley spark and take it back and get it into cars eventually and so what we are able to do is gather them up put them in a club and route a whole bunch of Silicon Valley startups and startups from other places to in front of them in a sort of parade and say these are some of the interesting technologies of the month so did they reach out for you did you see an opportunity because obviously they've all got the the Innovation Centers here we were at the Ford launch of their innovation center you see that the tagline is all around is there too now Palo Alto and up and down the peninsula so you know they're all here so was this something that they really needed an assist with that something opportunity saw or was it did it come from more the technology side to say we needed I have a new one to go talk to Raja Ford's well it's certainly true that they came on their own so they spotted Silicon Valley said this is now relevant to us where historically we were able to do our own R&D build our stuff in Detroit or in Japan or whatever the cases all of a sudden these Silicon Valley technologies are increasingly relevant to us and in fact disruptive to us we better get our finger on that pulse and they came here of their own at the time we were already running something called the telecom Council Silicon Valley where we're doing a similar thing for phone companies here so we had a structure in place that we needed to translate that into beyond modem industry and meet all those guys and say listen we can help you we're going to be a great tool in your toolkit to work the valley ok and then specifically what types of activities do you do with them to execute division you know it's interesting when we launched this about five years ago we're thinking well we have telecommunication back when we don't have the automotive skills but we have the organizational skills what turned out to be the cases they're not coming here the car bakers and the tier 1 vendors that sell to them they're not coming here to study break pad material science and things like that they're coming to Silicon Valley to find the same stuff the phone company two years ago it's lookin at least of you know how does Facebook work in a car out of all these sensors that we have in phones relate to automotive industry accelerometers are now much cheaper because of reaching economies of scale and phones so how do we use those more effectively hey GPS is you know reach scale economies how do we put more GPS in cars how do we provide mapping solutions all these things you'll set you'll see and sound very familiar right from that smartphone industry in fact the thing that disrupts them the thing that they're here for that brought them here and out of out of defensive need to be here is the fact that the smartphone itself was that disruptive factor inside the car right right so you have events like today so gives little story what's it today a today's event is called the mapping and navigation event what are people who are not here what's what's happening well so every now and then we pick a theme that's really relevant or interesting so today is mapping and navigation actually specifically today is high definition mapping and sensors and so there's been a battle in the automotive industry for the autonomous driving space hey what will control an autonomous car will it be using a map that's stored in memory onboard the car it knows what the world looked like when they mapped it six months ago say and it follows along a pre-programmed route inside of that world a 3d model world or is it a car more likely with the Tesla's current they're doing where it has a range of sensors on it and the sensors don't know anything about the world around the corner they only know what they're sensing right around them and they drive within that environment so there's two competing ways of modeling a 3d world around autonomous car and I think you know there was a battle looking backwards which one is going to win and I think the industry has come to terms with the fact the answer is both more everyday and so today we're talking about both and how to infuse those two and make better self-driving vehicles so for the outsider looking in right I'm sure they get wait the mapping wars are over you know Google Maps what else is there right but then I see we've got TomTom and meet a bunch of names that we've seen you know kind of pre pre Google Maps and you know shame on me I said the same thing when Google came out with a cert I'm like certain doors are over who's good with so so do well so Eddie's interesting there's a lot of different angles to this beyond just the Google map that you get on your phone well anything MapQuest what do you hear you moved on from MapQuest you print it out you're good together right well that's my little friends okay yeah some people written about some we're burning through paper listen the the upshot is that you've MapQuest is an interesting starting board probably first it's these maps folding maps we have in our car there's a best thing we have then we move to MapQuest era and $5,000 Sat Navs in some cars and then you might jump forward to where Google had kind of dominate they offered it for free kicked you know that was the disruptive factor one of the things where people use their smartphones in the car instead of paying $5,000 like car sat-nav and that was a long-running error that we have in very recent memory but the fact of the matter is when you talk about self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles now you need a much higher level of detail than TURN RIGHT in 400 feet right that's that's great for a human who's driving the car but for a computer driving the car you need to know turn right in 400.000 five feet and adjust one quarter inch to the left please so the level of detail requires much higher and so companies like TomTom like a variety of them that are making more high-level Maps Nokia's form a company called here is doing a good job and now a class of car makers lots of startups and there's crowdsource mapping out there as well and the idea is how do we get incredibly granular high detail maps that we can push into a car so that it has that reference of a 3d world that is extremely accurate and then the next problem is oh how do we keep those things up to date because when we Matt when when a car from this a Nokia here here's the company house drives down the street does a very high-level resolution map with all the equipment you see on some of these cars except for there was a construction zone when they mapped it and the construction zone is now gone right update these things so these are very important questions if you want to have to get the answers correct and in the car stored well for that credit self drive and once again we get back to something to mention just two minutes ago the answer is sensor fusion it's a map as a mix of high-level maps you've got in the car and what the sensors are telling you in real time so the sensors are now being used for what's going on right now and the maps are give me a high level of detail from six months ago and when this road was driven it's interesting back of the day right when we had to have the CD for your own board mapping Houston we had to keep that thing updated and you could actually get to the edge of the sea didn't work we were in the islands are they covering here too which feeds into this is kind of of the optical sensors because there's kind of the light our school of thought and then there's the the biopic cameras tripod and again the answers probably both yeah well good that's a you know that's there's all these beat little battles shaping up in the industry and that's one of them for sure which is lidar versus everything else lidar is the gold standard for building I keep saying a 3d model and that's basically you know a computer sees the world differently than your eye your eye look out a window we build a 3d model of what we're looking at how does computer do it so there's a variety of ways you can do it one is using lidar sensors which spin around biggest company in this space is called Bella died and been doing it for years for defense and aviation it's been around pointing laser lasers and waiting for the signal to come back so you basically use a reflected signal back and the time difference it takes to be billows back it builds a 3d model of the objects around that particular sensor that is the gold standard for precision the problem is it's also bloody expensive so the karmak is said that's really nice but I can't put for $8,000 sensors on each corner of a car and get it to market at some price that a consumers willing to pay so until every car has one and then you get the mobile phone aside yeah but economies of scale at eight thousand dollars we're looking at going that's a little stuff so there's a lot of startups now saying this we've got a new version of lighter that's solid-state it's not a spinning thing point it's actually a silicon chip with our MEMS and stuff on it they're doing this without the moving parts and we can drop the price down to two hundred dollars maybe a hundred dollars in the future and scale that starts being interesting that's four hundred dollars if you put it off all four corners of the car but there's also also other people saying listen cameras are cheap and readily available so you look at a company like Nvidia that has very fast GPUs saying listen our GPUs are able to suck in data from up to 12 cameras at a time and with those different stereoscopic views with different angle views we can build a 3d model from cheap cameras so there's competing ideas on how you build a model of the world and then those come to like Bosh saying well we're strong in car and written radar and we can actually refine our radar more and more and get 3d models from radar it's not the good resolution that lidar has which is a laser sense right so there's all these different sensors and I think there the answer is not all of them because cost comes into play below so a car maker has to choose well we're going to use cameras and radar we're gonna use lidar and high heaven so they're going to pick from all these different things that are used to build a high-definition 3d model of the world around the car cost effective and successful and robust can handle a few of the sensors being covered by snow hopefully and still provide a good idea of the world around them and safety and so they're going to fuse these together and then let their their autonomous driving intelligence right on top of that 3d model and drive the car right so it's interesting you brought Nvidia in what's really fun I think about the autonomous vehicle until driving cars and the advances is it really plays off the kind of Moore's laws impact on the three tillers of its compute right massive compute power to take the data from these sensors massive amounts of data whether it's in the pre-programmed map whether you're pulling it off the sensors you're pulling off a GPS lord knows where by for Wi-Fi waypoints I'm sure they're pulling all kinds of stuff and then of course you know storage you got to put that stuff the networking you gotta worry about latency is it on the edge is it not on the edge so this is really an interesting combination of technologies all bring to bear on how successful your car navigates that exit ramp you're spot-on and that's you're absolutely right and that's one of the reasons I'm really bullish on self-driving cars a lot more than in the general industry analyst is and you mentioned Moore's law and in videos taking advantage of that with a GPUs so let's wrap other than you should be into kind of big answer Big Data and more and more data yes that's a huge factor in cars not only are cars going to take advantage of more and more data high definition maps are way more data than the MapQuest Maps we printed out so that's a massive amount of data the car needs to use but then in the flipside the cars producing massive amounts of data I just talked about a whole range of sensors I talked lidar radar cameras etc that's producing data and then there's all the telemetric data how's the car running how's the engine performing all those things car makers want that data so there's massive amounts of data needing to flow both ways now you can do that at night over Wi-Fi cheaply you can do it over an LTE and we're looking at 5g regular standards being able to enable more transfer of data between the cars and the cloud so that's pretty important cloud data and then cloud analytics on top of that ok now that we've got all this data from the car what do we do with it we know for example that Tesla uses that data sucked out of cars to do their fleet driving their fleet learning so instead of teaching the cars how to drive I'm a programmer saying if you see this that they're they're taking the information out of the cars and saying what are the situation these cars are seen how did our autonomous circuitry suggest the car responds and how did the user override or control the car in that point and then they can compare human driving with their algorithms and tweak their algorithms based on all that fleet to driving so it's a master advantage in sucking data out of cars massive advantage of pushing data to cars and you know we're here at Kingston SanDisk right now today so storage is interesting as well storage in the car increasingly important through these big amount of data right and fast storage as well High Definition maps are beefy beefy maps so what do you do do you have that in the cloud and constantly stream it down to the car what if you drive through a tunnel or you go out of cellular signal so it makes sense to have that map data at least for the region you're in stored locally on the car in easily retrievable flash memory that's dropping in price as well alright so loop in the last thing about that was a loaded question by the way and I love it and this is the thing I love this is why I'm bullish and more crazier than anybody else about the self-driving car space you mentioned Moore's law I find Moore's law exciting used to not be relevant to the automotive industry they used to build except we talked about I talked briefly about brake pad technology material science like what kind of asbestos do we use and how do we I would dissipate the heat more quickly that's science physics important Rd does not take advantage of Moore's law so cars been moving along with laws of thermodynamics getting more miles per gallon great stuff out of Detroit out of Tokyo out of Europe out of Munich but Moore's law not entirely relevant all of a sudden since very recently Moore's law starting to apply to cars so they've always had ECU computers but they're getting more compute put in the car Tesla has the Nvidia processors built into the car many cars having stronger central compute systems put in okay so all of a sudden now Moore's law is making cars more able to do things that they we need them to do we're talking about autonomous vehicles couldn't happen without a huge central processing inside of cars so Moore's law applying now what it did before so cars will move quicker than we thought next important point is that there's other there's other expansion laws in technology if people look up these are the cool things kryder's law so kryder's law is a law about storage in the rapidly expanding performance of storage so for $8.00 and how many megabytes or gigabytes of storage you get well guess what turns out that's also exponential and your question talked about isn't dat important sure it is that's why we could put so much into the cloud and so much locally into the car huge kryder's law next one is Metcalfe's law Metcalfe's law has a lot of networking in it states basically in this roughest form the value of network is valued to the square of the number of nodes in the network so if I connect my car great that's that's awesome but who does it talk to nobody you connect your car now we can have two cars you can talk together and provide some amount of element of car to car communications and some some safety elements tell me the network is now connected I have a smart city all of a sudden the value keeps shooting up and up and up so all of these things are exponential factors and there all of a sudden at play in the automotive industry so anybody who looks back in the past and says well you know the pace of innovation here has been pretty steep it's been like this I expect in the future we'll carry on and in ten years we'll have self-driving cars you can't look back at the slope of the curve right and think that's a slope going forward especially with these exponential laws at play so the slope ahead is distinctly steeper in this deeper and you left out my favorite law which is a Mars law which is you know we underestimate in the short term or overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long term that's all about it's all about the slope so there we could go on for probably like an hour and I know I could but you got a kill you got to go into your event so thanks for taking min out of your busy day really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to our next one my pleasure thanks all right Jeff Rick here with the Q we're at the Western Digital headquarters in Milpitas at the Auto Tech Council innovation in motion mapping and navigation event thanks for watching