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Grayson Brulte:
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Hello, I'm your host, Grayson Brulte. Welcome to another episode of SAE Tomorrow. Today, a show about emerging technology and trends and mobility with leaders and innovators who make it all happen. On today's episode, we're absolutely honored to be joined by Sascha Meyer, CEO, MOIA, and Jan Becker, co-founder and CEO, Apex.AI.
On today's episode, they'll proudly discuss their recent partnership that enables MOIA autonomous vehicles to scale. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.
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Sascha Meyer:
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Thanks a lot for having us.
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Jan Becker:
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Hey Grayson, thanks for having us.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I'm excited to have you here because you're both working on very important parts of the autonomy stack, and in my humble opinion, partnerships are the one of the keys to scaling autonomy.
Without partnerships, autonomy doesn't scale. Sascha, MOIA announced that they'll be using the APEX AI's operating system, develop its proprietary passenger manage position for the autonomous driving ID buzz ad, which I think is really cool. I'd like to take it surfing one day, but we'll get to that in a later part of the conversation.
Why did MOIA choose Apex?
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Sascha Meyer:
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Yeah. First of all I think we should give a brief explanation on what passenger management is so you actually get an idea. So what we talk about with passenger management is all the secondary tasks that a driver takes besides driving. So welcoming the guest, making sure everything is safe and sound that all the legal regulations are followed, and that's exactly what we are building with.
The passenger management. And when we started the development and the conceptualization of what we are building inside the vehicle, we click realized we need a solution that helps us to build secure and certifiable system using the latest software development methods. And back in the days our CTO have stumbled upon Apex, actually in a podcast.
So more or less it's a get back to the old days session here for us. And that's where our journey started together with Apex.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Jan, what does that architecture look like? Sascha mentioned security, and you and I both know that's very important. What does that architecture look like and what is it enabling MOIA to do?
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Jan Becker:
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So MOIA uses our two core products, Apex.Ida as the basis for the MOIA passenger management system. So Apex is a software development framework and that makes it really easy for application developers. In this case, the developers have developed the passenger management system to write these applications in an agile, fast way, such that they are robust, reliable, and scalable.
And then under Apex, it's Apex.Ida that's a software package that provides all the different communication modes between different components of the software, between different com computers in the vehicle and also up to the cloud.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Sascha, would an example be that the user profile, so you have passenger A, B, and C, that you build the user profile on there. You store their credit card, you store perhaps their route information if they're using it to go to work or using it to go to schools is, that's some, an example of what could be built on top of that passenger management system?
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Sascha Meyer:
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The passenger management system targeted more to the customer experience inside the vehicle. So we think of the passenger management system as a bridge between the vehicle itself and then our fleet control. So fleet control takes tear of all the tasks to center vehicles from A to B, knows about the customers, pulls them into one vehicle, and the passenger management system. Builds us the operating platform to connect our backend services to the vehicle.
So we have connection to steer let's say door opening functions. We can look into the vehicle, we can broadcast to the vehicle, so it actually offers us. The gate to our customer who is then inside the vehicle to connect to our staff that actually steers and monitors the safe and comfortable operation of the service.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Jan, so you're the doorman essentially. You can open and close the doors, but then you're allowing that safety. How do you do that from a technical standpoint?
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Jan Becker:
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So Apex OS sits on a computer in the vehicle. On top of that sits the passenger management system, so the Apex OS consisting of Apex.Ida that really provides the basis.
And then the passenger management system interfaces with the actuators, for instance, in, in this case, the door, but also the user interfaces that show the passenger what is going on. And also it connects to the backend, to the cloud so that the operators that work for MOIA, that managed the whole MOIA fleet can see what's going on in each vehicle.
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Grayson Brulte:
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To me, it seems what you built with Apex is highly scalable. What was the inspiration behind it? Was the inspiration to build this, to deploy across fleets across the world, or did you see a market opportunity or what did you see there?
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Jan Becker:
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Yeah the initial idea was, and still is even broader. So back in the days 2008, nine, and 10, I started to get exposed to ROS, the robot operating system. And then at the time I was at Bosch thought that is a great idea to build a scalable, omni applicable robot-based software, which we were all lacking in the time everybody was doing their own thing.
Software wasn't interoperable. Nobody was working with each other. Everybody was working in isolation. And ROS aimed to overcome this and truly did. We forged Apex from ROS, the robot operating system and ROS, and on purpose because ROS was designed such that the architecture is such, so general, generally applicable, that really any mobility application can build on top today.
ROS runs in street vehicles and offroad vehicles in mines and agriculture in production, robots in service robots in toy robots. We've seen surgical robots, iot, drones, planes, even in the military, and NASA uses it in space. Now what we've done to ROS is we've taken it to the next level. We rewrote it in parts by keeping the architecture intact on purpose, such that the transition from Ross to an automotive grade application is simple and we've made it real time robust and reliable, and we've certified it to automotive functional safety to the highest level, such that then our customers, in this case, MOIA, can build their application on top, such that it's also easy, least certifiable.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Sascha, you have the automotive certification. Is that, and you have the platform that's, you can use the word more stable or more secure. You can a term that you like. There is that enabling MOIA to scale faster as you look to deploy your service? Add more vehicles, perhaps bring on more cities?
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Sascha Meyer:
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Yeah, absolutely. As you might be aware, in the situation in Europe, specifically Germany, is that we have a legislation already. This is nationwide to operate level four vehicles. Unfortunately, there are no such vehicles in the market yet, and that's exactly what we are working on. And with the integration of our passenger management system into the vehicle, that allows us to really speed up the development and all the necessary certification processes. So there is operational procedures like the pre-checks before you start service. There are certain requirements on how to deal with passengers from a safety perspective that derive from automotive standards and with passenger management and with Apex as a middleware.
We can make sure that we meet the certification and location goals to start in a European market due. Based on the German legislation and as it's supposed that the European legislation will be pretty similar to the German legislation for autonomous driving, we will be able to just scale pretty fast in the European market.
And Apex offers us another benefit. So if we, let's say, move towards a new platform, we still can use the same systems that we built and the functions that we built today on a new vehicle platform without building everything from stretch scratch, starting to recertify everything. So this really gives us benefit also if we move on new existing new vehicle platforms for in the future.
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Grayson Brulte:
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The fact that you can go from the buzz to perhaps, let's call it the X vehicle or the A vehicle or the B vehicle, that's a game changer. Then I wanna go down one step further. Let's just say you're operating vehicle type A, vehicle type B, vehicle type C. Could that Apex then go across that entire MOIA fleet, no problem?
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Sascha Meyer:
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That's at least our assumption that we are working on. So we want to use Apex as the middle layer to actually decouple all the vehicle functionality from the passenger management functionality that we build. So it becomes a real middle layer that for us, makes it agnostic. What kind of vehicle, what kind of downstream canvas controllers are integrated in the vehicle we don't have to take care about that because that's what Apex is handling for us.
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Grayson Brulte:
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What Sascha's describing to me is that you basically become Amazon AWS, you're allowing him to scale. He can build his space on there. So you can have a server in Oregon, you can have a server in Virginia, you can have a server in Iowa, and no matter what, if you go to moye.com, it's still gonna load really fast. Or you can have one in the EU. How is that possible? What is the secret sauce in architecture that's allowing this to happen?
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Jan Becker:
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So there's actually not a lot of secret sauce. The core here really is the clean architecture. And universally applicable API that works for all these use cases.
So as I mentioned earlier, Apex.Ida is a communication framework that really abstracts all the different protocols that vehicle speak. This way we can talk to a vehicle that speaks can, we can talk to a vehicle that speaks automotive, ethernet, or FlexRay or whatever it is. Without the application, in this case, the MOIA passenger management system having to change and the, that is called abstraction in the software world, and that actually goes multiple ways. So you may have different vehicles sitting underneath the passenger management system. You may also have different providers of technology sitting on top. And in this case, MOIA, I'm sure they still want to offer a consistent passenger experience across the different markets. And that is then, yeah, enabled business.
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Grayson Brulte:
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The consistent passenger experience, in my opinion. Sascha, going back to when you first launched a TechCrunch, to me is one of the key defining factors of the MOIA vision. Going all the way back there is that consistent passenger experience no matter where you're operating for the past four years, MOIA has been operating a ride pooling service in Hamburg, Germany. What have you learned over those last four years and how many vehicles? These are human-driven vehicles are currently in operation today.
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Sascha Meyer:
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Yeah, exactly. So we launched our operation in Hamburg in April, 2019. So two years in development, we started our flagship operation here today in Hamburg. We operate 515 vehicles. They're human driven, and despite Covid, we already transported 8.5 million passengers. So this has been quite successful to even what we have envisioned. Back in the days. So what we offer is a right pooling service.
So we have a customer app that allows you to book. We have all the operational management tools that we need to operate those large fleet and make or take care that they are fully utilized. So that's very important for us. A lot of the assumptions that we had in the beginning about what's important to customers actually came true.
For us, it's important that the ride is comfortable. So it's a direct ride. It's still shared. It's always shared. So we don't offer exclusive ride. That's what it makes it good for cities. The other thing is that customers really care about privacy. And for us, this is today incorporated in the vehicle design. So we have single seats. There's a wide-open aisle. You have direct line of sight to your luggage. You don't have to store that in somewhere in the trunk and don't know if it's still there or someone else is leaving. So a lot about privacy and the perception of safety is really fulfilled in our service already today and is loved by our customers.
The thing that we are, challenged with is actually reliability. So even though we already have this huge amount of vehicles compared to other services in pooling, pooling in Europe, we still struggle that we don't have sufficient scalability throughout the week. And that is something that we will tackle with the autonomous vehicles 'cause they allow us to scale the fleet according to the demand of the customers, way easier than it's today. So we can resemble those typical curves of demand that happen throughout the day, in the morning and in the evening as strong peaks and with hours in the middle. And autonomous vehicles will really help us to get to the level of, to the scale that we need to make it a real, reliable service.
And we want to facilitate all those learnings that we created; comfort, safety, reliability, and bring that together in the autonomous vehicles right from the start.
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Grayson Brulte:
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During the start, will you operate, I use the term a hybrid service where you have x percent of your fleet is driven by humans, X percent of your fleet is driven autonomously to fill in those demand peaks. Is that how you envision that? And eventually, will MOIA go fully autonomous?
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Sascha Meyer:
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Yeah, exactly. That's the idea. So by next year we will launch a first closed user group test still with safety drivers on board. That's where we will test all the integration with mobile AI as ours ADS partners, the vehicle itself from Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, and then our solutions and the fleet control and the customer experience. And we target towards 2025, 2026, where we pull out the safety driver and start full driverless operation. And in 2026 we expect to have a certified vehicle that allows us to go for scale but with an industrialized vehicle. So a vehicle that really comes off the production lines of Volkswagen can be sold, can be directly used, has industrial standards and certification. And then we are ready to scale up and extend to service in, in Europe. And that's our target that by 2026 we start to scale out. And as you said, we envision that this will be a gradual change from a mixed fleet approach where we'll add a few. Autonomous vehicles to more or less a balanced approach. And then later on we will rely on mixed fleet to make sure that we also offer a service for those who don't want, for whatever reason, use an autonomous service even in the long run.
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Grayson Brulte:
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You hit the nail on the head. Factory, great car. If you're going to scale an autonomous vehicle service, you're gonna operate it. You're gonna have to have a car built from the factory. There's no other way around it. One, the public's gonna demand it, and two, the regulatory bodies are probably gonna demand it as well, because there's accountability there that the great men and women in the factories build great vehicles and it's not somebody in the shop just putting pieces together.
So you're right on that. Jan, you were at the table when the, if you wanna call it the infamous or famous SAE levels were created zero through five. You've got deep insight and knowledge into autonomy. Since you were there in the founding days, the early days, what are your thoughts on how the technology's evolving and where it's going?
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Jan Becker:
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What we've seen over the past, let's say 10 years, is companies still doing R&D for quite a while, figuring out what is actually the right technology to solve both the technical problem. Which is really how to make the vehicle drive autonomously in a reliable, safe, and secure way. But then also the interaction problem where we are working with MOIA together, but then also, as you could see, can see more recently in San Francisco, and that's actually where Sascha pointed it out already where Germany's already ahead is the regulatory framework. Germany has an enact legislation specifically for level four vehicles already a couple of years ago, which provides a framework. With some limitation, but also really security for the companies how to deploy the technology.
Whereas as you could see just in the past few days in San Francisco, that is still a regulation in the making. So that's a clear difference between the European and specifically the German situation and what we currently observe here in North America.
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Grayson Brulte:
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So do you feel that launching in Germany, which is part of the EU, gives you a competitive advantage because you understand how to work inside of a regulatory framework?
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Sascha Meyer:
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Yes, to a certain degree it does because we have some sort of clear. Perspective on the risks that might occur during the development. There's a clear bar that we have to meet and that is defined, and we can really incorporate that into our development processes and make that the node constraints that we have to handle with this gives us a better situation because we can go to the authorities and say, okay, here's the car that we have developed according to the guidelines that you have created, please give us permission to operate. So it's not a city by city, day-to-day discussion development where at the end of the day you have to meet. And that's a kind important factor for us that reduces the risks of the investment for the vehicle development 'cause we know what we have to achieve to get the operational concessions ready.
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Grayson Brulte:
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For listeners listening you're testing in Hamburg today, and let's just give another German, say for example, Berlin say you decide, okay, we wanna launch in Berlin, no date there. What does that look like? Do you have to sit down with the authorities, ask for permission? Is what does that the process look like from a regulatory issue expand to new cities within Germany?
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Sascha Meyer:
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First of all we would need to have the certified vehicle, so that's going to be approved. And then we have the vehicle and the processes and all the systems that, that are required for that ready to go. What we need to do then is to talk to the city and ask for a special local permit, but that will highly relate on the certification. So there we have to discuss in which areas we are allowed to drive at which point in time. So more or less, it's the same as with the local regulation, let's say in California that you have discussed with.
But then we are ready to go and that's a real benefit. We need some concession from a viewpoint of the Transportation Act in Germany. So as soon as you start to transport passengers, you need some. To meet some special permits, but that is something that can be easily achieved without any problem.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Jan, you understand this very well. Is there any regulatory hurdles are around the software, things that as a partner to MOIA, that Apex has to go through in order for them to scale there?
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Jan Becker:
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There are a few industry norms that we meet and that companies need to meet, and that typically our customers, so MOIA and the Volkswagen Group require us to meet the most important one is ISO26262, which is a functional safety norm.
But then there are also certain information security and cyber security norms, which are actually quite standard and common practice in the industry. They are not in all cases required by law or regulation, but then almost all cases required by our customers, by the OEMs, or in this case by MOIA as a ridepooling company.
And we meet all these certifications. As we go in the future, as we go in into additional domains such as aerospace or agriculture or marine or robotics, there are additional norms which we then need to meet for those domains. But they all derive really from the same called mother norm for functional safety, which is IIC61548. So that's not really a big hurdle to jump over.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Do you feel that by having the certifications from independent third parties helps you to, one, build public trust with the public that's gonna perhaps ride in the MOIA vehicle, but then more importantly, the regulators. When Sascha goes to a regulator, says, hi, we're using Apex.AI, by the way, they have the following certifications. Do you feel that helps? Do you build that trust with both sides, both the public and the regulatory bodies?
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Sascha Meyer:
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It does. And I think that's a practice in Europe specifically that's been established for a long time. In Europe you have type approval which is then typically granted in Germany by the federal motor vehicle agency. But then they like largely rely on third party assessment most commonly by the turf in Germany. And they now do that. Yeah. Internationally, in Germany. In the US, the concept is significantly different here at self-certification and the concept of third-party assessment is not that common yet, but I think that's coming because it really it works really well.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Why, in your personal opinion, Jan, is Germany in the EU so far ahead from a regulatory standpoint? Because it seemed that America introduces a bill, it dies in Congress and then we, you repeat and repeat, and another bill's coming again in the fall and we, it's probably not gonna go anywhere. Why do you think the EU, and Germany are so far ahead from a regulatory standpoint. 'cause it seems that when Sascha wants to scale from his investor standpoint, there's clarity. From that why are they so far ahead?
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Jan Becker:
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Your observation is correct. Europe and Germany specifically are far ahead. I think it's a complex question. What contributes to it definitely is the way the US is set up and how distributed and diverse things are. So traditionally here in the US the states regulate the driver. And NITSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, regulates the vehicles.
Now, when we go into autonomous driving the driver and the vehicle intersect, so there's an overlap. So some of the states in the absence of federal regulation, then already over 10 years ago, felt compelled to start to regulate autonomous driving, and that then started to create a patchwork of different legislations and regulations, which are really hard to meet. But it becomes even more complicated. It's not just the patchwork of regulations, also the patchwork of infrastructure. You go to different cities especially here in the us different paint for the lane markings is used.
The traffic lights come from. Different manufacturers, they have difference in brightness, different in the lighting source that is being used and so on. So it becomes much, much more complicated. Germany, on the other hand, and that has a good side and the best side is very used to, to being regulated on various levels.
So there's a norm for pretty much everything. Including how roads are to be built in terms of geometry, how paint is being applied to these roads and so on, which feels overregulated at a time. But now when it comes to autonomous driving, it is actually a huge advantage. You know exactly what to expect in terms of a technical basis, but also in terms of a regulatory basis.
So the, once you've agreed, Germany did that a couple of years ago on, on that foundation. It's actually much, much easier to scale.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Sascha, you have the foundation to scale. When you sit down with a city and say, MOIA is interested or exploring, potentially launching in that city, what is the value proposition that you pitch to that those city officials?
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Sascha Meyer:
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First of all, as we act as a pooling only provider, we can prove that already today with our human driven fleet, with all the constraints that come with human operations from shift planning, hub returns, all that is necessary we can still prove that our utilization is. Today is already better than an individually driven car.
So usually in Germany a car is occupied with 1.1, 1.2 people per kilometer. In our operation today, throughout the week, we meet an average of around 1.4 to 1.5, so this is already an improvement. We now use the data that we created today and run simulation and consider the advantages that autonomous vehicles will bring us in the deployment of the fleet.
With the increased flexibility that they have, we can show them that with five or 10,000 vehicles in the city of Hamburg, we will. Not only create a great offering to customer, but we also will have a positive impact on the efficiency on the street 'cause we will reach an occupancy of about two passengers per kilometer driven.
And that's enormous, but that's only one effect. You need to remember that in Germany we already, or in all over Europe, we have quite a strong public transport backbone. So mass transit for us is something that, that really is hard to challenge in terms of efficiency. They transport hundreds of people with each train and with ride pooling, we are able to offer an alternative that is as good as the car, which then has a compound effect that people say, okay, cool.
That's the missing link. I can use public transport, mass transit to get into the city. And at the evening when I had some glass of beer and a good dinner and I wanted to go back home, then I have MOIA as the alternative. And that's exactly where we are positioned to say we are partnering with the cities to develop an extension to the public transport system that offers better occupancy, better utilization than a private car. And at the same time gives a benefit that people will use public transport more often than before.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And then will you connect to that public transport? And perhaps there's somebody coming in, you'll airport pickups. If there's somebody on rail, you'll pick up it on rail. Will you connect to all those, let's call 'em transportation hubs, transportation points. Will you fully integrate with that so the person can have a quote unquote multimodal trip?
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Sascha Meyer:
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Yes, exactly. That's like division. But most of the time it's not this transfer situation where people say, okay, I use MOIA for the first lack of my trip, and then I hop into a train. It's more using it discreetly from another, but on the same day. So you use public transport to have a commute, then you use MOIA to get to the fitness studio, and then you commute back with public transport and the train and It's really about to step in the middle, those occasions where you would start to decide, start to use your car in the morning 'cause you know you want to go to the fitness studio. And that's exactly where we jump in, offer the alternatives and that makes it a good service for the customers.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It makes it a good service for the city. Anything to reduce congestion in a major city is a home run. I was in New York City yesterday to go half a mile. Took me an hour and 10 minutes to get into the Holland Tunnel. So if there's some way that you can magically reduce congestion in a city, I'm giving you a giant high five and there's millions of individuals in New York City that would give you a giant high five for that because it's not fun and it's the only way to get there where I had to go.
Jan, what you're building with Apex is scalable. What Sascha's building with MOIA is scalable and together. You're the scalable companies as you collectively look at the vision of MOIA and Apex, how do you envision your relationship evolving over the years as both parties scale?
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Jan Becker:
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So we already earlier talked about different vehicle platforms underneath the MOIA platform that obviously goes in both directions. Once you scale to new markets you need a local localized, a locally applicable autonomous driving system. So that is one area for scaling that I can imagine. Then also, once you scale into more markets, you need a local, locally adapted passenger management system possibly using different cloud providers, they may require other interfaces to their cloud. So there are a lot of areas where we ultimately will need to scale once MOIA scales.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Sascha, that's really interesting what Jan says from local at adaptation. Is that a big thing as you go from to say, certain individuals drive differently in certain cities, perhaps there's certain customs or ways that things are operated in certain cities.
Does that, you just take the Apex platform and you just say, okay, we're in City A, we're gonna do blah, blah, blah, blah. We're in City B, we do blah, blah, blah. Do you just program that all into Ya's platform to ensure from a customer standpoint that it all, it meets all their customs and traditions?
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Sascha Meyer:
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Absolutely. So for us, when we started the Passenger management project for, from our experience, it was pretty clear that we have quite a good idea of what we need to build. But reality will tell us that we are completely wrong. And that's still what we foresee for the next steps in development and also during localization, so we can have the perfect system in Hamburg works for the majority of our customers and then comes localization. And you need to have, take care that the needs of customers, let's say in a thousand Europe are different. We have the United Kingdom close by, where you have a completely different perception on what customers want to have in terms of the service and what they expect.
And with the Apex middleware, it enables our own software teams to develop in an iterative and agile way. And that makes it really fast for us to get started and then refine over time. And also what we expect to learn is that We need to take care of people with disabilities to really make sure that autonomous vehicles are inclusive as possible.
And that's also where passenger management and then their fun and the functions step in. And we know that if you dig into the specific requirements of certain groups with disabilities, you really need to be aware and learn what works for them. What. It does not work and really cater the software solution towards the needs to make that happen.
And that's only something that can be learned over time. And with the Apex platform as we decouple the functions from the certifications to the best degree possible we can make sure that we can adjust over time without running a type approval again and again. And that's really important for us, so we can have this iterative way of development that we need to, to cater the need of customers.
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Grayson Brulte:
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For example, if there's a customer that's in a wheelchair and you learn a piece of the data that if you did exit the passenger management system, that person could have a better experience. That's something that you can develop from the MOA system and then push out to the vehicles without having to go back to Apex.
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Sascha Meyer:
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Yes, exactly. As long as it does not, it's not considered severely safety critical, then we would be able to just deploy a new solution, bring it to the vehicle in more or less, no time.
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Grayson Brulte:
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You can move fast. And by moving fast, you can just constantly enhance your customer experience. Absolutely. And if you can constantly enhance, the customer experience, you're gonna have stickiness. The customers are gonna keep coming back and coming back because you have the consistent experience and you have the ability to add new features because that's what Apex is enabling you to do. In my opinion, apex is enabling you to scale and to focus on building a really great business while they build really great middleware software.
Sascha, you're sitting here, you're getting ready to operate a very large fleet of autonomous vehicles. You're operating. A ride pooling fleet today. So you're learning a lot, you've got a lot of insight into this. In your opinion, what does the future of autonomous vehicles look like?
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Sascha Meyer:
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Yeah for us it's clear that they will be a game changer for the mobility trade transition in Europe. So shared mobility with autonomous vehicles will become an important pillar of the future mobility. So why is that? It's for the reliability, it's for the scalability, and it's for the flexibility. And that creates huge impact on the utilization, on the customer perception of our service. And that actually makes us able to scale into the European landscape.
And one important fact is it makes it sustainable. Of course not only from a financial point of view, we expect that less subsidies will be needed even to the degree that the service will be profitable, which is an unknown thing for public transport operators, all around the world.
But on the other hand, it also makes it sustainable if we look onto the effects of the demographic change that we are facing, because already today, Bus service operators, train line operators they are struggling with finding the sufficient supply of drivers. And it will get even worse in the upcoming 10, 15 years.
And that's where we as an industry really need to work together to offer this disjoint solution to this facing problem to keep. Our society afloat and offer inclusions and social integrations for those that otherwise would be missed because they can't afford a car or they don't have access to public transport due to the lack of sufficient services.
And that's really what we are aiming to with the autonomous vehicles to offer to turn them into. A tool for mobility that serves the common good. And that's really important to the bottom of our hearts.
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Grayson Brulte:
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You’re giving individuals freedom. They're not limited to where they can go. You're giving them freedom to explore. And when you explore, you learn and you have a higher self-esteem. And that's really good for mental health. You're giving. You're giving freedom back. There's no other way to describe it. And that's the beauty of autonomy. Jan, in your opinion, what's the future of autonomous vehicles look like?
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Jan Becker:
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It really goes back to what Sascha also mentioned. The applications that we've seen scale the most at scale, best at scale faster are the ones that fulfill an action need in MOIA's case it's a lack of multimodal transportation and the future. The future need to address is really the lack of drivers.
Another application that we see scale really well is autonomous trucking. We talked about that in the past also. And then what we've seen is, all these robotics applications that scale really well where there's also a true need fulfilled. If I now look at standard robot taxis that we see a lot here in the Bay Area in San Francisco, they directly compete with the human driver and there's currently no lack of human drivers.
So that's an application that in terms of getting to profitability, which ultimately for commercial company needs to be achieved, that doesn't scale as well. But areas where drivers are lacking. Yeah, those scale fast and really fulfill a purpose.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Profitability is gonna drive all this. Sascha, it's impressive what you're building at MOIA. I can't wait to see. At some point VW will break out your financials 10 years from now, 15 years from now. And I think when investors, those myself, get to look under the hood, it'll be really impressive, the metrics that you're gonna be able to pull off.
Gentlemen, as we look to wrap up this insightful conversation, what would you like our listeners take away with them today? And Jan, I'll start with you sir, please.
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Jan Becker:
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It goes back to how we started the conversation. The work with MOIA really has been a partnership. Having partnerships is very important to scale because if you try to build everything as a single company, it takes forever. Whereas in a partnership, we can do it together much, much, much faster. And it's been a lot of fun working with MOIA and the fun’s only getting started.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Sascha, what would you like our listeners to take away with them today?
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Sascha Meyer:
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For me, it's that as an industry, we really need to think about where we want to apply the technology that we build together. And I agree with Jan. It's about strong partnerships, about openness, and I think we also need the openness when it comes towards the application. So I. Do we want to use the autonomous vehicles for shared purposes to connect people to society, or do we want to use them solely for profit? And I think that's a decision that we have to take that will also massively impact public acceptance of autonomous vehicles in our street. And I think we should choose wisely where to go.
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Grayson Brulte:
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We have to choose wisely. We need public trust because without the public trusting the vehicles autonomy will not scale. Today is tomorrow. Tomorrow's today. The future is a scalable partnership. Jan, Sascha, thank you so much for coming on SAE Tomorrow Today.
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Jan Becker:
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It's been a pleasure.
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Sascha Meyer:
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Thanks for having us, Grayson. This was great.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Thank you for listening to SAE Tomorrow Today. If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, please kindly rate review and let us know what topics you'd like for us to explore next.
SAE International makes no representations as to the accuracy of the information presented in this podcast. The information and opinions are for general information only. SAE International does not endorse, approve, recommend, or certify any information, product, process, service, or organization presented or mentioned in this podcast.
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