With competition in autonomous trucking heating up we speak with two of the top leaders at Ike, a startup that brings a unique development approach to this exciting space. Co-founder and Chief Engineer Nancy Sun and Head of Systems Randol Aikin oversee Ike's work transforming core technology licensed from Nuro into an autonomous trucking solution, and they explain how their strategy turns some popular perceptions about AV development on their head. Learn why they see AVs as a systems engineering problem rather than an AI problem, how they get away with a tiny 6-truck test fleet, why they are sticklers about using the right language for this technology and much more.

Recently Ed had been noticing some negativity about AVs in tweets by friend of the show and brilliant technology analyst Horace Dediu. He challenged Horace to debate the prospects for autonomous drive technology, and what resulted was a fascinating conversation that proves there is more consensus about AVs than it sometimes seems. Though the resulting episode was less of a debate than originally imagined, it is still an in-depth exploration of the past and future of AVs as they struggle out of "the trough of disillusionment."

The gang struggles to make sense of Tesla's sprawling "Battery Day" presentation, which they contrast to Geely's very different strategy for EV dominance through a shared flexible architecture. We also look at Mobileye's new camera-only Level 2+ ADAS and discuss a couple of recent news items involving the autonomous trucking company TuSimple, making this week's discussion as diverse as the future of mobility itself.

The gang is back with another discussion episode covering a diverse range of topics, from the new Mercedes S Class and Polestar 2 and the struggle to create good modern user interfaces, to the GM-Honda Alliance and another look at the SPACmania that is inflating EV startup valuations while looking past AVs almost entirely.

Mapping continues to be one of the more misunderstood aspects of AV development, so to help clear up the confusion we spoke with one of the godfathers of modern mapping tech. Mark Wheeler is the co-founder and CTO of DeepMap, a company that's been working on onboard HD mapping for AVs since 2016. He explains why mapping matters, how DeepMap builds its HD maps, and how he ended up working in this fascinating space.

Lyft is one of the few mobility platforms where you can hail a ride in an autonomous vehicle, at least in Las Vegas and Chandler, Arizona where it partners with Aptiv and Waymo respectively. But Lyft is also developing its own autonomous driving technology, at its Level 5 organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lyft's Jody Kelman joins the show to explain this dual-track approach, lay out her vision for autonomous ride hailing and explain where the "Level 5" name came from.

Every once in a while, someone coins a word that takes a huge and complex concept and makes it comprehensible to the general public. That's exactly what Liza Dixon did one day, when she responded to one of Alex Roy's tweets with a brand-new neologism: Autonowashing. We caught up with the doctoral candidate, human-automation interaction expert and all-around badass to discuss Autonowashing, her research, human factors and much more.

Two major developments in the autonomous vehicle world captured our attention in this week's discussion episode: Waymo's deal with Volvo, and Amazon's purchase of Zoox. We discuss the deals, what they might mean, and how they affect the rest of the alliances... but more importantly, how we should mash up the names into catchy portemanteau.