Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun | Spotlight | Code 2021

[Music] ah i um started working on self-driving cars because when i was 18 i lost my best friend harold in a traffic accident it was just a split second bad decision and a human life was lost it was horrible on me his friends his family was even worse is the recognition that there's about a million families every year with the same fate traffic literally kills millions of people in 2005 i got my very first chance to bite my teeth at self-driving cars in a competition organized by the u.s government by darpa the entity often credited with the invention of the internet what looks thrilling back then looks lame today but we had to build a car that could drive 140 miles the mojave desert in less than 10 hours now we built this car using ai machine learning and i can tell you with an incredible amount of good luck my little team in stanford won this competition and built the very first darpa grand challenge winning car and then came 2009 when larry page and i decided it's time for the next step you want to build a car that wouldn't just drive through a desert but it could drive on any street in california so we got a team together of 10 incredibly talented engineer among them dimitri dolgov the co-ceo of waymo and chris rimson runs aurora and we built this car that could magically perceive traffic and navigate around it that's project chaffer you heard about it portraiture fur has recently graduated into way more in fact we have our course here way more presenting later today and what's fascinating about waymo weymouth obviously the leader in this field is that waymo has been able to navigate 20 million miles without ever hurting a person to put this new perspective you and i will drive maybe two hundred thousand miles a year just like a hundred human lives of driving without hurting a person so clearly these cars are safer than human drivers but there is a problem even with the advent of self-driving cars there's still massive societal problems related to cars and here in los angeles the number one and number two a number three four five problem of cars is traffic and the more self-driving cars we build the more traffic we're gonna have so let me take you along on a journey with larry page and myself thinking about how we can resolve that problem that's a few years ago when we started kitty hawk with this very simple and very pristine idea that if our cars just had wings and they could lift themselves up into the sky then traffic as it now we as you know it here in los angeles would be a matter of the past and that's what we do at kitty hawk outside we've stationed one of those vehicles these are the new generation of electric veto vehicles they lift off just like a drone but within 12 seconds they fly forward and become wingbone just like a small aircraft with all the gains of efficiency of small aircraft so these vehicles are not confined to the ground anymore like cars but they take the sky and in doing so they will transform urban transportation now under the hood is a novel highly redundant four tolerant eight motor distribution system you've never seen a plane with a one seater with eight motors but it can lose one until it flies fine and it also has a ballistic parachute so if you feel it's time to do an emergency landing you pull the parachute we tested the parachute through in many many weather conditions and it just works and to push safety even further we have a triple redundant flight control system all the way to triple redundant flight control services something you never see in a small aircraft so this we hope to be the safest vehicle ever seen on this planet it's a lot of work but that's where we're trying to go you see landing near hollister well over the past years um we'll see in a second we've built many many prototypes we've built human drones like this one we built vehicles like those together with boeing but this is the best this vehicle is battery operated as i mentioned it is a very small battery but on a single charge it can fly a hundred miles that's further than any two points here in los angeles and then it's also fast okay just like an aircraft at about fifty percent throttle we can go 180 miles per hour i know what you're thinking if you drive in in los angeles you go maybe on average 18 miles per hour there's like a tenth of it we can go 10 times as fast using this aircraft it's kind of amazing it's also insanely quiet okay i'm saying this because experts have predicted that this aircraft will never be quiet but the reality is if it flies over you at a thousand feet it's only 38 decibels that's just as quiet as a library you won't be able to hear it and finally this vehicles are green per mile traveled we use about a third of the energy that an electric car uses okay that's significant our battery is only roughly 15 kilowatt hours it's tiny compared to a tesla battery and why does it matter well if you want your cities to be green if you want to slow down or stop global warming you gotta want this technology because uses less energy perhaps the most significant innovation however is that we believe these aircraft have no pilot on board and that might sound crazy but just as much as i believe self-driving cars would drive themselves and elevators should have no elevator attendant i believe airplanes are safer with our pilots on board 75 of aviation accidents are caused by human error and that number is going to go up as we have more of those in the sky so that's a big deal for us so this technology as we bring it to market has the potential to be safer cheaper faster and greener and it's cheaper because there's no pilot on board we'll be able to lower the cost per mile below that of a car today now how about certification well we've worked over the years very closely with the faa to really understand what is the gold standard in aviation safety and we had the great benefit to learn from the fa what their perspective is on keeping this vehicle safe the faa deserves an enormous compliment for being innovative and keeping us safe as my creator tells me who works with us the former administrator at the faa if we had the same rate of accidents from 1980s with the volumes today we would see one major jet crash every three weeks in this country that's how safe is aviation become and here we're able to really work with authorities to really redefine aviation safety it's challenging because no one has ever built near taxi system without a paradigm board we know what life is full on challenges it's really fun finally yeah if you look at aviation it is a field that is rapidly evolving and if you look at aviation history we had a lot of innovation before the 50s because back in the day everybody flew whatever they wanted there wasn't really an faa but now if you look at the most recent news you find the faa massively engaged in bringing this technology forward and bringing to to with them the best expertise how to make it safe and inviting entrepreneurs and tech companies like us to really rethink how the sky works and how we can roll out a massive air taxi system for the benefit of the people so i'm i'm it's going to be a lot of work we are at the present point not ready to submit any type certification um but i'm very optimistic that's going to change the world finally we are launching okay um this is our faa picture you see a fav flying safely we are launching um we're launching um in ohio of all places the department of transportation ohio has worked with nasa with the faa with the air force to put together a situation where these aircraft can fly safely beyond the little line of sight and the magic of beyond whichever side is it really replaces the pilot's ability to see other traffic with something else that's going to happen in november first it's going to be a maiden flight it's going to be amazing and then i believe within a few months we can actually start taking passengers and the first passenger is going to be me you know that's how it works if you run a company but i'm so confident in our technology you know people our approach to safety i'm ready to do it in closing a hundred years ago we saw perhaps the most important revolution to urban transportation the advent of the car and we there came freeways and highways and parkways and driveways and tunnels and parking lots and gas stations here in los angeles more than half the ground infrastructure is dedicated to cars i'm telling you is that in the next years we're going to see a equally important change in society where the car is greatly being replaced by these e-vital air taxi systems and the way it's going to work is you're going over your phone uber meets evital you push in the button it picks you up and lets you go at the speeds 10 times faster than today then only in the sky will be the limit in closing i want to thank the organizers for making this event happen i know cara has been fighting with her voice for the yesterday and today what an amazing performance and i want to thank shannaz darva and chuck taylor who's outside for coming here and bringing aircraft we have an aircraft outside the aircraft has flown many many times have a look and see how you like the future thank you so much you

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Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021