#353: Annual Prediction Episode, w/SAFE CEO Avery Ash

Alex, do you have a, do you think that is 2026? Alex, the, the year of the data center in space. Kirsten, what are your predictions? We're going to say that to now. Hello and welcome to the Atonicast. I'm Kirsten Khorasek, Transportation Editor at TechRench. And I'm Ed Neeter-Beyer. I'm the author of ludicrous, The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and the Programming Director for the Right AI Summit. And representing innovation and optimism, Alex Roy, the co-founder and general partner at New Industry Venture Capital, and the founder of the Human Driving Association. And today, we have two awesome things. We have our annual predictions episode. And joining us is Old Friend and just a fantastic human being, Avery Ash, who recently became the CEO of Safe Securing America's Future Energy. Welcome, Avery. Thank you guys for having me. Fantastic. It's good to have someone, someone else who is a proponent of innovation on the show for a change. We'll see. We'll see by the end of the show or not. So I went back and listened, because I assumed that neither one of you would go back and actually listen to the predictions that you made so boldly last year. And so I'm going to, I'm just going to say them and then pause for humorous comment. Laughter. Well, Ed asked us if we thought that the musk Trump relationship would last, which is kind of fun because at the time, reminder, Trump was not in office yet. And Alex said, Elon is going to be around in the right-hand seat of power for the next eight years. And then predicted that Vance would be elected president in 2028. And I said, no, I said, the relationship will fade in 2025. But maybe not quite as fast as people think. Because at the time, people were already like predicting and that was in December. So I feel like I won that one. Well, what did I say? You didn't say you asked the question. You didn't ask the question. But you did say, if it does blow up, maybe I'll go and work at the White House. Well, that definitely didn't pan out. Another failed prediction. Yeah. So what I will say, though, is this is that much to do has been made about like the at the end of the Trump musk relationship, but he is still on paper one of the wealthiest, the wealthiest human on the planet. He certainly still has his fingers and a lot of things. And so while there may have been a very public breakup, I think that, you know, he's certainly, you know, he's spending midterm elections. So, yeah, it is typing messages to big oil right now. Send money. Yeah. So that happened. Alex, you weren't asked this, but you did say you believed the Tesla would launch FSD unsupervised in a limited, not it wouldn't be nationwide, but it would be limited in probably in Texas. Do we? It didn't do that, though. They did. They did do something called the Robo Taxi, but it's not exactly what you said. I will default to my friend Edward. Edward, how many vehicles does Tesla actually have in the road today without a person without a monitor, a safety monitor? Any? I mean, well, so we saw a picture of one. So we fear and I guess they did. They did the delivery event, whatever, apparently, there's a fully driverless vehicle that did a fairly extended drive on the freeway and stuff. No, it doesn't. It's not a serve. They don't have a driverless service. Okay. Well, then, okay. So I was wrong. I would say that it's another, it could happen, but it could happen in the next week where they have about, we, they have about 30 vehicles or so ish in Austin that has a remote safety operator in the front passenger seat, correct? And the claim is that they're pulling those out. So theoretically, in the next week, as we're taping this prior to the end of the year, it could happen. Wow. I hope it really speaks eternal after 10 years of one. It only has to be one headwear. I mean, I guess, I guess nobody has gone broke like being over optimistic about Tesla, but people have definitely been wrong. Okay. Next. Okay. I said that motionals would be absorbed into Hyundai and Alex agreed and said motionals done. And I think that they're not done. They're not done, they're not done, but they're certainly haven't been doing much. I haven't meeting, I haven't meeting with motionals at CES, so when we get back from CES, we will, we will know what motionals up to. Well, they have been hiring, really, and they're not done, but we're just taking a little nap. And they have some good people over there. At least I've always wanted them to succeed. They, they need to do some work. Right. I do think that they're tighter. They're more, they're needs them. We need to think that they're much more absorbed into Hyundai because app dev has no longer backing them. And so I think that that financially speaking is true, but I was wrong on that. Sometimes a nap can be really productive. I help with productivity, right? I mean, look at, look at NURROW. They definitely took like a year-long nap, essentially. I would call it a nap characterizing that way, but they're back in their, and they're in the mix. You know what I mean? They pivoted and my friends from Argo who went there are great. And so I am optimistic for them. We need competition. We need competition in this market. What else? So I was, I was wrong about this. I said that I, I thought that that the EV tax credit wouldn't totally disappear, but it would be like more restricted via the IRS. I was wrong about that. I said that I thought there would be a lot of talk about in 2025 about L3. I don't think that really happened. I mean, like, you could sort of say the Rivian thing and sort of that, but I think actually 2025 became the year of Robotoxys scaling. It did. Yeah, I think, I think thematically it seems, I don't even do you agree? I mean, people are talking about L3, but yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, when it breaks through into the, you know, mainstream Thanksgiving table Christmas dinner tables, it probably has broken through to the mainstream. And, you know, the, the number of constituencies who are now able to experience their first self-driving ride. I mean, this is, you know, this is the year where I heard the most number of, I wrote an app for the first time, some people who aren't working directly in the AV space. Yeah, that started about about halfway through last year, really, with, with Waymo and Tamer and Cisco. And it's just sort of been snowballing over the last year of just, yeah, like normal people texting me and being like, oh my god, I finally wrote in an AV and, and yeah, for me, I think that's what's putting a lot of the pressure on Tesla. Agreed. Okay, there's a couple of fun ones in here. Alex, you predicted major problems, specifically a German automakers, but I think you were talking like European automakers. And that, so you're correct on that one, they are having problems. But then you said you predicted that Matei Rimak would become the most important person in, in automotive, and that the burn project would become a thing. And I think that you're squarely, I think that's a miss. Again, I think it's, I mean, the burn thing is real. No, it is. Yeah, for sure. But I don't think it's the, I don't think it's the most important thing. I don't think it's not, but there's no, there's no question that Matei is very important. 100%. A lot more great over time. And I've seen him a few times recently. I was just in Saudi for a conference. He was there speaking and at that conference, and there were global regulators, investors and transport officials there. By a thousand miles, Matei was the celebrity at that event. Everybody wanted to be able to say me talked about human driving and autonomy. He's really impressive. And he's, he's cast a much longer, bigger shadow than people are aware of it. Well, he's definitely like, I mean, if you look at his career and when he's accomplished already, I mean, and he's the young guy. So I expect big things. But again, he's been on the autonocaster anything. If the VW group wants to survive, but also thrive, they should put image in charge. And I don't think that's going to happen. There you go. Okay. So Ed, you said Tesla sales in the EU would go down by double digits. I will be flat. China will be flat. China will be flat. And then you were really hard to pin down the US sales because you're like, I don't want to be wrong. But then you did. You committed and you said, US sales will not grow more than 3% year over a year. Ooh. So that's a specific claim. That's something you can really be over the headless. I don't know what's negative predictions. It's kind of, I don't think we should, we can really address them because he was party to trying to kill those sales, right Ed? Where's you part of big oil's attempt to shut down Tesla? Yeah. I don't know how much, you know, hanging out in front of the Portland Tesla. I definitely was, I'm still waiting on the check from Soros guys. He is. That guy is a deadbeat like the reputation and the reality with that guy, Arja. It's just not the way it's a yet another of what of Elon's over promises. I listened to Elon. I thought that by protesting Tesla, I'd be getting a be drowning in Soros money and he wanted not that did not follow on that one either. Okay. So Avery, I feel like now we're going in a territory about, you know, stuff that you're interested in. So not just Tesla sales, but EV sales in general. Like was that something that surprised you in 2025 or did you kind of see that coming? Not particularly for the US. I mean, particularly looking at the the sons of the tax credits, which no shade to you, Kristen. I think Kristen and I think we at the start of this year, we fought some of the good fight and tried to underscore where creating demand signals for electric vehicles is actually deeply tied to energy security, national security. Absent that that argument taking, you know, real root those tax credits disappeared. We saw sales ramp up, including a little bit of creative manipulation of the rules around the edges toward the end. And, you know, I think what we're seeing now is what happens when you remove a demand signal, demand driver from the market. And we might get it into a bit here around safe, but we see some of the next order impacts of that demand destruction, which starts to hit some of the priorities for safe and for this administration around critical minerals and processing that are very high on the list to be done here domestically without having ample demand from that sort of EV growth becomes a whole lot harder how you figure out where those offtake agreements are going to come from. And so, Avery, there's kind of two pieces of this too, right? Where one is like sort of what's happening over the next year or two or three with sales, right? Of sort of the vehicles that are either on the market now or, you know, with this business, right? You've got a four year pipeline longer, maybe for big certain kinds of EV projects, maybe shorter in other cases. But, you know, multi-year product pipeline, one of the challenges here, right, is like sustaining the investment in new product. And like one of the things that seems to have driven the EV market a lot over the last few years is a lot of new product, a lot of, you know, exciting flashing. You kind of see, you know, new product hits the market at sales spike and the last kind of hot one kind of. And so they're, you know, so I'm kind of curious, which of those is kind of the most concerning. Obviously, you know, they're tied together, but like, I guess I guess the real question I want to ask here is, is that investment in new product really at risk here? Because to me, that would be the really scary thing. Like, you can get some volatility in the near-term and demand, but if you stop making the investments in the product, right, that's where things get potentially really scary. I mean, I think we're at an inflection point. And if you were building for a global market, you're going to need to continue to make those investments. If you're building for a US market, you know, it becomes a whole lot more defensible to focus much more on hybrid vehicles and and ice and ice vehicles. You know, I think we're seeing some of the rumblings around that, then just the last couple of quarters. I think our expectation is that EV growth is going to continue, which is a good thing. We're doing a little bit of work for beginning of next year, around what is the tipping point at which you have a sufficient amount of EV demand to support supply chains necessary to create domestic capacity that can withstand the sort of market manipulation we've seen out of the CCP. You know, I think the number for that is far less than 100% penetration rate. And I think that's kind of an important message that I expect while we're doing predictions is really going to take hold here in 2026 of you're looking at the batteries as part of EVs as a national security imperative and a means to an end, which is addressing critical minerals and processing capacity for the US. Just a follow up on this though. So the context for this is interesting in the sense that, right, like she seems the consensus is that one of the main challenges around adoption of the US is affordability. And what's interesting to me about this is that there is a broader challenge around automotive affordability, right, and beyond the EV sector. And this is something I'm thinking about when we get to sort of upcoming this next year's predictions. I think it's going to it feels like a factor that is going to wait ever heavily on the industry and create some potentially for volatility there. Is that an opportunity for EVs or is that a challenge for EVs, the sort of rising tide of affordability challenges with cars? I mean, it's potentially an opportunity. I think for right now, it's a real risk. And I think where there is the opportunity for affordability to both serve as a catalyst for adoption. And there's also a very real risk for affordability to serve as, you know, yet another finger on the scale for particularly Chinese EVs, which are heavily subsidized, making their way into Europe. And when you compare it purely based on sticker affordability, it becomes a very challenging choice to purchase a, you know, European or a US manufacturer vehicle in Europe when compared to a Chinese EV. You know, we don't have that same challenge here in the US. Obviously, there's a number of different reasons. The access to the US market for Chinese automakers has been effectively blocked with a few kind of exceptions there. I think that to me is another prediction point for 2026 is the concept of, you know, in the context of this big US China trade deal that's going to get hammered out, what happens on the automotive side of the equation as part of those negotiations? Every, maybe this would be a good time to explain a bit about your new role at safe. And what safe role is in the landscape, goals, visions, what it's done, what you're going to do there? Yeah, so safe is a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. We were founded 20 years ago by Robbie Diamond, who folks may know. He is, you know, force of nature entity to unto himself. When safe was first created, we were, the US was fighting two wars overseas, global war on terror, record high gas prices here domestically. And you had a military leader in the form of General PX Kelly, 28th common donk on the Marine Corps, Fred Smith, founder CEO of FedEx, kind of looked at this energy security challenge and said this is a risk for for American service members. And this is a risk for American businesses. Surely there has to be a way to get our way out of this challenge of over reliance on OPEC. Early days of safe, it was, you know, you'd Republicans who were saying we could drill our way out of the problem, we had Democrats saying we could conserve our way out of the problem, built to this and said we should be doing both. We should produce as much as we can here with the highest possible standards, use it as efficiently as possible. We helped the broker the first fuel economy increase in decades for including for medium and heavy duty vehicles. And then we're kind of off to the races, right, thinking through particularly the transportation sector, how does our energy, how do our energy needs undercut our national security? Over time, that has expanded beyond just oil insecurity. We have a number of different what we call centers, kind of issue areas around the across the organization, which include a critical mineral center, talking previously about critical minerals, both extraction and processing security challenges. We have industrial material center mainly focusing on steel and aluminum, how those play into our national security considerations, particularly when considering for and adversaries like Russia or China who are making big gains in production. We have a center for grid security, pre-self-explanatory there, generation, transmission, cyber-physical security for the grid. Obviously, that's been a huge flashpoint issue this year. And then we have a coalition for re-imagined mobility. That's where our advanced vehicle technology work up to and including autonomous vehicles lies. I remember I've been in Washington 20 years and started working on AV policy about almost 15 years ago. One of the first conversations I had in Washington was with Robbie, who looked at AVs, which I just got back from Mountain View from my first ride in a vehicle as part of the show for a program and was telling Robbie about it and he then said, "I think this is going to be an energy security piece long term." That AVs are actually going to be an enabling function to deploying electric vehicles. They're going to be an enabling function deploying advanced technologies that can be used for both consumer as well as military application and that we are going to be able to more efficiently run our transportation system. If we can leverage AVs, also AI-connected vehicles, data, the kind of the full ecosystem in order to really think more in a 21st century fashion about how do we move people in goods? And that's kind of the thesis for safe. So, as Alex mentioned at the outset, I sent into the CEO role here after three years running our government affairs program last week. And as part of I'm looking to 2026, this intersection of energy security, national security, transportation, and advanced technologies, I think is going to be a fascinating interplay across a number of the big legislative packages that Congress is going to be at work at in 2026, as well as for a number of the state local conversations that we're really seeing catch fire right now. You match that up with the European initiative for energy security doing a lot of the same work in Europe. And it's a really interesting time for both the US and our allies thinking about where all of these topics really intersect on the automotive sector. And whether the automotive sector in over the next decade is going to be continued to be led by Western automakers, or whether we're going to continue to see this rapid onslaught of Chinese automakers really taking over the global market. So, what is your point of view on my good friend Edward, who is very opposed to one of the most important American automotive industries, growing into a major player of US automotive exports? Which would seem to be a critical pillar in America's future. Yeah, I mean, we are very bullish on the US auto manufacturing. And I think it would underscore that certainly includes the big three, the kind of US automakers, but it also includes companies like Toyota and Hyundai and others who are making a lot of vehicles here in the US. That is both important from an economic development standpoint, but as we have seen as a student of history over the past century, having an auto sector, a manufacturing sector to fall back on, both when we need to manufacture military equipment, as well as to fall back on when for the supply chain security that can be extended to the defense sector, really make it an industry that we're going to need to see grow in its global competitiveness here. I think there's very real questions in Washington right now that we're about what are the policies necessary to ensure that you can match up the scale of new technologies with the need for economic development and then not getting you know, totally pulled down into the, you know, the corrib discs of the culture wars that have taken a lot of casualties across the transportation space. You know, when we started working on electric vehicles back in the early early 2010s before you could buy a plug-in EV in the US, it wasn't a particularly controversial topic. We had a lot of conservators he worked with who saw this as a, you know, homegrown energy sort of driven vehicle subset. And, you know, obviously the the rest is history there. That's changed a lot over the past 15 years. You know, we saw that front and center as part of the the IRA defense with the 30D and four of X-Tax credits that played out over this past summer. I think it's really critical to ensure that we do a bit of a reset on auto industry writ large and ensure that, you know, the host of other exciting new technologies, we have coming on the pipeline, don't get derailed by this sort of, you know, political infighting crabs in a barrel that really play into the sort of, of play against us in the sort of, of, you know, global, you know, geopolitical and economic competition that's playing out right now. I'm super excited to read Ed's new book, but I'm really hoping that Ed's third book will be called Carriptus Transportation and Culture. I love a good classical mythology reference. I was very good. I had, I don't know if this is a prediction, but to your point about sort of the culture wars around EVs and sort of seeing how it's changed politically, I predict and see that, you know, coming back full circle to hybrids because you saw companies like Toyota get really skewered for having more of a hybrid approach and not going all in on EVs. Now you see all these other companies circling back to hybrids, which were called the bridge technology more than 10 years ago and now here we're back again. And then I kind of predict an interesting thing might happen in that is that hybrid sales will continue to grow, but people will be missing out on some of the sort of power and performance that you get from all EVs. And I'm wondering how that's going to play out. As far as on a securing domestic energy production and energy security, I'm not really sure where hybrids fall now, like politically, and also where this rise of popularity at least amongst automakers of these gas generator, you know, range extended vehicles. And I don't know if you have an opinion on that or a prediction on that, but clearly with Ford's pivot and others completely backing off EVs, I feel like all these automakers have completely missed what is really actually what the public wants, which is just a cheap EV. That Toyota didn't miss it. No, Toyota didn't miss it. But it's like the market clearly want, I think, well, by EVs, they just want one that isn't a luxury vehicle, right? So it's hard to predict what's going to happen in 2026 as like all these automakers are pivoting away from something that I think actually the market might want. I mean, I think it's very real to expect that, you know, as early as this coming year, that the efficiency gains across the transportation system are less likely to be seen at individual vehicle level. And frankly, that's been happening for a while, right? We saw huge benefits in terms of fuel efficiency as part of the CAFE program here over several decades. That has been somewhat pedering out, obviously been a shift from just how do we squeeze every more miles out of a gallon of gasoline to how do we think about bridging that over to electrification as well? You know, I think the next conversations around efficiency that we're going to shift from how do we make the individual vehicles more efficient to how do we make the overall transportation system itself more efficient? I spent seven years running government affairs and product for a company called Inrex out of Kirkland, Washington that does global traffic. And we spent a huge amount of time quantifying the cost of congestion. So that's both time spent in traffic as well as fuel burned. And, you know, while, you know, I think it's a, there is a lot of runway there for us to think about driving efficiency gains across passenger and commercial transportation systems without simply looking at how do we make an individual car or truck more fuel efficient? So I'd love to shift towards alternatives to cars because I think there's a lot of interesting exciting stuff happening there, but really quick before we do, and this is kind of also more of a little bit of a high level question that I have just because you're sort of in the thick of things in DC, I'm curious to get your perspective on, you know, as a student of history, you know, you mentioned we now see Toyota and Hyundai as sort of part of America, you know, state major stakeholders in American manufacturing. That was not always the case. It was a very difficult political challenge to get from the world that we lived in before that was the case to this world where it is. And of course, you know, as a historical parallel, one can't help but wonder, is this something that could provide a blueprint for a better, more collaborative future with Chinese automakers, frankly? Or is the sort of nature of our geopolitical competition with China so different than our relationship with Japan at that time, the '80s and '90s, '70s, '90s, that's just not a model that we can really draw from in terms of thinking about how we try to, of course, forward. I think it's very different now. I understand the parallels in comparisons. I think it's a very different dynamic, you know, particularly given the kind of the foreign adversary component here between the US and China. I think there's also a lot more direct national security and kind of economic concerns at stake here. It's some of the same themes. I just think it's a very different class. And then I think the third is we have this, you know, for US policymakers, if you wonder what's going to happen if we were to, you know, allow access to the US market for Chinese automakers, just look across the pond, you know, what's happening in Europe would, you know, quite almost certainly happen here. To be devil's advocate, that's different than what happened in the '80s, where we kind of required domestic manufacturing. I mean, it was a little bit more of a dance, but right? And this is what China did to all the other foreign manufacturers when they wanted access to their market. They traded that market access for, okay, but you have to come here, you have to invest here, you have to build your manufacturing footprint here. That's a little different than what's happening in China, right? I mean, you have a brother. Yes, that's fair. And I think that is a concept, right, that does continue to be discussed in some corners of Washington, you know, in a conversation that has born out in Europe as well with, you know, is it a good thing or a bad thing for Chinese manufacturers to start setting up shop in European countries? And I think there's a pretty fierce debate on both sides of that. You know, I think the challenge that we would see is, you know, you have, this is a bit of product of having moved from, you know, the automotive sector is kind of purely a hardware sector. To the automotive sector is a hardware in a software sector or a hardware innovation sector that really makes this a very difficult comparison across the, across, you know, Toyota's access to the US, you know, other international automakers looking to come to the US market, which is very much centered on economic concerns. You know, there are, in addition to economic concerns, there are now very real security and privacy competitiveness and national security concerns that go along with that sort of an access for software-driven systems. You know, this goes out a little outside the scope of the autonocass, but this is a similar debate that we're hearing in Washington around, you know, drone systems. There's a big deadline coming up here in, you know, in the next handful of hours before the end of the year, where, you know, if there is an investigation and audit is not concluded, you're going to see DJI drones pulled off of shelves in the US. That's a huge deal. Well, weren't they just banned last week that I missed, that I missed read? There are a couple of different pieces here. So you have the, the DOD procurement lists that have included Chinese drone manufacturers for a while. This would be the, the FAA was required to complete an audit of, of DJI that would, would effectively declare they shouldn't be added to a list. If the audit does not take place, then they get put on the list. So I think there's, you know, that this conversation is not just happening in the auto sector, which makes it a little bit easier to read the T-Leaves for. You know, there's discussions around ship-to-shore cranes. We saw that in both the bi-demonstration and the Trump administration of banning Chinese manufacturer Chinese cranes. We've seen this, the Commerce Department rule that was started under the bi-demonstration finalized under the Trump administration that for connected vehicle hardware and software creates some strict limitations, including effective bans on Chinese hardware and software. And then for autonomous vehicles, just on the software side, create some, you know, directing concrete limitations, barriers to accessing the US market to Chinese manufacturers. Do you see on the autonomous vehicle front, we've had discussions in the past about how this might affect Waymo because of its deal with Zeger? But then you have these other companies that have positioned themselves as US companies, but they might have Chinese founders or previous Chinese backing. Tensor is one that springs to mind. Do you think that there's going to be even greater pressure and scrutiny from a federal level on those companies? Yes, we're seeing, that's been a steady trend over the course of this year. Over the course of last several years, this is not kind of new under this administration. We saw plenty of this sort of the bi-demonstration as well. I mentioned the ship-to-shore crane rule that was under the bi-demonstration, continued under the Trump administration, for the Commerce Department rule on connected automated vehicles, started under the bi-demonstration, finalized with the Trump administration. We have seen that there were initially these either foreign entity of concern or prohibited foreign entity, depending on the language being used. The definitions included in the IRA around the 30D and 45X tax credits. Those are the ones relating to for the most part electric vehicles and batteries. There was a lot of discussion around what it would mean to be a prohibited foreign entity, up to and including how do you think about control, how do you think about ownership thresholds. What we saw in the Commerce Department rule finalized earlier this year that will likely be a blueprint for other sectors is a much more expansive definition of what would constitute a prohibited foreign entity. That's actually going to make it much harder for a company with ties to the CCP to gain access to the US market, at least segments that would be included under these sorts of Commerce Department rules. One of the easy layup predictions that I can make right now, if it weren't unfair, is they'll be the first big package of AV-related regulation in almost 10 years. We've seen the same package try and get through in different forms and different pushes. Can you tell us anything about what to. I would like to be able to make a prediction about whether I think it'll pass or it'll fail. I'm not asking you for anything so granular, but if you give us a little sense, you're probably better plugged into what may be coming down the pipeline just so we can in high-level terms think about what the discussion DC will be around AVs over the next year. Yeah, so Congress loves a good forcing function. There is a service transportation reauthorization bill that something needs to be done on before the end of September in 2026. That is considered a must-pass piece of legislation that creates a great opportunity for some autonomous vehicle related in addition to other service transportation policy concepts to be debated and considered. I would be stunned if there's not some component of AV-related text as part of that final package. I think the other place we're going to see action here is out of the White House on the executive order front of really pushing hard for the sorts of federal streamlining or preemption around AV deployments at a a city or regional level. So I'm really trying to push hard on removing the sorts of red tape that would be potentially delaying deployments. We may see some of that come out of of NHTSA and USDOT, but I think, you know, given what we've seen over the course of this year, the White House will not be inclined to wait on that if this is something that they set their sights on as a priority. We're likely going to see an executive order before we see codification as part of a reauthorization bill. Speaking of national security, I wrote a column in 2018 called Uber Paca Lift now suggesting that the notion that people would ever give up private ownership of their vehicles, even if, you know, driverless operation, robot taxi fleets were, you know, ubiquitous, was a non-starter for anyone who was the first generation refugee from a conflict, or a second generation descendant whose parents talked about escaping conflict. And, you know, last week, there was an incident with Waymo where there's a power outage in San Francisco, and the Waymo fleet was a disabled, temporary disabled. To what extent does an event like that fit into your point of view on AV as an ash security issue? Actual operations, not merely, you know, technology export, but actual operations. I mean, I think it's, you know, we're starting to see different questions being asked now for AV specifically as they, you know, move from pilot deployments to real scale. I think we're seeing some of the political support, frankly, plateauing, which maybe shouldn't be surprising, but we're also seeing the conversation shifting from a safety concern. All those, those certainly are still being raised to a reliability system, reliability concern that I think is actually a pretty healthy conversation to get to. You know, I don't think it's surprising that we're going to see some of these sorts of breakdowns in the, you know, some of these kind of high-profile breakdowns. I think in the San Francisco case in particular, I mean, yes, we saw a major snafu as an energy security organization. You know, the first thing I heard when I saw that was this is a challenge of grid security and power generation. And this is a cascading effect of not having effectively addressed our power needs and power resilience system resiliency across the power sector. In addition to right, not having a, you know, to having to learn to work through what are the, you know, the redundancies and fail safes when these sorts of networked impacts come online. But, you know, that was kind of how I, that's the lens, which I viewed this through a national security energy security. Security consideration is, you know, less around how does an autonomous vehicle system itself either create more or less national security and more of the underlying technology? Is that being developed by the US and our allies or by foreign adversaries? You know, what is happening? What happens to the, the learnings and the data that are driven by those deployments? How do they help us to compete economically? And then I think the kind of final piece of it is how do they plan to our energy consumption and make us either more or less reliant on global adversaries for our energy needs? What about the issue of, you know, Chinese AV fleets that have been deployed, or even Chinese just EVs that have been deployed in Europe and in Israel and other places that have been found to be insecure, not by accident, but deliberately insecure and gathering information and therefore banned by certain organizations and governments because of that risk. Do you, what is your organization's point of view on deployment of Chinese EVs or AVs in the US from a security standpoint? I would be extremely concerned. You know, we had been bringing the alarm bells on, chip to shore cranes, I mean, much, much smaller sector, a little bit less sexy than autonomous vehicles. But, you know, we had been hearing from the, the four star, former, former four star admirals that serve on our Energy Security Leadership Council that they've been thinking about this risk for years and not taking US military vessels into ports that have Chinese cranes on them because there is a very real expectation if not confirmation that data is being collected by, by those pieces of port infrastructure. You know, I think there should be, it should not be a surprise when we find out the same as true of autonomous vehicle fleets deployed at scale collecting similar sorts of data. That's not limited to autonomous vehicles. That can be connected vehicles as well. There's a very real conversation that I think will be playing out around, you know, not just who's manufacturing the vehicles and operating the vehicles, but what happens to that data when it's taken off, you know, when it's, when it's relayed off, where is it stored, how is it used? And, you know, this is a 21st century conversation for a 20th century transportation system. And we're seeing the real kind of limitations of our, of our, our, our governing bodies, our department's transportation to catch up with the speed of, of innovation that's coming to transportation networks. So I think, I mean, I think, in the case of this Waymo situation, I mean, you're absolutely right. Obviously, there's a system level failure that sort of was the prime mover of this particular scenario. I think to me, what's, what's surprising and just to be real honest, disappointing about it is like, you know, we're all, we all learn that an autonomous vehicle does fall back itself autonomously. If it can't do fall back autonomously, it's not an autonomous vehicle. This is like Waymo's own messaging here. And these vehicles did not fall back to a minimal recognition. They were littered across the streets. I mean, I keep a battery in my home because I know my power goes out. It is, it is not an edge case. It is something that happens and that I, as an individual, have to prepare for. If I'm operating a fleet of autonomous vehicles on the street, I don't see why that's not a normal thing that you just have to be prepared for. You know, I think it looks like Waymo is treating this as not a good situation that they want to not repeat and they want to learn from and improve from. But I think there's, there's, there's levels of challenge here, right? And I guess to turn that into a question for you about the next year, you mentioned, you know, I mean, we're seeing Waymo is very aggressive with scaling. I think other AV companies, you know, need to show that these systems are able to scale with that comes a really noticeable uptick in news reporting around challenges. You know, nothing like major safety concerns, but like challenges, annoyance and stuff. Do you think over the next year that we'll start to see that, that sort of drop off a little bit? Do you think that given the rate of scaling is probably going to remain high? Waymo doesn't look like they're keeping their foot off the accelerator, that we're going to continue to, we're in for maybe a couple years of this sort of elevated level of sort of challenging optics. Let's call it, you know, or do you think that like we're going to see safety problems or kind of how do you see that, that sort of AV scale thing play out over the next year in terms of the public perception and acceptance piece? Yeah, I think we really, we've already started to see that shift from, you know, a pushback purely on safety to now the starting point, and this will certainly be a flashpoint for San Francisco of a pushback on system reliability and integration. You know, I think one of the predictions I came, you know, within my pocket was, I think 2026 is going to be the year that autonomous vehicles start to be judged like software as a service, not like vehicles, and that the metrics you hear become less about, you know, miles driven and more about uptime and mean time to recovery, graceful degradation, blast radius, and chaos testing results. You know, my interstays, we built software service products, that's how we thought about the quality of our product. I think you're very likely to hear a lot of the same terminology get applied correctly in the AV world, and this is going to need to be the sort of of questions and parlance that, that DOT operator are going to need to come very familiar with. Yeah, I would agree with you on that one, and then I would also say at like a local level, I think we're going to see quite a bit of an in-biasm around where operations centers are, because we've already seen blowback in like Santa Monica neighborhoods, but just the idea of when it's a couple dozen vehicles or when they're doing these road shows, there's a lot of excitement and novelty around them. I'm speaking of Waymo, but when any company in Waymo's a prime example of this reaches a scale where you're starting to get into hundreds of vehicles, more than 100 vehicles, especially in Los Angeles is very spread out, but like in more concentrated metro areas, you have these parking lots that are used for charging and things like that, and it's just creating the noise level is something that's going to become a thing in every city in which they scale once they reach those numbers. So it's not just going to be like uptime and reliability and things like that, that I think it's going to become a very local, like a local reporting issue when it comes to people living adjacent to these things. It's going to be actually, I would say, not to the scale of when like a data center comes in town because that's much more public, but I think you're going to see like pockets of extreme reaction to these sort of operations centers popping up in neighborhoods. Frank, Frank reaction. No, I'll just say that. You know, other than the beeping when the waymos were backing up while maneuvering around their depot, that seems like a very easily solved problem. I can't. You would think so, but I think that if you're looking at the type of scale that they are, it's not going to be widespread across the city. It's going to affect just a few neighborhoods here and there, but I will say that like when you start to get in San Francisco, you've seen the sort of evident flow of a lot of people using it, but also a lot of people who aren't using it, becoming affected by it because a bunch of waymos stream into your cul-de-sac or endlessly or they set up a fairly permanent, you know, parking depot area that's outdoors where it's not just beeping, it's honking. You know, like those types of things, you're going to get people rally around those, those pieces because that feels something like that they can actually have control over as opposed to areas where they can't have control over, for instance, like canrobo-taxies be in my city, because in a lot of places that's happened. Also, I think that like it appears that the loophole around giving citations in the state of California to autonomous vehicles has been closed, and so I would say that will be very interesting to see how law enforcement uses that. Those are levers that local law enforcement or municipal days or, you know, citizens can use to push back against robo-taxies even if they use them. My new house is inside the geofence at a very quiet neighborhood, no traffic, but I did notice a few waymos staging there, and of course my point of view is I'm like thank goodness they're here, Cucco will be safe biking, and the ETA for my pick up will be fantastic. Here's a prediction, these are the most staging complaints will become, you know, much like a little bit like people who complain about, you know, aircraft overflights, except the problem is much smaller and it's going to go away faster, because eventually the sound, like, or at least the backup beeping, for example, in depot, that's going to go away, as depots go, except for that when you sign a loan and you buy a home and you are in one of those overflight areas, by the way, that is included in those documents. So it isn't like similar to a small thing, but I mean, this is, this is, I've got to go away. I've got a prediction. We mentioned L3 earlier. I'm going to say there will be three L3 announcements from major automakers in the next year. Okay. It feels conservative, but the three automakers will announce some form of L3 program. Kind of like what, so general motors, I think, you know, took the next, sort of the first to take this after the Anderson made announcement a few weeks back. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's a future product, you know, aspiration, there's still vagueness about where it will operate and how many places and things like that. I think one of the main developments that is empowering this is that I'm noticing folks are learning how to use language around these product announcements. Tesla set the expectation. Not well. You can learn about it and people will still, will still buy the product. And I think that what, what, what's being explored is sort of like how vague can you be to like get demand without being sort of like, you know, ending up in the situation that, or just invest or buy, invest or buy in. Here's a prediction. Sterling Anderson will be the next CEO of general motors. That's a, that's an easy one. You just, that's a tired, but I said it, I said it before that thing, well, the rumor was, you know, Alex, and multiple copycat, multiple, multiple copycat articles face after that. I said in record any of those articles. Sure. Okay. For a while. I will say that like, I do think it's funny that as soon as like one person comes into a role there, that they're like immediately like, Mary's out, you know, like we'll see. Mary's been there for a long time. Yeah, true. So I do want to bring up a prediction that Ed made that I didn't get to razz you about, but I'm wondering, but I'm gonna let you do a redo. Okay. You said that the ID buzz will be one of the top 4 EVs in the country for the first couple of quarters. And they will sell every one of them. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm with the information right after seeing it in person. And like, this is the number one challenge in automotive like analysis, auto industry analysis is like separating, but like, I think this is cool versus people are actually going to buy it. I'm producing that line and I blew it on that one. I will. Okay. So here, I'm going to give you a chance to make an EV prediction though. A is, will the ID, I know we know that ID buzz is apparently not coming in 2026. Yeah, they're taking a year off to another. Yeah, taking a nap. Which is the year of napping. Yeah. I actually like that. Well, yeah, will they come back? And what's your prediction for EVs? Like, we've got some really interesting ones coming out in 2026. We've got the R2, apparently coming out and at the end of 2026 slate. So is it going to be the year? Both of those are very important vehicles for the survival of these companies. Whatever Ed says, whatever Ed says, invest in the opposite of the production. Thanks Alex. So those two products, different in a lot of ways, similar in that, you know, they're kind of high stakes in newer companies. I think, I think Rivian, I think has obviously the better chance of the R2 really making a splash over this next year. They're launching it fairly early. I don't know exactly what the launch schedule is for the slate, but they're a new company. And just the way they're approaching that product, I just I feel like being a little more conservative in that I think that it's just going to take them a little bit of time to kind of get it rolled out. They'd unlike Rivian, they don't have stores and service centers. They just have a lot more to do to get that out and and make the kind of impact. I do, I do think that the market is primed or it's reaching a point where it's going to be primed by the end of 26. Slate has the potential to make a real impact because I think, you know, the affordability problems that we mentioned earlier. There's a lot about the automotive market right now that reminds me of, again, as a student of history of sort of the 50s where everything just gets bigger and more powerful and more and more and more and more of everything. And then at some point, you know, the Volkswagen Beetle lands like a comet and reminds people like sometimes cars are better when they're simple, right? This is not a car you're going to take out of town, but how often do you take every vehicle that you want to own out of town or not? I have a question. I have a question for you and Kiersten A. Redden, I don't know if you can answer this. Is it true that the ID buzz only has two switches for left or right windows? If you want to control the back, you have to flick the other thing. It doesn't have four windows switches two and then a front back button. Is that correct? It's been a really long time since I've been in that vehicle. So I do not remember. I feel like I would have remembered that. Prediction, prediction, any vehicle sold in America with four doors and four windows that only has two switches and a front back rocker will fail. There you go. Now, so to answer your question, though, I think our tool will be the the EV of the year of 26. I think slate will be 27 when it will really have isn't back. And I think the EV of the year will be the surprise reveal of a cyber cab with a steering wheel. That's already happened. That's someone just driving it. Andrew, do you have a prediction? I think we'll see 2026 be at least in lexicon the year of the we've kind of gone to from software to find vehicle. We're going to be in the AI to find vehicle for 2026. Yeah, I mean, I think physical AI, a term that you see in videos, CEO, Jensen throwing around a lot now. Everyone is throwing it around, which is interesting to me because, you know, it's like essentially the same. It extends beyond autonomous vehicles, but autonomous vehicles is being pushed under that, for sure. So yeah, Alex, do you have a, do you think that is 2026, Alex, the year of the data center in space? Kiersten, what are your predictions? I'm not invested in any data centers in space. Oh, interesting. So why do you hate innovation, Alex? Yeah, I do. Are you worried about getting left behind? No. Kiersten, your prediction. So we saw in 2025, like tons and tons of partnerships around robotaxies like with Uber and left. So I predict like the last remaining of those will occur. I don't want to be dark, but I do feel like with the pace of scaling, not just with way know, but I think others, I think that the robotaxie industry will be tested in some way with like some sort of incident, some major incident. And it might not happen until 20 end of 2026. And I certainly hope it doesn't happen in that people don't get hurt. I'm not hoping for that at all. But I think it's inevitable. And I think it's coming sooner than people realize. So I unfortunately will predict that. And I hope I'm wrong. I'm another big one. Okay. My big one is that Tesla will go bankrupt in December of 2026. Oh my god. And that's because my book is coming out on December the heart. So in 30 days, should be plenty of time. Okay. Oh my god. So basically when we sit here at this time next year, the opposite will be the fact it will be like the most powerful automaker exists because all of your predictions are usually the opposite. I guess we're just we're just going to have to find out, aren't we? Yeah. You should predict that they're successful. And then it won't be the opposite. Yeah. And then well, I did have one other one and now I'm I'm spacing it. But do you have any last remaining ones? Alex, I know last year you were hoping for a major refresh of the Model S. No, we're not going to see a major refresh. We had a minor refresh and they and the range improvements were largely due to aerodynamics and the people that are small. I have a question for you. Yeah. Will Tesla really change its door handles? Yes. Will they do it by the end of the year? 2026. Yeah, I think they will. I do think that they will be they will begin. I don't use this word scaling because scaling doesn't mean anything anymore. They will obviously their their robot taxi service will grow and it will actually will be brought to me. They will have a Robotaxi service. There will be there will be driver's operation of Tesla or Betaxi's in 2026. I also think that they're what they're going to they're going to do for privately owned vehicles with FSD, what they're doing is Robotaxi anywhere. There will be like limited domains of unsupervised FSD insert for I think for in Phoenix, for example. Okay, available to the public. Yes, I think so. They won't be vetted. I've been reading Reddit threads where people debate FSD 141 or 142 is the latest one. I am sorry. Yeah, and they've been debating it and I have seen such a wild diveritions of experience among users. So for me in Phoenix in the last couple of weeks, I'm basically at 99.9 or even 100% you know hands-off operation. No errors, nothing. Very specifically on the routes I use. Whereas other users in other areas of the country with different weather conditions and other you know complexities have had radically radically worse experiences. So there's clearly ODDs undeclared with radically different behaviors. So I think to goose the narrative and maintain error to command, they are going to release it to users that they know from a certain from their patterns will have good experiences. We'll see if they make it in 2026. The liability on the owner, it's not going to be six. Six months definitely. Okay, so are you re any last any last predictions before we wrap up 2025? I'll give you one final one. I think that the EU follows the US in some sort of a effective ban on connected vehicle components and maybe some autonomous vehicle pieces VseV4 and adversaries IE China. All right, so what does that do to Waymo Zika? I think that very much remains to be seen whether whether that's going to qualify under a pretty limited pretty narrow scope of connected vehicle infrastructure versus just the vehicle itself or whether this necessitates a shift away from Zika as a supplier. So I should go low on by because the ionic fives they're in fleeting and awesome. Sure, but by the way, we're just talking about the EU I want to follow up on that because that would greatly affect companies like Uber that have made a lot of partnerships with a number of Chinese AV companies to deploy specifically in the Middle East and the UK. I mean, Uber and Lyft have both have partnerships with Baidu for instance in Lat for a London. You see a lot of deployments have or starting to happen certainly lots of partnership announcements with even some limited deployments happening in the Middle East. How do you see if that does happen as you predict how do companies like Lyft or even Western companies that have partnered with Chinese companies to deploy in Europe and Middle East? How do they navigate that or do they? I think there will be much like with the US it will be some sort of a limited on ramp to decouple supply chains from Chinese suppliers or from foreign adversarial suppliers. I will be closely watching the Baidu UK story to see how that plays out amongst the national security set. How much real pushback there is. I think that will dictate some of the conversation that happens in the EU around the same topic. I have a question which will trigger prediction based on the answer one of you will give me. The VW announcement of the ID buzz but napping sales or cancelation sales in the United States. What does that do to the VW Autonomous Division and Robotaxi plans in the United States which rely on the ID buzz? I mean I could see their nappe basically being like we're going to take the remaining inventory and use it for AV testing. I haven't been in one of those vehicles in quite some time so I don't really feel comfortable saying like they may have come a far way since I was in that vehicle but when I was in it more than a year a year ago it had ways to go in terms of ability to navigate on street streets but it happened in 18 months or so. They're talking to late 2026 for that anyway so I think with a lot of these things a little bit of slippage could easily see that pop to its direction. The European automakers are in trouble even if they even if they ban Chinese vehicles entering that market because they need to be exporting cars outside the European market and if they do not have competitive electric vehicles they can export to all the markets where the Chinese are going. The European market I mean it's size X they won't be able to be competing for markets and that's the American car companies are in a marginally better situation but only marginally because you know they for all the reasons you already know but it's a problem you cure domestic market isn't enough for scale it's just not enough so the Europeans have a real issue is least the American companies we have Waymo and Tesla and you know there's movement at GM and we'll see what happens at Ford what do the Europeans have it's a problem. I think the US automakers are also going to be struggling because if you look at what Ford Ford GM and Stellantis every single one of those companies is going through some kind of I won't call it restructuring but but various stages of pivots and changing of things so GM they brought in sterling and they are redoing a lot of like who reports to whom and on the software side of things Ford is doing a big pivot. Stellantis is rebuilding with the new CEO in 2026 is is a weird year for them because to do well you need to launch new products so you need to launch new products well and you know I that's the tough one. I'll say this about the Detroit guys and we should probably wrap this up pretty soon here but yeah the Ford universal platform will not release until I think that product will not be out until 27 so it's not really a 26th thing but I will say that over the course of 26 it's not really a bold prediction to say that I will continue to be the only real believer in that product because everybody else seems so skeptical. Every maybe you're you're on my side here. People seem very skeptical of that. I think the combination of low cost and combining the commercial and the consumer use cases on one platform I just it's it's how Ford has succeeded in other parts of the business. It's I think it makes sense from an EV perspective because small businesses have a much better sense of of the amount of range they use on a given day and are emotional about or rather than emotional about it. There's a lot that I like about sort of the positioning of that of that project. Now we'll have a whole year of getting to like fight about it but Avery do you have my back or am I am I really as crazy as everyone makes a back of all loyal Americans. Yeah. Yeah. I'm yeah. I'm exactly I'm behind the I'm behind the back of every patriotic American. Okay. All right. As we wrap this up, ambiguous. I don't want to say that's very important. First of all, right. The autonomous casting you'll parties coming up on January 6th in Las Vegas and this year we're at over a thousand requests to get into that party for 250 spots. So yeah, Alex and I went over some of the names and we rejected all of Ed's suggestions and just kidding. You're relying on me to get into the party. You love all of you but this is going to be the largest number of love you but knows we've ever had to issue. However, a lot of people congregate outside the party. There's a bar nearby and we look forward to seeing all of you inside or outside no matter what and I just want to thank our flagship sponsors. Waymo, Wave and Woven Capital and a special shout out today to one of the OG friends and supporters of the autonomous cast Ro Gupta. He was a founder of Carmera who required by Woven many years ago and Ro was just announced in the last couple of hours as the new managing director of Woven Capital which is an incredible piece of news for him. He's a great guy and if we've often said I've often said to Riley Brennan as one of the godfathers of the autonomous cast but Ro would be the other because Ro pushed for when after Woven acquired us he suggested that they become a sponsor of the autonomous cast party and they have been every year since inception. Even before that when he was a Carmera it was literally after the very first autonomous cast party ever where the sponsor was just a guy friend of mine who had a suite and he sponsored it by it was to get in the suite there he had. He he three days after that party he was like I want to sponsor next year and the party's been a thing ever since and it's largely due to Ro so that's I I'm just learning this news now congratulations. Well and one other thing is that George Kellerman who was managing partner at Woven Capital's now advisor to the CFO of Toyota. So it's interesting who's a you know gem of the earth um what an unbelievable arc he's got and uh well we'll see you all the party. George yeah congratulations in your promotions and then I will end by saying every thanks for joining us um again and always appreciate having you on hopefully we see you in January and thanks to our audience for listening to another episode the Autonomic cast.