Oct 6, 2023 · 40m · big-technology
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt — Self Driving Cars Will 10X Every Year
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In this episode of the Big Technology Podcast, Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt joins Alex Kantrowitz to discuss the commercial inflection point of autonomous vehicles, detailing multi-city fleet expansion, passenger experience, safety metrics, and the future economics of driverless transportation.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Alex holds 29.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Alex as informed peer 4.4 Guest teaching 4.4 Guest disagreement 2.0 Alex pushing back 1.9
speaking balance: gold is Alex, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 17:18 Rejection of Tesla FSD comparison
Vogt strongly dismisses Tesla's FSD marketing claims, stating it is silly to even put driver-assist systems in the same sentence as fully autonomous driverless vehicles.
Hardest push from Alex ▶ 14:57 Economic viability challenge via Harry CampbellKantrowitz confronts Vogt with a direct challenge from an industry analyst on how robotaxis with massive R&D overhead can ever beat a human driver making $20 an hour.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:35 Explaining vehicle jerk and motion sickness physicsVogt educates the host on the physics derivative of acceleration, termed jerk, and explains how Cruise specifically engineered vehicle dynamics to eliminate passenger nausea.
Alex holds their own ▶ 20:55 Reporting on Apple's internal hardware-software strugglesKantrowitz displays deep domain reporting by explaining why Apple struggled internally with Project Titan due to attempting to bury sensor suites to preserve sleek hardware aesthetics.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Alex as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Alex pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Autonomous Driving Inflection Point and 10X Scaling | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Kantrowitz opens by citing Vogt's LinkedIn growth metrics and asks whether the industry is finally at a true commercial inflection point. Vogt agrees and explains the engineering challenge of solving for the final nines of reliability after a decade of development. | |
| Passenger Experience, Ride Comfort, and Safety Perceptions | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Kantrowitz shares personal observations from riding in Cruise vehicles and enthusiastically praises the experience. Vogt educates the host on how Cruise specifically tunes vehicle jerk, the derivative of acceleration, to eliminate motion sickness. | |
| The Future of Rideshare Giants and Cruise Economics | 6 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Kantrowitz presses Vogt on whether Cruise will obsolete Uber and Lyft, channeling an economic question from Harry Campbell about competing with human drivers. Vogt reframes the economics around escalating human labor costs versus rapidly dropping compute and hardware costs. | |
| Comparing True Autonomy with Tesla FSD and Apple's Efforts | 5 | 6 | 6 | 3 | When Kantrowitz brings up Tesla's Full Self-Driving data moat, Vogt forcefully rejects the premise, explaining that Tesla's system is mere driver assistance where 'you work for the car' and calling direct comparisons silly. | |
| Redefining Shared Transit with the Cruise Origin | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Kantrowitz brings in his own reporting on Apple's Project Titan design compromises, which Vogt uses to introduce the custom-built Cruise Origin and discuss the UX flaws of traditional pooled rideshare. | |
| Scaling Across Cities and Expanding into Los Angeles | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Kantrowitz asks whether driving models trained in San Francisco can immediately generalize to complex driving environments like Los Angeles. Vogt details Cruise's scouting playbook and explains how driver behavioral distributions overlap across cities. | |
| Safety Performance Metrics, Regulation, and Market Timeline | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Kantrowitz queries Vogt on safety metrics, regulatory headwinds, and GM's ownership structure. Vogt breaks down Cruise's empirical safety benchmarks against instrumented human rideshare drivers, demonstrating significant crash reductions. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Vogt: Cruise operates nearly 400 AVs concurrently at peak
“So for context, last year we operating tens of AVs. We're currently operating hundreds, you know, almost 400 concurrently at peak.”
Vogt: Cruise will sustain 10X annual fleet growth for the foreseeable future
“Next year it'll be thousands. And then it'll kind of continue. At least 10 X growth every year for their foreseeable future.”
Vogt: Autonomous vehicles will expand from robotaxis to personal vehicle ownership
“So it'll start with, you know, kind of this robo taxi market and then expand eventually into personal vehicle ownership.”
Vogt: Public perception of autonomous vehicles will always lag their actual capabilities
“Public perception will always lag the true state of this technology because it's moving so fast by the time, you know, people develop a consensus opinion, it's already out of date.”
Vogt: Human-driven ridesharing will be remembered as a flawed social experiment
“I think we will look back at, you know, right now is kind of like a flawed social experiment, you know, gone wrong with human driven ride share.”
Vogt: The autonomous vehicle industry has thinned down to three players
“The field has thinned down to, you know, one or two or maybe three players.”
Vogt: Robotaxi unit economics dramatically beat human drivers at thousands of vehicles
“So the unit economics aren't great at hundreds of vehicles. They start to get pretty interesting at thousands. And then, you know, above that the advantage versus a human ride share driver is, is pretty dramatic actually.”
Vogt: Next-gen sensor and compute costs will barely add to vehicle prices
“We have two generations of newer AV sensors and compute technology and develop in development that each one of those has a huge drop in the cost of, you know, the sensors and compute to the point where It doesn't really add that much to the cost of the vehicle…”
Vogt: Data volume is not the primary bottleneck in building autonomous vehicles
“Well, look, if data was the only constraint to making a driverless car, I think there would be a lot more driverless cars out there than there are. It's a lot more than data. Like cruise is not data starved, even with, you know, hundreds of vehicles on the roa…”
Vogt: Driver assistance and robotaxis share no parallel and cannot be compared
“But again, like there's no parallel. They're not the same thing, like a system that's driver assistance where you have to take control. Versus one where you have cars driving around without a driver. And that really doesn't come to light until you actually try…”
Vogt: Late autonomous vehicle entrants face long paths due to public testing
“Unlike a consumer device, which you can test really well behind closed doors you know, building driverless AVs is very interactive. You have all these feedback mechanisms between, you know, how AVs react with other users on the road. Training first responders …”
Vogt: Current Cruise robotaxis on the road run on four-year-old hardware
“Well, you know, it takes about four years to you know, go through the automotive development cycle. And so what you see on the road with cruise robotaxis was four years ago, technology, the stuff we're developing now you know, is a lot more sleek and integrate…”
Vogt: Cruise will avoid highways during initial Los Angeles neighborhood launches
“No, we'll probably start off in, in you know, a few neighborhoods and then ramp up over time. Our vehicles won't be on the highway right now, which I think is good.”
Vogt: Autonomous driving systems trained in San Francisco perform well elsewhere
“You take a system that's designed to operate safely in San Francisco and put it in Austin or Phoenix and it performs extremely well.”
Vogt: Vehicle manufacturing is the biggest limitation to scaling Cruise in 2023
“Yeah, we're not done. There'll be more this year. And you know, that that's because next year we're going to be manufacturing a lot of vehicles and you know, that's our biggest limitation to scale right now.”
Vogt: Cruise AVs cut total crashes by 50% compared to human drivers
“Just from the first million we saw a 50% reduction in, in any kind of crash. And over a 70% reduction in the kinds of crashes that Could lead to injury.”
Vogt: Fully autonomous vehicles will dominate new car sales within 2-3 years
“What I do expect is, you know, within two or three years, most likely, I think the. Majority of new car sales will transition to vehicles where people don't have to drive because once you have that choice, I have a hard time believing that people are going to …”