Luminar's early team lived and worked on a former military tank farm
Austin Russell · will.i.am & Austin Russell: Mute the hype, amplify the product | Masters of Scale · Jan 9, 2024 · at 19:21
Austin Russell, founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies, describes the Portola Valley hacker house and workshop where Luminar's early team lived and built LiDAR systems.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“That was really where a lot of the Luminar folks that I had brought on were living and working out of. It was up on, like, hundreds of acres up in the hills of Portola Valley, where it actually was formerly a tank farm and museum, where it had, like, the largest private collection of, like, military vehicles on site, so it was, like, kind of crazy because you saw these, like, tanks driving around everywhere, and sometimes we would go, like, tank drifting up in the hills, which was kind of fun.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Austin Russell
Russell: Tesla's vision system fails to stop for child crash dummies
“Like, literally, if you put, like, a, you know, a crash dummy right in front of the car like a child pedestrian crash dummy, like, it doesn't come to a safe stop, like, at a reasonable speed.”
Elon Musk falsely brands assisted driving systems as fully autonomous
“I think a lot of the friction of why it's been so controversial in terms of what he's saying is because he's calling an assisted driving system and autonomous driving system.”
Russell: Luminar can be a trillion-dollar company integrated into every car
“It's this kind of thing where, you know, you have this outcome of where it's, like, very, very clear in your head, like, how we're gonna execute on these programs, how, you know, we'll see Luminar in every car, how, you know, it can be a trillion dollar compan…”
Russell: LiDAR is fundamentally required to prevent accidents and enable autonomy
“If you want to be able to prevent accidents and do autonomous, right, this is not an optional system. This is something that's fundamentally required to be able to prevent accidents.”
Camera-only driver assistance systems fail basic crash dummy stopping tests
“Reality is it is great to see some improvements for some basic level of assisted driving capabilities, but it doesn't solve some of the fundamentals of what you need to do to prevent accidents. Like literally, if you put a crash dummy right in front of the car…”