Vogt: Autonomous vehicle skepticism dropped from ~80% to ~20% after one ride
Kyle Vogt · No Priors Ep. 102 | With The Bot Company CEO Kyle Vogt · Feb 20, 2025 · at 23:33
Kyle Vogt, founder of The Bot Company and former CEO of Cruise, discusses consumer adoption lessons learned from the autonomous driving sector.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“One thing I saw in self-driving, which I guess you could say it's intuitive, but it was still very striking, was that most people on the whole were very skeptical of self-driving cars. I guess like, 75, 80% of people are like, I've never, you know, I'm never gonna trust one of those things. That dropped, like, dropped to like 20 or 30% after one ride.”
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 Kyle Vogt
Vogt: Claims That Mostly Autonomous Systems Cannot Reach Full Autonomy Are Wrong
“That statement is, is almost certainly wrong given a long enough time span.”
Vogt: Winning Autonomous Driving Stacks in 2025 Will Not Require LiDAR
“If you're making a bet on the right technical approach in 20, 25, it does not involve a bunch of expensive LIDARs or exotic sensors. It involves the most commodity is sort of, you know, high volume, readily available sensors you can get, and probably just seve…”
Vogt: Founding a Startup to Commercialize PhD Research Is a Red Flag
“They will leave their academic program because they want to commercialize their research, which to me is like a huge red flag, because that means you are, you're saying, I'm not going to be flexible on how I solve the problem. I'm going to force my solution in…”
Vogt: China is years behind top US companies in self-driving
“I think even though they may be doing a lot of teleoperation and other things there, I do think that China is still years behind, behind the best US companies for self-driving.”
Vogt: Cruise was decimated by GM abandoning priority and support
“We got completely decimated by GM's like lack of, you know, priority and then completely abandoning crews.”
Vogt: Elon Musk Nailed Tesla's AV Business Model Over Cash-Burning Rivals
“To be fair, Elon nailed it from a business model perspective. He's been making billions of dollars of profit while developing self-driving cars, whereas everyone else has been burning billions of dollars to try to get to basically the same point.”