Larry Burns, GM vice president of Research and Development and Planning, gestures during a press conference Thursday, January 27, 2005, in New York. General Motors, along with Shell Hydrogen LLC, announced plans to provide 13 fuel cell-powered vehicles to New York State, and to open New York state’s first hydrogen service station in 2006. Photographer: Emile Wamsteker/Bloomberg News
Lawrence Burns is a former vice president of research, development and planning at General Motors, who has been an advisor to Waymo (formerly Google’s self-driving car project) since 2011. He and Christopher Shulgan co-authored “Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car and How it Will Reshape the World” to be released Aug. 28 by Ecco/HarperCollins. Burns is a strong advocate that autonomous vehicles will transform how the world moves over the next two decades. I interviewed him recently and here are the highlights of that conversation.
Q. You begin the book with the early DARPA Challenges, a series of government funded robotics competitions that validated the fundamental concepts of self-driving vehicles. You introduce us to people like Carnegie Mellon’s Red Whittaker, Chris Urmson, Bryan Salesky, Sebastian Thrun, who helped launch Google’s self-driving car project, and others. Why did you start there ?
Larry Burns: The reason I wrote this book was I just felt there were so many people who played a part in this once-in-a-century revolution in transportation that were at risk of being forgotten. The story needed to be told about the people who put the blood, sweat and tears into not just driverless cars, but connected vehicles and ZipCar. When they made their decision that was a high-risk, unproven, courageous thing to do. My dream is that there’s a 9th grader somewhere who picks up the book, maybe with the encouragement of a teacher or their involvement in FIRST Robotics and they see the Urmsons and Saleskys as their role model.
Q. Given your background with General Motors and now Waymo, what are the major differences in their respective cultures that are advantages or disadvantages to competing in developing fully autonomous vehicles ?
Burns: There were three primary differences. First, the leadership of the auto industry, historically and even today, is not grounded in the digital economy. People like Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick, the digital economy is second nature to them.
As such, the traditional auto industry leaders viewed the DARPA Challenges and the four or five years after them as a curiosity more than something that could have an immediate impact.
Secondly, the auto industry is led by people who are interested in creating compelling vehicles that can be sold through dealerships. Folks from Silicon Valley look at transportation as an experience. It’s not surprising that a lot of the teachings about experience design came out of the Stanford Business School. When you pull that thread you realize there are a lot of negative aspects to owning an automobile.
When I was at GM I don’t think my peers and Rick Wagoner, who was my boss, approached the company’s legal counsel and asked if I could take driverless cars and operate them on public roads, there’s no way they would have said yes.
Q. We see in cases like Tesla’s Autopilot and Uber’s fatal crash in Phoenix, how much are these failures setting back the broader development of autonomous technology ?
Burns: If not managed properly they could set back the technology significantly. Let’s use the analogy of fracking. Early on there were people using fracking irresponsibly, drilling wells and not casing the wells properly and there was methane leakage and it was getting into the water supplies. But you haven’t heard a negative word about fracking recently. How did that go away ? The oil companies started policing themselves.
I am very impressed and very proud of the safety record of Waymo. They always a driver in the vehicle. They fire drivers who do not follow the standard procedures.
They recruit people who have a special makeup for this kind of work, often ex-military people.
Yes, they’ve had a couple accidents, but you look at the (Uber) Elaine Herzberg fatal accident in Arizona and that’s the equivalent of someone fracking in an irresponsible way.
Q. Given the cost structure and the cyclical nature of the auto industry how can any traditional automaker make it in this new technology ?
Burns: Just look at the market capitalization of General Motors, Ford and FCA, which range from about $30 billion to $60 billion. Then look at the $175 billion valuation Morgan
Stanley has put on Waymo. That’s a concern. Second concern, just the amount of resources needed to keep a conventional auto company viable. I led global planning for General Motors and was responsible for a budget of about $16 billion a year.
You could end up spending all your resources just trying to sustain your conventional business. Meanwhile you’ve got these startups from a whole different part of the world coming at you, it’s tough.
That said, the moves General Motors has made are admirable. I really like what they’ve done with the Bolt. I like that they have the foresight to integrate an autonomous driving system into the Bolt. If Cruise Automation is in the mix of one of the most self-driving systems in the world, GM is positioned well to bring a lot of those vehicles to market quickly.
But their challenge is that they have to run all this other legacy part of their business.
Q. Which traditional automakers have the best autonomous vehicle strategies today ?
Burns: I think GM has done the right things. I always have respected Daimler. Daimler has the advantage of competing in big commercial trucks, and they have Car2Go.
I never, ever, ever write off Toyota. They were slow to accept this reality, but I’ve learned that once they figure out the secret sauce there’s nobody better in the world. I don’t think you should rule out Chinese companies.
Q. The book doesn’t address public policy. You’ve seen what New York City did recently in limiting new ride-hailing registrations and setting a minimum wage for drivers. Still Bruce Schaller, a former New York City Department of Transportation official has released a study showing that ride-hailing vehicles just in 2017 drove 5.7 billion miles in the nation’s nine largest cities that would not have been driven otherwise. Is this an unintended consequence of new technology or just a messy transition we have to plow through ?
Burns: We are not ready to scale autonomous vehicles by any stretch today. This is a story about thinking really big. Companies have started small and they’re learning fast. A lot of the issues that people are wringing their hands about will play themselves out when we scale.
There’s a lot of people worrying about things prematurely. You’ve heard the term “unanticipated consequences.” There’s probably a lot of other public policy issues that will have to be managed that no one has ever thought of yet.
As long as we can continue to learn I’m not worried. For the first time in over a century we’ve got a convergence that let’s people have a better experience at lower cost, you can make money by supplying it and it deals with all these negative side effects of traditional automobile transportation.
Q. When we get to full autonomy people those 4 million people who now drive for Uber, Lyft or whoever for part of their incomes will no longer have that job. What are we going to do about that ?
Burns: That’s a significant jobs impact. It’s one you have to take seriously. The bigger jobs is the number of people who will still work in the auto industry if the cars have one-tenth as many parts. The bigger story is the people who work in the oil and gas industry if we need only 20% of the gasoline we use today. The owner operator of the gas stations will be impacted.