Inside Transportation

Inside Transportation is about the business of moving people and goods, and it leaves the explaining to the executives whose companies are trying to do it. The show uses two formats. In the one-on-one interviews, Nicholas, who introduces himself as a senior analyst at Inside.com, questions a single company head. Other episodes come from Inside.com's Future of Transportation event, where co-host Johan introduces speakers who give a presentation and then come back for a Q&A. The subjects cover the whole street, and what runs under it. Garrett McCurrach of Pipedream Labs describes an underground delivery idea and stresses that it is very early, with much of what the company knows still an educated guess. His account of the first pilot city is unusually concrete: a two-day permitting process and a franchise fee paid per mile. He also notes that cities have no rules yet for robots working underground, so they regulate the kind of infrastructure going in instead. On the sidewalk, Ali Kashani of Serve Robotics walks through the levels of vehicle autonomy. Level five, he says, is science fiction. Level four is the goal everyone is aiming for. He expects people in major U.S. cities to see robots operating around them within the next few years. Freight gets its turn with David Maday of Aurora, who presents autonomous trucking as a driver-as-a-service business built with truck manufacturers as partners. His pitch covers safety, efficiency, lower emissions and a lower total cost of ownership. Justin Lang of Joby Aviation makes the case for aerial ride-sharing with commute math: a 25-mile trip that can take well over an hour on the road, flown in 12 minutes. The infrastructure he describes is modest: landing pads on the underused roofs of parking garages. On launch markets, he says Joby prefers to announce what it has actually done rather than what it plans. Spin's session covers scooters that use computer vision to tell whether they are parked at a bike rack or blocking the sidewalk, with Tampa named as the first market for that technology. Will Coleman of Alto argues that ride-hail markets usually have too many drivers, and he presents Alto's model of paying drivers whether or not they have a passenger as a way of taking responsibility for that. Emissions come up in several of these conversations, from Spin's carbon targets to Coleman's point about extra miles driven in cities. What a listener gets is each company's case for itself, in its own words. Ford Motor Company sponsors the episodes.