HIBT Lab! Cruise: Kyle Vogt

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So a few weeks ago, I had a chance to go for a ride in a driverless car, and and I don't mean the hands free driving on the highway like what's available in a Tesla or in a bunch of other new cars right now. I mean I got into the back seat of a car and there was no one. in the front seat. The car drove completely by itself. And this wasn't on some closed course. This was right in the middle of the city of San Francisco, with other cars on the road and pedestrians, cyclists, and all the distractions that any human driver might face, and it was Actually amazing. The car was an electric Chevy Bolt, and the company behind it is called Cruz. And right now they have a whole fleet of fully autonomous Chevy Bolts giving rides to people around San Francisco every night.

Cruz was founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogue, and before working on Cruz, he dropped out of MIT to help start Justin TV. the company that eventually became the streaming platform Twitch. Cruz was acquired by General Motors in 2016, and sin the company has gone full steam ahead with building and deploying cars that can drive themselves, with Kyle in the driver's seat having stepped back into the CEO role earlier this year. Kyle has always had a love for robots and self driving machines. In fact, in college, back in 2004, Kyle was involved in a competition that was a pioneering event in the history of autonomous vehicles.

While at MIT you got involved in something called the DARPA Grand Challenge, and this actually I think is widely considered to be like a kind of a pivotal moment or maybe really important moment in the history of autonomous vehicles. Um what what was that grand challenge in two thousand four? Yeah, I mean it was put on by DARPA. And their goal was, I believe, to accelerate

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