Russell Vickers

It's very, you could take this in a lot of different ways.

But essentially at the moment, you know, it is trying to address a problem where there's just a driver shortage generally.

And this is, you know, the business model makes sense.

Our road network is pretty good from a European context.

It started in California because that's where the people were that could understand these systems, let's say, and that's where the talent pool was.

Then what also lends itself to that was the weather is a lot better and the road network is kind of a grid network.

So from trying to train a vehicle or train a robot to understand that system, it's an easier system than putting them, say...

in the centre of Galway, in a medieval city, and they're trying to work out all these road networks.

But at this point, those vehicles are very capable of still traversing all of those cities.

Now, weather is a problem, right?

If you consider the sensors are there to cover extreme rain conditions, and they do a good job of that.

But if you had, for example, in New York, where the city could just get completely...

hit by a you know a lot of snow then the vehicles can struggle because they can't they struggle to be able to detect the edges of the roads other vehicles and things like that so that's why you're not seeing it you know not not rolling out so quickly in some of the other cities but but in

But in places like China, though, for example, they're just plowing ahead.

They just get this and they're just moving ahead and they've moved ahead pretty aggressively on it.

And now as Europeans, we're left with the choice that we don't have any technology that's really been developed in Europe or very little, let's say.

In terms of the brains of these self-driving cars.

So what we're going to have to rely on at the moment is either the US or China.

And that's actually potentially an opportunity and potentially an opportunity for Ireland that we could create that driving stack.

Yeah, it's definitely electric.