Sean McLain
speaker
44 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 1 May
Sean McLain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If you've been in Austin or Phoenix or Los Angeles or San Francisco, robo-taxis are increasingly commonplace.
There are hiccups, like getting lost in a parking lot, and there has been some highly public incidents and accidents on the road.
But the technology is becoming more stable and people are becoming more comfortable with it.
And that's giving the industry confidence to roll out into more places like Detroit, Minneapolis, even trying to tackle midtown Manhattan.
The industry and analysts feel the technology is stable enough to start tackling harder challenges.
They're starting to roll out in Austin and Houston and Dallas.
That's what people mostly have their eyes on, whether or not Tesla can do the same thing with robo-taxis that it did with electric vehicles.
And Uber, who is aggregating a bunch of different robo-taxi players into their network.
And even startups like Zoox, who we've been hearing about for the better part of a decade.
All of these companies are starting to deploy vehicles or getting close to being able to deploy their vehicles.
Of course, it's a street race. Looks like the streets of Miami, if I recall correctly.
And there were very iconic cars from the 1990s and the early 2000s. And two in particular that I think are relevant for our discussions. One is a candy pink convertible made by Honda, an S2000. Whoa. And then we also have the Nissan Skyline GT-R, nicknamed Godzilla, rolling down the street, puffing smoke out of its wheel wells and shooting flames out the tailpipe.
And these are two of the most iconic vehicles of the street racing circuit from that period.
We are following some breaking news this morning. Japanese automakers Honda and Nissan have announced that they plan to merge. If the deal goes through, this would make the companies the third largest automakers in the world.
I mean, I would say this boils down to money and pure desperation.
I mean, there were three giants of Japanese automaking, all storied companies for different reasons. You obviously have your Toyota, largest carmaker in the world, an engine of profit and efficiency. And then you have Honda, probably Japan's most famous startup. You know, started from Soichiro Honda, who made motorcycles out of bicycles and then had no background in cars and cars.
forced his way into the car industry and his current place in the world. Honda's kind of like the engineering weirdo of the triumvirate of Japanese automakers.
Nissan, innovation that excites. Nissan, which was always the most storied, I would say, of the Japanese automakers, maybe not the biggest, maybe not the best known, but certainly the most storied. I mean, Nissan's name in Japanese literally means Japanese industry. You know, it was an industrial powerhouse throughout the sort of the mid-century till today.
So Nissan of the early 90s was known as a very engineering-driven company that, you know, the cars you bought from them were, in one sense, over-engineered. They were exciting to drive.
Nissan was the inventor of the modern electric vehicle.
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