This week, we speak with Brad Templeton, who started his career as a software developer and, after writing about a dozen software packages, founded the world’s first .com. Brad entered the self-driving car space in 2007, and his website and blog, robocars.com, are the oldest and most popular on the topic. Larry and Brad talk about privacy and safety concerns and the future of the technology.
“Could someone other than Elon, other than a Tesla employee, somehow get your car to do something that you didn’t want it to do? It’s physically possible,” Templeton says.
Listen to their conversation below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Listen to “Navigating the Future: Safety and Privacy of Self-Driving Cars” on Spreaker.
Transcript
Larry: It’s my pleasure to welcome Brad Templeton. Brad started his career as a software developer and after writing about a dozen software packages, he founded the world’s first .com. Now that’s impressive. And then chaired the electronic frontier foundation. Brad entered the self-driving car space in 2007 and his website and blog at robocars. com is the oldest and most popular site on the topic. He’s worked on Google self driving cars and a lot more. He writes a column or a post, I should say, I guess that’s a column on Forbes.com about all things self driving and electric cars. So he’s my go to guy when it comes to cars. And you might be wondering why would ConnectSafely’s “Are We Doing Tech Right?” Podcast want to talk to a self driving car expert. And the reason is that there are all sorts of safety implications and privacy implications when it comes to autonomous vehicles, both physical, they can crash into things and hurt or kill people, but also in terms of data, privacy and security and other cyber issues.
So. Brad, welcome.
Brad: Good to be here. And uh, the long resume is just because I’m old, basically. But I have been very interested in this topic now for, I’ve been writing about it for almost 20 years. And I’ve also, though, delved a lot into the other topics you talk about at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I was for 20 years as, as known as one of the, the leading organizations in terms of civil rights, privacy, free speech, and cyber issues.
Larry: Yeah. I want to get into that. There’s, there’s all sorts of issues of equity and privacy and security and other things that have very little to do with steering wheels or lack of steering wheels or other things that make vehicles move forward or backwards.
But let’s first talk about self driving cars, self driving vehicles. What, what does that mean today or in the future? But even today, what does it mean to call something an autonomous or self driving vehicle?
Brad: Well, today we actually have a self driving car taxi services operating in about a dozen cities around the world, in the United States, in San Francisco, in Phoenix, in Austin several other cities were operated by General Motors unit called Cruise, which is Currently suspended, which we may get into and as well, there are many cities around China where four different companies are operating self driving taxi services.
And if you haven’t been to these cities, you don’t realize that people on the streets are just pulling out their phones very much exactly like Uber. And they’re asking for a ride, and a vehicle with no one in it pulls up and takes them where they want to go. In San Francisco today, they’ve gotten approval to, and probably later this year, we’ll deploy across the entire San Francisco Peninsula down to Sunnyvale, including where I live and where Larry lives.
So this is, this is not a science fiction, we’ll see it in ten years, that’s something that’s real.
Larry: If you took one of those self-driving cars in San Francisco and airlifted it to Des Moines, Iowa and put it on the street, would it work just as well? Or does it somehow know something about San Francisco that it doesn’t know about Des Moines?
Brad: Well, it wouldn’t operate there because they have programmed it to only work in the cities that they’re working in. And typically that involves a fair bit of, well, legwork might be the wrong term, but a fair bit of work of getting to know the city, getting to know its government, knowing its streets.
Building maps and so on. And because of that, they don’t want it to operate in a place that they’ve never tested it before. Would you want to get in one that’s never been tested in the city you’re in? Well, people who are fans of Tesla’s approach to this. And when I say this, Tesla has a product that they gave the name full self driving to, they recently changed the name to supervised full self driving, which is a bit of a contradiction in terms.
But that’s because. It’s not ready. It’s not anywhere near the level of the products that Waymo has out, that Cruz had out in terms of operating with nobody in the vehicle. It needs a driver watching it to intervene in case something goes wrong. And there are people who still enjoy driving with that.
I actually like it on the highway. They’ve offered that functionality on the highway in my Tesla for many years since I got it. But it doesn’t do self driving now. They. Believe, and Elon Musk regularly says that any day now, it will be he always says sometime this year or next year, that’s as late as he’ll ever go in the future but that it will reach the level of those other systems and that it will be able to drive in a variety of cities and drive you around, pick you up and even operate a taxi service.
He’s in fact promised that. On april the 8th, sorry august the 8th of this year. He’ll be showing off their new Robotaxi custom vehicle. It won’t drive itself yet But they’ll show you what the form of the car itself will be in August and I’m sure it’ll be driving itself Sometime this year if you listen to mr. Musk
Larry: So I want to interrupt you for just a minute. As you know, Brad, I too have a Tesla. And in fact, for the longest time, you and I had exactly the same model. I now have the new Highland, the 2024 model. Are you still on team blue? Team blue? No, it’s team. It’s stealth gray. I think it is, but I don’t consider myself, I’m on team Larry.
I, I can’t get into, I can’t get into being a cheerleader for Tesla, even though I’ve made a contribution, a couple of contributions to their, to their coffers, but I actually like self driving. What they call full self driving. I recognize if you point out that it is not something you can’t crawl up in the back seat and let it take you places.
But from where I sit, literally, I like the fact that there are, in my car, seven cameras, on your older car, eight cameras, that are looking out for me. And I’ll give you a great example. The other day, I was on Highway 101, and I turned on my turn indicator to change lanes, and lo and behold, there was a car in my blind spot that it saw, But I didn’t see, and it didn’t make the lane change.
Now had I not checked, I would like to think I would have checked very carefully, and I made that the old fashioned way, I might very well have crashed into that person.
Brad: Well, good that you didn’t. And driver assist is a wonderful thing to have, and it’s in a lot of cars, and Tesla has done that very well.
Whether you, and it’s a more interesting question as to whether someone will like driving down a city street, and you know, making a left turn at a, at a crosswalk. Traffic lights and so on, while the car is doing the steering and pedals for you. And you just watch and are ready to grab the wheel if necessary.
Now, those vehicles do make mistakes. And um, uh, until recently they’ve come with a new release, which is a bit better. I tended to need to intervene with my car’s driving about every trip. And now some people are saying that, you know, it can go it can. Certainly do a whole trip without intervention quite often, maybe even five to 10 trips.
But to put that in contrast, Waymo is driving 50,000 trips every week with no one behind the wheel, no one who could intervene if the car needed it. And it’s having very minor problems. So Tesla’s at about 10 trips in a row and Waymo’s about maybe 30 trips in a row. There’s a large gap there. Tesla has a lot of room to cover if they want to get up to that.
Larry: So before we continue to talk about the physical safety issues, because this is a tech podcast, not that self driving isn’t entirely tech, but, and also because we’re focused on safety, privacy, and security, Let’s talk about safety, privacy, and security from a cyber standpoint.
Brad: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of issues around that, and oddly enough they were just getting discussed because there’s a new bill before Congress to regulate and possibly try and ban Chinese vehicles which are connected from coming into the United States. We’ve seen, of course, the U. S. government attempt to force TikTok to give up its Chinese ownership or be banned.
We’ve seen a variety of efforts where people claim products from outside could be national security issues and cars definitely can I mean, we’re talking about, you know, millions of cars driving around the roads, people would be concerned if those were spying on them or even Possibly under the control of powers, which China isn’t an enemy today, but everyone worries, could they be an enemy in the future?
Brad: They’re a national security rival. They are, you know, a huge trading partner there. I think the second biggest trading partner after Canada. And They’re very important to the United States, but right now it’s a pretty, strong bet that they wouldn’t allow a fleet of robotic cars controlled from China to be operating in the United States, and they may ban even connected cars.
Now, we today have been giving up a lot of the privacy we used to have with conventional tra taxis and transit, which is you could travel anonymously, you could just. Get into a train or get into a cab, pay cash, walk out. No one knew what you’d done. No record of it. Today when we use Uber and Lyft, which is what we mostly use instead of taxis or even transit we have a complete record of that.
We pay with a credit card. There’s a log of where we went and what we did. And that already has scaled down the amount of privacy that we have in travel with my Tesla, it is also noting where it goes all the time. And I actually like this feature in spite of its privacy implications, because I, when I’m doing my taxes, I’m, you know, I can go look through my trips and I can say, where did I drive and how far did I drive and have it you know, record what are business trips and what are personal trips. We kind of like this privacy invasion, but there’s no question that the Tesla and many other cars like it are recording a great deal more data about where we go and what we do. They’re also, of course, potentially under the remote control. I have joked, because I don’t think this is seriously true, but I’ve often been quite critical of Elon Musk, as we were earlier in this podcast.
And if Elon wanted to, he could put some software in my car that could kill me. I mean, I don’t think he’s going to do that. I don’t think he even would imagine doing it. But it’s not impossible, which was not true, for example, with my, you know, other cars that I’ve owned, which didn’t talk to the network at all.
Larry: Well, let’s assume for a moment that Elon would never do such a thing, but could a hacker do it? Could someone other than Elon, other than a Tesla employee, somehow get your car to do something that you didn’t want it to do?
Brad: It’s physically possible. One hopes that Tesla has done a decent job on their security, but there’s no guarantee of that.
And the truth is that really complex security tasks are not within human capability today. Now one thing we can do is we can secure links that are between two known parties. So the car talking to its headquarters, that is something that is securable. Some people dream of the cars just talking to everyone they meet on the road and talking to all the traffic signals.
They call it vehicle to vehicle communication. We’ve never been able to secure any complex device that talks to the random other computers that it encounters in the world. And so I would definitely not advise that. It’s probably possible to secure this, but It’s difficult to say you could do it perfectly, certainly difficult to say you could withstand the Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies if they wanted to get into your Tesla.
I think they’d be fully capable of doing so.
Larry: And also Tesla, like most cars that have any level of autonomy, including from GM, Ford, or anywhere else, have cabin cameras, and in fact, Tesla is about to finally eliminate the need to put your hand on the wheel. Because the camera in the cabin will make sure you’re paying attention.
But on the other hand, it’s also recording what’s going on in the car. Or at least, I don’t know if it’s recording it, but it is.
Brad: They say it’s not recording. It could, but they say it’s not recording. This has been a bit of a controversial issue. It’s the regulators actually who have been pushing for these cabin cameras.
Because they want you to be supervised, or they want to know that you’re keeping your hands away, you’re keeping your eyes on the road. They want that for safety reasons, and so that’s why that camera is there. There are cameras inside the Waymo vehicles as well, and the cruise vehicles. I have been a lone voice saying that the way those cameras should be designed is they should have a physical shutter on them.
The same way many people put their webcam on their cars. Laptop, they have a physical shutter on it. And the trick is that you would end your ride by clicking the button that opens the shutter, so the camera can now see inside the car. Or you could open it yourself at any time if you want the remote staff to see you.
Other people would argue, you know, what if I get sick and I collapse? It’s good that they can look through the camera. Camera and they can see that I need to go to the hospital and take me to the hospital and that’s true. But I’m not sure it’s worth the cost of them being able to look in at any time.
There are people already Shall we say doing certain activities that you do in the back seat of a car in the back seat of waymo’s? Since there’s no one in the front and if they’re doing that they could in theory be being recorded By waymo’s cameras, and I don’t actually know if waymo has You Given the same promise that they’re not recording that Tesla has given..
Larry: Let’s talk about kids. I mean, are there any special things we need to think about with children? One thing that occurs to me is that we come a time, and it may already be true in Phoenix and San Francisco, when a child can get into a vehicle, go somewhere without another adult, even present in the vehicle with them.
Brad: Absolutely, and that could cause really large changes to the way society works because children would get, for the first time, the mobility abilities of adults. You know, I mean, right now, if kids go to school far from their home, well, actually, we know what happens. Their parents drive them to school.
Now, you and I are both of an age. But I bet your mother never drove you to school.
Larry: It was either walking or bicycling. No, it was never for me. I cannot recall any instance. I mean, maybe if I was sick or something, but that’s what it was like in the 60s. Today, of course, 75 percent of kids are driven to school by their parents even if they don’t need to be driven there.
And that pendulum will probably swing back and forth. But. If you have a robotic car owned by the parents or hired as a taxi, children could have friends anywhere in town, go to school anywhere in town. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s something that is going to be possible. Now, the question is, will parents trust the vehicle to carry their child?
I think above the age of 10, I don’t see any particular reason they wouldn’t, as long as, you know, if the kid is, is savvy enough to sort of handle themselves in the world. Now again. When we were young, we, you know, went out on our bicycles and drove many miles. When I was 10 years old, I took a commuter train into town on the subway and I went to meetings until 10 at night and came back.
That’s a foreign idea today, but I, it might return in particular because with that camera inside, mom and dad can say, well, the kid is writing. I can call it. The kid can call me by video call at any time. I can see what’s happening. Talk to them. Responsible adults can, you know. Suddenly intervene and help if there’s any problem where the kid needs it.
The vehicle can take the kid to a safe and responsible adult nearby because you can have networks of those. So there are a lot of ways where I think we could make it possible and let’s face it I mean people let their kids go in the elevator and they were scared of elevators When they first came out to at least automatic elevators, even manual elevators scaring people in the very beginning So, yes.
Yeah. Children will be able to travel. They’ll travel to school. They’ll travel to many of the things in their life. Some people might say, well, that’s horrible. We should, kids should walk more, and they probably should but I won’t say that this can’t happen.
Larry: So you mentioned already, we’ve got these robo taxis in a few select cities. I don’t know of any robo taxis that you and I could buy other than a Tesla in theory, but in fact, as we know, they are far from fully autonomous.
When do you think the time will come when you and I, if we chose to, could buy a car that would just drive itself?
Brad: Well, I think that will happen. It is not on the to do list of any of the companies except for Tesla. Because it is actually easier to make a taxi than to make a car that could drive itself.
Rather than owned by a private individual because a taxi fleet is something you own and control And so you can be seeing them. They come back to you every night You can be updating the software in them when you sell a car to someone it’s gone and it’s in their hands And it’s much harder for you to maintain and support it plus It has to be able to drive everywhere because you’re not going to buy a car that can only drive well, the joke I make is would you buy a Chevy Tahoe if it only worked at Lake Tahoe?
Well, no, it’s gotta and if you’re a big car maker, you’ve gotta make a car you can sell in every city in the U. S., every state. So it’s a much harder task to make something you could sell to someone, so it, most people would say it comes later. Now. As I said, even if the car itself has no special need for localization.
Now, most people who build these use maps where they get a lot of data that they remember from other drives of the road in order to do a better job. So they’re not surprised by anything. And Tesla makes a big point about how they don’t they do use maps, of course But they don’t use the same level of maps that cruise waymo and the other companies are making And so they say so they’re more adaptable.
They’ll more readily work in other cities. I don’t actually think that’s right I’m, I’m pretty sure waymo if they wanted to build a car that could drive in every city Could probably build one that drives better than tesla. I’m very confident of that
Larry: Right. Let’s talk about current technology, but we talked a lot about Tesla, but it’s by far the only car that has assistive technology.
It’s probably the most advanced of the cars you can buy, but there’s plenty of other cars that will do. Certainly. Like I remember when I first got adaptive cruise control on my 2016 Prius and I was just blown away that I could be in stop and go traffic and keep my hands on the steering wheel and the car would stop and start based on what was happening in front of me.
And that’s primitive by today’s standards, but it’s kind of also common. But beyond that, what do we have and what do you make of the technology that’s widely available today?
Brad: Well yeah, a lot of cars are doing it. In fact, you’ll find even more of it in the cars that are only sold in China, which you won’t see on American streets.
They’re not even sold or seen that much outside China yet. I like Tesla autopilot. I like adaptive cruise control. Now with adaptive cruise control, there was no risk of this automation complacency, because if you stopped if you took your hands off the wheel of a car with adaptive cruise control, it was immediately very apparent you needed to put them back.
Larry: You can relax a little bit about the car in front of you. If I can stop and go driving. I had to keep my hands on the wheel, but I didn’t have to constantly be taking my foot between the brake and the gas pedal.
Brad: Well, the very first adaptive cruise control is actually, it was not that good because it couldn’t see a stopped car.
It was radar based. And so if cars were stopped in front of you, your car would just happily drive into them. And you knew that though. And so you were okay with it. The debate that we’re having, and it’s sort of a paradox, is that the better the system gets. The riskier it may be because you are now, and I know a lot of people who do let their Teslas do all the driving and, you know, are sort of happily doing emails and so on.
That was true even with autopilot, which was a much more primitive product. And you will get away with that most of the time. And that is how we are. We human beings are funny. You get away with something most of the time and you decide you can get away with it all the time.
Larry: No, that’s true with a lot of things.
You could get away with driving 90 miles an hour much of the time, maybe most of the time.
Brad: I would never do that. Never. No, no.
Larry: Not on 280. Actually, I’ll tell you something. Cruise control and autopilot and self driving. I think of the reasons why I don’t get speeding tickets anymore, because I used to get them accidentally.
I get on the highway and I just, you know, paying no attention. And the cop pulls me over and say, you’re going 85 miles an hour, and I’m looking at him. Really? I truly had no idea. I was going 85 miles an hour.
Brad: The cop always wants to ask you, do you know how fast you were going? You were, you would be, you would be honestly saying no idea, officer.
Larry: No idea. No, it’s true. But now I set it for whatever speed I’m comfortable, whether that’s the speed limit or slightly above it or slightly below it. And I don’t get tickets anymore. So that’s a good thing.
Brad: It’s an interesting debate. In fact, another issue that I’ve brought up, which we don’t seem to much talk about yet, is that the, the new products that are coming out, now Tesla’s autopilot doesn’t do this, but Mercedes has a car where they do allow you on the highway in traffic jams to do your email, to look away from the road.
And Tesla probably could make that, but they haven’t seemed to be interested in making that. But there aren’t many car companies trying to make that.
Larry: Would you trust that if you had a Mercedes? Would you use it?
Brad: I don’t have a Mercedes. I mean, I think if it were well tested and shown, yeah, a traffic jam speeds and traffic jams are a pretty solvable problem, you’re not going very fast, you’re surrounded by other cars.
You just do what they do, right? You just have to follow the leader in front of you. It’s
Larry: a, but you couldn’t use that at 60 miles an hour at freeway.
Brad: They do not currently let you, but is there a plan to let you use it on the Autobahn? It’s of course German. They expect that that’ll be there.
And sure, I mean, and the Waymo is driving on the freeway at those speeds today, but only with employees of Google, not with the general public yet, but that’s going to change pretty soon. So yes, I’ll trust that when the technology is good enough. However You can’t do that if it isn’t certified to, you know, really let you look away.
And get stuff done. But once you can do that, once you can just push the button in the car, get on the highway and have it take you all the way to San Francisco or all the way to Lake Tahoe, that is a pretty valuable feature. It’s mostly a luxury feature. It basically says, okay, you’ve bought a more expensive car and now you get your time back on those long drives.
Larry: I would argue that it’s also an accessibility feature. If for whatever reason, and there are many reasons you’re incapable of self safely driving could be your age. Either too young or too old. Well, I wouldn’t say too old. It could be your age, too young, or it could be a physical disability or cognitive issues.
There’s plenty of reasons.
Brad: The Mercedes product, though, only drives on a certain number of freeways. So it’s no good for those people. However, at the original Google car Waymo project, the very first public demo that we did was to let. The blind fellow, the head of the local blind center take a ride in it.
And for him, it was a revelation because you know, he is very dependent on other people to get him around because he can’t drive because of his vision problem. There are a lot of people like that. And this is going to be a boon for those people, but in general, and the reason I got involved in this, and I think the reason that Google started it and many other people have gotten involved is.
Taking the driver out of driving is really world changing. It changes a lot about the automotive industry. It’s not just a luxury thing. It’s not just a more pleasant or comfortable ride or giving you your time back. Those are great, but when you can change it to. A taxi world where you don’t all have to own cars, you can just get from A to B without it taking time, seamlessly in the right vehicle for the trip, that has a lot of big consequences, huge consequences.
Some of the biggest numbers you’ll ever hear will come out of automotive. It’s the world’s third largest industry. It’s 25 percent of our energy, 25 percent of our greenhouse gasses, kills 1. 5 million people around the world because of human driving. I mean, the numbers dwarf almost anything else in technology.
And so that’s why people have become so fascinated in working on it. And of course, the big dollar signs also aren’t unattractive to the companies that have invested.
Larry: See, I am of the belief that we you, you’ve talked about project zero. I doubt if we’ll ever get to zero with any technology, including by the way, hammers or cutting knives
but we could, I think, eliminate most of that. traffic fatalities, don’t you think, if we could get everybody?
Brad: Everybody certainly hopes so. And it’s not just in the United States, about 40,000 people are killed a year, which is one of the largest causes, the largest cause of death in a certain age range.
Although it was recently eclipsed for a bit by drug overdose. Unfortunately, that’s a tragedy as well. But also millions of injuries every year. Some of them quite serious and 4 million emergency room visits every year are driven by car accidents. It’s the second most expensive thing we buy as well.
I mean, it is, it is such a huge part of our lives and economy
Larry: people. It’s the most expensive now that they’re increasing percentage of us don’t own homes.
Brad: Well, no, but I think you still pay more in rent than you do in free. All the
time. But yeah, I’m talking about a purchase, right?
Brad: Yeah. But in terms of what you spend your money on it’s your, how it’s your, where you live and then what you drive are the top two things.
So these are really huge things and changing how they work and changing how you pay for it and what the economics are. These are our giant things. There’s no way we won’t do this. It is just so valuable that the problem, as we said at the beginning is that it’s so attractive that we will probably face some privacy and other issues in the rush to do it, but we will rush to do it and we should rush to do it, but we should think about how to preserve the things that we value as we make this change.
Larry: Part of, part of the way I justify owning a Tesla and as you know, Brad, cause you and I have talked about this, I feel some pangs of guilt of Elon literally kicked me off the Twitter safety advisory board along with all of my other fellow safety advisory board members and has done many things that annoy the heck out of me.
But I don’t know, maybe I’m, maybe I’m rationalizing it. I do think that by being one of the people testing this technology, as primitive as you may say it is, I am, I think, I hope. Contributing to a knowledge base that will eventually, whether it’s through Tesla or someone else, be part of the equation that’s going to lead us to a world of autonomous driving.
Am I making this up or is there some
Brad: Well, I mean, you’re contributing a little bit. I would say that one of my criticisms of Tesla is that by letting everybody use it, they are getting a lot of data about What’s going on and possible things to fix. But in fact, they’re getting so much, they couldn’t possibly use it all
right.
Brad: So they don’t really need that many people out there testing with it. So you know, I’m sure that their team doesn’t have the capacity to fix problems as quickly as they show up.
Larry: Well, it reminds me not to call you up to get my conscience under control when I’m feeling guilty about
Brad: Yeah, I’m terrible at that.
Actually, sometimes I can do a good job, but No, I mean, drive the car you want to drive. I’m sort of the I mean, I think Elon is definitely doing some crazy stuff. He’s also done, let’s face it, more good for the world than almost anyone else I can name. Yeah, I know. Which is, which is very frustrating.
Larry: Well, and he also made electric cars cool, made them fast, made them pretty.
And now he’s making them affordable. I mean, the new Tesla model three base model, I think it’s cheaper than a Camry or certainly not very much more than a Camry. It’s a kind of a mainstream priced car, which is pretty remarkable.
Brad: Now, they say that the new Chevy Equinox is going to cost it’s, it’s a really, I think it was 28, 000 bucks or something, very low, low price with a nice size battery in it there is a car, a, a, a halfway decent car, and I’ll say only halfway decent, that people buy in China for about 16, 000 dollars.
And a nice electric sedan. And there’s an effort there was a proposal yesterday, actually, that the U. S. should create a prize to get some company to build a 16, 000 electric sedan. But I’ll tell you something that a lot of people who are not really into electric cars don’t understand. Which is that, that Tesla costing even 50,000 is cheaper than a Camry in total cost of ownership.
Brad: Because it just, it’s cheap. You know, if you get your electricity at home at the U S average cost for electricity, and the cost of maintenance, the car solo, that is already the cheapest car to buy.
For people who understand what total cost of ownership is. It’s surprising how few people can really internalize in their heads. Total cost of ownership is the important number. Everybody sees that sticker price and goes, I can’t spend that much for a car. That’s crazy. But over time I did. A 5, 000 mile road trip in my Tesla up to British Columbia.
I’m Canadian. I did this during COVID when we were the only ones allowed to cross the border. So I figured that would make it less crowded. It didn’t actually work. I did that 5, 000 mile road trip. I paid 83. For the electric. That’s amazing. In that five. Now I’m cheating a little bit. I had a few credits left on free supercharging, but that was only about a thousand of the miles.
The rest was all in. A lot of hotels just give you charging when you stay the night at the hotel and they don’t charge you any extra for it. But, you know, that would’ve been 500 bucks of gasoline.
Larry: It and also, your 5,000 miles in a car, which I happen to know, had an EPA rating of 264 miles and realistically far less, probably about two something, two 20 maybe, I don’t know, was adequate.
For getting on a 5,000 mile road trip. You, you know, cause not just, not just a 5,000 mile road trip, a 5,000 mile road trip into places where there isn’t any charging. Yeah. Okay. Well, there’s, there’s, there’s no Tesla charging at that time, except on one highway in British Columbia. And there is other charging and I had an adapter with me, but in many cases I went out to places that were very far from there being any charging, I wasn’t quite ready to do the Alaska highway, which doesn’t have.
I got to the sort of, you know, near where you might start it. And we were not quite ready to do that. However, the British Columbia power utility has a plan and probably this year or next year, there will be the charging you need to, to drive up to Alaska.
Larry: Well, good. Maybe I’ll go to Alaska anyway. I do need to get going, but I very much appreciate you taking the time.
It’s been great.
Brad: All right. Well drive safely or ConnectSafely,
Larry: Or ride safely, depending on if you’re,
Brad: Or ride safely. Good to see you, Larry.
Larry: Thanks so much, Brad.