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Sebastian Thrun is one of the greatest roboticists, computer scientists, and educators of our time. He led development of the autonomous vehicles at Stanford that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and placed second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. He then led the Google self-driving car program which launched the self-driving revolution. He taught the popular Stanford course on Artificial Intelligence in 2011 which was one of the first MOOCs. That experience led him to co-found Udacity, an online education platform. He is also the CEO of Kitty Hawk, a company working on building flying cars or more technically eVTOLS which stands for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft.

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Many, many years ago, 1903, the Wright brothers flew in Kitty Hawk for the first time.

And you've launched a company of the same name, Kitty Hawk, with the dream of building flying cars, EV tolls.

at the big picture, what are the big challenges of making this thing that actually you've inspired generations of people about what the future looks like?

And let's go back in our history of your dreaming of flying.

I think my honestly my single most remembered childhood dream has been a dream where I was sitting on a pillow and I could fly.

I remember like maybe 3 dreams of my childhood, but that's the 1 I remember most vividly.

And then Peter Thiel famously said, they promised us flying cars and they gave us 140 characters, pointing at Twitter at the time, limited message size to 140 characters.

So we're coming back now to really go for this super impactful stuff like flying cars.

And to be precise, they're not really cars.

They're actually much closer to a helicopter than anything else.

They take off vertically and they fly horizontally, but they have important differences.

1 difference is that they are much quieter.

We just released a vehicle called Project Heaviside that can fly over you as low as a helicopter and you basically can't hear it's like 38 decibels.

It's like if you were inside the library you might be able to hear it but anywhere outdoors your ambient noise is higher.

They're much more affordable than helicopters And the reason is helicopters are expensive for many reasons.

There's lots of single point of figures in a helicopter.

There's a bolt between the blades that's called Jesus bolt.

And the reason why it's called Jesus bolt is that if this bolt breaks, you will die.

There is no second solution in helicopter flight.

Whereas we have these distributed mechanism, when you go from gasoline to electric, you can now have many, many, many small motors as opposed to 1 big motor.

And that means if you lose 1 of those motors, not a big deal.

Heaviside, if it loses a motor, has 8 of those.

If it loses 1 of those 8 motors, so it's 7 left, it can take off just like before and land just like before.

We are now also moving into a technology that doesn't require a commercial pilot.

Because in some level, flight is actually easier than ground transportation.

Like in self-driving cars, the world is full of like children and bicycles and other cars and mailboxes and curbs and shrubs and what have you.

When you go above the buildings and tree lines, there's nothing there.

I mean, you can do the test right now, look outside and count the number of things you see flying.

I'd be shocked if you could see more than 2 things.

In the Bay Area, the most I've ever seen was 6, and maybe it's 15 or 20, but not 10,000.

So the sky is very ample and very empty and very free.

So the vision is, can we build a socially acceptable mass transit solution for daily transportation that is affordable.

Heaviside can fly 100 miles in range with still 30% electric reserves.

We know that that solution at scale would make your ground transportation 10 times as fast as a car based on US census or statistics data, which means you would take your 300 hours of daily, of yearly commute down to 30 hours and give you 270 hours back.

Who wouldn't want, I mean, who doesn't hate traffic?

Like I hate, give me the person who doesn't hate traffic.

I hate traffic, Every time I'm in traffic, I hate it.

And if we could free the world from traffic, we have technology, we can free the world from traffic.

It's not a technological problem anymore.

Do you think there is a future where tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of both delivery drones and flying cars of this kind, EV towers fill the sky?

And there's obviously the societal acceptance is a major question and of course safety is.

I believe in safety we only exceed ground transportation safety as has happened for aviation already, commercial aviation.

And in terms of acceptance I think 1 of the key things is noise.

That's why we are focusing relentlessly on noise and we built perhaps the quietest electric VTOL vehicle ever built.

The nice thing about the sky is it's three-dimensional.

So any mathematician will immediately recognize the difference between 1D of like a regular highway to 3D of a sky.

But to make it clear for the layman, say you want to make 100 vertical lanes of highway 101 in San Francisco, because you believe building 100 vertical lanes is the right solution.

Imagine how much it would cost to stack 100 vertical lanes physically onto 101.

That would be consuming the world's GDP for an entire year just for 1 highway.

In the sky, it would just be a recompilation of a piece of software because all these lanes are virtual.

That means any vehicle that is in conflict with another vehicle would just go to different altitudes and then the conflict is gone.

And if you don't believe this, that's exactly how commercial aviation works.

When you fly from New York to San Francisco, another plane flies from San Francisco to New York, they're at different altitudes, so they don't hit each other.

It's a solved problem for the jet space, and it will be a solved problem for the urban space.

There's companies like Google, Bing and Amazon working on very innovative solutions, how do we have space management.

They use exactly the same principles as we use today to route today's jets.

Do you envision autonomy being a key part of it so that the flying vehicles are either semi-autonomous or fully

You don't want idiots like me flying in the sky, I promise you.

watch the movie, The Fifth Element, to get a view for what would happen if it's not autonomous.

And a centralized, that's a really interesting idea of a centralized sort of management system for lanes and so on.

So actually just being able to have a similar as we have in the current commercial aviation, but scale it up to much, much more vehicles.

That's a really interesting optimization problem.

It is very mathematically very, very straightforward.

Like the gap we leave between jets is gargantuan.

And part of the reason is there isn't that many jets.

Today, when you get vectored by air traffic control, someone talks to you, right?

So an ATC controller might have up to maybe 20 planes on the same frequency, and then they talk to you, you have to talk back.

And that feels right because there isn't more than 20 planes around any house, so you can talk to everybody.

But if there's 20,000 things around, you can't talk to everybody anymore.

So we have to do something that's called digital, like text messaging.

Like We do have solutions, like we have what, 4 or 5000000000 smartphones in the world now, right?

And somehow we solve the scale problem for smartphones.

We know where they all are, they can talk to somebody, and they're very reliable, they're amazingly reliable.

We could use the same system, the same scale for air traffic control.

So instead of me as a pilot talking to a human being in the middle of the conversation receiving a new frequency, like how ancient is that, we could digitize this stuff and digitally transmit the right flight coordinates.

And that solution will automatically scale to 10,000 vehicles.


Speaker 0: Many, many years ago, 1903, the Wright brothers flew in Kitty Hawk for the first time. And you've launched a company of the same name, Kitty Hawk, with the dream of building flying cars, EV tolls. So

Speaker 1: at the big picture, what are the big challenges of making this thing that actually you've inspired generations of people about what the future looks like? What does it take? What are the biggest challenges?

Speaker 2: So flying cars has always been a dream. Every boy, every girl wants to fly. Let's be honest. Yes. And let's go back in our history of your dreaming of flying.

I think my honestly my single most remembered childhood dream has been a dream where I was sitting on a pillow and I could fly. I was like 5 years old. I remember like maybe 3 dreams of my childhood, but that's the 1 I remember most vividly. And then Peter Thiel famously said, they promised us flying cars and they gave us 140 characters, pointing at Twitter at the time, limited message size to 140 characters. So we're coming back now to really go for this super impactful stuff like flying cars.

And to be precise, they're not really cars. They don't have wheels. They're actually much closer to a helicopter than anything else. They take off vertically and they fly horizontally, but they have important differences. 1 difference is that they are much quieter.

We just released a vehicle called Project Heaviside that can fly over you as low as a helicopter and you basically can't hear it's like 38 decibels. It's like if you were inside the library you might be able to hear it but anywhere outdoors your ambient noise is higher. Secondly they're much more affordable. They're much more affordable than helicopters And the reason is helicopters are expensive for many reasons. There's lots of single point of figures in a helicopter.

There's a bolt between the blades that's called Jesus bolt. And the reason why it's called Jesus bolt is that if this bolt breaks, you will die. There is no second solution in helicopter flight. Whereas we have these distributed mechanism, when you go from gasoline to electric, you can now have many, many, many small motors as opposed to 1 big motor. And that means if you lose 1 of those motors, not a big deal.

Heaviside, if it loses a motor, has 8 of those. If it loses 1 of those 8 motors, so it's 7 left, it can take off just like before and land just like before. We are now also moving into a technology that doesn't require a commercial pilot. Because in some level, flight is actually easier than ground transportation. Like in self-driving cars, the world is full of like children and bicycles and other cars and mailboxes and curbs and shrubs and what have you.

All these things you have to avoid. When you go above the buildings and tree lines, there's nothing there. I mean, you can do the test right now, look outside and count the number of things you see flying. I'd be shocked if you could see more than 2 things. It's probably just 0.

In the Bay Area, the most I've ever seen was 6, and maybe it's 15 or 20, but not 10,000. So the sky is very ample and very empty and very free. So the vision is, can we build a socially acceptable mass transit solution for daily transportation that is affordable. And we have an existence proof. Heaviside can fly 100 miles in range with still 30% electric reserves.

It can fly up to like 180 miles an hour. We know that that solution at scale would make your ground transportation 10 times as fast as a car based on US census or statistics data, which means you would take your 300 hours of daily, of yearly commute down to 30 hours and give you 270 hours back. Who wouldn't want, I mean, who doesn't hate traffic? Like I hate, give me the person who doesn't hate traffic. I hate traffic, Every time I'm in traffic, I hate it.

And if we could free the world from traffic, we have technology, we can free the world from traffic. We have the technology. It's there, we have an existence proof. It's not a technological problem anymore.

Speaker 1: Do you think there is a future where tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of both delivery drones and flying cars of this kind, EV towers fill the sky?

Speaker 2: I absolutely believe this. And there's obviously the societal acceptance is a major question and of course safety is. I believe in safety we only exceed ground transportation safety as has happened for aviation already, commercial aviation. And in terms of acceptance I think 1 of the key things is noise. That's why we are focusing relentlessly on noise and we built perhaps the quietest electric VTOL vehicle ever built.

The nice thing about the sky is it's three-dimensional. So any mathematician will immediately recognize the difference between 1D of like a regular highway to 3D of a sky. But to make it clear for the layman, say you want to make 100 vertical lanes of highway 101 in San Francisco, because you believe building 100 vertical lanes is the right solution. Imagine how much it would cost to stack 100 vertical lanes physically onto 101. That would be prohibitive.

That would be consuming the world's GDP for an entire year just for 1 highway. It's amazingly expensive, okay? In the sky, it would just be a recompilation of a piece of software because all these lanes are virtual. That means any vehicle that is in conflict with another vehicle would just go to different altitudes and then the conflict is gone. And if you don't believe this, that's exactly how commercial aviation works.

When you fly from New York to San Francisco, another plane flies from San Francisco to New York, they're at different altitudes, so they don't hit each other. It's a solved problem for the jet space, and it will be a solved problem for the urban space. There's companies like Google, Bing and Amazon working on very innovative solutions, how do we have space management. They use exactly the same principles as we use today to route today's jets. There's nothing hard about this.

Speaker 1: Do you envision autonomy being a key part of it so that the flying vehicles are either semi-autonomous or fully

Speaker 2: autonomous. 100% autonomous. You don't want idiots like me flying in the sky, I promise you. And if you have

Speaker 0: 10,000,

Speaker 2: watch the movie, The Fifth Element, to get a view for what would happen if it's not autonomous.

Speaker 1: And a centralized, that's a really interesting idea of a centralized sort of management system for lanes and so on. So actually just being able to have a similar as we have in the current commercial aviation, but scale it up to much, much more vehicles. That's a really interesting optimization problem.

Speaker 2: It is very mathematically very, very straightforward. Like the gap we leave between jets is gargantuan. And part of the reason is there isn't that many jets. So it just feels like a good solution. Today, when you get vectored by air traffic control, someone talks to you, right?

So an ATC controller might have up to maybe 20 planes on the same frequency, and then they talk to you, you have to talk back. And that feels right because there isn't more than 20 planes around any house, so you can talk to everybody. But if there's 20,000 things around, you can't talk to everybody anymore. So we have to do something that's called digital, like text messaging. Like We do have solutions, like we have what, 4 or 5000000000 smartphones in the world now, right?

And they're all connected. And somehow we solve the scale problem for smartphones. We know where they all are, they can talk to somebody, and they're very reliable, they're amazingly reliable. We could use the same system, the same scale for air traffic control. So instead of me as a pilot talking to a human being in the middle of the conversation receiving a new frequency, like how ancient is that, we could digitize this stuff and digitally transmit the right flight coordinates.

And that solution will automatically scale to 10,000 vehicles.

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Sebastian Thrun: Flying Cars Has Always Been the Dream | AI Podcast Clips