Episode 025: Autonomous Vehicles & What They Mean For Fleet

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show. All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show, episode number 25.

Can I get a woo-woo?

Right.

This has been quite the journey. Exciting, right? So joining me today, I've got with me Steve Salzgiver. How you doing?

Good.

Joe Jenkins.

Living the dream.

Always. Well, it's— this has been a lot of fun. You know, looking back at 25 episodes in, we're a quarter of the way. You know, we want to at least hit 100. So we got to come up with another 75 more topics, which I think is probably the most difficult part of doing this. So please email us if you have any ideas or questions, podcast@rtafleet.com. 25 episodes, we're just a little over 2,000 downloads, so it's, it's moving along quite well. Thank you to the listeners. Thank you guys for, for liking us on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram, wherever else we're at, you know, following us on, on the podcast wherever you're listening to them. So we're seeing those downloads every time you guys come in and download them every time we drop an episode. It's really awesome to see the response we're getting from you guys, so thank you to our listeners. So who wants to take our topic today? Jeff, you want to lead us off?

I would love to.

This is your favorite topic.

Well, I mean, everything is my favorite topic. It's because I got an opinion on everything. That's probably why. I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

Well, you know what they say about opinions, right?

I do know what they say about opinions, that mines are the ones that only matter.

Jeff Swear Cologne.

I can't swear, Steve.

They don't say that.

Okay. Oh, all right. Episode 25. We're going to talk a little bit about autonomous vehicles. So this has been going on for several years now. Lots of new companies come out with their different platforms for autonomous and, you know, there's a lot of buzz in the industry. So we kind of want to just, I guess, explore a little bit about it and talk about, you know, what could be or couldn't be and kind of the hype that is autonomous vehicles.

What it means for you and what to be ready for, what to realize is overhype. This isn't something that's going to happen if you're thinking that, or, you know, but don't underhype it. Don't assume that it's never going to happen because it's definitely at the forefront of the technology spend right now in fleet. It's where a lot of the innovation is happening. So I think one of the big things to recognize is that there are levels of autonomy. So SAE has come out. You know, that's the— Steve, remind me, SAE, Society for Automotive Engineers. I was going to say excellence, but that would have been wrong. That's ASE. It's also very good. Thank you. So, so the SAE, right, you know, very big standards organization came out with a Level 5, you know, 5 levels of autonomy. And really it's 6 because there is a Level 0. But so they came out with their levels of autonomy and basically listed out, hey, this is what it means at each of these stages. Then right now, I'd say most of the ones that we're seeing, like Tesla's, you know, I don't know what they, what do they call theirs? It's not autonomous mode, is it? It's like adaptive.

Yeah. Well, I mean, they have, I think we're getting close to level 3, but we're mostly in 1 and 2.

Yeah, I think they have level 3. I think that's where Tesla's at right now is level 3. But we don't have level 4 and level 5. Level 3, for everybody's, you know, education, is where the driver, where the vehicle is capable of navigating on its own without driver input. But if the feature needs it, it can't operate in all conditions. And so the feature still needs a driver to take over every once in a while. Level 4 and Level 5 do not require driver involvement at all. And that's where they're trying to get to. But we're not there yet.

That's where I've always wondered. And I've asked a lot of autonomous people at panels, at conferences, you know, having grown up in Utah where we get a lot of snow, you know, on the roads, you know, how are these sensors going to to work in those climate situations. Are you gonna have little wipers on the sensors? Are you gonna have little things to clean 'em off? I mean, I can't even use my current cameras in that climate, right? Because they get clogged up with snow or slush.

I wonder if they'll put some type of sensor in the roadway.

Yeah, I think ultimately the infrastructure is gonna be the key to all of this.

—to make it work really, really well. —To flawless. Right. There'll be some infrastructure elements that you'll need. But then what do you do? And this is why, like, you can't have it depend on the infrastructure because, I mean, shoot, we've had dirt roads for— since the horse and buggy. Right. And so that's going to be a part of this is that there are things that are off the beaten path. You know how many miles of roadway there are in the United States alone, let alone backcountry roads, you know, in other undeveloped countries. You know, autonomous vehicles having to be able to operate in those environments.

I was reading about an MIT study though that successfully navigated dirt roads and off-road. So it is available out there, but somehow you've got to map that.

Right, but that's why I say you can't depend on the infrastructure to catch up because it will never get to where it needs to be. You can do things to make it easier, but if you become dependent on that, then you're basically leaving behind, you know, if you want to drive off-road, you're back to self-driving, which might be part of the experience, right? Maybe that's something that— I know I enjoy driving, and so I'm not as interested in an autonomous vehicle, but man, that's a— there's a big productivity savings there.

You kind of hit a key, key word. You said dependent. I mean, think about the Level 1s and 2s now that we have. When you have blind spot detectors and stuff, you really get dependent on that stuff. Yeah, you know, and you don't— I know that, uh, my My grandson is a driver instructor for, in the state, and he takes people around and passes them and stuff. Well, a lot of people now, a lot of the young drivers, they don't even look behind them anymore because they got blind spot detectors, they got cameras, they got mirrors that show everything, you know? And so they're still trying to get them to turn their head. But yeah, it's kind of a crazy thing when you get used to that.

Well, and coming from an older car into a newer car, like, you know, I just got a truck that has blind spot detection in it, uh, it has collision avoidance and all that. I mean, you know, making that adjustment is, you know, there's an adjustment there for some of the older drivers, but the newer ones, it's like, you know, the, the millennials and Gen Zs, you know, I say this as a millennial, but coming in and like, we know how to use a lot of technology and, you know, but Gen X, we didn't get that, right? And so you have to kind of pick it up as you go forward. I think the same thing will happen though with autonomous and with all those other things. So I mean, you're trying to teach them to turn their head and, you know, the engineers of tomorrow saying, "Why?" Yeah. Why don't we just build the car to be smarter where it won't let you do it? You know?

Well, let's take a stab at that because it doesn't always work. Fair enough. So, you know, it's kind of like when my two oldest took their driving tests and we were teaching them how to drive. We covered up the backup camera every time and made them use their mirrors and look around because we didn't want them to get dependent on a backup camera, which may not always function properly. They may not have one. So what happens then? Oh my gosh, I don't have my camera. I can't back up. What am I going to do? Dad, get in the car and back it up for me. Right? I mean, it's like that people still need to learn certain things because technology is not perfect. That's like too much stuff goes wrong all the time.

Never learned how to shift a car. Because automatics were so prevalent, they didn't have to learn a stick.

Yeah, but I think you failed as a father then.

No, I tried to teach them. I just got frustrated and left.

Okay, so they're still alive because, you know, you're a good dad.

I get it, I get it. Well, I can't wait till you teach your kids how to use a stick. One, I can't wait till you find a stick when your oldest is fine.

We're gonna find one. We're gonna, we're gonna do that for sure. It Or if not us, you know, we'll pick up a motorbike or something like that, you know, go dirt biking or pick up a quad that's— 'Cause they are so similar, the shifting.

Sticks are becoming more popular now in some of the muscle cars that are coming out, like the new Mustangs and stuff.

Well, they'll give the option, right?

Yeah. Well, you're almost having to pay a premium, right? Because it's part of the driving experience to be able to use a clutch. I mean, you know, that's this new fancy technology that we're coming out with.

Yeah, it's just so— it always recycles.

What a role reversal. Right.

So we talk about the 5 levels of autonomy. We talk about where we're going. You know, the OEMs are trying to push for Level 5 autonomy, no driver needed. I know one of the challenges they're having right now between Level 3 and Level 5 are things like, you know, it doesn't always work. What happens? It can read red lights, but what happens when the lights go out? And you've got a police officer there, can they— can the cameras and the sensors read that police officer's signals? Do— does every police officer use the same hand signals? Do they have the same uniforms on? Are they using high-vis vests or are they doing something different? And so there's a lot of, you know, variability that you have to build into your AI and into the self-driving algorithms that you don't necessarily have to do for a person. You can teach a person, and there's a lot of communication that happens and it bridges the gap that you kind of take for granted and you don't realize, oh, we have to program every one of those cases and circumstances in so that the machine knows, okay, when you see this, this is how you handle that situation. And that's just one example.

Well, obviously when they roll it out, there'll be a lot of AI and self-learning machine language. So it'll start to recognize those patterns, those situations.

Maybe it'll just recognize the car in front of it and say, oh, well, that car went. Of course, hopefully you're not the car that gets stopped and then you blow past the police officer. I'm sure he'll be real happy about that.

But what do you guys want to take a stab at when autopilot was invented? The first autopilot system for, um, it was—

I was going to say it was probably for planes. For planes, yeah. What year? I would say probably 1953. I was going to say '72. 1912. '12. 1912. Really? Wow.

'12 is when the first autopilot system for planes was adopted.

Just using like the tension and springs and things like that to— I'm not 100% sure, right?

They used a lot of like, you know, like the gravity from the Earth and all this other— I mean, they're going to an explanation. It was very rudimentary from what it is now, right? But think about that. And then the autonomy when it comes to vehicles, right? How long has it been going on now for vehicle as far as the push?

A decade? Yeah. The last one like this where it's gotten a lot of momentum and it's really been since Tesla got involved because you didn't hear a ton about it before that?

Tesla and Google? Until it was made for the consumer, right?

Um, it's been, yeah, 10, 15 years, I'd say.

So you look at that and then you talk about, okay, well, as a company, let's say a trucking company or whoever wants to go ahead and put autonomous vehicles in their fleet, right? Well, planes still have pilots. There's a reason why, and that technology was, you know, built over 100 years ago. Well, there's a reason, is because there's not the full functionality. There's things that go wrong, right? There's malfunctions. It's going to be no different. So when you talk about the ROI on an autonomous vehicle, where the whole point of having that is to eliminate driver error, but you still have to have a driver present. If you talk about the trucking world, probably a CDL-certified driver, right? Right. So you still have all the same expenses you had before, but how much more of a premium now are you paying for that autonomous truck?

Well, certainly with the technology, that's a boost in cost.

So is it worth it for those trucking companies to look at autonomous vehicles when you still have to have the same expense, even more when it comes to your vehicle, but the expense of having a driver sitting there in the cab?

I'm going to go one step further and say maybe you don't need them in the cab, right? I mean, like, we've got UAVs and things like that that are all flown remotely. Now, there's no people on board, which is a different thing, right? —right? But there are a lot of infrastructure elements. I mean, we talked about the, you know, airport shuttles and things like that. Fixed track. They're totally autonomous. They carry passengers every day. I think you could get to that point and maybe it wouldn't be, hey, now you're not having to pay them to drive, but you do pay them for experience on what to do when things go wrong. You just— it's a different level of training. Well, it is.

And like you said, I mean, like drones, you could have someone sitting in an office somewhere remotely operating that truck and driving it.

Right? They do have that, right, going on right now. Well, but it's not—

I mean, you can't do it legally on the road. Oh no. Right. But I'm just talking about they could do that, which would help eliminate, I guess, some of that expense, because that person could be a dispatcher, a customer service person, also operate. And then you could also run those vehicles 24 hours a day, right?

You just switch them out. You just switch it.

Like, you know, with slip seating, that's very hard to do, to find drivers willing to slip seat. Well, you could probably find someone more likely to slip seat as a cubicle.

Yeah, people have been doing that in offices for decades. Exactly. You know, hot seats, what we call that, which is kind of Funny because the reason they're—

one of the reasons they're trying to go to autonomous vehicles is to address the driver shortage.

Yeah, I don't think it'll work.

It's the number one vocation in America.

It'll take a long time to get to that point, but not yet.

Well, you'll still have to have a CDL though, and that's the problem, right, is getting a CDL and then sitting right now.

You would, but I think eventually they probably would if the technology catches up to it. The CDL requirement might go away. Yeah, and it might be replaced with— it'd be relaxed type of requirement. You know, like it will change with the technology, but the technology is not there yet. Right. And so for, yeah, for the foreseeable future, you would need a CDL in that driver's seat ready to take over for any situation.

We could teach a monkey how to drive if it's autonomous, right?

They put a monkey in space, right?

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, you could, but that's just why I think that, you know, when it comes to autonomous vehicles, especially in the heavy duty industry, you're just so far out.

It's not around the corner. It's not even in the next decade, I don't think.

No, I think I'll be retired before something like that ever even happens. It's just not cost effective.

I'll definitely be retired. But the thing about this is—

Steve, you'll be in the ground.

Yeah, I might be dead. Yeah. I won't see that day.

I'll be on the other side of the dirt. So, I mean, they've been talking about autonomous vehicles. They've been talking about electric vehicles for how many decades? That really hasn't become too prevalent. It's getting there, but— It's coming, right?

I mean, it's just crazy. Like anything technology-wise, right?

There's a long time.

It's difficult. It's not a smartphone. And I think that's the thing that we have to realize is, you know, for smartphones, there was infrastructure already, and that's really pushed, you know, the adoption of 3G, 4G, 5G. But it's not, it's not as cheap to manufacture as a smartphone. It's not as commercially viable as something like that. So there are things that move really fast. So you look at fleets and automotive, and it feels like we're just going so slow. But there's a reason, right? There's a reason why, you know, 50, 60 years ago we were still running coal trains, right? And then we just barely switched to diesel, and now we're, you know, we've got all this interstate, and we haven't made a lot of technology advances in trucking. There's been some, but not a ton.

Trucking has been slow. I mean, they're just barely getting some of the automotive technology in trucks and some of these manufacturers.

So there's definitely some inertia at play against innovation. But I think you're going to start seeing more of it. You have been seeing more of it just in the last 10, 15 years. I think that will speed up, but it's not going to move as fast as say, you know, hey, all of a sudden we need tablets and we need phones in the shop and we need, you know, there's a lot of other technology drivers that are moving faster. One of the things with autonomous vehicles, I mean, we kind of mentioned, well, what happens when you don't need, you know, we were talking about it from more of a commercial standpoint. Is you'd still have to have a pilot in the seat, so to speak. But on a less industrial level, like maybe at a consumer level or at a light fleet level, that necessarily you wouldn't need that. You know, we were talking, me and a group of innovators were talking about, you know, what happens when you don't need a car anymore? You know, how do you design cities and design residential neighborhoods when all of a sudden, you know, I don't actually need to go buy a car, I can rent a car. We're looking at instead of a car rental doing— what's that called? Turo. Turo, where people just lease their own vehicles out. Hey, I've got this truck and you can come pick it up at this date. So you Uber to that person's house or they drop it off for you or whatever, but they're renting their own personal vehicles out. And then they've got another one where— just imagine that you sign in instead of Uber and I'm going to order an Uber with an Uber driver, I'm going to order an Uber car and they come pick me up. It's an autonomous vehicle and it just picks me up. And so it's like ordering your own personal driver, personal chauffeur. What happens then? Do you need a garage attached to your house? Do you need, you know, super wide streets on your residential neighborhood, or can you get a lot more condensed? All of a sudden you have high-rises out in the suburbs kind of a thing. And so I think that'll be— it'll be interesting to see when that technology is available, how it impacts beyond fleet, beyond I mean, now you're starting to talk about real infrastructure and real changes to how we live and how we operate in our daily life.

I mean, you see, I've seen technology on YouTube, future technology, where a person will take an autonomous vehicle, autonomous taxi, they'll go into a parking lot and a drone picks it up and takes them into the city. And I mean, a lot of that's feasible, but whether it's actually applicable is the issue, right?

Feasible and cost-effective, that's always the thing that sinks it. It's the same thing why we haven't talked about, you know, like we say autonomous trucks are not there because it's not cost-effective yet. I do think there's a market for it. I do think there's, you know, the technology is coming. I don't want to— my personal opinion is don't stick your head in the sand and say it'll never work, so I don't need to worry about it. Just don't worry about it a ton because it's still a ways off.

You know, we talk about total cost of ownership a lot. Fleet management. And I don't know that anybody's done a real total cost of ownership analysis. If it truly saves accidents, that's the biggest cost in fleet because of all the lawsuits and the liability and all that. So I mean, if you could literally factor that in and get a decent cost, you know—

But I think that's why other technologies that kind of stopgap Right. We talked about, you know, driver assist. We were doing blind spot detection, but I think collision avoidance, you know, there's a lot of those little technologies that you can supplement today and retrofit today those vehicles and get a lot of the same benefits as you would out of an autonomous vehicle. That's true. Right. And so then back to the cost-effective strategy. One thing I did see, and this is probably a year or two ago, you know, was there's a company, I think Transdev was doing this and maybe one other but they're running school bus routes using autonomous buses. Little buses, not, not your big school bus that you think of, but like a little shuttle-sized car. Like, think of, uh, like a, like a light rail car cut in half, uh, might seat 12 people total. But they were using these just for little school bus routes, top speed of like 25, 30 miles an hour, uh, but dedicated routes, no driver, uh, you know, just would go to their house, pick them up, take them to the school. And I think that's brilliant, especially right now. We do have a major driver shortage in school districts. I just posted about this not too long ago, but they're having to cancel bus routes and having to— like, the parents are having to now all of a sudden be responsible to get their kid to school. Schools are having to open an hour later, an hour earlier.

Massachusetts, Ohio now are deploying the National Guard to pick up kids so they can go drive it, right?

Use the, the CDL exemption for, for the military. Yep. So you have that. And I think, well, this would be one of those things because schools are usually centrally located, at least, you know, in the suburbs, they're not too far away from where they're getting picked up at. You know, that would be a, you know, a situation where you could deploy some of those and just kind of run up.

Not to drop a name, but Waymo out there, they're doing university shuttles already on several campuses out there that are autonomous. Yeah. I saw one of those that we talked about, NAAFA, I saw one of those one year at NAAFA. So I mean, they work, they've been around, they're functional.

They work. But when you talk, there's two big differences here, right? One is you're talking dedicated routes. That's totally different than irregular route.

True. Yes.

Right. So this, yes.

When you talk about autonomous, that's what we call it, fixed route.

So if you've got a fixed route versus an irregular route, it's a lot easier because they've got that schedule. They know where they're going typically. There's not other vehicles in that lane they're going. I mean, there's a lot of things that's to the benefit of that and making it happen. So that's going to be a lot more commonplace. I mean, I think you'll start to see city bus routes probably would adopt it sooner than anything else. Right. Because it is a dedicated route. It's the irregular and what you encounter on the irregular is when you have issues. Like you talk about like, oh, well, if you can prevent accidents, right, with having it be computerized with the AI as opposed to a human, that doesn't take into account the humans that are on the road that are going to cause the accident, not necessarily that. So you'll still have lawsuits.

You're going to have issues. We had that here in Phoenix, right, with Uber. Yeah, they had their autonomous, you know, Google, right? Or what? No, it was Uber. Was it Uber? Uber was doing an autonomous test here in Phoenix and, you know, their car was on autonomous mode, plowed over a guy riding a bicyclist. Yeah. And, you know, just in dark, wasn't— I don't believe it was well lit. but the sensors should have still picked it up. And it didn't stop at all. Just, it kept going, right? The driver had to intervene.

Well, I think that's why we talked earlier about infrastructure. I mean, I guess at some point in time, at least on the early edge of this, you're gonna probably have to have dedicated lanes that are segmented off. I mean, I know in Phoenix, you know, a lot of people drive older cars. Yeah. Because of the weather, they don't rust here. It's very conducive to those old muscle cars. That's why they have the big auctions here, right? And so those will, like Jeff said, those are going to be, you know, detriments to the autonomous vehicle.

Well, as long as they still let us drive them, right? I know the cash for clunkers thing was a big deal, but let's not do that again.

Well, they are talking about, you know, kits to make things autonomous, old cars. So I'm sure that'll come into play at some point in time. All right.

Well, anything else that you guys want to add into this?

The only thing I would add is just the platooning, right? Which is just a totally separate faction of this.

It's like a spin-off of autonomous? A little bit.

So basically what it is, you've got several vehicles in a row and the front one is operated by a human and then the ones behind are basically following via AI. You know, so you've got these sensors that are when the front vehicle brakes, the second, third, fourth vehicle brake. When they speed up, they also speed up. So it's really just like more of a mimicking what's happening in front of them. So that's something that has actually gone through a lot of testing. And I actually think that UPS and maybe FedEx are doing it a little bit right now. But, you know, is it something that can be used outside of trucking? I mean, probably not, unless it's like a dedicated carpool where a whole bunch of cars are going to the same location. Right.

Well, it loses some of its advantage, right? Because there are some aerodynamics they get from platooning. Yes. Now I know they can adjust how close the tail vehicles follow. The closer, the better for aerodynamics, but that also means they need to be in constant communication so that when braking events happen, that they're all aware of it before, right? So you don't have that delay and that lag. Yes. And a point break—

You mentioned those that have, that pay no attention to following, right? Right. A little car could sneak in between the platoon and then it just offsets the whole thing.

Yeah.

Well, that's where, you know, you narrow the following distance and that should help. But drivers are dumb. Like, you know, you see some of these videos online and you're just like, what were you thinking? And because they'll—

especially with big rigs, right? Yeah, there's, there's your car length in between two big rigs and I'm gonna cut them off as if they have time to brake.

You are taking your life into your hands.

Yeah, I mean, there's still trying to pass them on the right, these trucks. Yeah. Stupid things getting their radiuses.

Well, yeah, my favorite is, you know, makes wide right turns and, oh no, I'm just going to sneak around you and get them bent into a telephone pole.

Screw your right turn.

So I do think like platooning is happening. It's not happening as fast as obviously trucking companies would like it to. There are still some challenges that's coming up against. And even that, though, is not fully autonomous that's more of that Level 3, maybe even a little bit Level 2 because you still require a hands-on operator in that lead vehicle. But it is one of those things that I don't know if there's a huge benefit outside of trucking because you wouldn't really have 2 or 3 vehicles stacked up against each other. You lose some of the fuel economy in smaller vehicles.

Yeah, maybe military convoys, something along those lines. But yeah, outside of trucking, even then you'd have to have you know, 5 loads going to the same place, picking up, delivering at the same time, which is rare. Uh, it— well, it depends. I mean, you're big DCs, so if you're shipping like, uh, Kellogg's is shipping to a Walmart DC somewhere, they'll ship, you know, 10 loads a day from there to a DC or to several DCs. Yeah, so that, that may be the case where you can actually use it there, but still you got to think about the cost of all that technology, right? Is it worth it? Because companies are not going to spend money if they're not making money, and in trucking especially with thin margins right across the board, is it really worth investing into that?

Well, but most of your trucking companies aren't running loads like that. Most of them are last mile carriers or they're doing one-off loads, right?

Yeah. Oh yeah, that's— it's all your regular routes. There's some dedicated that it would work for, but dedicated, you still need someone to unload the trucks. And when you get there, I mean, there's a lot of different—

you can't have one driver doing all 5 loads. Well, they'd be a crap.

They probably would ask them to do it though. They would, they would, for sure.

Past anybody.

So we are the Fleet Success Show. So how does maintenance and repair figure in all this?

I don't know if it does. I mean, you know what it does? It complicates it, right? It's the same way that when we went from carburetors to fuel injection, from fuel injection to what we are, you know, that same complication, you know, it just makes the things more complex.

So now you're training, training, right?

Again, right? And yet what's the first thing that gets cut? Travel and training.

So, well, and think about the different types of school. I mean, now you're talking about not necessarily a mechanic. Right? You're talking about engineers. You're talking about, you know, people that—

CIOs. Computer Information Systems.

So it's a whole different level that you've now got to bring into your shop just to work on those vehicles.

Right. Yeah. If you thought it was bad with the DEF mandates and everything like that, it's, you know, when this comes out, it's going to be real fun. Yeah.

So I got a question because we talked about levels of autonomy, right? So is Level 0 like horse and buggy, or is it Flintstones? I don't know.

I'm gonna look it up. We're gonna look—

they don't actually mention Level 0 in there, but I would say it's vehicles without any kind of technology. So Flintstones. Because even, even, uh, cruise control is a level of autonomy, right?

So maybe pre-cruise control. Yeah, maybe we'll go with that. Yeah. Um, it's a Level 0. I'm saying, uh, features limited to providing warnings and momentary assistance. So automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning— look at that, that's level 0. We were giving it way too much credit. Uh, level 1 would be things they provide steering or brake and acceleration, so like lane centering and adaptive cruise control. I will tell you, adaptive cruise control is freaking awesome. It is awesome. That is amazing.

Although I found it— I drive slower with it.

Yeah, occasionally, right?

But then like somebody always gets in front of me and then I slow down their speed, you know.

But I didn't have to touch the brake. Yeah, I can tell you how awesome that is, you know, having come from a vehicle that required a lot of intervention to this. And then I'm like, okay, if I want to move, I just change lanes and then the truck does it on itself again. All right, here we go. Uh, let's see. So Level 1 is, uh, yeah, lane centering, adaptive cruise control. And that is nice, like lane departure warnings, you know, like that is— I realized how crappy of a driver I am now that I have lane— always hitting the line lines. Oh my goodness, I had no idea. And maybe, yeah, this truck's a little bit wider, so maybe that's what's going on.

But my wife always told me So that's what they're there for.

Um, let's see. So, oh, the difference between Level 1 is you could do lane centering or adaptive cruise control. This is like splitting hairs here. Uh, Level 2 is lane centering and adaptive cruise control at the same time. So there you go, right? Like, we're moving up here. Seriously, simultaneously.

I actually, I actually drove my Lincoln one time with adaptive cruise control and lane centering and took my hands off the wheel. It will actually keep you in the lane.

So it's a big jump though from Level 2, right? Which is just be able to do lane centering and speed acceleration to Level 3, which is no driver involvement at all, right? Like a traffic jam chauffeur, you know, like it just does it for you.

Well, there's been a lot of criticism about SAE standards, so I suspect at some point in time they might adjust them.

Yeah.

They ought to get our opinion next time. Seriously.

We just got to get on the phone with these guys. They'll listen to us. They totally will.

Hey, we run the Fleet Success Podcast. Come on.

Did you have any idea this is what's happening. All right. Well, that'll wrap it up for us. Episode number 25 in the books. Again, if you have any comments or love us to tackle a topic, podcast@rtafleet.com, and we will see you next time.

Yabba dabba doo. That's what's happening in our world today. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media at Fleet Success. See you next time.