Fourteen NASCAR Cup Series teams got a first-hand look at the 2019 series aero package, in its entirety, during a two-day test at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1.

The new package will debut in a competitive environment in the second race of the season on Feb. 24 at Atlanta Motor Speedway. The series will then visit LVMS on March 3.

NASCAR’s goal with its new aero package is to improve racing by bringing cars closer together, resulting in drafting at mile-and-a-half tracks. The package includes aerodynamic ducts and tapered spacers to reduce engine output to approximately 550 horsepower.

“This is a journey,” NASCAR Vice President of Innovation and Racing Development John Probst told NASCAR.com. “We started a few years ago trying to bring more entertaining and competitive racing to our sport. This was the first time we got to see 14 cars go out there and run 25 laps. So far, so good.”

Up to 17 cars were on the track at a time, as the 14 participating teams were joined by at least one car from each of the three manufacturers participating in NASCAR’s top series—Chevrolet, Ford, and Toyota.

“We’re all trying hard. We all have high expectations for these changes that we’re doing,” Clint Bowyer told Motorsport.com after the first drafting session of the test. “These aren’t just changes made to be changing. We all trying to make this sport better for our fans and everybody involved. This is an important test; everybody knows that, and we need to learn as much as we can. We’re not here selfishly for ourselves, you better not be; everybody is trying to learn as much as they can here. Collectively, we as a group need to put ourselves in situations that we know we will be in the race to see how these cars react.”

Kyle Busch, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver who has been critical of the package since its announcement, maintained his position through the test at his home track.

“We’ve taken the skill away from the driver in this package,” Kyle Busch said during a media availability during the test session. “Anybody could go out there and run around wide open. You could probably do it.”

Darrell Wallace Jr.’s experience differed from Busch’s.

"When we got in the pack, it was a little bit of a handful, and we’ve still got to work on passing a little bit,” Wallace Jr. said.

But Busch doesn’t expect much passing, even though he does expect closer racing.

Driver critiques aside, NASCAR officials were happy with the results.

“We’re encouraged by what we saw on the track,” Probst said.

As many continue to claim international sanctions are crippling North Korea's economy and leaving the Kim regime starved of cash and luxury goods, we continue to get glaring indications otherwise. Case in point, Kim Jong Un being filmed rolling around Pyongyang in yet another new super high-end limousine. Last time it was a Rolls Royce Phantom, this time it's a late body armored Mercedes-Maybach S600. The revelation comes just weeks before another summit between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump will be held, one in which the North Koreans are demanding sanctions relief before proceeding with nuclear disarmament to any tangible degree.

The new armored limousine based on the Mercedes-Maybach S600 first appeared in a broadcast, seen below, on state-run Korean Central Television (KCTV) on Feb. 1, 2019. One clip showed Kim standing next to the car on Jan. 31, 2019, during a visit to see performances by the DPRK Friendship Art Delegation, which had recently returned from China. Another showed the vehicle driving to the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) Central Committee building in the North Korean capital Pyongyang.

The segments in question begin at 40:00 in the runtime in the video below.

Kim's affinity for Mercedes limos is well documented. He notably used armored S600 Pullman Guard limousines to travel to his historic summit with South Korean President Moon Jae In in April 2018 and then to his equally historic meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore two months later.

This attraction to western automobiles, and Mercedes in particular, is something the younger Kim shared with his father Kim Jong Il, as well as his grandfather, Kim Il Sung. In 2001, the elder Kim reportedly purchased some 200 luxury cars and smuggled them into the country in the face international sanctions against the regime in Pyongyang, which are in place in response to its nuclear weapons program, ballistic missile developments, and horrendous human rights record, among other things. Mercedes limousines were also a staple of Kim Il Sung's transportation.

The connection between the Kim family rulers and their various modes of transportation is so strong that the vehicles they used are displayed prominently in their mausoleums. Below is a screencap from a video (also posted below) of Kim Jong Un's tour of Kim Jong Il's mausoleum, which even has his yacht and train car on display:

Flaunting these vehicles is an obvious act of defiance for the North Korean regime, which is an international pariah, but has developed an elaborate network of foreign contacts, shell companies, and illicit enterprises around the world to skirt sanctions and continue to function despite foreign pressure. The regime deliberately allowed state news crews to film Kim and his new car ahead of his upcoming second summit with Trump, where the issue of relaxing sanctions is set to be a hot topic.

As for the new cars themselves, it's not clear how many Mercedes are in the North Korean government fleet at present. At least a pair of S600s reported arrived in the country in 2009 and went into service in 2010. Two years later, another handful in a different configuration appeared at a military parade in Pyongyang. Yet another lot emerged between 2013 and 2014, again in configurations different from the other vehicles.

In 2015, a panel of experts investigating sanctions violations for the United Nations Security Council reported that the second set of S600s were not actually Pullman guards, but had been armored by an unspecified North American company before making their way to North Korea. The third pair was also not factory standard, with "body characteristics suggest that these vehicles are not Pullman versions of the S-class vehicles but were modified by a third-party."

The following year, the panel of experts issued new findings, saying the customization of at least two of the cars had occurred in the United States before the vehicles arrived in China and were then transported into North Korea. A firm known as Seajet International, run by Chinese businessman Yunong Ma, also known as George Ma, allegedly arranged the deal. Ma, who was also a representative for North Korea's flag carrier Air Koryo, and Seajet, have been linked to illicit North Korean arms sales and other foreign deals, according to the U.N. report.

Then, in October 2018, it looked as if Kim's association with the iconic Mercedes limos might be coming to an end when he appeared at meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a Rolls Royce Phantom. You can read our writeup on this surprise unveiling here.

Kim's Rolls is visible in the brief video below.

North Korea's fleet of active Mercedes VIP vehicles dates back to 1990s model years, with older vehicles that are no longer needed to transport Kim and the regime's top officials being used for other diplomatic transport duties. So, it's not like the regime just uses these vehicles during their prime and tosses them away.

It was not clear at the time of the Phantom's arrival if Kim was intending to replace his top Mercedes limousines with Phantoms, but at this point, it seems as if the Rolls Royce may be a one-off, or it isn't being chosen for primary transportation missions outside of benign circumstances for operational concerns raised by Kim's Guard Command that is tasked with protecting him. These can include the vehicle's level of armor, parts availability, reliability, maneuverability, and weight and space concerns for traveling via train or airlifter to meetings abroad. The vehicles may have simply proven too easy to track and too hard to smuggle for the North Koreans.

To this point, in 2017, Bangladeshi authorities seized another Phantom – falsely declared to be a BMW – belonging to the former First Secretary of the North Korean Embassy in that country. Officials in Bangladesh had expelled the diplomat the year before for smuggling cigarettes

Regardless, it seems that Kim has returned to form with the acquisition of the new Mercedes-Maybach.

As with the previous S600s, it is also unclear whether or not this car is actually a factory standard armored Guard model or came via a third party concern. The unarmored Mercedes-Maybach S600 sedan has been on the market since 2015 and the armored VIP Guard version appeared the following year. The list price for the S600 Guard model is more than $500,000.

Video caption: Executive limousines became a point of connection between Trump and Kim at the Singapore summit last June when Trump showed Kim the inside of the "The Beast," the most famous limousine in the world. Kim has an established love for transportation and vehicles and the fact that the U.S., Russian, and Chinese presidents have all received new limousines over the last year seems to have sent his regime looking to do the same:

"The correct export of products in conformance with the law is a fundamental principle of responsible entrepreneurial activity," Ute Wüest von Vellberg, a spokesperson for Daimler, which owns the Mercedes and Mercedes-Maybach brands, told NK Pro in response to a query about how the car had made its way to North Korea. "Our company has had no business connections with North Korea for far more than 15 years now and strictly complies with EU and U.S. embargoes."

NK Pro also noticed slight differences in the armored surrounds inside the door jam from Kim's car to a stock S600 Maybach Pullman Guard.

So yeah, the Kim regime isn't exactly crumbling due to a lack of cash from international sanctions. And there is a very good chance that this new car shows up in Hanoi where Kim will meet Trump on February 27th, 2019 for their second round of attempted detente. North Korea has long claimed that sanctions don't work, while also claiming they cause hardship on the North Korean people. As such, they argue they should be lifted. Considering Kim's new super-expensive whips, this seems at least partly true.

The facts show that the regime has its ways to get the products it wants, and with China and Russia cozying up to Pyongyang, it seems more likely we will only see less enforcement of the international sanctions regime that is supposed to bring North Korea to the bargaining table and punish them for their dangerous behavior, not more.

Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com

It's amazing to think that the B-2 Spirit's first flight was nearly three decades ago. On July 17, 1989, the world's first stealth bomber took to the skies for the very first time. What came next was years of intricate testing that brought the Air Force and industry together to transform the bat-winged bomber from an exotic flying machine into America's deadliest flying weapon. A video montage recently posted online shows this process, and the B-2 in general, like you've have never seen them before.

We were recently treated to a series of beautifully produced videos celebrating the B-2's creation from the jet's manufacturer, Northrop Grumman. Those videos were great, but this B-2 Combined Test Force highlight reel is absolutely awesome for a number of reasons.

First off, it shows so many unique elements of the B-2's development, many of which we have never seen before. Beyond that, it has a surprisingly good 'vintage' soundtrack that is paired with some sweet editing that really works to capture the esprit de corps among the sprawling team of people who gave birth to the Spirit.

As the video notes, at its peak, the B-2 test program involved over 2,000 dedicated people, six B-2s, and a C-135 avionics testbed. It completed over 23,600 individual test points that occurred over 989 missions and 5,242 flight test hours. In the end, all this work was done for just 21 airframes, but to this very day, the small fleet of B-2s is considered a national treasure and linchpin of national security that is capable of executing a surprisingly wide array of missions. These include nuclear and conventional strike missions.

The video's timing is somewhat topical as America's next stealth bomber's Combined Test Force is already spinning up. Its job will not be easy. Even though thirty years of technological development and knowledge gained from operating the B-2 have helped, the B-21 Raider will have a fairly compressed testing schedule. The advanced stealth jet is slated to enter service in the middle of the coming decade when it will also begin to replace B-2s and B-1s at a steady pace into the 2030s.

With that in mind, it's good to remember those who blazed the stealth bomber trail and how they did it. It's also worth noting that the B-2's own development continues till this very day with the 72nd Test and Evaluation Squadron playing a central role in those efforts.

Maybe what becomes most clear when watching the test montage video is that the B-2 still looks totally alien even after plowing the skies for 30 years. In fact, the plane remains so technologically sensitive that even disposing of it will be a major logistical undertaking.

Thankfully, we still have years to marvel at the B-2 before she heads to the boneyard or meets the scrapper's blade.

Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com

This week, there were over 300 vehicles on display at the 2019 Chicago Auto Show, and almost as many wheel designs. From most points of the convention floor, even on busy public days, there are more gorgeous wheels visible than there are people, owing to many manufacturers stepping up their design game.

We decided to choose our 10 favorites to share, but we had to set some rules for what we'd include. They have to be...

• Actual wheels—sorry GMC. Your Sierra 2500HD with tracks is cool, but they are by definition not wheels.
• Available as factory or dealer options, not as aftermarket products.
• Good-looking (no Rockstars).
• Real, road vehicle wheels. No concept cars, no Cadillac or Acura Daytona Prototypes, no Alfa Romeo Formula 1 car.

Before diving into the list itself, enjoy the violators of the above rules. As attractive as they are, they don't belong on a list of road car wheels. The following 10, however, are available on cars sold today, or will be available by the end of the year.

Toyota Land Cruiser

Tasteful wheels are harder to find on a luxury SUV than one might expect, with gratuitous chrome infecting the market segment like a rash. An understated bronze tint to the Land Cruiser's wheel is a welcome change, and a handsome polygonal five-spoke arrangement speaks ruggedness without bragging of it.

Hyundai Elantra Sport

The Elantra Sport's wheels manage intricacy without becoming too busy, and do so at a relatively approachable price point. It hides two styles of five-spoke wheels, one inside another, but the star-shaped background is subtle enough to be obvious only on close inspection.

Volkswagen Jetta GLI

Each individual spoke of the 2019 Volkswagen Jetta GLI's wheel looks like a temple out of either the final season of Samurai Jack or a de-canonized Star Wars comic book. Either way, they're a fitting way to roll around in the fastest road-going Jetta released to date.

Alfa Romeo 4C Spider Italia

Alfa Romeo's diminutive, mid-engined 4C sports car may be aging, but its wheels look as good as the day they first rolled from the factory in 2013. A special-edition 4C Spider Italia bearing a paint color new to the 4C will try to tempt 15 customers into the car, which will live on for at least the 2020 model year, before either being retired or reborn.

GMC Denali

GMC often goes chrome-crazy as a lazy way of attaining upscale looks, but this set of Denali wheels has a clever design. Attention is drawn away from the seven gloss-black spokes to the spaces in between via tactful use of chrome, but the fact that the chrome outlines empty space prevents it from becoming tacky.

Hyundai Kona Electric

For the most part, early mass-market electric vehicles have foregone traditional styling trends and the electric Kona crossover is no different form many of its competitors in this respect. Five slab-like spokes use matte black to evoke the likeness of a wind turbine, fitting with the electric Kona's environmental ethos.

Audi S5

It may have an atrocious-looking infotainment screen, but the Audi S5 redeems itself some to onlookers with sharp-looking seven-spoke wheels. Matte metal faces on the spokes make the wheel stand out without making it too flashy, a task with which many automakers struggle.

Chevrolet Corvette Z06

Five (10?) spokes form a pentacle for the Z06's wheels, but slight offsets prevent the design from coming across as generic or underwhelming. Understating itself is a skill of the Corvette's, and this wheel is but one of many such details found on the current C7 generation's thoughtful exterior.

Hyundai Veloster

While these brightly colored wheels may not be Hyundai in manufacture, a company spokesperson told The Drive that Hyundai will be pushing the redesigned Veloster on younger buyers by emphasizing customization before delivery. Multiple exotic wheel options will be available for the Veloster later this year, and though their final design may differ from those displayed in Chicago, all these wheels will be warranty-compliant.

VW Passat

They're not Jetta GLI wheels, but they're just as handsome. Machined faces on five warped, Y-shaped spokes with black surrounds ensure that Passats will distinguish themselves visually from other cars in their segment without getting gaudy.

The blurry photograph posted on Facebook was striking and unsettling, the Patterson-Gimlin film of car spots. A cloudy day. A rain-darkened highway. And like Bigfoot streaking through the frame, a Ford F-150-Mustang fastback mashup. We had to know more.

It might look like a one-off build commissioned by the truck's brave and touched owner, destined to become legend on his local roads and beyond. But as we found out, that tapered, louvered roofline—styled after the 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1—is actually a new production bed cap called the Aero X, and its creators at Michigan Vehicle Solutions are hoping to make fastback pickup trucks the next big thing.

The company is one of those all-purpose automotive outfits that does everything from custom part installations to complete restorations and pretty much everything in between. What it's never been is a manufacturer, which hasn't stopped CEO Rich Oliver from pursuing his vision for a fastback bed cap.

"We looked around and saw the lack of innovation out there," Oliver tells The Drive. "It's time for a different thing from our grandfathers' bed caps. The flat tonneau, the shoebox, all that has run its course."

The Aero X is nothing if not different. Currently available for the 2015+ Ford F-150 in 5 1/2-foot and 6 1/2-foot lengths, the 260-pound fiberglass topper adds a Mustang-inspired sloping roofline and louvered rear window, a lockable clamshell opening for convenient access, and extra options like a built-in sound system. It attaches using the industry-standard bed clamps like any other bed cap, no modifications required, and it starts at $3,995.

It's true that out of any vehicle, the profile of a pickup truck has changed the least over the last century—there's either a box or a bed behind the cab. But it's also true that of any vehicle, the way we use pickup trucks has probably changed the most over that time, going from work tools to everyday drivers. So, okay, maybe there is room to do something different, especially since the weatherproof space essentially turns the bed into a giant trunk.

But why the Mustang fastback? Oliver says there was no real market research, no business case other than the billions of dollars customers spend in the truck aftermarket every year. (The Ford F-150's status as America's best-selling truck didn't hurt, either.) After commissioning a few renderings and nailing down a final design, he committed to producing the Aero X. "It's been a 'if you build it, they will come' kind of process," he says.

The concept of a sloped, aerodynamically-efficient bed cap for a pickup isn't entirely new, but until now they've been the provenance of design studios, homebrew eco-modders, and the occasional rally raid truck. By contrast, the production Aero X was born from a form-over-function approach—that is, it looks the way it does because Oliver thought it was cool. The minor boost in fuel economy provided by that sleeker profile, which MVS hasn't formally tested, is incidental to the style.

Neither the design nor construction were as simple as chopping fastbacks off Mustangs and plopping them onto the F-150, of course. Program manager Jim Thompson tells us the team played around with the angle of the slope and how much it should taper in when viewed from behind before settling on the final look—which Oliver admits can have a polarizing effect on people.

We think it looks surprisingly good with the decal package on the truck in the Facebook photo; slightly less so on the trucks seen here. If you're going to go all out, go all out. There are a few alpha issues we can spot right away, like how the topper looks ill-fitting when placed over the Ford Raptor's wide fenders. The design also feels a little more cohesive with the short bed. We'd love to see one backing a single cab as well.

For America's roads to be ruled by fastback pickups, though, MVS will need an OEM or large aftermarket partner to help with production and installation. As it stands now, the company can only make between 8 and 10 Aero Xs per week at its facility, and fast, efficient shipping remains a hurdle. A Ford representative who recently swung by for a meeting had one big question, according to Oliver: "If I need 10,000 this week, who's going to build them?"

There's no simple answer yet. As to the question of who's going to buy them, Oliver claims the company gets at least several calls a day from prospective owners since it showed the Aero X at SEMA last year. So MVS is focused on meeting current demand, building up inventory, and further refining the feature set to lower costs. But the ultimate goal, Oliver says, is to develop fastback bed caps for every pickup on the market.

Even if you think this entire concept is ridiculous, you have to admit it's easy to get lost in broadening the idea. What would a Nissan Frontier look like with a 300ZX bed cover? How about a Chevy Silverado combined with an 80's Camaro? Why shouldn't this be a thing? Accept the premise, and the possibilities are endless.

And if you just don't get it, well, it's a free country. But should you see an oddly-shaped truck bounding down the road one day, there and gone in a flash, know this—your eyes aren't deceiving you. Fastback pickups are real.

Got a tip? Email the author: kyle@thedrive.com

William Byron posted a 46.319-second lap in the final round of Daytona 500 qualifying to claim his first career NASCAR Cup Series pole position. Byron’s pole marks the fifth-consecutive Daytona 500 pole for Hendrick Motorsports, an event record, and the fourth for HMS’ No. 24 team in the last five seasons.

The pole comes in Byron’s first attempt with his new crew chief, Chad Knaus.

"The Axalta Chevy was really fast. Credit to Chad and all the guys,” Bowman said. "It’s been a great off-season. We’re prepared. We’re ready. This is kind of the first step of our process together, so hopefully it goes well next Sunday. We can kind of chill out throughout the Duel races and learn a little bit. I’m looking forward to it. This is awesome.”

Byron’s first-career Cup Series pole is the 700th in the series for Chevrolet.

Hendrick Motorsports dominated the qualifying session, posting the fastest four times in each round. Last year’s pole sitter, Alex Bowman, wound up second after leading early in qualifying. He’ll join HMS teammate Byron on the front row for next Sunday’s race.

The two front row spots were the only two Daytona 500 starting positions determined in Sunday’s qualifying session. The remainder of the Daytona 500 starting grid will be set after the two Gander RV Duel races Thursday night. The starting order of those two races will be based on Sunday’s qualifying session.

As a result, Byron will be on the pole for the first row with teammate Jimmie Johnson alongside him. Bowman will start the second Duel on the pole with Hendrick teammate Chase Elliott next to him on the front row.

Tyler Reddick and Casey Mears don’t know exactly where they’ll start the Daytona 500, but they did guarantee themselves Daytona 500 starting spots as a result of being the fastest two drivers in cars without charters.

• GANDER RV DUEL STARTING GRIDS

New Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series team Obaika Racing has pulled its No. 97 entry from the Feb. 17 Daytona 500, the official 2019 season opener. The withdrawal has left Cup Series Rookie of the Year candidate Tanner Berryhill without a car to drive in the race.

“It is no secret that this is a very small team with limited resources,” a statement from the race team read. “This is also a very new team to the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. The No. 97 team has worked very hard through the winter to prepare cars and to secure funding for the 2019 season, and things did not come together as quickly as hoped or needed. The odds of making the Daytona 500 did not seem reasonable enough to stretch our resources, so the team feels that our assets can best be put towards a future race.”

The withdrawal announcement came Friday, just two days after Obaika Racing announced its sponsorship deal with Wave Sports and unveiled its car in an event at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“Adding Wave Sports as a year-long partner was a huge boost to our program, and they will be a very important part of our future efforts,” the team’s statement on Friday read. “We continued with the Wednesday, Feb. 6, press conference at the NASCAR Hall of Fame with great optimism about our program coming together in time to make it to Daytona International Speedway. Even though that did not work out, we are still very thankful to Wave Sports for continuing their support. The team still has big plans for the 2019 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season. We will compete in as many events as possible, and we will announce our 2019 debut race as soon as possible.”

After Obaika Racing competed in three Cup Series races late in the 2018 season, the last two of those with Berryhill as driver, the team announced during the offseason plans to run the complete 2019 schedule, also with Berryhill.

I've written about a thousand different things I'd like to share, but I just can't seem to put something together other than I'm devastated. What I thought and hoped was the opportunity of a lifetime wasn't. #Daytona500

— Tanner Berryhill (@tannerberryhill) February 8, 2019

Berryhill’s two races with Obaika Racing last season have been his only Cup Series appearances to date. He posted a best finish of 31st in his debut at ISM Raceway.

There are recent reports that Tesla’s “Autopilot” isn’t type-approved in Europe, and therefore absent in the first batch fresh off the boat in Belgium. In the EU and in many countries throughout the world, a valid type-approval is essential for the legal operation of a vehicle. The reports of Tesla’s AWOL Autopilot not only caused an uproar on Twitter. The allegedly absent approval also is the source of intensive puzzlement in the auto industry, for one simple reason: There is no EU type approval (yet) covering self-driving technology.

For this article, I could simply draw on my long and occasionally painful experience with the subject matter. It could be outdated, especially when it comes to a both fluid and impenetrable set of EU rules. I therefore called upon a number of homologation experts in the EU, and elsewhere. Not wanting to discuss another OEM, the sources have quested anonymity, and it has been granted.

To a man (and a woman) all experts told me: “There is no type approval for self-driving cars.” Neither in the EU, nor in the U.S., China, or elsewhere. Read the EU regulations, try to sift through all amendments and annexes, and you will find no regulation covering the type-approval of self-driving cars.

You probably begin to wonder how a EU that regulates even the shape of a banana could possibly not have rules for stuff the world has obsessed about for years. Not to worry, it is just a matter of time, I am told. Several working groups, in Europe and at the United Nations, are discussing regulations covering self-driving cars, with results expected in 2020, or more likely 2021. As long as no type-approval for self-driving cars exists, exemptions for self-driving cars will be carved out of traffic laws.

But what about the current Model3?

The experts interviewed were not familiar with the Model 3 type approval, and being experts, they didn’t want to hazard a guess. Some voiced the opinion that regulatory problems with the Model 3 “Autopilot” should be unlikely, simply because Tesla’s Model S and Model X have received EU type approval when equipped with the same Autopilot module.

I don’t give up easily, and taken by the hand by one of the world’s top homologation experts, I traversed the thicket of laws, regulations, amendments and annexes, until my guide pointed to vague references to the technology, buried deep in the United Nation’s Regulation No. 79, covering “the approval of vehicles with regard to steering equipment.” This regulation has been included into EU type approval regulations, and compliance is mandatory.

At first glance, this regulation specifically does not allow “systems, which do not require the presence of a driver, [and which] have been defined as ‘Autonomous Steering Systems’.” No soup for you.

But maybe a cookie:

UN Regulation No. 79 allows “Advanced Driver Assistance Steering Systems” for functions such as Lane Departure Avoidance, lane changes (when initiated by the driver) or systems that “assist the driver in maneuvering the vehicle at low speed in confined spaces.” According to the interpretation of my expert, the current rules allow autonomous steering only at speeds below 10 kilometers per hour, i.e. in an automated parking situation.

Not being familiar with the Model 3, my expert guide refused to give an opinion whether the Model 3’s Autopilot would comply or collide with these regulations.

Tesla’s “Standard Autopilot” comes with automatic emergency braking, along with frontal and side collision warning, and this should easily pass Regulation 79. However, if the Model 3 “Enhanced Autopilot” indeed comes with the features advertised on Tesla’s website, then there is potential of rule breakage. A car that, as promised by Tesla’s website, “takes over, steers itself,” a car that “automatically changes the lane,” a car that “masters freeway exchanges and exits autonomously” could collide with UN regulation 79, and by extension with the EU type approval regime. The final decision would have to be made by the EU regulator, and/or by an accredited technical service, in Tesla’s case RDW in the Netherlands.

Bottom line, Tesla’s Autopilot cannot collide with a type approval for autonomous cars that doesn’t exist in Europe. The Autopilot has, however, the potential of a conflict with provisions deep down in the United Nations regulations on steering.

Russ Mitchell, who covers Tesla for the Loans Angeles Times, cited an RDW spokesman last Thursday as saying that “at this moment the autopilot is not part of the original Type Approval of the Tesla Model 3.” It wasn’t clear which of the two Autopilot versions this referred to. A day later, Mitchell received a sibylline email from the Dutch regulator, stating that “today the approval of Tesla's Model 3 has been published with ‘Autosteer’ added.” Mitchell did not receive amplification, neither from RDW, nor from Tesla. Oddly, those who scour the pertinent United Nation’s Regulation No. 79 will find no mention of “autosteer.” Should “autosteer” refer for Tesla’s lane keeping functionality, then that would be permissible as what the rules call “Automatically commanded steering function (ACSF) Category B1.”

Also on Friday, Bloomberg told its terminal subscribers that Autopilot (which one?) gained “Approval for Autopilot in Europe.” Again oddly, this hot news did not find its way into Bloomberg’s news service and website. At the time of this writing, RDW’s database of type approvals shows no change to the three entries covering Tesla’s Model 3.

Should features of Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot conflict with the rules, Tesla would be in trouble way beyond Europe. United Nation regulations are observed in countries all around the world, except for the U.S.A. Countries or regions are free to adopt any of the more than 140 UN regulations, and therefore, Regulation 79 is not automatically in effect in every country that subscribes to the UN rules, but it is in many. Should Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot be held in violation in a Europe with a leading role in the UN regulatory framework, it could have a ripple-effect around the world. Tesla’s solution could be to re-submit a stripped-down, make that nEUtered, version of the Enhanced Autopilot, and it would have to studiously avoid adding the nEUtered features later Over-The-Air. Tesla’s European fans would not be happy.

OTA updates themselves are an even bigger can of worms. As intimated in a previous article, over-the-air updates can conflict with one of the core tenets of UN and EU type approval, namely that a type-approved component may not be altered without a new type approval. As one of the experts told me, “if the software update concerns something that is regulated by Type Approval, an OEM has to get an update to a Type Approval before pushing the software update.” This matter also is in flux, and I was urged to seek the advice of an OTA homologation expert, which I shall do. Stay tuned for more legalese.

Jimmie Johnson continued Hendrick Motorsports’ Sunday of domination with a win in the Advanced Auto Parts Clash after teammate William Byron claimed pole for next Sunday's season-opening Daytona 500. Fellow HMS driver Alex Bowman also performed well in qualifying, scoring his second consecutive front-row start for the South Florida classic.

“Yeah, this is great to have all four Hendrick cars qualify one through four, us in third with the Ally Chevy, and, then, to have a very competitive race here today. I wish we could get in the full distance, but obviously, the weather isn’t cooperating,” Johnson said.

Johnson took the lead after he and Paul Menard made contact, resulting in the latter hitting the wall and most of the 20-car field being collected on lap 55. Rain during the caution brought the red flag, followed by the checkered flag on lap 58.

"I knew the rain was coming, so I was trying to set-up my move and make my run on the No. 21 [Menard] car,” Johnson said. "I had it kind of set-up down the backstretch a few laps prior to that, and then, my opportunity came along. I made that move to the inside, and then, we kind of got together. I’m not sure if just the air breaking his bumper plane pulled his car over or if he was late to block, but it was just really a racing thing, honestly. So I made my move, and unfortunately, he got sideways, and it collected a bunch of cars.”

The rain that ultimately ended the race was the third weather-stoppage of the race. Red flag periods also came on lap 8 and lap 43 of the race that was scheduled for a 75-lap distance, all because of rain.

Menard dominated the race, leading 37 of the 43 laps before the second rain delay. He continued up front when the race returned to green and led the field until the incident with Johnson. By the end of the race, Menard had broken the record for most laps led by a driver in a Clash race with 51. He wound up 13th at the finish.

Kurt Busch was credited with a second-place finish but though he should’ve been the race winner. He had a discussion with a NASCAR official after the race, claiming Johnson took his lead by passing below the track’s yellow line, an illegal move according to the NASCAR rule book. NASCAR determined that Johnson was forced below the yellow line.

Reigning Cup Series champion Joey Logano, his Team Penske teammate Ryan Blaney, and Alex Bowman rounded out the top-five.

The yellow flag waved four times. The caution for the multi-car crash at the end of the race was the only yellow flag for an on-track incident. Aside from the rain-related cautions, the yellow flag also waved on lap 25 for a scheduled competition caution.

ADVANCE AUTO PARTS CLASH RESULTS

1. Jimmie Johnson [No. 48 Chevrolet]
2. Kurt Busch, No. 1 Chevrolet
3. Joey Logano, No. 22 Ford
4. Ryan Blaney, No. 12 Ford
5. Alex Bowman, No. 88 Chevrolet
6. Austin Dillon, No. 3 Chevrolet
7. Chase Elliott, No. 9 Chevrolet
8. Aric Almirola, No. 10 Ford
9. Ryan Newman, No. 6 Ford
10. Daniel Suarez, No. 41 Ford
11. Jamie McMurray, No. 40 Chevrolet
12. Kevin Harvick, No. 4 Ford
13. Paul Menard, No. 21 Ford
14. Kyle Busch, No. 18 Toyota
15. Martin Truex Jr., No. 19 Toyota
16. Clint Bowyer, No. 14 Ford
17. Denny Hamlin, No. 11 Toyota
18. Brad Keselowski, No. 2 Ford
19. Kyle Larson, No. 42 Chevrolet
20. Erik Jones, No. 20 Toyota

It is indisputable that radar detectors matter more than ever, but what is the world’s best radar detector? Ask the wrong question, get the wrong answer. The arsenal of law enforcement has vastly changed since the first civilian radar detectors hit the market 40 years ago. A radar detector is useless against laser guns. Laser detection is pointless without laser jammers. What about unmarked police cars pacing traffic? Or air patrols?

Your basic stand-alone radar detector is the proverbial knife in a gunfight.

The real question is: What is the best solution for avoiding speeding tickets, right or wrong?

The answer isn’t as easy as buying a single box at any price. A radar detector is merely one tool in your arsenal, not some magic potion that will protect you 100% of the time. All those detector reviewers comparing sensitivity, ergonomics, packaging and price? Dilettantes discussing gilded bricks. It’s true. Most radar detectors—even those that look good on paper—are a primitive vestige of the pre-smartphone era: sealed boxes with hard-coded software. They are unable to keep up with or address the myriad evolving threats to their users.

The detection sector is 10+ years behind even basic connected consumer electronics, so identifying the best possible solution requires working backwards from the perfect system, which must include the following features:

Directional Display

A detector’s sole purpose is to save time and money. Any information that helps you maintain your speed is good. Any information (or lack thereof) that slows you down unnecessarily is bad. Therefore, any detector without a clear display indicating the direction of an incoming threat cannot fulfill its purpose, and is worthless.

Why? Suppose the world’s best detector sans display lights up indicating a potential threat. Is it ahead of you or behind? Three miles away or one? Impossible to know. You must slow down. You’ve now lost time. If the threat is ahead, how do you know when you’ve passed it? Until you locate the threat, you don’t. More time lost. If you had known the threat was to the rear, you might have maintained speed, or even accelerated.

No directional display? You bought a brick. Sell it, slow down, and use Waze.

Front & Rear Sensors

You wouldn’t drive without a rear-view mirror, so why would you use a detector without sensors in both directions? A directional display won’t work without them, ergo, these are mandatory. For those people who only mount sensors in the front: Good luck.

Laser Jammers

Laser detection is absolutely useless without jamming functionality. Unlike radar, once you’re hit by laser, you’re caught. Is laser jamming essential? Here’s a chart of where police use lasers in the United States. If you can install these legally, do it. Illegally? That's your business—and don’t ask me in the comments where to get it done.

Sensitivity & ADAS Filtration

The very best radar detectors will all detect radar threats of virtually any type well outside police radar guns’ effective range, in virtually all conditions. Sensitivity isn’t the problem, nor are the traditional X-Band false alarms so common in urban areas.

No, the biggest problem is the rise of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) like radar cruise control and blind-spot monitoring. These use frequencies overlapping with police radar operating in what’s called K-Band. Different ADAS suites use slightly different frequencies within K-Band, and the brute force method of filtering all of them out may lead to silencing the very threats one needs to hear.

Which brings us to...

Software Upgradeability

Your desktop or smartphone is only as safe as the latest security update. Why would you expect your anti-radar/laser solution to be any different? The rise of ADAS means that radar (and soon Lidar) will become pervasive. All that Lidar you hear about in the context of self-driving cars? Lidar = Laser = more potential false alarms.

The only solution is one that is upgradeable. As police and civilian radar and Lidar evolve, so must filtration algorithms. This means software upgrades that can behaviorally distinguish between police and civilian ADAS operating in the same frequencies and wavelengths.

Upgradeability requires more than mailing in your unit every few years for an update. False alarms are evolving faster than threats, and crippling the effectiveness of even the best countermeasures. Every time a car is updated or released with new ADAS hardware—and possibly even when a manufacturer updates their ADAS software over the air or at a dealer—filtration algorithms will need to be updated as well. This requires...

Real Connectivity

Sealed-box detectors in 2017? Be serious. USB inputs? What a kludge. A cutting edge solution should have 4G/LTE built-in, if not wifi. Smartphones and iPads in the same range price do. Besides, how else are you going to conveniently update your absolutely essential database of fixed threats. Please read on:

Fixed Threat Database

Countless GPS devices and phone apps come preloaded with red-light and speed camera locations. These change. If these change before your database has been updated, you’re screwed.

GPS-enabled

Everyone knows exactly where on their daily commute their detector goes off for no reason. Mute switches are so 1997. I want a GPS markup/tagging function that integrates with the fixed threat database, allowing me to identify fixed false alarms by location. The only argument against this is that muting by location may mask a real threat, a problem solved by combining GPS, filtration updates and—

Crowdsourcing

There is no substitute. The world’s greatest detection/jamming suite can only benefit from maximizing data across a network, and correlating it to local information. Whereas Waze relies on active input by users who spot police and enter it via its cutesy UI, imagine a platform that actively shared real radar and laser signals across the network, cross-checked both against a list of popular speed traps and patrol zones, and created a historical database ranking risk by location, time, day and date. The foundation of such a platform existed in the now defunct Trapster. If only Trapster hadn’t been acquired and abandoned by Nokia.

If only.

Be Built-in, Concealed & Shielded

Built-in, so you never have to worry about mounting hardware and turning it on. Concealed, because cops assume people with detectors are up to no good, and in some states detectors/jammers are illegal. Electromagnetically shielded, because where they’re illegal police often use radar detector detectors.

That’s quite a list. Now let’s take a look at the best you can buy today.

The Current State The Art

The good news? There are several options that deliver a mostly perfect solution. The bad news? None of them come cheap. The best solution depends on you, how much you want to suffer, and how much you want to spend on the best solution available today.

There are only two factors that matter: 1. Do you believe in the power of crowdsourced data and ecosystem? 2. Do police use lasers where you drive.

if you believe in ecosystem, there is only one choice at this time.

As for laser, the effectiveness of any built-in solution depends on what kind of laser guns police use where you drive, and whether your system can jam them. If you can afford these solutions, you (or someone you're paying) need to do some homework.

Our Choice: Consumer Near-Perfection

Escort’s Max 360 CI is an excellent built-in system, with one caveat. It costs $3,499.00 plus installation, and that’s not even the caveat. It’s the most comprehensive and easiest to use of the built-in solutions, and far closer to functional perfection than any of the alternatives.

Escort's only real shortcoming conceals its unique advantage: ecosystem. Although it doesn't integrate with Waze, you can connect the system to your phone via Bluetooth to integrate with the Escort Live app, which is vastly superior to Waze for police location in every way but one: size of user base.

In the connected future, ecosystem is everything.

Escort won’t reveal figures for their user base other than to say it's "in the millions", but it can’t be anywhere near the 50 million that Waze claimed as of 2013. Of course it’s almost impossible to estimate how many Waze users are in the US, how many actively enter data, and how much of that data is accurate enough to become information a driver can act upon.

But quantity does not equal quality.

Escort Live users may be far fewer, but pony up $50 a year for the full subscription, tether it to your system, place your smartphone on a good mount, and witness the future of situational awareness: radar and laser alerts from other users in-network appear on-screen, overlaid with their fixed threat “Defender” database updated weekly.

When you see a radar or laser threat in Escort Live, it's there because another user with Escort hardware detected it. If it's undefined, it's there because another Escort owner entered it manually—which, in my book, gives it real credence.

When you see a cop in Waze, you're hoping one or more users reported it accurately. Talk about porous. Even if they do, you don't know if it's radar or laser. Not all that helpful.

I loved Escort Live. Unless Waze starts working with one or more competing manufacturers to integrate radar/laser threat data into their app, the Escort ecosystem is the only game in town.

Has the Escort Live community reached sufficient critical mass to replace using Waze alongside the Valentine Research V1 ($449) I’ve been using for 25 years? I’m not sure about that critical mass in Nebraska, but it was sufficient on two drives cross country, and the Max 360 standalone unit ($649) I’ve been using for the last ten months is vastly superior in filtration to a V1 with the latest update.

Let me repeat that. The Escort killed the V1 in terms of false alarms. Sad, but true.

Escort's fixed threat database is accessed via Escort Live, which means it's updated via your smartphone's cellular connection. Their sensor hardware's firmware still needs to be updated via USB, but at least they're moving in the right direction. Hope you own a laptop.

As for ADAS filtration, Escort claims they are building a database of ADAS hardware by make/model, and distributing updates as quickly as they can.

Escort has a lot of work to do, but that’s a function of their ambition—they are light years ahead of everyone else in terms of ecosystem. No one else in-sector appears to be looking past hardware and basic phone apps/external displays. Until they do, every day that passes is one in Escort’s favor.

The Professionals’ Alternatives?

Two companies at the cutting edge of laser jamming now offer full halo suites designed for the serious — and I mean serious — user, both claiming radar sensitivity and laser jamming superior to Escort’s: AL Priority ($2659 + install) and Stinger ($7290 + install). Both offer updates via USB, but neither offer an app-based community/ecosystem like Escort Live.

This is where things get tricky.

For years, AL Priority laser jammers have been the product of choice for hardcore enthusiasts (and many of my friends) cobbling together a suite around the vaunted V1. Their new full suite would appear to be an incredible value for this level of performance, but the amateur user is not going to get the most out of this hardware. Effective customization is a time investment the average person is just not ready to make. Their phone app is impressive, but even if Waze alerts pop up on top of it, running two apps simultaneously on your phone does not a real ecosystem make.

How does Stinger justify its incredible price premium over everyone else? Hardware quality and size. If you know what a phased array antenna is, you're either already a Stinger customer, or you've played Harpoon and know something about Aegis missile defense cruisers. Also, Stinger's sensor heads are seriously small, which helps in states where such hardware is illegal. Stinger also offers a gorgeous little proprietary display instead of a phone app, because they think that if you're going to use Waze, you don't need another app on your phone.

I agree.

A Stinger installation will still cost you somewhere north of $8500, which is crazy even by my standards. Amortizing its expense over X moving violations and Y time is the devil's math. I admire their hardware as much as the next guy, but I can't rationalize this pricing other than as a very juicy piece of techporn.

How about that ADAS filtration? It's only as good as the update quality and frequency, and neither company has Escort's resources. How much does this matter? Seems to me that the more data gathered, the better. If you've heard of network effect, you know Escort's got a leg up.

A head-to-head-to-head test is necessary, but unless these companies start building ecosystems, the convenience/data/information chain is cut. If only someone would do an ADAS false alarm comparo, we might actually see who's ahead purely for performance. It would have to be repeated quarterly, at least, but does pure performance matter as much as crowdsourcing data from other detector owners?

I don't think so.

If you've got time on your hands and you’re satisfied with Waze, these options will take you down a rabbit hole of customization that may suit your taste. Were I attempting to break the Cannonball record again, I might be tempted by AL Priority, but I'm firmly in Escort's ecosystem camp.

Is K40’s Next Big Thing the Next Big Thing?

Back in the 80’s, K40 was the first company to offer a built-in system with front and rear sensors and a directional display. Their current halo suite, the RL360i + Dual Diffuser Optix laser jammers ($2499 + install), remains excellent by traditional standards. The laser jammers are software upgradeable via USB, but it lacks radar filtration upgradeability and integration with crowdsourced platforms.

Back to Waze, again.

K40 has a major product announcement coming. K40 was the thing until the V1 came along. Maybe they'll surprise us with something nuts, like two-way data sharing with Waze.

Now that would be something.

What if you don’t want to spend $3500+?

There are two standalone alternatives, but you lose the laser jamming, and you better not leave them on your windshield or in a door pocket if you park your car in a major metro area.

Option 1: Get a good phone mount, install Waze or Escort Live (subscription version), and buy the standalone Escort Max 360 for $649. I used one to set three Cannonball records last year, including the Key West to Seattle run in 45 hours and 24 minutes. It’s the wise man’s choice, ready to roll and easy to use.

Option 2: For the hardcore tinkerer on a budget, you can still go out and buy the old standard, the V1, mail it in periodically for the latest update, and don’t forget the concealed display kit. You’re at around $500 already, plus all the accessories you need to cobble together the functionality you want by adding the Bluetooth module, and third party software like YaV1 or V1Driver, and a good phone mount, etc. Then it’s time to watch a video about how to program it, then watch another video, then program it, then download something else that sort of works with Waze, and hope you got the frequencies right, then make a video about how your custom-built suite is better than anything else at any price, then start all over again because of some negative comments on Reddit.

Option 3: All of this is insane. Drive the speed limit. Get a driver. Wait for self-driving cars.

Alex Roy, entrepreneur, President of Europe By Car, Editor-at-Large for The Drive, and author of The Driver, set the 2007 Transcontinental “Cannonball Run” Record in a BMW M5 in 31 hours & 4 minutes, and has set multiple driving records in Europe & the USA in the EV, 3-wheeler & Semi-Autonomous Classes. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Dear Elon:

Just over 100 years ago, Erwin “Cannonball” Baker drove a Stutz Bearcat from Los Angeles to New York City in 271 hours, ushering in the era of coast-to-coast endurance driving records that still bear his nickname. Although “Cannonballing” is often conflated with reckless driving, Baker’s feat—and his 142 records that followed—was intended to demonstrate the safety and reliability of the internal combustion technology that would transform the 20th century.

With your claim that a Tesla will make the first “full self-driving” cross-country run before the end of 2017, a new era is about to dawn, and with it a new series of records showcasing the electric and autonomous technologies that will transform the 21st.

Among all the potential benefits of self-driving cars, the moral imperative to reduce injuries and deaths caused by human driving towers above all others. Tesla already commands 40% of global press in the automotive sector; combined with the hope, fear and anticipation over the arrival of self-driving cars, the first Level 4 Cannonball Run record will be one of the most important events in the history of transportation, if not human history.

The public spectacle of a Tesla’s safe journey across the United States will likely become the hinge upon which public faith in autonomous driving will swing.

But only if the public believes it.

An edited video isn’t going to cut it.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Every great leap in the history of human and technological achievement is one that inspires those that follow to greater feats. Any such claim clouded with doubt only leads to disappointment, acrimony and loss of faith extending far beyond the original effort.

If the “full self-driving” Tesla Cannonball is to serve your broader goals, it is essential that the claim meet an incontrovertible evidentiary standard exceeding that of any prior effort — human or autonomous. Anything less harms not only Tesla, but industry-wide efforts to develop autonomous driving technologies that will save 1M+ lives a year.

What follows is a summary of prior evidentiary standards, with one critical addition. Whereas the most effective demonstration of Level 4 autonomy would logically exclude any passengers from the vehicle, no less than two humans must be in that Tesla, for reasons I shall explain.

The History of Cannonball Evidentiary Standards

The history of Cannonball Run records is filled with wild claims, starting with Cannonball Baker himself. Who is to say that any or all of his 143 claimed records occurred as his Wiki suggests? The historical record is weak. Baker was paid by manufacturers for many of them, and often accompanied by witnesses in an era when journalism standards were even lower than those of most fake news sites today.

Baker’s presumed standard for his early records — alleged 3rd party “journalists” and some still images — would barely suffice for a Facebook boast today. Why are Baker’s early records still taken at face value? Probably because of the volume of reporting, the lack of modern recording methods, and the difficulty of refuting his claims.

Brock Yates’ multi-car “Cannonball Run” races (1971-1979) added multiple 3d party witnesses — real journalists, bystanders and rival teams — and fragmented film/video recordings. Time cards were punched at both ends, but record keeping was porous. Cheating was allegedly rampant, but the details have been lost to history, obscured by the popularity of the eponymous film with Burt Reynolds and Farrah Fawcett.

The top secret U.S. Express races (1980-1983) were the first with real standards, partially due to the participation of now-famous tech figures like Will Wright and his co-driver, the futurist Richard Doherty, who was also the race organizer. They agreed that a time clock should be flown from the start to the finish, and that time cards, toll and fuel receipts be gathered at the end.

Despite these precautions, the record set in 1983 — an incredible 32 hours and 7 minutes — remained disputed until my book and a documentary on the topic were released. Many veterans from 1983 have suggested that no subsequent record would be valid unless VIN numbers were recorded at both ends.

Numerous silly claims were made over the next two decades, until mid-2007, when television personality Richard Rawlings — the Brian Williams of automotive — claimed he and co-driver Dennis Collins set a new record of 31 hours and 59 minutes, all without a shred of evidence. The media picked up his preposterous story, until my team went public later that year with our time of 31 hours and 4 minutes, backed by the largest amount of evidence ever shared publicly.

I was keenly aware of the necessity of incontrovertible proof, not only for our own credibility, but to deter any false claims that might follow. Given the limitations of video hardware, storage methods and bandwidth at the time, we resorted to multiple overlapping methods which could be easily corroborated:

1. Time cards — w/clock flown from New York to LA
2. All fuel/toll receipts
3. 3rd Parties — including journalists from Wired & Jalopnik
4. 3rd Parties — our attorneys, families, and veterans of the U.S. Express at both ends
5. Spotter Plane — shooting stills/video during daylight hours
6. In-Car Video — from multiple cameras, including thermal/night vision
7. GPS Tracks — recorded on four Garmin GPS units, the only digital record employed

Despite these precautions, it took the editors of Wired and The New York Times several months to validate our claim.

Our evidentiary standard was so high that it deterred any other claims until 2013, when Ed Bolian & David Black claimed a run of 28 hours and 50 minutes. Their decision to eschew journalists and video led to some controversy, but once they made their GPS data and witness list public they were granted the credibility they deserve.

My most recent record—the 2016 Tesla EV/semi-autonomous Cannonball Run of 55 hours (including charging)—returned to the evidentiary standard we set in 2007, and no claims have been made since.

Impressive, but Tesla can and must do better. The world is watching. For every naysayer betting on your failure, countless more want you to succeed. Everyone knows which side I’m on.

The Evidentiary Standard Tesla Needs To Meet

Tesla’s upcoming claim needs to substantiated such that no critic can call it a hoax, and no competitor can subsequently claim to have beaten it by meeting a lower standard.

A 2017 record must use 2017 technology, which means exploiting the latest in bandwidth improvements, hardware miniaturization and social platforms. Anything omission in content gathering and propagation will be mercilessly exploited by a clickbait driven media and the kneejerk opposition of those who seek to gain from Tesla’s failure — real or perceived.

A Tesla “full-self driving” record therefore requires:

1. Real-Time Streaming Video In-Car—uninterrupted, bandwidth permitting
2. Real-Time GPS Tracking—available online, to the public

Throw in invitations to your most loyal fans, customers & the media:

3. Predetermined Supercharging Stops—with multiple 3rd party witnesses

And then add the human glue:

4. Passengers

Why are passengers essential? Because the goal of the full self-driving Tesla Cannonball isn’t merely a technological demonstration. Total elapsed time is irrelevant.

All that matters is trust.

Not the ten minutes of trust Uber and Waymo’s passengers place in a car driving them crosstown. I’m talking about trusting a Tesla to drive itself <3000 miles over three days, on the same route made mythic by Cannonball Baker himself. Nothing short of passengers — at least one of whom is not a Tesla employee — will suffice in demonstrating that trust.

Who Should Be In That Car

There are <10 journalists in the world with the writing skill, the technical knowledge, the audience and the desire to be part of this historic effort. The appropriate passengers must also be comfortable sleeping, writing, managing media and broadcasting from a moving vehicle not under their control for just under two days.

That probably cuts the number to five.

Among them, I’m the only one with any relevant endurance driving or racing experience, including a masochistic 41 hour run in a Morgan 3-Wheeler in wintertime, and multiple semi-autonomous driving records set in the USA, Sweden and Spain, in both Teslas and other brands. I wrote the deepest comparison between Tesla Autopilot and rivals’ suites to date, which has been widely circulated within Tesla, and cited by many owners as having compelled them to buy one.

Given my unique contribution to the history of endurance driving records, my credibility among both supporters and skeptics of self-driving cars, my specialized knowledge of autonomous driving technology, and my position as Editor-at-Large for Time’s automotive portal The Drive, I hope you will see the value of having me in the car that will make history.

Two days is a long time to spend in a car alone. I hope you choose to send a second person I can get along with. Here’s an idea: you take the back seat, and I’ll take the front. We can always play Civ head-to-head to pass the time.

Love & kisses,

Alex

Alex Roy is Editor-at-Large for The Drive, author of The Driver, founder of Polizei 144, and has set numerous endurance driving records, including the 2007 Transcontinental “Cannonball Run” Record in 31 hours & 4 minutes. You may follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Who is really #1 in self-driving cars? You wouldn’t know it from this week’s unintentionally entertaining Navigant Research Leaderboard Report on Automated Driving, which placed Ford first, GM second and Renault-Nissan third. Waymo? Seventh. Tesla? Twelfth. The media—most of whom appear not to have paid $3,800 to read the raw report—lapped it up. Wired’s summary ran with the mother-of-all-clickbait heds, “Detroit Is Stomping Silicon Valley In The Self-Driving Car Race.”

The Navigant report is well researched—it’s Navigant, after all—but it has one major flaw: It doesn’t really make sense.

No less than Elon Musk biographer Ashlee Vance launched a Twitter war against Navigant's Senior Analyst Sam Abuelsamid, suggesting the report was skewed by the company's client list, which includes Ford and other companies that ranked higher than conventional wisdom would suggest. I disagree with Vance. Navigant has a long history of transparency and authoritative research. The authors’ credibility—especially that of the widely respected Abuelsamid—is unimpeachable.

The problem isn’t with Navigant’s research, it’s with the report’s scope and methodology.

The overall thesis—that self-driving technology is nothing without the might of a traditional manufacturer behind it—is as myopic as Silicon Valley’s belief that technology investments alone can “disrupt” the car industry.

This type of disruption mythology makes me sick. Disruption isn’t magic. Disruption isn’t the art of executing an idea competitors can’t or won’t. Disruption is the science of executing an idea better than competitors can or will. Disruption mythology harms both sides of an industry under attack, because it masks the nature of realities everyone must face if they want to survive and prosper.

Navigant’s report is a perfect example of counter-disruption mythology, a document that satisfies a calcified industry who want to believe buying is as good as building, money can solve for time, and being a Foxconn in a new transportation paradigm is for losers.

What Does The Navigant Report Really Say?
The report’s actual title is “Assessment of Strategy & Execution for 18 Companies Developing Automated Driving Systems.” The report is very impressive, but you don’t need to read past the abstract to recognize its inherent flaw. Here are the ten criteria by which Navigant ranked the players:

1. Vision
2. Go-To-Market Strategy
3. Partners
4. Production Strategy
5. Technology
6. Sales, Marketing & Distribution
7. Product Capability
8. Product Quality & Reliability
9. Product Portfolio
10. Staying Power

That sounds like a pretty comprehensive set of criteria, but by giving them all equal weighting, Navigant presupposes the car industry will stay pretty much as it is, that self-driving cars will be built and marketed through existing channels, and that new channels/platforms will be controlled or owned by existing manufacturers.

By making technology only 1/10th of any given player’s score, numerous car manufacturers outrank even the most advanced Silicon Valley players, and would do so even if the formers’ R&D budgets dropped to zero.

Two missing criteria? Government relations and data.

Self-driving cars won’t become ubiquitous overnight. Different types of vehicles will propagate—on different software platforms, in different regions—based on local laws, all of which depend on wildly expensive, long-term lobbying efforts. Whichever platform/car conforms to local laws first—especially if they helped define those laws during R&D—wins.

Once hardware is commoditized, software is everything. Actually, it isn’t everything. Data is, because data is the fuel that feeds self-driving technology, or, as Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated, "data is the new oil." The greatest AI in the world needs data—mountains and mountains of data it can turn into information to act upon.

Here’s Navigant’s list by rank:

1. Ford
2. GM
3. Renault-Nissan Alliance
4. Daimler
5. VW Group
6. BMW
7. Waymo
8. Volvo/Autoliv/Zenuity
9. Delphi
10. Hyundai Motor Group
11. PSA
12. Tesla
13. ZF
14. Toyota
15. Honda
16. Uber
17. nuTonomy
18. Baidu

If technology and data gathering were the only criteria, the list should look like this:

1. Waymo
2. Tesla
3. The other Americans
4. The Germans
5. Volvo
6. Hyundai
7. The Japanese
8. FCA

Of course, it's difficult to find anyone who disputes Waymo’s advantage. One could debate swapping Waymo and Tesla’s rankings, but I’ll leave that to the experts on Twitter. Waymo and Tesla have gathered orders of magnitude more data than anyone else, but the precise nature of the data, the rate at which they’re gathering it, and the value of that data is difficult to ascertain.

What about George Hotz's Comma.ai, with nearly 1M miles of data, including video? Hard to say what that’s worth without knowing how much and what kind of data automakers have gathered. Maybe there’s a reason they’ve been so quiet on the data front.

What about government relations? Fairly opaque, but stealth startup Zoox’s example highlights the folly of trusting Navigant’s methodology. Former NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind just joined Zoox’s management team. I’d call that a pretty big advantage. Zoox has raised $290 million and is rumored to have drafted self-driving car legislation in multiple states.

Zoox isn’t even mentioned in the report.

Tier 1 suppliers Delphi and ZF are on it, but Bosch isn’t. Does NVIDIA deserve a spot? How much credit is Volvo getting from the Autoliv/Zenuity alliance? How much of BMW’s position is derived from the Intel/Mobileye partnership?

Imagine the same list for the computer industry. Would you place Foxconn on the same list as Apple and Dell, and declare Foxconn the loser? Of course not, and yet Navigant has ranked key suppliers in the self-driving “race” alongside manufacturers with whom they share few (if any) characteristics.

So who is really #1 in Self-Driving Cars?

This one’s easy. The company closest to delivering a Level 4 self-driving car—even if it’s geofenced. Why? Because multiple overlapping industries will realign overnight, from car rental to sharing platforms to public transportation. It will be exactly like bringing a gun to a knife fight (but without the guns or knives). Mobility is the watchword, and self-driving technology is a foundation element. Everyone will want in and nothing will be sacred. Whomever can deliver will be able to pick and choose their partners, as no one can afford to be left out. If Morgan Stanley is right when they say that only six car companies are likely to survive, then the only question is who will be happy to play Foxconn in exchange for the technology they lack.

By that standard, Waymo and Tesla are tied for first in the only race that matters: the mobility race. If it’s Waymo, they’ll be able to sign up everyone low on Navigant’s list (and unlisted players like FCA), forming an alliance eradicating any lead held by those higher up on the report. If it’s Tesla, their allegedly inflated stock price will justify itself, spike overnight, and crack open capital markets guaranteeing not only the survival the shorts love to question, but long-term dominance of a sector whose future shape remains unclear.

I'd bet on Waymo, who already have a partnership with FCA.

As Brad Templeton pointed out, Navigant’s rankings aren’t completely wrong, but a true leaderboard would have to include alliances whose true nature remains unclear, define all the players across the mobility continuum, and attempt to define the nature of “mobility” itself. Silicon Valley and traditional automakers need each other, but they don’t need all of each other. Beware reports with conclusions born in a vacuum, for that’s where billions of dollars are most likely to disappear.

Alex Roy is Editor-at-Large for The Drive, host of Autonocast.com and /DRIVE on NBC Sports, author of The Driver, and set the 2007 Transcontinental “Cannonball Run” Record in 31 hours & 4 minutes. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

On May 2, 2011, a group of special operators from the top secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) descended on an unassuming compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In an ensuing fire-fight, members of SEAL Team Six shot and killed infamous Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Due to an accident during the operation, the elite troops had to leave behind evidence of previously unknown stealthy transport helicopter, likely related at least in part to the ubiquitous UH-60 Black Hawk.

The incident offered a rare window into the activities of the U.S. military’s most secret aviators and a look at their unique aircraft. Although the secretive 160th Special Operations Air Regiment, otherwise known as the "Nightstalkers," may get all the attention, layers of clandestine units far more obscure exist. Some of them are silently blazing the path for special operations aviation's future.

Though they often involve various military units and personnel from intelligence agencies, these sort of “black ops” are most commonly associated with the nebulous JSOC. When planning America’s most demanding military operations, which officials in Washington might never admit even occurred, these elements sometimes need very specialized aerial support.

So, with help primarily from the U.S. Army and Air Force, the Pentagon has steadily formed a permanent and secretive infrastructure to provide aircraft and helicopters for these missions. As of January 2017, this included at least four different units across the services and within JSOC itself: the joint Aviation Tactics Evaluation Group (AVTEG), the Army’s Flight Concepts Division and the Air Force’s 66th Air Operations Squadron and 427th Special Operations Squadron.

The bland-sounding AVTEG is situated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and JSOC. While little is known about this organization, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we can now present its official organization. The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) provided the following chart in response to a request for information about the group's organizational structure.

The breakdown is almost completely standard. A unit made up of individuals from across the services, AVTEG has a command group and seven “joint” offices, including typical administrative, operational and supporting elements.

The numbering scheme is standard across the Pentagon and the absence of a “J7” – usually set aside for a group in charge of creating joint operational plans, doctrine, training materials and exercises – is not necessarily notable. The sections specifically for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (C4I) and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) – distinct from the common operational and intelligence components - are more unusual.

With no description of the functions of these offices or details about their size and associated equipment, the chart provokes more questions than it answers. We have no idea whether or not it is even complete. Of course, none of that is surprising.

Details about the other units are similarly scant. The Air Force Historical Research Agency, which had official records on every unit in the service, has nothing in its file for the 427th after 1972. It does not list the 66th among active squadrons on its website, either.

It is possible that these are unofficial or cover designations rather than the formal nomenclature. However, the 427th resides at Pope Airfield in North Carolina and “provides U.S. Army [special operations forces] personnel opportunities to train on various types of aircraft for infiltration and exfiltration that they may encounter in lesser-developed training,” according to an official mission description that aviation researcher Andreas Parsch obtained through his own Freedom of Information Act request.

The only readily available public mention of the 66th is from an Air Force manual on forward-area refueling point (FARP) operations, which also name drops AVTEG. Both units are exempted from over-arching rules regarding pre-site surveys and “for short-notice exercises and contingencies, AVTEG and 66 AOS may authorize the use of temporary FARP sites” based on the service’s approved parameters, according to the handbook. Oh, and there’s also its awesome patch.

Researchers and journalists have found evidence that these Air Force squadrons fly a mix of traditional military type aircraft like the C-130 and less common types, including Cessna C-208 Grand Caravans, Pilatus PC-6s, and CASA 212s and C-295s, over the years. The service went so far as to assign the official designations U-27A and C-41A to the Caravan and 212, respectively.

There is even less information about the Flight Concepts Division or what aircraft it has in its inventory. But it would be reasonable to expect its fleet includes a diverse collection of American and foreign aircraft.

In his 2015 book Relentless Strike, Sean Naylor said this unit had quietly transformed into the E Squadron of the Army’s equally secret 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment D, more commonly known Delta Force. However, on July 8, 2015, Army Colonel Paul Olsen briefed Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Norfolk District’s work, in which he described work on the Flight Concepts Division’s hangar as something “you will soon see.” Again, its possible that one or more cover names is in use to refer to these units.

The obscure building itself sits secluded at Fort Eustis, Virginia behind multiple layers of fencing. The base’s fire chief isn’t even allowed in to check things out for emergency planning purposes. “Research activities are also conducted by the Flight Concepts Division that is highly secret and access for pre-planning purpose is non-existent,” an undated job posting explains. “Nature of their work is known to be hazardous.”

The exact relationship between these units, as well as AVTEG, remains unclear. There is, understandably, little official information available. A cursory Google search of .mil websites mainly turns up biographies of officers who list one of the elements among their previous positions, as well as vague job postings. Titles like "operations officer," “troop commander,” and “fire support officer” are just standard military positions that offer no obvious clues as to the specific nature of the missions – no doubt by design.

Of course, the U.S. military has had these types of units for decades. However, by and large, they had historically been ad hoc formations that lasted only as long as specific conflicts. During World War II, in Europe, what was then the Army Air Forces used modified attack planes and medium and heavy bombers to drop intelligence agents behind enemy lines, insert Office of Strategic Services (OSS) teams – a precursor to both the Central Intelligence Agency and Army Special Forces – and resupply those efforts and friendly partisan troops.

From the United Kingdom, the Eighth Air Force’s used the nicknamed “Carpetbagger” for its component of these operations. The 801st Bomb Group (Provisional) and then the 492nd Bomb Group flew the actual missions with a mix fleet of B-24 Liberators, C-47 Skytrains, A-26C Invaders and British Mosquitoes.

Another unit, which ultimately became the 885th Bomb Squadron (Heavy) (Special), conducted its own sorties first from sites in North Africa and then from bases in Italy. Similar “air commandos” supported operations in China, India and Southeast Asia, including providing dedicated air support for allied guerrilla units such as Merrill’s Marauders – the predecessors of the 75th Ranger Regiment – and the British Chindits.

When the war ended, the Pentagon shut them down, only to have to bring them back for the Korean War. This procedure continued for covert and clandestine missions around the world for much of the Cold War. The CIA created its own network of cover companies, including the famous Air America, for similar duties.

By the time America’s war in Southeast Asia was in full swing, things had not changed dramatically. To support an explosion of so-called “special activities” – covert and clandestine missions requiring the United States to be able to plausible deny involvement – in South Vietnam, Laos and then Cambodia, the Pentagon rushed to stand up new secretive aviation units.

In 1964, the top U.S. military headquarters in Vietnam created a single entity to handle these top-secret operations, blandly titled the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG). Though regular and special operations units worked with MACV-SOG, the Airborne Studies Group (OPS-36) was responsible for dropping agents and propaganda leaflets into North Vietnam and Laos, as well as parachuting supplies to teams already on the ground.

The group’s First Flight Detachment at Nha Trang had six specially modified twin-engine C-123 Provider transports sporting a special dark-colored camouflage paint job and equipped with special navigational and communications gear. To help conceal American involvement in this operation, nicknamed Heavy Hook, American personnel trained Taiwanese and Vietnamese crews to fly the actual missions. Special brackets on the sides allowed personnel on the ground to swap out American and South Vietnamese Air Force insignia as necessary.

The C-123s were not particularly popular for the demanding missions. “The C-123 load capacity, operating range, and inability to fly in adverse weather greatly hampered airborne operations,” one 1964 review explained, according to a subsequent Air Force study of special missions. After initially resorting to shorter range helicopters, in 1965, the Pentagon approved plans to convert a number of four-engine C-130Es for specialized missions in Vietnam and elsewhere. These aircraft were the forerunners of the MC-130E Combat Talon and arrived at Nha Trang in 1966, where they joined the 15th Special Operations Squadron.

For a time, both the 15th and First Flight Detachment flew together. MACV-SOG used the codename “Heavy Chain” for missions involving C-130s. Air Force and Army UH-1, CH-3, and CH-53 helicopters, along with Air America and other private companies working for the CIA also provided support to MACV-SOG and other clandestine units in the region.

But "throughout the Vietnam conflict, [unconventional warfare] operations were tainted with the constant infusion of conventional military thinking," the Air Force complained in its post-war review of special activities. "'Dedicated air assets' was a concept antithetical to the Air Force concept of the Single Manager – centralized control."

So, despite these activities, when the Pentagon decided to launch Operation Ivory Coast in 1970, the daring raid on the Son Tay prison camp in North Vietnam, officials had to craft yet another temporary task force. This process repeated itself nearly a decade later for Operation Eagle Claw, the attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran who had been swept up in the country’s revolution.

That embarrassing debacle, which left eight Americans dead at a remote site named Desert One, provoked a significant amount of soul searching in Washington and increased support for developing a standing set of special operations units to respond to various crises. International terrorism, the War on Drugs, and continued Soviet-backed insurgencies had already contributed to the Army’s decision to create Delta Force in 1979 and the U.S. Navy forming SEAL Team Six the following year. This in turn led the U.S. military to ultimately create new secretive aviation elements to support those forces.

The most notable of these was a shared CIA and Army special operations element codenamed Seaspray, which reportedly had a mixed fleet of Hughes 500D helicopters and Cessna Grand Caravan and Beechcraft King Air fixed-wing aircraft. The Agency already had significant experience with flying specialized helicopters on top-secret missions, having crafted a pair of ultra-quiet, long-range, night-flying Hughes 500Ps as part of a project to tap phone lines in North Vietnam.

Based at Fort Eustis, the group flew covert and clandestine missions from the Middle East to Latin America, routinely working with Delta Force, SEAL Team Six and the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity. Authorities in Washington ultimately decided to clearly delineate the responsibilities of intelligence agencies from the military and gave the Army full control of the unit, who renamed it the Flight Concepts Division. The force has continued to operate since then, shielding its operations for at least for a time under the codename Quasar Talent, according to Michael Smith’s Killer Elite.

Though there is no official public record, it is likely the Air Force established the 427th and the 66th after Seaspray came under full military control as part of the Pentagon expanding these aviation capabilities. But there is little doubt these special operations aviators have been busy since the 1990s, though it may take decades for any formal information about their latest operations to come out into the light.

In December 2001, Russian authorities arrested a group of contractors working for the Army – reportedly for the Flight Concepts Division – and the CIA in the far-eastern city of Petropavlovsk. The group was trying to surreptitiously buy Mi-17 transport helicopters for operations in Afghanistan.

Nearly a decade later, there was the Bin Laden raid in Pakistan. Though members of the Army's elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment reportedly flew the stealthy chopper, this was precisely the sort of product one could expect to see come out AVTEG or the Flight Concepts Division.

There's also the matter of these shadowy Sikorsky S-92 helicopters operating in northern Syria surfaced on social media. For more than a year, these mysterious choppers had made appearances first at a major U.S. military base in Djibouti, then in Erbil in northern Iraq, and finally near the city of Kobani in Syria.

No one seems to know who owns these rotorcraft, which have been devoid of any national markings, but they could belong to various U.S. government outfits or another regional actor. Officially the Pentagon does not operate the S-92, but it is exactly the kind of "non-standard" or "off-the-books" aircraft AVTEG or another of the secret aviation elements might provide for discreet operations.

The fact that we don’t know for sure is the entire point of having these groups in the first place. We may just have to wait for another tidbit to turn up through FOIA – and hopefully not another accident during an actual operation – for the next set of new details to emerge.

Contact the author: jtrevithickpr@gmail.com

Lost in the putrid cloud of self-driving car clickbait, the Department of Transportation’s Advisory Committee on Automation in Transportation held its first meeting on January 16th, 2017. One look at its members is all it takes to know whose lobbying dollars hold sway in Washington. The largest constituency? A bloc including Apple, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Waymo and Zoox, all of whom profit from you losing your steering wheel as soon as possible. They may cite safety, but there is only one objective voice on the panel, a man with true life and death experience at the intersection of human skill and automation:

Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.

In a world where political hacks and “experts” are increasingly replacing those with real-world experience, Sully’s inclusion on the panel is a revelation. Best known for The Miracle on the Hudson, Sully’s entire career has been devoted to safety. Look past the mythology, and his is the story of the opportunity, danger and cost inherent to sacrificing skilled humans on the altar of automation. Sully has written and spoken extensively on the criticality of training and compensation for airline pilots, and his insights have clear applications to the future of the trucking industry.

In a recent interview, Sully made clear three simple messages: 1) we need real standards for self-driving cars, 2) the industry needs to reboot its approach to semi-autonomous cars, and 3) drivers education “is a national disgrace.”

Sully also ends his interview with a singularly authoritative message about human driving. TL:DR? If you love driving, read this to the end.

One more critical point. For those unfamiliar with the term, “flight envelope protections” automatically prevent pilots from exceeding a plane’s operational limits, akin to a car limiting how far you can turn the steering wheel, or push the gas pedal. Such systems are standard on all Airbus aircraft, but not Boeing. Debate has raged for decades over whether Airbus’s higher level of automation is actually safer than Boeing’s more human-centric approach. Although Sully’s miracle landing was in an Airbus, he’s experienced in both. Neither are capable of going gate-to-gate without human operators. Their differences highlight the lack of consensus not only in aviation, but on the ground, where Tesla differs with traditional automakers over the safe implementation of semi-autonomous features.

Here’s our interview, edited for clarity:

The Drive: How is that you came to join the DOT’s panel on automation?

Sully: I’ve spent my entire professional life becoming an expert at and thinking deeply about how one uses technology. We need to assign the best possible role to the human component and the technological component, taking into mind the weaknesses and strengths of each. To make the designs we implement and use complementary is one of the most critically important decisions that we must make. It is important that we assign the appropriate roles to the human component and technological component. Even in autonomous vehicles, humans are involved very much in the design, the implementation and the maintenance of these devices, and we must assign the proper roles to each part of the technology.

Two things jump out at me in any attempt to make important recommendations going forward. We have to account for what we cannot know yet. We have to allow for the unknown unknowns. The second critical issue is that we have to decide if there will be the possibility of human intervention in case the technology isn’t doing what we want, or what’s best for that situation.

If we acknowledge that based upon our experience in other modes of transportation—and I’m talking specifically about commercial aviation—that if you require the technology to be used almost all the time, you make it much less likely that humans will be able to effectively and quickly intervene.

In that case the technology has to be so good, so resilient, so adaptable and so reliable that human intervention is never necessary. That’s a very, very high bar. The more you take humans out of engagement with the process, the less likely you make them able to quickly and effectively intervene. If that’s the case, you must make it so good that they never have to.

Do you think we will see 100% automation of flying such that pilots can come out of commercial aircraft?

I don’t know. I think in the distant future that might be a possibility. Not in the near term, in my lifetime. I think it’s likely that even if it were thought to be technologically possible, it wouldn’t be acceptable to those participating. I don’t think it’s the way to go.

We may have gone too far in the use of technology that removes human operators from immediate engagement with the process. This degrades their manual skills and leaves them with less confidence to be able to quickly and effectively intervene.

Some [pilots] have continued to use technology past the point when they should have abandoned it, or used degraded modes of technology, or even taken over completely manually. They wait too long to intervene and often it’s too late. That’s been true in several seminal historic accidents in the last several years.

The greater concern in aviation-based studies I’ve seen is that not only are manual flying skills degraded—which decreases confidence and the timeliness of the intervention—the greater concern is actually the lack of constant mental engagement with the operating process, which means that analytical skills are also degraded.

By not being constantly involved and engaged in the process, we’re less able to quickly analyze what’s going wrong and determine what needs to be done. That also delays the response. It delays the ability to quickly and effectively intervene in case it’s necessary, either when the technology fails, or where it’s not doing what we want, or what’s necessary in that phase of the flight.

I think we really need to rethink our cockpits and areas like nuclear power control rooms. Any critical function where safety is so important, we need to make sure we’re assigning the proper roles to the human and the technological components. If we don’t do that there are unintended consequences that can actually degrade safety of the system as a whole.

The obvious example in aviation is Air France 447, where the crew’s situational awareness was so poor.

When we assign technology as the doer and the human component as the monitor, we’re doing it backwards. Humans are inherently poor monitors. It’s very difficult for a TSA screener to do it, or for the pilot who’s on a 16-hour flight to be monitoring their technology for the whole time, avoiding that one chance in hundreds or perhaps thousands — where it’s not doing what it should — and having the skill and competence to quickly intervene.

The concept we’re talking about is knowing what roles one has in the cockpit.

It would be much better — at least at a conceptual level — for humans to have more direct engagement with the operation, and technology to provide guardrails to prevent us from making egregious errors, and to monitor our performance. That would be, in terms of our inherent abilities and limitations, a much better way to go.

Regarding your Hudson water landing, it would appear that because you were in an Airbus, with flight envelope protections, you were able to focus on decision-making rather than managing of the aircraft itself. It seems as if a less experienced pilot in that seat would not have been able to make the decisions you made. Or—if it had been a Boeing—the pilots might have had to spend more time managing the aircraft rather than deciding where to put down. Does that make sense?

Sully: It does, but I wouldn’t go quite that far. I think had we been in a Boeing, as long as the airplane was similarly configured with wing mounted engines, etc., we would have had a similar outcome.

I don’t think whether it was an Airbus or Boeing really made much difference at all, because we never approached the limits of the flight envelope protections. A little known part of the experience is that not only did we not exceed the limitations beyond which the Airbus flight control protections would have protected us from ourselves, but at the very end of the flight, right as we were landing and trading some of our forward velocity for a reduced-rate of descent at touchdown—in other words, raising the nose to achieve the maximum aerodynamic performance of the wing right before landing—a little known part of the software of the Airbus flight control system inhibited me from achieving the last bit of lift out of the wing, even though I was not yet at maximum performance of the wing.

As I was calling for more performance from the wing by continually pulling back on the sidestick to raise the nose even more to make it a softer touchdown, the Phugoid mode of the Airbus flight control software prohibited me from achieving that last little bit of nose-up control, and we hit a little bit harder than I think we should have. There was a little bit more damage to the airplane, and water was being taken on after we landed a little bit faster than it would have if we had not struck so hard.

We did the best we could, considering we were using gravity to provide the forward motion of the airplane. We didn’t have engine thrust to make it a gentler touchdown. One flight attendant was injured when a piece of metal came up through the floor from the cargo compartment and gouged her leg. All those things happened in the last seconds of the flight where the flight control computers prevented me from achieving the maximum performance of the wing.

The protections that were there, we never really needed. One protection that nobody in the airlines—not even airline pilots, and only a few Airbus engineers knew about—is that the Phugoid mode would actually prevent me from getting that last little bit of lift and making a slightly softer touchdown. So it was a mixed blessing to have that protection in place, but I think if we were in a Boeing it would have been a similar outcome.

Have you driven a Tesla using their autopilot technology?

I have never driven a Tesla, but I’m sure we’re going to learn a lot about what the technology is, and how good it is. The other point I would make about this entire endeavor—especially in terms of terrestrial autonomous transportation—is that while we can look to a certain domain such as aviation for guidance, we have to realize the environment in which commercial aviation takes place is very different than your average everyday driving experience.

In aviation, we have professional pilots (for the most part) and well-designed equipment in a really sterile environment in terms of our processes, protocols, and our procedures. Think about the compliance we achieve with professional pilots and commercial aviation. Even though there is certainly ambiguity in commercial aviation in dealing with real world endeavors and situations and environmental conditions, it’s not nearly as messy as driving on the street, where drivers are much closer to each other.

We’re talking about separation of feet, not miles. We’re talking about narrow roads where there may be construction going on, or the striping is worn off, or where there are obstacles or animals or pedestrians nearby. It’s also not yet possible for technology to have vehicles automatically communicate to each other the way aircraft do, where they have Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems that actually talk to each other electronically. Autonomous vehicles must be very, very good about seeing in rain, fog, snow and darkness, and then be able to account for what other vehicles—autonomous or non-autonomous—may or may not do. It’s a much more difficult problem than what we’re seeing in aviation.

Do you think the manufacturers who are constraining autonomy until they can go all the way are correct? Or do you think Tesla’s incremental approach is the right one?

It’s difficult to know, because the tests have been done have been so differently, and the designs that they used have been so different among the variety of manufacturers. It’s difficult to draw broad conclusions at this point. What I will say is that based upon decades of experience in commercial aviation, as long as the human operator is immediately engaged in the process, I think it’s very helpful to have systems like lane departure warning and automatic emergency braking, technologies that can assist the operator to help avoid situations where a collision is caused because of distraction, or help assist the driver to react more quickly.

These are very useful because human performance among non-professional drivers in automobiles is, quite frankly, abysmal. With the increasing distractions of personal devices, paired with the increasing chances of legalization of certain substances in certain states, the former NTSB Chairman—who is now CEO of the National Safety Council—was on CBS yesterday talking about these issues, and how for the first time in decades, we’re seeing an increase in traffic deaths and collisions because of the factors I just mentioned.

I think those kinds of assistance technologies—again, the guardrail approach I’ve talked about; setting limits beyond which your vehicle cannot go even if the operator is impaired or distracted—are very helpful. That’s quite a different situation than going totally to a semi-autonomous vehicle where the operator is so disengaged, they’re unlikely to be able to quickly and effectively intervene. I think the danger is going to be...

...transitions?

Transitions.

There seems to be confusion between automation and augmentation in the automotive sector. People lower their attention, and their situational awareness is poor. Is the missing thing in automotive something like Airbus's flight envelope protections? I’m amazed we don’t see driving envelope protections, a holistic system unifying current and semi-autonomous safety technologies. Do you think that’s something we’re going to see more of in the coming years?

I think that would make sense based upon the experience we have had in commercial aviation. I think that would help, up to the point where people think that no matter what they do—no matter how distracted they become, no matter how impaired they are—that technology will save them. I think it’s unlikely that even Airbus-style protections can save people from themselves if they really feel like they’re invulnerable and they aren’t actively engaged as skilled, alert drivers.

So in this country we obviously have the lowest driver education standards in the western world.

Which is something I’ve written about before; I think it’s a national disgrace.

I hope you don’t mind if I quote you on that.

I hope that you do. What we’re doing currently in driving training is a joke and a national disgrace, and it’s costing lives. Real lives on a daily basis.

An investment in a national driver training program with higher standards would be a lot cheaper than a twenty-year, multi-trillion-dollar investment in automation, right?

I think the investment in automation will occur whether we choose as a nation to have it occur or not. That’s the direction that industry is going, but I agree with you that driver education could be more cost effective than the investment in technology. I would go one step further than that. The case that I would make—and this is something I’ve believed for a long time—is that the most effective thing that we can all do right now is to stop using our phones when we’re in a vehicle. That’s a personal choice that each of us could make now, today. That would save thousands of lives. More lives than would be saved than by any of these technologies, or by any of these training initiatives.

It’s really inexcusable. It’s a matter of people — because of their own unwillingness to put their immediate gratification aside — to have a sense of civic responsibility to those around them. They are choosing to do things that could easily wait, putting others at risk to great harm unnecessarily.

If we are really serious about safety, that is the first thing that we would do. We would make it completely socially unacceptable to do. We would have traffic stops for that alone, on every street, every day until people got the message that it’s going to be too expensive for them to continue to be so selfish, and that they’re putting others at risk for their immediate gratification. Everything they could do on a phone can wait, just like we waited to find out what was going on 10 or 15 years ago, before these devices existed.

There's something cultural or even psychological about the American notion of freedom that compels people to drive the way they do, often irresponsibly. Do you think that once Level 4 automation is commercially available that it will have to be mandated to get people to use it?

Sully: I don’t know, but what I do know is this: we as citizens should feel and act on a sense of civic duty. While we have the freedom to be stupid, it’s only up to the point it hurts someone else. We have a civic duty to be educated, well-informed and scientifically literate, so that we can understand important concepts and can vote intelligently. There really are things that we owe each other in this winner-take-all world. If we didn’t do these things, and occasionally put our own needs aside, and delay our gratification, everyday activities that we take for granted in our culture and society wouldn’t be possible.

Giving these little gifts of civic behavior to each other is what makes civilization possible. If we didn’t do these things, you couldn’t drive down the average street or highway. It would be suicidal to do so if everybody was running red lights constantly, if everyone was impaired, if everyone was doing something on their phone constantly, the body count would be much worse, even more than what it is today. I think we have to rethink our role in society and our relationship to others. We really aren’t completely islands to ourselves. I think that’s my underlying message, no matter what technology we’re using, no matter what mode of transportation we’re using, no matter what part of our society we’re talking about. We have to be intelligent citizens, capable of independent critical thought, scientifically literate, and make informed choices, thinking about how our choices have implications for those around us.

Thanks so much, Captain.

The bottom line? Sully supports a zero BS approach, whether it's automation or human driving. Until Level 4 self-driving cars arrive—and no one knows when they will—a skilled human operator with the best technology isn’t just the safest option, it’s also the fun one.

If you love driving, educate yourself as to your car's limits, whether hardware or software. Go to Skip Barber and safely enjoy your car while you can. The future is unknown. Hopefully, we'll have a choice.

Sully’s position sounds like what I think we’re going to end up with for a long, long time: augmented driving, which is not the same as semi-autonomy. What’s the difference? Stay tuned, because I’ve got a lot more to say about that in future columns…

Alex Roy is Editor-at-Large for The Drive, author of The Driver, and set the 2007 Transcontinental “Cannonball Run” Record in 31 hours & 4 minutes. You may follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

"You're one cheap ass motherfucker Roger!"

Roger White was staring out the dealership window and looking at the type of car that had made Southern Honda rich. A 1999 Honda Accord EX, white on tan, with 363,000 miles.

It had been bought new by its one and only owner, Joe Prescott. A food broker who made a small fortune of his own by selling imported foods from all over the world. His trunk came loaded up with samples and brochures for a massive food import company called Roland. One of the quiet 800 impound gorillas of the gourmet food industry which sold everything from Korean agar-agar to Costa Rican zucchini.

"You really want that damn thing Roger? That old Honda is about as wore out as an old mop!"

Joe lived in Savannah. But his job took him all over the southeastern seaboard which meant the Honda needed to pile on the miles no matter what. So Joe paid the premium. He would take his Honda in for service, and instead of staying in the deathly boring waiting room, he would have a nice chat with Roger. A guy Joe had known since high school, but didn't become friends with until he was in his late-50s.

Roger had helped Joe buy Hondas for his three daughters, two in-laws, and one deadbeat brother who was thankfully kept in a senior community. Joe had been widowed, but he also had absolutely no taste for the dating life since his wife, Karen, had been his one and only love. She was amazing. Loved kids, had no care in the world for stuff, and was as easy going and fun loving as anyone Joe had ever known. Ovarian cancer had killed his only true love and he wasn't about to desecrate his children's lives by marrying again.

So Karen's parents raised the daughters and Joe was there for a few evenings during the week and every weekend. It had been a busy lonely life. Joe began to realize that he needed something to break up the monotony of familiar business faces and canned speeches.

So he had an idea. Joe was going to operate his own food brokerage firm and began searching for his first salesperson.

It was tough to find anyone that was worth hiring. Nearly everyone lied or glorified their own backgrounds to the point where Joe jokingly wondered whether he should be the ones working for all these supposedly gifted souls.

"It's a damned clusterscrew of stupid people!" - Joe muttered as he was driving up to Southern Honda for his 360,000 mile service On Monday Joe had spent the entire day interviewing four people. He would come to remember that day as one when he interviewed "Two birdbrains with breasts... and two baboon bullshitters!". There had been so much phony cliche answers that Joe thanked the good Lord he never took that HR job straight out of college.

Then he saw Roger... and that was his Eureka moment. Joe remembered how Roger envied his free life away from all the loud mouths and do-nothings at the dealership who took credit for the achievements of others. After 22 years, Roger had found that he loved the normal people in his life. It was just the nuts and human circle jerks who were driving him crazy.

The Accord had gone through 48 oil changes, 3 timing belts, and 2 transmissions. The last was done at 345,000 miles, and Roger had been helpful in bringing the price down to a manageable $2400. If anyone deserved that Accord, it was Roger, and if anyone could handle the food brokerage business, it was a guy like Roger who could figure out how to make the squeaky wheels of his business get the grease. Most everyone in the food business was older, male, and an old hat in the field. Roger's laid back conversational nature would be the perfect fit.

"I'll trade-in the Accord for five hundred bucks if, and only if, you sell it to Roger right now for the same price." The sales manager knew that Joe had eyed a rare bird that had been sitting for months at the dealership. A 5-speed Accord, four-door Sport model in Hematite Metallic that had been shucked off to the Siberian outposts of the back lot.

Without even a thought, the sales manager stood up and shook Joe's hand.

"It's a deal Mr. Prescott. Glad to keep you in the family."

Joe went to the bathroom, When he came out, he heard that same sales manager blurt out the words that would set off the rattlesnake in him.

"You're one cheap ass motherfucker Roger!"

Joe was as angry as a hawk watching its young ones being taken. That Accord was his damn it! Who the hell did this guy think he was dealing with?

So he wandered back to to the service department and planned out what would become the second best question he would ever ask in his life.

"Roger, how would you like to travel, meet a lot of good folks, and never have to deal with that manager ever again?"

Most people would ask for a day or two to weigh in the offer. Others would have declined for fear of the unknown. But Roger White had the one thing no one else at that dealership had.

'Fuck you' money. He had earned a pension as a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy. $20,000 wasn't much to live on by itself. But Roger figured that if Joe wasn't blowing smoke, he would find the food business to be a perfect fit and the money would come eventually.

"Consider it so!", and with that Roger took Joe's so-called cheap Accord for another two years and 90,000 miles around the southeast. He enjoyed coffee and chocolates in Savannahs and beignets in New Orleans. The gourmet foods were an easy sell, just like the Hondas. But the fringe benefits were way better.

Last weekend Joe traded in his 'cheap White Honda' on a brand new Accord. A 2017 model EX-L with all the options. At 465,481 miles it still works fine. Just like Roger.

Will humans still drive in the future? I was recently asked to join the debate over at 2025AD, a blog focused on the year many have claimed will be the watershed for the arrival of self-driving cars. I'm pessimistic, but convinced there is a silver lining. My opponent? Journalist John McElroy, with whom I disagree bigly. Watch his video, then read this:

Will Humans Still Drive?

I’m of two minds on whether people will still drive.

The answer, of course, depends on one’s timeline. According to Fight Club, on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Apply this to driving: Once technological barriers to self-driving cars fall, the end of human driving seems inevitable. On a moral level, people shouldn’t be driving at all, if only for 1.) on a personal level, the unacceptably high chance of a fatal or injurious accident; 2.) on a societal level, the shared cost of emergency services dedicated to such events; and 3.) on an economic level, the inefficiencies of entire industries and government organs required to service even the minor accidents that plague our roadways.

As a result, I am absolutely convinced that human driving as we know it will be outlawed, beginning in major urban centers in the first world before spidering out across major arteries to form regional and national autonomous transportation networks linked with multi-modal nodes.

The tipping points won’t be for global, national, or even regional ubiquity, but for local, with interlocking threads slowly strengthening between nodes, intermixed with human-driven and semi-autonomous vehicles.

Whether I like this future is another story.

The Dichotomy of Driving

The moral argument for mandating autonomy is in direct conflict with a fundamental truth underlying human nature. For many, acquiring a driver’s license is a rite of passage that leads to an ownership dream more accessible than home-ownership, and makes real a concept of freedom inextricably linked to a machine that doubles as a figurative expression of self.

There are only two messages in car ads: Have More Sex (one could argue Be More Successful is in there, but that one is pretty much just a subliminal springboard to Have More Sex) and Do You Love Your Family?

This dichotomy tells the entire story of whether people will still drive, because we all know exactly which message will be used to compel people to stop.

On a cultural level, cars are not merely transportation, but transformation. How we drive and what we drive are two axes on the chart of self-expression. However more efficient or safe an autonomous vehicle, it may prove impossible to convince people to relinquish this channel of self-expression without a massive generational shift, if ever, unless forced.

If cars were merely transportation, sports cars wouldn’t exist. Nor would the majority of highly profitable cosmetic and performance options, or the entire aftermarket sector.

Driverless Cars: An Urban-Rural Gap?

Fortunes have been lost betting against human nature, and anyone who believes driving should be mandated out of existence before culture demands it is in for a bitter fight. It’s easy to believe human driving could be banned in Manhattan, Paris, or London on a ten- or fifteen-year timeline. Inspect a map of the United States, however, and overlay voting patterns in the most recent Presidential election, and a picture emerges of the timeline for cultural acceptance of full autonomy.

Texas? Good luck with that.

There are over 274,000,000 cars in the United States, with approximately a 17M car/year turnover. Even if 100 percent of cars sold today were self-driving, it would take 16 years to get to ubiquity. Chris Gerdes, Chief Innovation Officer for the DOT, has said he thinks 35 percent of the cars on the road in the United States will be self-driving in ten years. To get there, 100 percent of the cars sold would have to be self-driving by 2021.

Aggressive, and unlikely.

The fifty-year scenario—the only one that matters to anyone making investments today—is vastly different than the clickbait-hungry media would have us believe. The automotive industry’s focus on reaching full autonomy, and apparent fear and resentment of semi-autonomous technologies like Tesla’s, has poisoned any honest discussion over what’s likely to happen before full autonomy becomes ubiquitous.

The biggest opportunity in the near- and mid-term isn’t full autonomy, it’s the universe of products and services that will orbit semi-autonomy, occasionally overlapping with the onset of full autonomy, based on geography.

Acceptance Will Not Pop Up Overnight

Over time, a patchwork quilt of autonomy-mandated, autonomy-optional, and autonomy-banned zones will emerge. An equilibrium between technologies will be reached, followed by a long plateau upon which people will slowly come to accept increasing levels of automation. Parallel forms of transportation will evolve and interlock with semi and fully autonomous driving, finally giving meaning to the word “mobility”, which has so far been no more than a catchphrase concealing a lack of clear vision for transportation’s future.

Pure autonomy brands will prosper, if they accept the limited scope of near and mid-term acceptance, and fill demand rather than try to create it. Pure driving brands will also prosper, as generations raised on human driving cling more closely to concepts of agency and identity rooted in control and ownership.

Brands that hedge and dilute a century of association with one of the two overarching messages behind automotive marketing will suffer. Porsche has wisely distanced themselves from full autonomy, and will reap the rewards on the long plateau, even once they offer it. BMW? The Ultimate Driving Machine must offer it once available, but it should never be front and center to their marketing. Toyota? Protected, for obvious reasons.

Create Technologies That Enhance Driving

Despite my past as one of the most infamous speeders of our time, I couldn’t be more optimistic about our semi- and fully- autonomous future. The key to cultural acceptance—the only barrier that matters—is developing technologies that help human drivers while letting them retain control, if not a sense of control.

Imagine a Porsche 911 that replicated every 911 ever made. A BMW M5 with a heads-up display that indicated the correct line through Stelvio Pass. A Mercedes-Benz AMG-GT with real-time traffic and condition data for scheduling a Sunday drive, linked to stability control and hi-res maps which would prevent loss of control before entering a turn.

These are all as-yet undeveloped technologies which will enhance rather than detract from driving in a mixed autonomy environment. I wish I could use them now.

At the end of the plateau, some 50-75 years from now, human driving will likely go the way of horseback riding, but only once other forms of visceral self-expression have supplanted the transformative appeal (and, yes, danger) of driving itself. Virtual reality, augmented reality, video games, and cybernetics will all evolve on parallel and increasingly overlapping tracks, converging with concepts of mobility, yielding inconceivable forms of entertainment and leisure.

Eventually, the professional wasteland of racing/driving schools will meet Disneyland in the middle. Racetracks will become mechanical petting zoos and amusement parks, with attendees signing waivers before they risk their lives in quaint machines under semi-controlled circumstances. Imagine Ferrari World was the only place you could drive a Ferrari.

I hope I live long enough to see that. I doubt it. They’re still using pack mules in Mongolia, the Land Cruisers I’ve seen in Africa are pretty much indestructible, and there will always be someone with enough money to buy a human-driving exemption. Actually, that would never work; once autonomy is ubiquitous, no human driver would be fast enough to keep up with the flow of self-driving traffic.

Right now is a good time to be a car guy. The future? Not so much.

Alex Roy, entrepreneur, President of Europe By Car, Editor-at-Large for The Drive, and author of The Driver, set the 2007 Transcontinental “Cannonball Run” Record in a BMW M5 in 31 hours & 4 minutes, and has set multiple "Cannonball" endurance driving records in Europe & the United States in the EV, 3-wheeler & Semi-Autonomous Classes. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

How many trucking jobs will self-driving trucks eliminate? All of them, if Uber subsidiary Otto has its way. What about Embark, last week’s alleged “Otto-killer”? Hard to tell from the vague press release regurgitations. But one company has just emerged from stealth mode with a genuinely fresh take on self-driving trucks—the first one to make truckers allies instead of enemies. It's called Starsky Robotics.

And how is it doing that, exactly? By inverting the traditional “disruptor” role Silicon Valley loves to crow about. Starsky hopes to use AI to augment and positively transform the truck driver’s traditional role—and to do so with the cooperation of the trucking companies and regulators their competitors have so far taunted or ignored.

If Starsky succeeds, they will provide an example of how evolution can sometimes be better than revolution. Theirs is a genuine effort to adapt technology to political and cultural realities, a strategy others would do well to emulate, as Uber is finding out in country after country.

What Sets Starsky Apart

One peculiarity of self-driving technology is that, while automakers proudly brag about investing billions to catch up with Silicon Valley’s efforts, truck manufacturers have been fairly quiet, if not downright reluctant. That's because the politics of the trucking industry, one of the largest employers in the United States, is a minefield even larger than that of the taxi industry. And you don’t need to be Travis Kalanick to know how badly Uber’s handled the latter.

Another reason? No one know when self-driving technology will be ready for primetime. Even once it works—and even developers have yet to define what “works” actually means—a universe of local and state regulations wait to be navigated or rewritten, unless or until the Department of Transportation announces a national policy the states will honor.

Enter Starsky Robotics, whose solution of adding autonomy without endangering trucking jobs seems so obvious, it seems insane that Otto, with Uber’s apparently unlimited resources behind them, didn’t launch with Starsky’s model out of the gate.

Whereas Otto’s business plan is to lease/sell/rent brand-new self-driving trucks the day after it’s legal (at some unknown point when full Level 5 autonomy actually works) Starsky’s is to keep humans in the loop from Day One.

They just won’t be in the truck.

Starsky’s first product is a robot that retrofits to existing trucks, comprised of a series of actuators to control the gas, brakes and steering. The robot uses cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors to see, and is connected to a remote control facility from which truck drivers will take control during the first and last mile, similar to the U.S. Air Force’s facilities from which operators control drones all over the world.

Here's a fascinating video of one of their recent tests:

As far as why Starsky doesn't use LiDAR like the majority of automakers, Starsky founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher says they "don’t want to be building a system reliant on technology that doesn’t exist yet,” in an apparent jab at companies like Quanergy, whose long-awaited, low-cost solid-state LiDAR units have yet to hit the market. “We’re just trying to build this based on technology that’s readily available.”

Comma.ai’s George Hotz agrees, and so does Elon Musk, who has promised “full self-driving” Teslas without LIDAR as soon as next year.

Assuming that trio is correct, the heart of Starsky’s model isn’t their self-driving tech, but a system that uses autonomy to improve safety, efficiency and the quality of life for existing truck drivers. While Otto and Embark’s business models marinate behind the narrative of a shortage of 100,000 drivers, their plans either replace them with machines, or keep them in the truck. Starsky, by moving drivers to a drone-control facility, turns them into supervisors, enabling one “driver” to monitor many trucks, taking control only as necessary, or when a problem occurs. If Seltz-Axmacher can execute, the Starsky system will resolve the driver shortfall in an industry-wide win-win.

I’m sick and tired of startups claiming to care about safety. Using AI to improve safety makes perfect sense, but it will never happen if the end result is masses of unemployed drivers who will vote in candidates opposed to AI. This is where Seltz-Axmacher gets it.

“AI is quickly becoming ubiquitous,” he says. “Everyone’s worried about where they fit into a post-AI economy, but human beings play a really important role. Humans with AI can achieve much more than the world’s best algorithm. We're focused on empowering drivers.”

Starsky Robotics Isn’t Really a Tech Company

A lot of things have to fall into place for Starsky to begin executing their blue-sky plan, but Level 4 autonomy isn’t one of them. Rather than accumulate test miles at investor’s expense, Starsky began hauling freight for its first customer earlier this month, in one of the only states where self-driving trucks are legal: Florida.

There’s another reason to test and haul in Florida: the weather is great. Business-friendly states with good weather will likely embrace autonomy as Florida has, and do so before the DOT develops a federal policy. Self-driving trucks will function in Florida winters long before they do in snowy Michigan, allowing a company already in the trucking industry’s good graces to generate revenue market-by-market as the technological hurdles to Level 5 autonomy continue to fall.

Starsky claims the drive you see above was done 85% autonomously, but didn’t want to discuss details of the teleoperation component, and claimed multiple disengagements, which I don’t consider relevant because definitions of disengagements are so vague as to make apples-to-apples comparisons practically meaningless. What is relevant is Starsky’s plan to generate revenue from shipments on which they’re both testing teleoperation and gathering data for their self-driving tech—two systems which must seamlessly work in concert if Starsky’s model is to succeed. In other words, Starsky isn’t really a tech company as much as a trucking company developing self-driving tech.

Seltz-Axmacher, who stuffs George Hotz’s confidence and Jack Black’s humor into a Seth Rogan-esque package, put it another way.

"We’re a staffing agency,” he said. “We’ll lease you a robot on a per-mile basis. Driver-as-a-service.”

This is why I’m so fascinated by Seltz-Axmacher and Starsky. He’s clearly not revealing everything they’ve done, nor everything they intend to do, but you can draw a straight line from their first principles to where they intend to go. By using AI to augment a sector as it exists rather than obliterate it into a new form envisioned by "disruptors," Starsky may prove to be one of the first public-facing examples of how and why humans needn’t be sacrificed on the altar of autonomy, and can in fact benefit from it.

If only someone would build a VR-based system so every Uber driver with a gaming wheel on their desk could remotely drive cabs, we'd be onto something. I'm talking to you, Travis Kalanick.

The future isn’t binary. We face a multi-decade plateau, a mixed environment of semi-autonomous and human-augmented driving, which are not necessarily the same thing. If both can save lives but only one sacrifices people’s livelihoods, I know which is more likely to be embraced by a vast industry with a powerful union behind it.

I also know who is most likely to profit from it, if only Seltz-Axmacher can execute, but we'll cover that in the next chapter of my visit to Starsky's secret HQ in San Francisco.

(UPDATED to reflect Starsky claim of 85% autonomy on video test run, rather than 65%.)

Alex Roy is Editor-at-Large for The Drive, author of The Driver, and set the 2007 Transcontinental “Cannonball Run” Record in 31 hours & 4 minutes. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

So you want a drone that can film from the sky? DRIVE/Aerial is here to help. A few years ago, if you wanted to dabble in aerial photography or cinematography, you only had a handful of options. Today's offerings, however, come with a wide array of features and can range from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars, which makes trying to find the right one daunting.

So to help you sort out the good from the bad, we at DRIVE/Aerial decided to put together a list of our favorite camera-ready drones available as of February 2017. That way, you'll be all ready to film your family on your next vacation to Aruba.

Holy Stone F181 - $109.99

If you'd like to dip your toe in to the aerial filming market, the Holy Stone F181 is a good place to start. This feature-packed drone comes with an attachable 720p camera, a push-button return, and an altitude hold function that can help any pilot stay up in the air. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with an external gimbal to stabilize your footage, which means your camera is only as steady as your flying. But for the $109 price tag, this drone is hard to beat.

Yuneec Breeze 4K - $364.38

We like to call the Breeze the budget DJI Mavic (see below). It's a portable 4K drone that is easy to use and fits in a backpack. The only drawback is its lack of stabilized footage. The portable design means Yuneec sacrificed an external gimbal, so you'll have to stabilize your footage in post-production. But for the price and feature list (4K video and 13MP stills, as well as selfie, orbit, journey, and follow-me modes) the Breeze is a good entry into filming from the air.

Yuneec Q500 4K - $799.00

Although the Yuneec Q500 4K is a little older than some drones here, it makes the list because of its modularity. The Yuneec Q500's removable gimbal is not offered on any other drone on this list. This means you can detach the camera and film beautiful, stabilized 4K footage by hand. Unfortunately, it doesn't contain some of the accident avoidance features we'd like to see in this price range...but for the filmmaker on a budget, its versatility is perfect.

Xiaomi Mi Drone - $459.99

The Xiaomi Mi is the most affordable stabilized 4K drone on the market. For $459, you get a lot of the bells and whistles that you see on the more expensive drones (GPS-assisted hover, tracked flight, surrounded flight) with only a slight loss in picture quality, which is really only visible during editing and color correcting.

Snap 4K Vantage Robotics - $915

Some time has passed since we last wrote about the Snap, but we're still eager for its arrival. We like the Snap because it of its novel approach to modularity, and the safety guards around its propellers. What makes Snap interesting is that the fuselage housing the camera and battery can come off completely and the propellers fold up, making it able to fit in a laptop bag. But the longer this drone takes to get to market, the likelier the competition may catch up.

Parrot Bebop 2 FPV - $649.00

The Bebop uses a novel approach to filming. Instead of having a separate gimbal to stabilizes the camera, the drone uses electronic stabilization (like the iPhone) on the front-facing camera. The limitation of this is the camera and drone are directly attached, which means the drone has to make any moves you want the camera to perform. On the upside, the setup makes it easier for pilots trying aerial cinematography for the first time. You see what it sees (hence FPV, or "first person viewing"); instead of trying to orient the drone by looking at it in the air, your left is its left, and so forth.

DJI INSPIRE 2 - A lot

The DJI Inspire 2 is a powerhouse. It can shoot 5.2K in CinemaDNG raw and Apple ProRes on the biggest sensor available in a RTF (ready-to-fly) drone on the market. It offers a separate FPV camera, so one pilot can steer and fly the drone while another pilot operates the camera from a separate controller. The footage is top of the class; entire movies have been shot just using this drone. The downside: the price tag. Fully decked out, the DJI can cost upwards of $8,000 dollars. But if your budget stretches that far, this is the drone to get.

DJI MAVIC - $999.00

The DJI Mavic is our favorite drone on the market today. Its portability and crisp 4K video make it the drone to beat. It doesn't compromise on quality photo (12MP) or video (4K video at 30 fps) just because it's small, and it still packs a five-kilometer range and a 27-minute flight time.

The biggest drawback to drones prior to 2016 was the clunky packaging. Each professional drone needed its own case, which often meant leaving it behind when using a small crew. The Mavic changed that; it's small enough for users to toss it in a back pack. The only downside is that it costs nearly $1,000, but for the price, you get one of the most feature-packed drones on the market—one you can take anywhere in the world.

If you want to raise money, lose money, buy a company, sell a company, or hide the fact that you don't have a viable business plan in the transportation sector, add the word mobility. Mobility is the dumbest word in Silicon Valley, Detroit, and anywhere cars are built or software is written. What is mobility? While everyone hemorrhages cash trying to figure it out, one old-school automaker has unexpectedly put a stake in the ground which shows genuine courage: Cadillac.

The product is called Cadillac Book. It’s a $1,500-per-month subscription service that gives users access to almost any Cadillac—including halo models like the excellent CTS-V—via the Book app. Throw in white-glove delivery service, insurance, registration, taxes, maintenance, unlimited mileage, no long-term commitment, and up to eighteen vehicle swaps per year, and you have what appears to be an overpriced, long-term car rental.

But it’s much more than that. To understand why Book is so brave and potentially revolutionary, we must define what mobility is, and will be.

What is Mobility?

Mobility isn’t any one transportation solution, it’s a continuum. From walking, biking, riding, driving, pooling, hailing, sharing and renting to subways, trains and planes, we're already highly mobile, but we often experience gaps in our access to these verticals, inefficiencies within them, and the friction of switching between them. This is where Silicon Valley has owned the personal transportation sector. Remember when you couldn’t get a cab in the rain? Uber solved that. What’s the most efficient combination of walking, buses, and trains to get from A to B? Behold, Google Maps.

Because mobility is composed of so many fractured elements, from cars and bikes we own to trains and planes we never will, there are few economies of scale for users requiring more than one mode to get from A to B on a daily basis. You can buy a discounted, unlimited monthly NYC Metrocard, but if you live outside the city and drive to a train station you don’t get a discount for bearing the cost of a car, gas and insurance.

Before Uber and Chinese competitor Didi, everyone in mobility was highly specialized, at least to the end user. Cars? Ford made them; dealers sold them; taxi companies charged for them; Hertz rented them. Trains? Bombardier made them and transit agencies operated them. Planes? Boeing or Airbus, then Jetblue or Delta, probably booked through Expedia or Orbitz.

When Uber talks about mobility, they’re talking not only about replacing taxis with ride hailing, but public transportation itself. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be lobbying cities to reduce the amount of parking, or to replace bus lines they claim are inefficient. Uber’s mobility plan isn’t merely to annihilate and re-create taxis and pooling, but to move into neighboring mobility verticals as well.

The dream is Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), a single point of contact, payment and access for multiple modes of transportation like the MultiPass from The Fifth Element. The dream is to turn mobility into a business like health insurance.

MaaS is the logical evolution of mobility. People don’t need (or necessarily want) new ways to get from A to B. Until self-driving and -flying cars arrive—and even then—the only metrics that matter are access and cost-per-mile. Combine verticals, simplify access, reduce friction, and cut pricing, and you have where Uber plans to go, and traditional automakers need to.

MaaS is Uber’s dream and everyone else’s nightmare. Uber’s plan is everyone else’s backup plan, which is why “mobility” is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It’s why self-driving cars, the clearest subset of technologies spanning the mobility continuum, get so much attention. It’s why car manufacturers are reluctantly and desperately investing in any and every vertical on the continuum, hoping to glue them together while Uber and Didi figure it out, or go broke trying.

Cadillac parent General Motors is as guilty as anyone of taking a shotgun approach to MaaS. GM has acquired both Cruise Automation (self-driving cars) and Sidecar (ridesharing/delivery), launched Maven (a car sharing app/service), and invested $500M in Uber competitor Lyft (ride hailing/pooling). GM is offering discounted short-term leases to Lyft drivers and giving them first dibs on the new Chevy Bolt EV, while Maven partnered with Uber to rent them Chevys.

Confused? I’m sure GM CEO Mary Barra is, too. I was confused researching that paragraph, which means the average consumer is probably clueless. Daimler’s mobility strategy is equally messy. Ditto Ford, BMW and VW. That’s why you don’t see nice, clean charts explaining the state of the mobility sector. Doing everything means doing no one thing well. Focus matters.

And then you have Cadillac Book.

Cadillac’s Trojan Horse

What are the minimum requirements for a MaaS provider? You need cars, and you need an app that is the entry point for two or more mobility verticals. If you don’t have a direct relationship with the end user, if you don’t have their credit card, if you don’t control pricing, then you’re at the mercy of someone else who does. Premium MaaS can charge more for a better product or service. Budget Maas must save the customer money over alternatives.

Cadillac Book meets all those requirements, starting with the ownership/leasing and sharing verticals.

For the right customer, Book’s $1,500 monthly fee makes sense. A 36-month, zero-money-down lease of Cadillac’s fantastic CTS-V sedan runs about $1000. If your insurance is $4,000 a year, your monthly expenses will run $1,333, not including maintenance. Now add, at no additional charge, the option of swapping out to an Escalade SUV or XT5 crossover for a weekend, or for the entire winter. How else could you do that? Renting a Platinum edition Escalade for the weekend even once will cost you at least $350, not including the hassle of pickup and return. Lease or buy one, and your monthly cost for two such vehicles is well over $2,000, not including parking for the second one.

What about Turo, my favorite car-sharing service? CTS-Vs run $2,100 to $2,700 per month, not including their premium insurance.

If you need two different luxury vehicles in one year, Book is a bargain.

If $1,500 a month works for Book, it’s easy to picture Ford, Chevy, and the Japanese at less than half that, Porsche coming in higher, and the Germans offering tiered pricing.

“Have an accident?” said Thornton Hughes, Cadillac’s Director of Strategy & Advanced Analytics, “we’ll bring you another one.”

Try that with Hertz or Avis, or your local car dealer. Even a luxury car dealer. Once Cadillac expands Book beyond its Manhattan test, premium MaaS becomes a reality. Why? Because your subscription is portable to other cities. Vacation? Work? It doesn't matter. You and your employer both save, and rental, in a sense, becomes Cadillac's third vertical. Goodbye, Hertz and Avis; hello, curbside pickup and dropoff. If Book works, car rental companies have a big, big problem.

But now, the real Trojan Horse.

What’s the biggest problem in the car industry? Manufacturers and end users are separated by Stone Age dealer networks and the franchise agreements that protect them. Nearly 75 percent of consumers would prefer to buy online. Dealer associations have waged war to stop Tesla’s direct-sales model, and those dealer agreements hinder manufacturers efforts to duplicate Tesla’s wireless over-the-air (OTA) updates. OTA updates are at the core of Tesla’s massive lead in deploying and improving their Autopilot technology.

Remove dealers as a point of entry to mobility, and all these problems are solved. Behold, Cadillac Book.

I asked Hughes whether this was Cadillac’s plan, and where Book’s cars would come from.

“For the [New York] pilot, they will come from the factory. We want to scale fast. Using the dealer network would be a great way to do that.”

I bet it would, but pulling cars from dealer stock still removes the dealer from the point of sale, and as an entry point to mobility. If Book succeeds, dealers become parking lots and service depots. Dealers that adapt may thrive. The others will become wards of GM. Either way, consumers win.

When pressed, Hughes deflected my Trojan Horse theory.

“We’re trying to attract people to the brand who would not otherwise have considered it. We’re trying to take the pain out of ownership and leasing. No commitment. This could end up being totally synergistic with dealers.”

I’m sure that’s true, but if all Cadillac Book does is attract new buyers, it will have fallen far short of what it might be. I’ve given GM a hard time for too many reasons to list here, but Book is the first potentially revolutionary mobility play to come from a traditional manufacturer. Combine Book with the self-driving tech to come out of GM’s Cruise acquisition, and Mary Barra’s plan to “disrupt ourselves” will come true.

Or maybe GM just wants to sell cars the old-fashioned way. I hope not.

Alex Roy is Editor-at-Large for The Drive, author of The Driver, and set the 2007 Transcontinental “Cannonball Run” Record in 31 hours & 4 minutes. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

We're really looking forward to the new season of Top Gear. It's fair to say at this point that The Grand Tour was a bit of a letdown and, shouting aside, the last season of Top Gear without "the holy trio" wasn't as bad as we'd expected. With a little honing and the loss of a couple of the more annoying hosts, the next season is shaping up to be perhaps quite good. Still, though, we are a bit nostalgic for the good 'ol days of Top Gear, back in the mid-2000s when the cinematography wasn't the star, back when the jokes would still land, back when the hosts were still genuinely enthusiastic about the cars they drove.

After a little digging, we came up with this excellent clip on YouTube, wherein Hammond takes a brand new 996 GT3 for a spin... Literally.

Richard, it's easy to tell, has fallen deeply, madly, and truly in love with what is possibly Porsche's best watercooled model ever. Even after more than a decade, it's hard to beat the raw passion that the 996 GT3 engenders. Sure you have to put up with those awful 996 headlamps [admittedly they're growing on us, time heals all wounds, suppose], and a lackluster 996 interior that is as uninspired as it is spartan. But spartan is really what this car is about, there's nothing fiddly to get in the way of your driving. There aren't any nannies to prevent you from having as much sideways fun as you want. This is as pure a sports car as has ever existed, and it deserves as much praise as is heaped upon it in this film. Hell, even Jeremy Clarkson admitted he adored driving it.