AARON LEWIS: Hi everyone.
I'm Aaron Lewis, Content Producer at Edmunds.
The car shopping destination.
We've been here all week.
Many of us and the staff at Edmunds
checking out all the technology that's on display here at CES.
And I wanted to start with you Ron.
Ron Montoya you are our Senior Consumer Advice Editor.
You've been looking at a lot of stuff
that's coming in the near term.
Especially autonomous technology in cars.
Tell us a little bit about what you're seeing about autonomy?
RON MONTOYA: Yeah well CES seems to be the annual progress
indicator for where we are on autonomous technology.
And it seems like every year we get a little bit closer.
And this year seems to be a nice sweet spot in which computing
technology is getting to the point
where it's able to be shrunk down and put
into a vehicle that can learn and adapt to it's surroundings.
And you have a company like Audi saying
that, within a couple of years by 2020
they will have a level four self-driving car.
And level 4 means, that in many situations
the car can drive itself and only in some situations
does the actual driver have to intervene and drive
the vehicle.
So, you know, Audi you have--
they're partnering with Nvidia to have
these high powered computer chips.
So they're at the front lines of it.
Whereas, Toyota who was speaking earlier,
they feel like it's a little bit more difficult
and they need a little bit more time to sort this out.
AARON LEWIS: So it sounds like a little bit
of a mixed bag with autonomy.
But Mark, you've been looking at stuff
that's been coming far off in the future now.
There's especially-- Toyota has some really interesting stuff
that really is coming up far down the line.
What was that you saw here at CES?
MARK TAKAHASHI: The Toyota Concept-i is just bonkers.
It's so forward looking.
I mean, it looked like it was out of Minority Report.
The Ai is the key on the interior actually.
It's supposed to learn you and give you what you want.
Ron and I were in the simulator and at one point
we're on a highway run and all of a sudden it
went into autonomous mode.
The seats started reclining.
We started getting this lower back massage.
It was fantastic.
And I had this big grin on my face.
But it was tracking my facial expressions,
and it knew when I was happy.
And after time, it learns what makes you happy
and if it sees that you're not happy,
it will try to do whatever it can to make you happy.
Yeah, it's weird.
It's using technology to give it personality, almost.
AARON LEWIS: And that human machine interface is definitely
a theme here at CES.
Greg Shaffer you're one of our Senior Director of Product
here at Edmunds.
You do a lot of work in Ai voice controls, Alexa.
How is that all folding into the car ownership, car shopping
experience?
GREG SHAFFER: Yeah one thing you can see a lot of here at CES
this year is Alexa everywhere, Amazon's voice technology.
It was debuted a number of years ago in their Echo products.
And they really have a big ground hold on developers
integrating with it.
A lot of manufacturers out there are integrating.
Not only-- their integrating with the echo devices.
So you can unlock your car, start your car,
turn your lights on from your kitchen
just by talking to your Alexa, Echo, or Dot device.
But also they're integrating that voice technology
inside the car.
So you could be sitting in your car and say, it's a rainy day
and you realize you need some new windshield wipers.
Volkswagen actually introduced this.
You can actually say, Alexa order me some new windshield
wipers.
It knows the exact size you need for the exact car.
It's hooked up to your Amazon Prime account
and they show up on your doorstep a couple days later.
So it's those kind of full end-to-end connections
of technology that we're seeing between Amazon
and manufacturers.
Some manufacturers are using the Google Technology, Google Home,
or Google Assistant.
I see Hyundai chose to use them.
But it's really, really fascinating
with how far Ai has gone with the voice.
And not just voice, the image recognition,
the image detection technologies of artificial intelligence
have really gone far a long way.
Nvidia, which you don't really hear on automotive a lot,
really is one of those behind the scenes players
that has a lot of technologies that enable these autonomous
vehicles behind the scenes.
AARON LEWIS: And speaking of Nvidia, Brock Stearn,
he's our Director of Immersive Technology at Edmunds, which
is kind of a fancy way of saying VR.
I know that you're playing around.
You're the guy around the office with the VR glasses, the VR
cameras, 360 cameras.
You mentioned earlier today to me--
I thought it was interesting how Nvidia
is using VR to help build their products
and improve this whole driving experience.
Tell me a little bit about that.
BROCK STEARN: Yeah, exactly.
I mean Nvidia's been a big player in gaming for ages.
A big player in VR.
They've been in automotive.
They power the center console of the Tesla, things like that.
But with the drive-- the Nvidia drive that they announced,
they're using technology from VR like eye tracking
to put into automotive.
And eye tracking isn't just where you're looking,
but the depth that you're looking.
So it starts to open up possibilities
that you can actually have a heads up display
in the windshield that adjusts for the distance you're
looking.
If you're looking at the car immediately in front of you
or if you're looking at a sign far away.
And so you're never really losing
that information when you're driving
a car, which is amazing.
And it can be used now, even though their advertising is
fully autonomous driving.
But all VR related--
I mean CES last year had a lot of VR, this year has way more.
Almost every car manufacturer has something VR related,
whether, a VR test drive, 360 video, or VR sit
in our car change some options.
There's a lot of that at The LA Auto Show
and they're basically bringing that here and then
adding a little bit more to it.
The LA Auto Show wasn't too far away.
And then Ford took an interesting approach.
They're partnering with Forza to put the 4GT in there.
And so there big experience is driving in a driving simulator.
That 4GT inside the Forza game.
It's a little cheesy because it's
the game that's already out.
But it's just the 4GT that you get to drive
and it's in a driving simulator.
So it's better than most people have at home.
But, all in all, VR's big.
And every auto companies using it.
AARON LEWIS: It's really an exciting time.
A lot of technology out there that's really improving,
both the car shopping, the car development product experience.
So a lot to be excited about here in Las Vegas, for CES.
That's it for now.
We'll keep at it.
I'm Aaron Lewis, for Edmunds.
Take care.