Software-Defined Vehicles: Do You Really Own Your AI Car? | Utilizing AI Episode 35

We live in the era of the software-defined vehicle, with connectivity, computing, and AI transforming the car and the experience of ownership. This episode of "Utilizing AI" features Futurum Group analysts Olivier Blanchard and Brad Shimmen discussing the radical transformation of transportation and what it means to buyers and to society. Welcome to "Utilizing AI," the podcast focused on practical applications of artificial intelligence from the Futurum Group.

Every Wednesday, we explore news and use cases of the ways in which AI is transforming enterprise IT and the industries it serves. I'm your host, Steven Foskett, president of the Tech Field Day business unit here at the Futurum Group. Before we dive into this discussion, let's meet who's on the panel today.

Well, hi back. I'm Olivier Blanchard. I'm a research director at the Futurum Group, and my focus is intelligent devices, so anything that's AI not bolted down to a data center, which includes automotive products, which I think we might be talking about today.

And I am Brad Shimmen. I work with Olivier as a VP practice lead for data intelligence, analytics, and infrastructure, the stuff that often happens within the data center. And I am Steven Foskett.

I'm an AI enthusiast, and this is one of the interesting podcasts. Let me tell you, I've been wanting to do this episode for a while. I'm really glad to do it.

I want to start with an anecdote from the annals of the "Utilizing AI" podcast. " Even though it feels like the Futurum Group "Utilizing AI" podcast is a little new, there's actually a whole other universe called "Utilizing Tech" 10 seasons in. For the first three or four seasons of that podcast, I used to ask all of the guests a surprise question at the end, just for fun.

Maybe I should revive that to surprise you guys. Maybe not. But one of my favorite surprise questions was when I was talking to AI researchers.

Now, this was early. This was before this, five years ago, six years ago, that kind of thing. And one of my favorite questions was, when will we have autonomous driving that can go anywhere, anytime, in any circumstance?

And the answer universally was never. And I think that that's really interesting, because today, AI is very firmly in our cars, in our driver's seats, in our world of transportation. I think if you ask the normal man on the street about the current status of just automotive technology in general, they're going to talk a lot about self-driving cars.

They're going to talk a lot about navigation. They're going to talk a lot about connected systems, and maybe they're frustrated by the sort of what the industry calls the software-defined vehicle of the future. Maybe they're angry about electric cars or angry not to have electric cars.

There's a lot of thoughts out there about AI and technology general and connectivity coming into the car. And the reason that I'm excited about this is because I don't know of anyone who knows this topic better than Olivier, who is joining us here. So Olivier, kick us off a little bit.

Give us just a little overview of the connected car in 2026. Yeah, okay. So one, thanks for the fun intro, and I hope that the question at the end isn't too difficult to answer.

So I think the best way to look at it, and being as old as I am, I won't share my age, but I grew up as an analog guy in an analog world that was becoming more digital. And so I still remember with great nostalgia, the old cars of my parents and grandparents, which had very little digital stuff in it. But essentially what we're looking at today is a radical transformation of the automotive industry that's been going on for a few years, where instead of design and mechanics, you're looking at different zones or different types of areas in the vehicle where digital technologies have sort of taken hold.

One of it is the drivetrain. We all understand that modern engines are very different. Especially electric vehicles require a complete redesign of the technology around the engine and the drivetrain.

So there's that part, and we can talk about what that means potentially for automated driving and how electric vehicles have basically become a completely different platform that redefines what a car is. On the other hand, you also have, I think, more sort of explicit changes. One area is the cockpit, what we call the cockpit.

So that's kind of like the dashboard, the telematics. There's also the in-vehicle experience. So that's going to be your audio, your entertainment, things of that nature.

Obviously, there's GPS and sort of navigation elements to this. And increasingly, we're also seeing a lot more AI get into vehicles, not just for the automated driving or the assisted driving, but also with this ambience, agentic sort of idea that was first popularized by the old David Hasselhoff popular TV show, "Knight Rider" with his vehicle, KITT. So note, we don't get a turbo boost, but we do get a talking car.

And then, of course, there's also connectivity, which is a big element of this, because not everything can or should be contained in the vehicle. A lot of it has to do with connectivity, with the infrastructure, with other vehicles, with the cloud, with all of the digital services that you might consume in the car or that might help the car perform better overall. From navigation, safety, entertainment, data collection standpoints, et cetera.

So it's a big reshuffling. It's a huge industry. It's a huge opportunity.

And what we've seen is that not only have the automotive manufacturers, so the BMWs and Renault of the world, jumped on this, and they all have, but we've also seen huge investment and huge involvement from the big semiconductor companies. Right? So all the same companies that are building data centers, or that are involved in the building of data centers and PCs and other AI devices, are in automotive.

So you have MediaTek, you have Qualcomm, that's done an amazing job the last few years of really sort of building this out. NVIDIA's in there. Intel was in there.

So it's also just a huge technology category that is adjacent to a lot of the other things that we talk about generally on the show. I think when people start thinking about technology and cars, like I said, I think if you ask the casual person on the street, they would immediately jump to autonomous driving, and Waymo and Tesla and things like that, and probably in a negative way. But it's funny, I think if you talk to them for more than 10 seconds, they would start talking about electric cars, and they would start talking about connectivity.

And then they would bring up the infamous BMW heated seats by subscription situation, which actually I think is more telling than griping about Waymo's stopping in the middle of the road because today's cars are a lot more like smartphones than they are like cars in that they require subscriptions. I mean, BMW gets a lot of criticism for that, but I think most car makers are eagerly and aggressively trying to move towards subscription-connected vehicles and subscription services. And then maybe the conversation might even go further than that, and I think this conversation will as well eventually, in the thoughts of this sort of surveillance state aspect of smartphones and connected devices and so on.

All that's coming to the vehicle as well. A vehicle is not an autonomous item. It's part of a system, and it always has been.

But now, more than ever, it's part of a connected system with privacy implications and with AI and so on. So I guess if we're going to start here, let's start with the software-defined vehicle and the connected car situation. So Olivier, what is a car in 2026 now that the computer is so much a part of it?

What is a car in 2026? What is a car in 2026 is an excellent question. In a way, it echoes some political questions that I've been hearing recently, where we're trying to redefine what things that we know are into a different thing.

I think a software-defined vehicle is just a platform, essentially. It's a technology platform that happens to be a car, just like a phone or a cell phone or a smartphone happens to be a phone, but you're really using it for a plethora of other things that you didn't use to use it for. I very rarely make phone calls on my phone.

Right? I use it for everything else. The phone is just sort of one of the many features of it.

And with vehicles, what we're seeing is that the driving element of it, the experience of driving, and having the mechanical device around you to allow for this, is sort of becoming secondary to all of the other things. But I think one of the challenging pieces of this is that you have this tension between the sort of utopian view of what technology can bring to the automotive experience, to cars in general, to road safety, to the infrastructure around that, and how it might improve our lives or just be cool. Right?

Like having a talking car that can jump over things safely, or have the James Bond car that has all these gadgets and all these gizmos and things. The way that phones have become sort of the gadget that does it all. If you used to be a spy or you used to want to be a spy, rather, and watch James Bond movies or spy movies, all of the gadgets that James Bond used to have in the '60s are now basically in your phone.

Right? The cameras, the recording devices, the geolocation, everything. And one of the big sort of accessories, main accessories of James Bond and a lot of spy movies for those types of characters are kind of like the spy car that does all of these things.

And we've reached that point now with robotics, where we have humanoid robots entering the chat. We have these cars that do all of these amazing things. And the gadgets and the additional features are taking precedence over the experience of driving.

And so I think that there are two points of tension here. One is the tension between what the software-defined vehicle and all of these technologies entering the car could mean for us, and how cool it could be, and how much better and safer the experience would be. But the flip side of that is what are these technologies really doing for me, the driver?

Right? Are they more of a hassle? Are they more of a threat?

Is my ability to control my own driving experience being taken away from me by automation? Right? Are car manufacturers taking away the joy of driving to put more screens in my car and feed me more data or extract more data from me?

Right? And if you don't enjoy driving, if for you, driving is getting from point A to point B and you want the entertainment and you want the comfort and you want the security, that's great. But for people who actually enjoy driving and enjoy the experience of driving, the tactile experience of driving, who like working on their cars, who like doing mods and customizing their cars and doing fun things with it, that can become more of a problem than an opportunity.

So I think that we have that tension there. And then the other thing is the pace at which this change is happening. I feel that with a lot of technologies that are not as personal necessarily, or that don't necessarily have something as much to do with the experience or the joy of experiencing the experience, I just don't have the words for it, it's not a big deal to suddenly have this cool new technology that you can try.

Right? So smart glasses, giving you the ability to have less screen time, but still be connected to your devices, to your apps, and to some of the features that you like on your phone, that's not a big ask. Right?

You can basically opt in if you want. You can get the glasses, you can not get them. You can choose to enter that market at your own pace when you're ready.

With a car, you need a car. You need a car to get around, especially in the United States. There's not a lot of public transportation.

And having new rules and new technologies enter your vehicle very quickly is disruptive. And not necessarily disruptive in the great way, because now you have this thing that you need to buy that costs a lot of money, that you want to be able to have control over, that essentially is telling you, "No, you can't do things the way you want to anymore. " It's going to do things not necessarily with your consent.

Also, you might have to subscribe to things that used to come in your car that you just paid for, and then you had them, and now you have to pay a monthly subscription, whether it's heated seats or something else. And the whole thing starts to feel like, "Is this really my car? Is this really my experience?

" And that's a level of tension, I think, that I haven't seen with any other technology. Not PCs, not smart speakers, not mobile devices, nothing. It's very specific to the automotive industry, and it's something that the automotive industry needs to focus more on, especially in terms of messaging and especially in terms of having a dialogue with their customers that currently I don't feel that they're really having effectively.

Yeah, and that's that dialogue to me. And by the way, I love what you guys have been saying, and I could just be content sitting and listening to you, but oh my gosh, there's so much cool stuff that we're talking about today that I want to chime in about. And so I'm not going to try to rewind, but that dialogue you just talked about, Olivier, to me is the key.

And it's the difference in dialogue that you have in a car versus, let's say, a phone or a laptop and the introduction of AI into those devices. And by the way, I'm going to now officially name cars the conveyance platforms. They're no longer cars because they are a platform.

And just like the phone, as you rightfully pointed out, is a platform to do many different things, so is the car. It just happens to convey you from one place to the other. But that dialogue, and the reason why I feel like that's key to what we're talking about here, guys, is that it's a different conversation.

I can root my phone. I can put whatever OS I want on my laptop. I can build my own software to run on those.

And if it blows up, I might have a small fire on my desk, or it might just be a brick. But if that happens in the car, you may be hurt, and others may be hurt, more importantly. And that's what I think the difference is and where a lot of this tension comes from, because you just can't have the same conversation about ownership, right to repair, right to modify.

And it bums me out a little bit because the US has historically been a very car-centric culture. It is a car culture, and a lot of that revolves around modifying, and changing, and making something your own. And it's different.

You see the hot rod get-togethers people have, and there's everything under the sun has been done to these. Then you see a Tesla get-together. The difference is what skin they chose to put on the outside of the car.

And that's kind of the extent you can really do without endangering yourself and somebody else. And that's a bit of a shame, but I understand that that's critical for us because just, we said we really didn't want to talk about the dangers of Waymo and all that. But ultimately, whether it's lane assist, using some AI, some narrow AI, to just say, "Don't go to the left so much, Brad," or if it's Waymo just making a trolley car decision about who to run over, that's something that I don't think you can just leave to individuals to build as they see fit.

Yeah. I'd also add that, to go back to Steven's original question about automotive driving, ADAS. So you have driver-assist technologies which are really great, like when your car starts to brake before you do because it's paying more attention and it's faster to react than most drivers.

That's great. Fully automated driving, I think still has a long way to go before it's 100% safe. And there are two points of view here.

One, and again, I'm a little bit old school on this I grew up with NASA, and so everything was a redundancy to a redundancy. And it was always about safety first. And if the objective is safety, then the objective should be safety, and that should always be the priority.

And I feel that some companies, and I won't name them, but some companies may have jumped the gun a little bit, gotten ahead of their skis, with fully autonomous- You could even say they've made a MESLA of the whole situation. Yes, they've made a MESLA of the whole situation. But I think it's not just the company.

" My view of this is that regulators, especially safety regulators in various countries, should be the ones to decide, "Okay, no, your technology's great. " Like understanding the limitations of the technology. We know where and when it's safe and when it isn't.

And depending on whether your vehicle system is using cameras, LiDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever the technology is, they all have their limitations. And if a vehicle doesn't have all of the different types of sensors that you need to be able to defeat different weather conditions, different temperature conditions, different light conditions, different environmental conditions, then maybe that vehicle cannot have the right to be in full autonomous driving mode in environments where it's not 100% safe. 9% safe, but 100% safe.

But can I-- Sorry, Olivier, I just want to interrupt you to say that, or to ask, do we really need 100% to find this of use? Because think about airplanes and think about ILS, the instrument landing systems for those. We don't use them every time we land, but if the pilot happens and the co-pilot fall asleep, as has happened, maybe the plane can actually land itself safely.

And so we don't have to depend upon them. We don't have to say we need to reach 100% before we use this technology. We just need to use it wisely, I think.

Yeah, and so- On that as well, I think that it's important to note, too, that no matter where you are, ultimately, the driver is the one responsible for what happens with that vehicle. And I think that we've seen this happen- Yeah ... with autonomous driving and other driver assistance.

And thank you, Olivier, for pointing out that it's not just full self-driving. It's all of these technologies, and all of these technologies that can fail. And ultimately, the driver's responsible, except in a true driverless car, like a Waymo.

And so yeah, talk to us a little bit about that aspect. Yeah. So you can also geo-fence certain vehicles, like a Waymo, and train them to be the type of vehicle that is designed to drive safely around city streets.

And it might be a very specific city or a very specific portion of a city, where essentially you've trained the system to be safe in that area or in those specific conditions. A full self-driving system that works in all weather conditions, that works on all road conditions, in all environmental conditions, city, big city, small village, European back road versus American highway. These are all very different environments, and I feel that unless a vehicle is able to do all of these things, maybe ADAS or the use of these systems should be restricted or limited.

And I feel like, Steven, I think you make a good point. A lot of these technologies, especially AI-related technologies, always bring us back to this sort of binary equation of, does the AI replace the human, or is the best use of the AI to enhance the human? One of the things I like about a lot of ADAS systems and driver assistance is that you're combining the skills and attention and the intentionality of the human, the human operator, the driver, with systems that help the driver be a safer driver.

And what we're seeing right now, the new mandatory driver monitoring and distraction systems that people are balking about, like the surveillance system inside a car that, like cameras that face the driver and that monitor where the driver's eyes go, where its attention is, where their head is turned, where their hands are. Those things work well within the context of, look, we know statistically you're a terrible driver or, at best, an average driver. We know that you're being distracted by all the screens that we've actually put into your car, into your dashboard, that now draw the eye away from the road to the screens.

We also don't want you to be distracted by your phone, which you're checking every time that there's something going on, or you want to change a song. So we're going to do this to help you. And to sound an alarm or do something with the controls of the car so that you can't accidentally swerve off the road or crash into a school bus.

That sort of makes sense. But I think that the danger is that once these technologies, like a driver surveillance, get into the car, they start doing other things. You have what we used to call in the military mission creep, where the device or the system that was meant to assist you and make the car safer starts to take over.

And the more it takes over, the less control you have over the vehicle, and the more you have to be able to trust that system to do more and to do it well and to be safe 100% of the time. One could argue that it only has to be 1% safer than the bad driver that it's replacing. I feel that that's a low-hanging fruit.

I think it just needs to be solid all the time, for a lot of reasons. A technology that's only 1% more effective than a human is not necessarily worth the investment. But the other thing is that it starts encroaching on our ability to learn how to be good drivers as well.

So we're at this weird place where are we transitioning to cars no longer needing drivers at all? And I'm not talking about Waymo, I'm talking about all cars. Where all cars will be driving you to your location, where you will have really no complete control over the experience of driving, and cars just become this sort of utilitarian, like an elevator.

Something that you just ride in, and then you go into it in one place, and then the doors open, and you're in another place, and that's what driving becomes. I don't know that we're ready for that. I don't think that the technology is ready for it.

And so now you're seeing all of these technologies that are sort of like the intermediate, the transition technologies, where we're trying to get the car to take over, and we're trying to take away as much of the driving and the decision-making from the human operator as possible. But without the proper dialogue, without the proper cultural sort of conversation about this, without the sort of a unified vision of what this will be, and primarily without the consent of the operators, the owners of the vehicles, the consumers, who are sort of forced to cope with these technologies that they haven't really understood all that well, and that don't necessarily clearly solve a problem that they had before. And it starts to feel like a lot of these vehicles are taking away their freedom, taking away their autonomy, surveilling them, and also charging them for features that used to come with a car, like the heated seats or whatever else it is.

And I guess the- Yeah, that's the real thing, isn't it? Yeah. That I think it fundamentally challenges people's understanding of the vehicle.

Yeah. " We would've said freedom, right? We would've said it means I can go where I want, I can do what I want, I can meet people I want, I can have experiences.

I mean, a car was a symbol of freedom. And I think that a lot of what we're talking about here fundamentally changes that nature. Whether it is autonomous driving or surveillance or connected cars or right to repair or subscriptions that undermine your ownership of the vehicle.

All of these things, I think, fundamentally challenge what a car is to us. And I think that that's the thing that makes people the most crazy about this topic. It's not that they hate electric cars or self-driving cars or subscriptions or whatever.

It's that they hate that it's not a car anymore, right? Or am I just- Yeah ... Brad, am I just a grumpy old man?

Stop it. No, you are, but you're right. And it is very much the case that when I think about a car, as a teenager, I would think of muscle cars in the late '60s and early '70s, and what those meant, of course, was freedom to be able to go fast, to feel the power, to hear that sound of those engines.

And even with the synthetic noise that modern electric cars can make, it's not quite the same. Which is totally ridiculous. Right, it is.

It's just like, why don't you just make it a cheery little musical tone like in Las Vegas? And it probably will be. But the point is that, yeah, I think that we're now at a point where, with the personal conveyance device, that we don't really need-- Or I should say, we need to look beyond the car to what's next.

What are the teenagers of tomorrow going to see as their route to freedom? When we were kids, it started with a bicycle, and then you moved up to a car. And that pathway doesn't exist anymore.

So what is it going to be? Is it going to be my own personal drone that I fly around in? I don't know.

I doubt it- Hopefully not ... because it'll be a subscription service that will phone my insurance company the minute I do something stupid. That's right.

And so, I mean, for me, obviously, it's motorcycles, right? You see some of the helmets in the back. And I found that a lot of people are moving towards into the motorcycle world because they're looking for that freedom that they can't necessarily get from their cars anymore.

But I think there's nothing easy about it. But I think one of the big problems is that if your car is also is a sense of freedom, it's a sense of ownership, you no longer have the freedom, and you no longer feel like you have the ownership. And on top of that, you're being surveilled, and you have to pay extra, like a subscription, whether it's heated seats or something else.

It just starts to feel like, okay, wait a minute. What is this? Right?

I didn't ask for this. I want the car to do what I want it to do better than it used to before. I want it to be more fuel efficient.

I want it to smell less terrible, or at least the exhaust, right? I want it to not leak oil all over my garage or my front porch. I want it to be the car that I want it to be.

I don't want to have all of these things forced on me. I think some of the technologies that solve problems are the driver assist, like early braking system, right? Or a warning system that, hey, because every vehicle is connected and the infrastructure is connected, I know that there's a bicycle coming around that corner that I can't see because it's behind a bush or behind a bus stop, and my view is obstructed and I need to watch out.

Or there's a car about to make a left turn and cross into my direction of travel that's going to get T-boned, so it's telling me to slow down, it's giving me an alert. Or you've been looking away from the road for too long, stop talking to your passenger or stop looking at your phone. Another one is if I'm in heavy traffic and I'm tired of constantly having to brake, accelerate, brake.

It's like stop-and-go traffic. " Right? And I also want the car to tell me when it's no longer able to drive in fully automated mode because the weather conditions are bad or the streets are too busy, the car to basically just beep, beep, and say, "Hey, you need to take control.

This needs to be on you now. " Those are the types of things that we want. The things that should require a monthly subscription are the smoke screen, the oil slick, the turbo boost, the things that are extra, right?

Not the things that you actually bought the car to do on a daily basis. And if auto manufacturers lose the trust and sort of erode the value of owning the car that they're trying to sell you, people will turn to older cars or will turn to other manufacturers who will get the clue that, hey, wait a minute, maybe we don't need to be the technology platform that everybody else is doing. Maybe our market differentiator is to give people that analog feel, that analog experience that they crave and no longer can get anywhere else.

And I think it's an inflection point for the automotive industry that I think hasn't necessarily moved too fast, but it hasn't done the work to build the trust, build the vision, and obtain consent from the consumers that they're trying to sell cars to. Yes, bring back the turbo. We must do that.

And I would say if I were to give a message to anyone, it wouldn't be the consumers, it would be the car manufacturers, and that they really should not look at the car as another web browser. The experience should not be the same. It should be something that is very much, as we've been talking about, respective of that user.

And if you're going to do that, why not make it something that's AI-free, except as you described, Olivier, some of the things that might keep you safe, but not the things that might take over your experience and turn it into a negotiation for your next premium on your insurance claim. It needs to be something that you actually want to own, assuming people want to own cars anymore. And it seems like, remember the craze of everyone every three years getting a new car with leasing and how ownership is something that has been sort of Netflixed away over the last 10 years or so.

I would love very much for manufacturers to bring back the ownership. Make a cheap sports car. Bring back the Stag from the UK in the US, something that's going to break down every weekend, but will be loved, will be beloved by its owner.

I think we're going to miss that if we don't do something about it. Yeah. There's a niche thing.

Also, we lose the skill of driving, which we may need again if things go sideways. We'll need people to know how to drive. And if they no longer know how to drive because they're letting cars drive for them, we're going to have a big problem.

No, I think I'm looking to China for a lot of the new sort of innovative automotive technologies. I just watched a video last night of, I think it was a BYD SUV. Basically, you choose your parking spot in the available spots in a parking garage, select the one that you wanted to park in, get out of the car, and it goes and parks itself.

Those are the kinds of things that are interesting. I think that those are the kinds of subscription features that I would pay for. Sort of like this extra self-valet service of the car going around looking for a parking spot, parking itself, and then coming to get you later, and then you get in the car and then you take control of the car.

Unfortunately, those are not necessarily the feature that we're seeing here. We're seeing surveillance first, and then the self-parking features sort of come later. And one of my worries as well is that in a world of automotive that is being so disrupted by so many different technologies and different potential features, what we need is more competition, not less.

We don't want to be limited to two or three companies. And what I've noticed with the new BIS rule, which we don't have time to get into, but there seems to be an effort to, in the interest of safety and sort of data and vehicle security, of trying to keep a lot of Chinese and other foreign components out of the supply chain for US vehicles and vehicles in Europe as well. But when I look at what China is doing with their vehicles and a lot of the direction that it's going into, that is more about what we're talking about, like features that are interesting, differentiated, valuable, that people will want to use and that people sort of opt into as opposed to sort of have to jump through hoops to opt out of I wish we had those features in those vehicles in the United States.

And if what is happening with some of these new rules is an effort to keep foreign competition out of the US market, what we end up with is just less of what we could've gotten if competition had been allowed to do its job and to bring us more features that consumers actually want in vehicles, as opposed to features that nobody asked for. So I think that's my closing thought, that technology is a double-edged sword, and it has to be in the service of the user. And in free markets, the popularity and success of a technology or of a product is if enough users find value in it.

Not the opposite, where technology is forced upon the public, and then you don't have a choice, and you have to accept it. That is not how you drive growth in the automotive industry or in the tech industry. And so it's just a cautionary closing argument here.

That's all. And it is interesting that when you've studied this sort of thing, you come up with this thought that systems tend to evolve to reflect the system in which they were developed and the system in which they're used. Hmm.

And we end up with basically, when cars are created by Silicon Valley-type tech entrepreneurs, they tend to look a lot like something as a service, Silicon Valley-type tech things. Whereas when they're invented by, I don't know, other types of people, they tend to look like that. And it's such a crazy situation where we're in, where you said there's protectionism, there's surveillance, there's connectivity, there's electrification, there's all of these things all simultaneously coming together in ultimately what is supposed to be a useful device for people on a daily basis.

And it really confounds what this thing is supposed to be. I do think there's hope, like you said. You look at what a lot of the Chinese companies are doing.

It's absolutely incredible. I also want to point out, you look at some of the upstart American companies. Rivian has been doing really well.

I want to point out the Slate pickup truck that was just launched, which has zero surveillance and subscription features. In fact, it has pretty much zero features at all, except it's got 1,000 customization features. It's a very cool idea, and it really runs counter to a lot of the things I think that people are thinking of when they think of modern electric cars.

And so I think there is hope. And I hope there is. We will certainly be continuing this conversation- Yep ...

" I really cannot say how much I appreciate, Olivier, learning from you about this world. Brad, thank you so much as well for providing your incredible perspective on this. And before we go, where can people continue this conversation with you, Olivier?

Well, with me, I'm still on X, and I'm still trying. But also on the Futurum Group website, I'm publishing a lot of technology coverage. I have reports that are coming out on a regular basis.

And you might be able to find me on LinkedIn, but I'm just not very active. I'm kind of the inverse. I will post on LinkedIn.

I don't post on X. And like Olivier, I'm also publishing quite a bit on the Futurum site. And I think actually all of us are getting ready to publish our predictions and our, what you'd call the docket for upcoming reports that we're going to be working on for the rest of this year.

So I would invite everybody to take a look because there's some really interesting stuff we got coming down the pipe. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this conversation has shown just what Futurum has, the kind of minds inside the company, and what we're thinking about and how we think about things and how we approach things.

I just love that. So thank you both for joining us on this conversation, and thank you everyone for listening. If you enjoyed this discussion, please do subscribe.

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