Stanford mechanical engineering Professor Chris Gerdes explains his team's research comparing the performance of their automated vehicle, Shelley, versus two professional race car drivers. The humans had a slight edge over Shelley because they drove their car to its limits and adapted to the path that opened up in the moment - an insight entrepreneurs should heed, Gerdes says. 

Autonomous-vehicle maker Chris Gerdes shares key lessons about entrepreneurship that he learned when he decided to co-found a trucking company. He discovered that winning support from different stakeholders involved framing discussions in the context of their unique interests: “If you’re going to be successful in a venture, you need people to share your vision, even if they don’t share your motivation.”

In building and testing autonomous vehicles, Stanford mechanical engineer Chris Gerdes discusses a truism that holds on the racetrack, in the lab and in life: Problems that seem difficult turn out to be easy, and the ones we think are no-brainers aren’t. He describes how the task of making a self-driving DeLorean “drift” on a racetrack is relatively easy compared to programming it to do the “right thing” in some everyday situations.

Stanford Professor Chris Gerdes talks about conceivable second- and third-order consequences of widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles. He uses the example of how transportation costs could drop dramatically when drivers are removed from the equation. Will that drive up car use and energy consumption? Will that open up new ways to advertise to a captive audience that is otherwise sitting idly?

Stanford mechanical engineering Professor Chris Gerdes addresses the commonly held fears around autonomous vehicles. Most of it isn’t rooted in personal experience, and once people are allowed to ride in them, Gerdes says public perception will start to turn if that experience is pleasant. So it’s incumbent on the first companies that deploy driverless cars en masse to get everything right, according to Gerdes.