I believe the self-driving car

has very strong environmental implications: safety, social.

It'll really fundamentally transform how many of us live.

Congestion is a major problem

for pretty much every city in the world.

We're just not operating cars very efficiently.

When you think about cars,

they have transformed cities, everything else.

They cause traffic jams.

There's a lot of congestion.

A peak capacity highway,

a highway that's really functioning, has only 6% cars on it

and 94% is the space between the cars

that we need because we're humans.

We're not that great driver.

Imagine a future where your highways actually work.

You go on a highway with your car

and left of you is a group

of very close distance cars coming by.

You push a button, it opens up and you merge in,

and then you push a second button

and all of a sudden the car drives itself,

all the cars line up very closely to you.

You're now in a train.

The train uses the aerodynamics of a train

but it frees your time.

Now imagine we fill the highway with cars

and pack 50% of the surface, which means all of a sudden

we have almost no congestions any more.

We would be able to do away with almost all traffic jams.

I started to realize we can actually build cars

that are safe, and cars that can drive themselves.

Cars are as safe as their drivers are.

We text while driving, we do all kinds of things

that distract us from the driving tasks.

Almost all accidents in the United States

are caused by lack of attention or driver errors.

Now, with self-driving technology, I think it's kind of

the holy grail for that specific problem.

Which is, we will be able to give people the mobility

that they want without exposing themselves and others

to the dangers that come with the fact

that they're not quite able to operate motor vehicles.

The biggest challenge we face is to make it really safe.

We recently had a situation where a plastic bag

blew across a highway and the car thought it was a kid

flying across the highway.

It sounds funny

and it was certainly something you could fix very quickly,

but these types of situations,

humans are just really brilliant

and cars have a hard time, to be honest.

So I believe there's an entire universe of amazing ideas

to be developed and I wish I lived 200 years later

to see them come to fruition.

But now is the time to start working on it.