Thrive Ep 53: The Driver-less Future: Bridgestone & Kodiak Robotics Explore Autonomous Road Ahead
Keith Cawley: Well, hello everyone. We are recording Thrive, our Bridgestone Americas podcast here in Las Vegas at CES 2024, the Consumer Electronics Show. We are having conversations throughout our time here for the podcast that focus on obviously different areas of our Bridgestone 3.0 strategy, the emerging world of mobility, vehicle tech that is being featured all over here at this year's show and talking again about some of the strategies that we're driving to bring these stories to life for you as we continue on our Bridgestone journey. Today, we're going to get into a conversation about autonomous vehicles and we've got a guest from a company that hopefully some of our Bridgestone teammates have become quite familiar with in the recent years.
But Don Burnette who's from Kodiak Robotics, CEO, and founder of Kodiak joining us here today. Don, thanks for coming by. Don Burnette: Thanks for having me. Keith: And in between us here, it's a returning guest of the podcast, so we've seen his name and face before, but Cassiano Polycarpo, Director of Original Equipment Account Management for Bridgestone Mobility Solutions, maybe even in a different role since the last time we talked to you, but here again to join us. Thanks, Cassiano. Cassiano Polycarpo: Absolutely a pleasure.
Keith: Yeah, so we will dive in, I think with this larger world, this larger industry of vehicle technology, autonomous driving, but first we always like to start as Cassiano knows, getting to know a little bit about our guests. So maybe Don, we'd love to learn your background, your story, the journey that brings you to founding this company and the focus that you have today. Don: Absolutely. So I've been working in self-driving for over 15 years now. Most people didn't even know it was a thing back then. It really wasn't a thing to be fair.
Keith: You invented it. That's what I just heard on the podcast. Don: There were people who were thinking about it, but there weren't a lot of people actually working on it. And DARPA came along in the mid two thousands and had this big challenge.
They called it the DARPA Grand Challenge. It was a robotic competition in the desert, and I was not a part of that, but I was in college at the time and I worked in a lab right next to the team that was actually doing the challenge. And then I had this event, I got into a car accident on the highway when I was driving home from college, I walked away and completely unscathed, but I realized in that moment it could have gone the other direction. And I said to myself, there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a safer way to move vehicles on the road.
And I was an engineer. I didn't know what I wanted to do at that time, and I thought, you know what, maybe the future is self driving. So I started working on that. I went to grad school where again, it was all research and then something happened where Google decided, Hey, we're going to take this out of academia and we're going to try to build a real team around it.
Crazy idea at the time. Everybody asked, why is Google doing that? I asked, why is Google doing that? But lo and behold, there were a lot of visionary people bringing that together. So I was lucky enough to join the original self-driving team at Google, and I've been working on it ever since.
The journey for me really became a one of starting out as a researcher, thinking about what's possible with the technology, to recognizing that if we're going to have an impact, if you really want to make an impact in the world, you have to build a sustainable business. And I became a lot more entrepreneurial and I started looking at use cases and it became very clear to me that commercial was the proper application for self-driving. And so I ended up leaving Google. I started a company called Otto, the first autonomous vehicle (AV) trucking company. I joined Uber after being acquired and then eventually after Uber decided to go in a different direction, started Kodiak back in 2018.
Keith: Okay. And Otto is OTTO was the spelling of that Don: OTTO. That's right.
Keith: Yeah. We have auto a lot that we hear in our world. So just making that clarification, but no, and I think we'll start to unpack a little bit of the Kodiak story here as we go because it is super fascinating and an impactful place that Bridgestone is spending a lot of time and focus as well. Cassiano, what about you? We did get a little bit of your journey and your backstory on the first visit, but maybe what's changed for you and the role that you're focused in since the last time we chatted? Cassiano: Absolutely. So last time I was talking to you, Keith, I think it was probably about two years ago, I was managing a team and a cross-functional team on partnering and exploring opportunities to find synergies with companies like Kodiak.
We call internally the new mobility players and emerging OEMs really to help support us on our mobility solutions journey. And since then we created Bridgestone Mobility Solutions (BMS), right? And within BMS, we have a customer success team, and that's the team that has been leading with a very similar, let's say, scope, but prior to that it was really focused on consumer. Now it's broader. So I'm working also on the commercial space and that's where I got close to Kodiak as well.
Keith: And that's part of what Bridgestone is talking about here is this idea of fleets. A lot of people hear that word, one specific thing comes to mind, but the world of fleets is so vast, so diverse in size and industry and the ways that they need to be served. So that is branching out well beyond commercial, which is part of what we'll be talking about though of course today. Don, let's then go into Kodiak, right? So you said you founded this company after some of these other stops with this focus on commercial trucking in mind, but where did you start with it and how has it maybe grown and evolved since then? Don: The insight to go into the commercial space specifically over the road, it's largely driven by a few factors. First of all, when you think about building a business, you want to have a large opportunity.
It's a massive market. Everybody knows it's a massive market that makes a lot of sense, but it's a constrained environment with repeatable routes moving back and forth. A lot of the focus at the time was on Robotaxis, as we call them today, but they operate in dense urban environments, it's really hard to optimize a system and train an AI, or at least it used to be, for those types of dynamic situations.
And the risk and exposure to severe incidents is very high, even when speeds are relatively low. So the insight was focus on the commercial sector first. These trucks, they get out on the highway, interstate highway, so middle of nowhere mostly we're not talking about highways around the city.
They're middle of nowhere. Keith: A lot of places with a lot of land out there. Don: That's right. A lot of land. Most people aren't driving there except trucks. And it gets into the right hand lane drives the speed limit, minds its own business.
You'd pass it by. If you ever do encounter it, you won't even notice it's there. That's the type of application that I ultimately wanted to pursue, and that's why we started Kodiak with a very specific focus. And one of the things I think we've done well at Kodiak is maintaining focus and not letting ourselves get distracted by other things. It's really easy to want to solve all the things, but especially in the early days of a company, it's incredibly important to focus.
Keith: And I know that when we talk about long haul trucking, that description that you started is a little bit helpful. People will be like, well, what do you mean autonomous driving trucks? Is that already happening? Are they on the road now? But yeah, the answer is yes, they're out there. Whether it's testing, but also in real application.
Don: Absolutely. We have a fleet now of about 34 trucks that Kodiak owns. We have a bunch of fleet partners that we work with, folks like Werner Enterprises, some of the largest truckload carriers in the country. We actually have a network of over 18,000 miles that we commercially operate on. Not every route every day, but we are out there driving with this technology 24/7, carrying commercial freight, working with the industry, showcasing what the future holds because people don't know.
You say, oh, what does it look like? Exactly. Just our listeners are like, what does that actually look like? Even our customers ask us, what does that actually look like? So we have to go out and we have to work with them to understand their pain points and show them what's possible. And that's what we've been doing over the last six years. Keith: Without maybe giving anything away.
But I think we'd have to keep it at a level for me to understand, that probably won't give much away. But if somebody would say, how does that work? Right? The idea of autonomous vehicle driving through the middle of nowhere, Texas minding its business, but it changes lanes or does what it needs to do when it does, how does something like that work at a fundamental sense, I guess? Don: Well, let me try to break it down in the simplest form. At the end of the day, what do you need to do? You need to perceive the environment and understand what's out there and where are you, and ideally, where's the road? And we use sensors for that. Most people are familiar with these sensors like cameras. Everybody knows how cameras operate.
That's one of the core sensors that we use. We also use something called lidar and radar, which are kind of cameras in just another sense. But these sensors together allow our system to build up an understanding of the environment around us. So the priorities are where are the lanes, where am I in my lane and where are the other cars? And then of course we layer on top of that. We have an overall routing map that tells us where the connectivity is, where are the exits? Because if you're going to drive a thousand miles down the road, you need to know what exit to take when you finally get there. Keith: Where are you going, right? Don: Exactly.
You can think about that in the same way that you would have an Apple Maps or Google Maps on your dashboard telling you which exit to take in five miles. Our truck has the same thing, and then that data coming from those sensors gets pushed into an AI computer and we run over 40 different neural networks and AI processes in our system that's making sense of the world around it, where are the other vehicles, making predictions about where those vehicles are going to be in the future, not about right now. You need to know where things are in one second and two seconds, et cetera. And then that ultimately feeds into a controller that makes decisions about how to drive. Should I be hitting the accelerator? Should I be hitting the brake? Should I be steering left, making a lane change, as you said, and that ultimately gets fed into the actuators of the truck. Keith: At this moment right now, are there human drivers in the cab in those trucks? Don: Yes.
So today, all of our operations thus far have been with a human safety monitor. However, we just announced at CES our sixth generation truck, this truck is equipped with all the redundancy that we need on the actuation side. So think braking. We have triple brake actuators, we have double steering actuators, we have double alternators for power.
You can't forget the power. All these computers run on power. Keith: That's where it all starts it sounds like. Don: If you lose the power, you can't make decisions. So we need to have redundant power. Our truck, our sixth generation truck that we just announced at CES has all those redundancies to be safe out there on the road and we're going to be going driverless, meaning pulling the safety driver.
Nobody in the cab, later this year. Keith: It's all happening 2024, the next iteration, right? Cassiano, I think maybe from the Bridgestone side, everything that Don's talking about is super exciting and you see the industry starting to move in this direction is the technology now continues to iterate. Where does Bridgestone approach this from? How did we identify Kodiak as a partner that we wanted to start working with more and how do we approach working with them? Cassiano: So when we started this initiative that we call new mobility players, we were evaluating looking for companies that are tech oriented, innovative, that would help us also to accelerate our journey into becoming these mobility solutions company. And also that they were open to collaborate on co-creating new technologies and new business models that would be complimentary to each other and support both find a common ground. And that's how Kodiak came up on the top of our list. I mean, Don explained it better than anybody how exciting it's the things that they're doing and bringing to the market.
And for us, it was a real life, almost test for our own technology, for us to proof test it, to validate. We were focusing on the beginning, of course, on our smart tire technology where we can do all the, we assemble tires with the sensors on it and then we integrate with their technology, with their truck, stream data from it, transform this data into digestible insights that we can transform into predictive maintenance. To Don's point before, it's about what's going to happen so we can prevent it to happen as much as possible and avoid the cost and be more efficient on transportation. Keith: Don, when Bridgestone comes to the table and says, Hey, we want to talk to you about maybe working together, doing some things. What was your understanding of who Bridgestone was at that time? I think we're obviously making moves to position ourselves as more of the mobility solutions and being big in that mobility tech space, but I think a lot of people just look at us and say, I always know them as a tire company.
When they come to talk to you about getting involved in autonomous technology you're developing, what is your understanding of where they're coming from in that conversation? Don: I have a confession. Yeah. I didn't know much about Bridgestone. We started, when we first started talking, I knew about the tires. I also knew about the golf balls. Yeah, I'm a pretty avid follower of the golf space, but we started to, well, we always recognized, I guess I would say that tires play a critical role in the safety and operation of our vehicles.
You can have all the AI intelligence in the world and all the sensors and all the computes, and if your tires don't perform, it almost doesn't matter. And I think this was something that was very overlooked by the industry. It's something that most consumers, to be fair, and I'll put myself in that category, take for granted. Keith: We talk about it all the time.
Don: We just assume the tires are going to work. You don't really think about it. Every once in a while you have somebody else look at 'em and say, yeah, you're good to go.
And you just don't think about it. Well, in the commercial space, obviously it's much more critical. We do thorough inspections each and every day before the truck departs.
But from an autonomy perspective, we need to know that the tire technology underpinning what we're building is reliable, it's safe. And of course, Bridgestone was fantastic. We sat down, had deep conversations about the future of mobility and the way that Bridgestone was thinking about it started to really open my eyes to, Hey, there's really something here.
There's a lot more science behind this. You mentioned predicted maintenance. That was something that I think really struck a chord with us because we're all about preventing incidents before they occur. It's one thing to be able to react. Like let's say we have a tire blowout or something happens, our system needs to be able to handle that, but it would be way better if it just never happened, right? Or if it's very unlikely to happen.
So I started to really, we started to think about this and it just made sense that we should work together on this. Keith: Maybe for both of you then, I guess, where has that then developed? You had this conversation where you find this common ground, this common thinking of how to approach the future. You mentioned Cassiano, the idea of tire centric kind of data gathering with the sensors in the tires. How does that start and then maybe where has it evolved since then? I know Azuga is kind of at play here in a data capture sense as well, but where are we working together? Cassiano: So we started with really a POC, right? A proof of concept on small steps like integrating our systems together. So we were able to stream data from the truck. Again, as I mentioned before, transform that into actionable data that will the future be a kind of predictive maintenance insight for the truck itself so they can action on top of the data that we are digesting in and working with.
But it goes broader than that. We do have a relationship where Bridgestone has an observer seat on the board of Kodiak that gives us a broader perspective of how the autonomous industry is developing, and it's very good to be close by to one of the leaders in this space so we can learn and be prepared for the future. As a matter of fact, we're just kick starting a new route with a common transportation partner where we are going to have tires that we manufacture in Aiken, South Carolina, be transported all the way down to Dallas by Kodiak autonomous vehicles. So that's how this relationship has been growing around and I think we are going to talk about it.
I'm sure it's about the ecosystem, right? Paolo always bring that up and it's not one that does. I think this collaboration and bringing other partners together is key for us to build the whole ecosystem on autonomous vehicle. Keith: And maybe you get that perspective, as you said, Don, you learn a little bit more about what Bridgestone is thinking about what they can bring to the table. I think a lot of people we talk to don't realize that tires play a big role in safety as the only part of the entire vehicle that touches the road. So when you think about that and what all is carried by, that changes the conversation a little bit to drive a little bit, but also the data as we've been talking about that you can glean from that to drive these actionable decisions.
I think people start to get that concept in general. But then Don, as you're growing in this space, you're like, if we could get this data, we can get this software to do this, so we're going to put driverless vehicles on the road. I would have to assume that a lot of people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That sounds like it's moving too fast, too much maybe, or they're fearful of the change.
What have maybe been some of the dialogue over time as you have those conversations to get people really wrapping their head around how all of this could really happen or is happening? Don: It's been a huge evolution, right? Keith: It's two weeks. It's done. Everybody snaps. Don: 2010, we talked to people about self-driving and they looked at you like you just said, some foreign language that they didn't understand. Incredible amounts of skepticism everywhere we looked, every person we talked to.
That has become less true over time. As we sit here entering 2024, I no longer have to go about convincing people that this technology is safe and it's the future. Most folks who have spent any time in and around the industry now understand that autonomous is the future.
Whether it's coming this year, next year or 10 years, it is coming. And that's the important piece. There are still people who think it's scary, but what I find is that that's because they haven't had exposure to the technology.
When people actually get exposed to it, and we're seeing this with Teslas and other personal vehicles where it's starting to get some of these capabilities, not quite like a driverless level, what we call L4 system that we're developing, but they actually get too complacent. They get overconfident in the system after a very short period of time, on average like five minutes, people get into the car, they're like, wow, this works great. I guess it's just always going to work, and that's not true. So exposure is the name of the game. That's why we try to put a lot of content. We try to put videos out.
We publish thousands of miles of raw uncut footage of our truck just driving down the road and guess what? It's really boring. It's not very entertaining. Keith: It sounds like a truck driving down a road. Don: It can be reassuring.
It can be reassuring to people who are like, oh, that's what it does, which is basically nothing most of the time, and I think this is just about education. Keith: And we've been talking here at CES. We had a panel in our booth here with Bridgestone where we focus heavily on safety and you talk about, it doesn't seem that exciting. The truck is staying in its lane, it's going its speed limit. It is delivering what it needs to the point where it needs to go, but there's inherently dangers that come along the way and the way it currently works, vehicles on the road in general, and that is a big part of what we're trying to address here in this is that safety aspect.
How big of a difference can this make? Don: Absolutely. It can make a night and day difference. But what I want to say first is we have to understand that human drivers are actually incredibly good. The statistics don't look good when you kind of read about all the deaths on the road, all the accidents, millions of people who are injured every year, and that's terrible. And it should not be acceptable, by the way, but by and large, we drive a lot of miles, so we're actually quite good.
But it's not all the times where you're paying attention, it's that one split second where you lost focus. You bent down to grab your drink, you happen to look at your phone or whatever it was, and that's when things go wrong. Keith: The idea that you always can't control the surroundings too. Those are things that maybe you're doing in your car, but then the environment externally around you, it's somebody else and then you don't have time to react. It's out of your control.
Don: We're not going to be able to prevent all accidents. As long as there are humans on the road, there are going to be accidents. I always tell people, it's kind of funny because we're trying to solve this problem at the peak difficulty. If all the vehicles on the road were autonomous, this problem would be solved. But we can't flip a switch. We can't just go zero to one overnight.
So we have to solve it in the most difficult of circumstances. But as there's more penetration of autonomous systems on the road, the problem becomes easier and easier, more predictable because other autonomous vehicles are just minding their own business or not doing anything crazy, and that's a lot easier to react to. So the problem will get easier over time while at the same time the technology gets better. So it's obvious that there's going to be a moment where this takes over.
Keith: But I like driving my car, Don. I mean, come on. Don: No, people will still be able to drive cars.
I don't think it's going to be banned for a very, very long time. I mean, we can talk about a hundred years from now what that's going to look like, but who really knows. You can still ride a horse if you want to. People own horses, they still ride them. And so it's always going to be possible. Keith: No, absolutely.
I mean, it is part of the learning curve and the development. I think Cassiano, when you look at Bridgestone's journey with this, autonomous is one aspect of this mobility solutions, the emerging technology space. You mentioned Palo talks about ecosystems CASE is an acronym that's been very used in the industry, meaning connected, autonomous, shared, electric in their vehicles. We're exploring a lot in all of those spaces, but I'd have to assume there's been a learning curve for us in doing that. Where have we seen things that maybe opened our eyes or that we maybe need to change approach or maybe spend more focus as we learn? Cassiano: I think autonomous for me is a disruptive technology. Once companies like Kodiak are able to pull this together and really have this on scale, that would change the world of mobility as we know today.
And think about personal ownership. You mentioned you like to drive your car, but I think the personal ownership for a vehicle when autonomous is out there will be different than what we see today. It's going to be a different relationship with your vehicle source to say, or mobility.
We are going to see mobility differently. We're just looking to mobility to go from point A to point B. And when we have autonomous, it'll be much cheaper and accessible to everybody. It'll be more efficient from consumption standpoint as well, energy or fuel.
It'll be much more efficient than we have today. And safer, I mean, no doubt about it. You mentioned about ecosystem and it's all about the ecosystem. I think autonomous vehicle ecosystem still on the beginning. So we are learning all together and being partnering with companies like Kodiak, it's very important for Bridgestone to be on the forefront of the autonomous ecosystem creation and even help to shape it. And that's where the opportunities will come up and we'll need to be on timely working with them to be able to grab those opportunities and understand where to play.
Keith: Yeah. I guess as we look at the future, what are the big challenges, Don, as you continue to try to iterate and try to grow? Awareness is one that's continuing to come. But I guess what are the other obstacles we're working around as you try to get this more mainstream or more advanced? Don: Well there's always everyone's favorite, which is the regulatory environment. But to most people's surprise, it's a pretty favorable regulatory environment today. We already have the green light to operate our system in a fully driverless capacity across pretty much all of the southern states of the United States. Right now it's a patchwork of state laws.
So we don't have a federal framework. We're working hard to get a federal framework, but I think everyone pretty much acknowledges that autonomous is the future. It's going to drive economic activity, it's going to improve safety, it's going to improve efficiency and also resiliency of the supply chain. When you think about resiliency of the supply chain, truck drivers are great, but think about what happened during covid.
All of a sudden everything broke down. People couldn't be out on the roads as much. And for the first time in a long time, at least certainly in my lifetime, consumers felt the hit personally, we couldn't get things that we needed like toilet paper and other goods. So this is where autonomous is going to help bolster the resiliency of the entire supply chain. So regulatory is one of the things. Obviously the technology is still hard.
I don't want to give anybody illusion that I can describe it pretty simply. It's a very simple problem to talk about, but underpinning that is really complicated science. Keith: There s no we've solved it all, right? Don: That's right.
And so it's going to be a gradual rollout. We have to make sure that the software and the hardware are both reliable. Safety is our number one priority.
We don't want to launch anything or put anything out on the road that has the chance to do more harm than good and that it's really the biggest challenge for companies like Kodiak. Keith: Yeah, well if we could, I'd also like, I have curiosities as I explored more about Kodiak. We've been talking a lot about the trucking space. You do work in other industries as well with this autonomous vehicle technology.
One of 'em is work with the Department of Defense. I mean, I see something like that and I'm like, I don't know what you can share, but I'm like, I'd be interested to learn more. But what types of other industries and then including the Department of Defense work are you working on with this type of technology? Don: Well, there's one key technological innovation that we went after early on that no other AV companies are really deploying, which is, it's a lack of something. We don't use HD maps. The traditional way to make an autonomous vehicle work is you go out and you pre-map the environment to high detail, that's why we call it high definition, with all of your sensors.
And you build this cohesive single map that you put in your data center and it's this big clunky thing. And then you use that to what we call localized to tell you where you are because you look at what you see, you look at your map, you compare the two, and you know where you are. It works great, well understood technology developed in the 1990s. Everyone else uses that. But there are key problems there, and I promise I'm getting to the answer of your actual question. Keith: No, it's fine.
Don: The key problems there is as soon as you build a map, it's out of date. Because the world is changing specifically on highways, there's construction zones all the time. We don't ever see the same stretch of road twice day to day.
It's always changing. So you can't rely on the map. So we decided very early on we were going to drive the way humans drive. You look at the road in real time, you see the lanes, you decide where the lanes are going, and you drive in that direction. That's exactly how we do it.
We don't have a pre-map of all the lanes and all that stuff. So we went on the journey, we perfected that solution, and here's the advantage. It allows us to go into more areas than just highways. So an opportunity came along to work with the DOD where they needed autonomous technology to go into unexplored terrain for things like surveillance and reconnaissance, but also supply convoys. You can think about contested logistics. The US Army and the US military in general is the largest logistics company in the world.
They move more freight and more goods than anybody else on the planet. And so this is a huge opportunity for us to work with them and take our technology into other sectors and other areas. The last thing I'll say is that it doesn't stop there. There's other opportunities as well. You can think about short haul, like Drayage, last mile delivery, retail.
Our system is now delivering to retail stores for ikea. We can do that fully autonomously, all the way to all the dock. And this is something that we've really shown that it's generalizing. There's mining, there's all kinds of other applications where I think this is going to be useful.
Keith: Also, since we have you, I'd love to ask about AI because it's like the buzz phrase of the moment, and it means something different, I think, to any industry and anybody who's kind of exploring with it. Where does AI come in for you? How does it maybe excite you? I'd have to imagine it plays a pretty futuristic big role in what you guys are working on. Don: When people who aren't in the AI space think about AI, they kind of think of the movies and really intelligent robots and all that kind of stuff. And there's some truth to that at the bare, at the bare bones, AI is really about pattern recognition.
You give it a bunch of data, it identifies the patterns, and then it allows you to ask questions like, okay, what does this pattern indicate to me? And that might say, okay, when you give me that pattern, that's a vehicle. I can tell you that that's a vehicle because I've seen a bunch of vehicles in the past. That's really what AI enables. It's a sophisticated tool for identifying and making sense of patterns in data that is huge, huge data sets of data that humans just can't possibly understand. And the progress of AI technology over the last decade has just been astronomically huge. And we are the recipients of that.
We're not at the forefront necessarily of pioneering all these areas because AI is just so general. But obviously in the computer vision space and the autonomous vehicle space, we do think that we have a lot of the state-of-the-art stuff. Keith: Well, I would like to close, maybe Cassiano, with where do we go from here, right? I think we always take a look at, this is great learning for us on what we're working on right now. The things that are focused in our strategy with our partners in the ecosystem that we talk about.
What do we have to look forward to? What is the future for this relationship? Cassiano: So I think like timely collaboration with companies like Kodiak, right? And OEMs and other key players on the AV space will help us to understand where the industry is going. As I mentioned before, it's on the very beginning. The ecosystem is still being built, but there is a lot of opportunity. Think about that today. We still don't have a complete autonomous vehicle fleet, and once this is coming, how can we manage that and how can we leverage fleet care business model in our solutions portfolio to support those autonomous fleets to manage and control and maintain and do all the predictive maintenance activity that we want to do and enable with our technology in the future.
So I think this timely collaboration is very important for us to be there working with this team and capture these opportunities. Keith: We hear our leaders and Paolo in particular talk about it a lot, but these are these kind of proof points. We talk about it at the big picture level, but these are the individual work streams, the collaborations, the delivery of this kind of thinking and co-creation to make that stuff happen. So appreciate the time to both of you, gentlemen, it's been great to talk.
I'm learning a lot. I am glad we didn't get into the actual any software engineering discussion because I'd be very lost there, but I know we would have a bunch of people that would actually understand and quite a bit of it's just not me. But Don, thank you so much for spending some time with us in the Bridgestone booth today. It was great to get to know you and get to learn more about Kodiak. Thanks for stopping by Cassiano. Always good to see you, sir.
Appreciate the time. Cassiano: Thank you. Likewise. Keith: We'll make this a regular thing, every 18 months, we'll just bring you back around.
Cassiano: I'm okay with that. Keith: It'll be good. Awesome. Well, we thank you both for joining us. We thank you for listening to this episode.
We want to remind everybody that you can always find more topics like this if you are interested in autonomous driving, this type of mobility solutions technology, by checking out other episodes of the Thrive Podcast. You can find us, of course, on any of your podcasting platforms of choice. Or if you want to watch the video, you can find us on the Bridgestone YouTube page as well.
If you have a comment, a question, a topic idea that you would like us to explore to learn more about, you can also send us an email at ThrivePodcast@bfusa.com. Well, we are at CES 2024 talking to partners, learning more about our industry, and we will have more episodes for you to come. But for now, I'm Keith Cawley, reminding you to keep on keeping on. And remember that at Bridgestone, today, tomorrow, together, we thrive. Be good, everybody. Page 1 of 2
2024-02-11 17:08
