Quotes from Karl Iagnemma

It's maybe an unrecognized fact of academia that what you spend a lot of your time doing is convincing people of your vision and raising funds to support your research activity. So in that sense, transitioning to a startup wasn't that big of a transition.

Partnerships remain critical to nuTonomy's success, and our aim is to work with groups with whom we share strategic aims and core values. These are partners that are transparent, innovative, and are focused on putting autonomous fleets on the road.

In Singapore, drivers generally obey the rules, but the attitude around pedestrians is actually quite different. It's culturally different. People drive safely, but it's not the same deference shown to pedestrians.

Singapore's not a very big country. They speak with one voice, and they have a clear idea of what their regulatory environment should look like.

Conflating thought experiments with reality could slow the deployment of AVs that are reliably safer than human drivers.

This is an indisputable fact: there are many, many people around here who love things that will never love them back.

I made a quick calculation: a 180-pound man, falling thirty feet under an acceleration of 32.2 feet per second square—I drew the shade and turned away from the window and closed my eyes.

Work, at times like this, is a sweet mercy: it allows a man to forget anything, even his true self.

I mean, I love you, I love all the nerdy things you do, I just don't understand why you feel the need to control me. We can love each other and still lead normal, semi-independent lives.

From a societal aspect, when you are impatient behind a driverless car and there's no one to listen to your beeping horn, what are people going to do? How are they going to take out their aggression?

We hope to get to the place where there are thousands of Peugeot cars on the road running nuTonomy software.

When you contribute to an open-source or a shared solution, and there's a liability issue that arises from the use of that solution, how will this be tracked back to individual contributors?

There's so much rich interaction with drivers that we take for granted. It seems like a mundane thing, but it turns out to be a really big deal.

I grew up in Michigan, in the Detroit area, so cars are sort of in my DNA.

In the automotive domain, generally speaking, when you look at consortium models, the groups that have leading technology are less incentivized to contribute to the consortia.

Building cars is highly specialized, it's hard, and it's capital intensive.

Uniformity is the friend of scalability.

I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.

The thing about stories is that they almost always find their way onto the page, even if it takes a while.

My parents encouraged me to be creative by being creative and interesting people themselves, and by making it clear how highly they valued creativity in others.

I usually have a general idea of where the story is going, but I try to avoid planning in too much detail. The best endings are those that emerge only after I've thought long and hard about the various ways the story might end. Then I choose the ending that seems surprising yet somehow inevitable.

From a technology and economic perspective, it's vastly more likely that autonomy will be used for mobility services.

Even if we wanted to imbue an autonomous vehicle with an ethical engine, we don't have the technical capability today to do so.

Surveys show that while many people are open to the idea of an autonomous vehicle driving them to work, far fewer are willing to let one drive their child to soccer practice.