Technology, Connected - AI At The Wheel: Why You Shouldn't Be Driving

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Everyone thinks they're a great driver. They're wrong.Most drivers think they can judge a safe overtake. They can't. And that's why we crash.Barry Lunn breaks down the sensor technology that sees eight cars ahead, detects velocity before brake lights appear, and intervenes when you're about to make a mistake.The tech: Radar. Not cameras. Not lidar. Millimeter-wave signals that bounce around traffic and see what you can't.More than half of global crashes are rear-end collisions. All preventable with earlier detection.We talk about:- Why radar beats cameras and lidar for safety- How sensors detect danger before humans register it- Why machines see eight cars ahead while you see two- How velocity changes are detected before brake lights- Why rear-end collisions dominate crash statistics- The trust paradox (people resist automation but quickly rely on it)- Why hands-off driving feels wrong even when it's saferThe problem isn't technology. It's human ego. We think we're good drivers. We're not. We're slow, distracted, overconfident.The machine doesn't get tired. Doesn't check its phone. Doesn't misjudge closing speed. It just prevents the accident you didn't see coming.The question: Why do we resist the system that saves us from ourselves?---Guest: Barry LunnTopics: Self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, radar technology, driver assistance, crash prevention, automation, trustFormat: Short episode-- Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]

You're listening to a five-minute thinking on paper short. I don't know what you're listening to. It might be AI. It might be quantum computing. It might be our book club. It might be one of her interviews with IBM on Microsoft. Or who knows. But I do know that it's five minutes that will add a layer of knowledge to your thinking,

which you don't get anywhere else. You won't get anywhere else. Welcome to thinking on paper shorts. Give us a couple more examples of when the tech that you're actually working on and testing and delivering, what are those scenarios where it helps you make that switch? Our backbone in our technology is radar,

and we're very radar focused. And the reason for that is there's loads, like cameras are on every vehicle and it will be. And we work with cameras, obviously, very closely. And then you've LIDARs was another technology that was about, but LIDAR has a lot of the same weaknesses that camera has, right? And what humans have, right? So cameras can see like a human can.

So we can't see the vehicle in front of the vehicle, for example in front of us. And we can't, you know, we can't tell, as I said earlier, the exact velocity. So a very interesting example of how we use the technology is radar that's millimeter waves, right? And it literally bounce up around the vehicle and then onto the next one and on to the next one.

And those waves send back the signal on the image of the vehicle, but also it gives you the, as I said, range of velocity. So you know what every vehicle is doing. So when you have multiple vehicles ahead, humans can't tell what's going on a couple of vehicles ahead. The cameras can't tell, a lighter can't tell because it's shadowing, but we can, the radar can. So, for example, we've all been there,

especially in country roads in lots of different countries, where you're stepped behind someone and you go to make that overtaking maneuver, but you're blinded to the vehicles coming towards you as well. The sensors can see all of that. And these are some of the early implementations we're seeing with our OEM partners, where it gives you a gentle nodge as a driver. So you go to make that overtaking maneuver, it stops the wheel. Then you see that cargo pass you and you go, oh, I'm so glad that there's artificial intelligence built into this that saved me for myself, right?

And now suddenly I trust a robot, right? As opposed to when we actually use hands off driving, humans get very nervous. They've done the measurements on our brains. Like when we hand over control, we're not really good at it. It's why people are scared of flying even though it's so safe. So when the machine starts to save your life on a regular basis like that, that's where we think that that impact would be significant. Another one that I can give you is more to 50% of car crashes are rear endings, right?

So why do you drive into the guy in front of you or the guy behind you drive into you? It's because of lack of foresight, right? If you could have seen that something was going to happen, you wouldn't have hit them, right? And so, in that scenario, we can see the car, let's say, six, eight, cars ahead of you, we can see that car start to decelerate before his brake light, come on, right? That's what the technology allows you to do because we basically got his exact velocity. And so normally you've to wait till the car in front of use brake lights. So you can imagine the latency in that, right?

It's one car, two cars, three cars, four cars, and then bang. So if I'm able to see that so much earlier, I'm able to take preventative action, so I'm able to slow down in a manner that the guy behind me doesn't hit me either, right? So those are two kind of just very simple type scenarios that if you've the right sensors, you're absolutely going to be better than a human driver.