6 Almost Impossible Challenges Humans Are Trying To Solve | The Limit

Are supersonic planes about to make a comeback? Can lasers burn a hole through

the Earth's crust? >> Wa! It just started to fly apart.

>> And why do robo taxis keep making dangerous mistakes? I've spent the past

year asking tough questions about why the future we were promised hasn't

arrived yet. Here are six futuristic things that are almost impossible.

Have you ever looked up at a skyscraper and said, "How tall can this really go?"

Well, I'm about to climb up there to show you something.

Until 1971, this was the tallest building in the world. After that, for decades, buildings got taller and taller until

the Burj Khalifa was built in Dubai. That's now the world's tallest, and it's

twice as tall as the Empire State Building. And soon, a tower will open in

Jedha, Saudi Arabia that's three times as tall. Franklidd Wright said a mile

high tower is technically possible and he designed one back in the 1950s. I

spoke with the people behind the tallest towers ever and they told me exactly how

far we can push it. >> I think Jedha Tower is the next step. I

don't think that it's the limit of how tall we can go. The sky's is the limit.

>> We went into the hidden parts of the world's super talls.

>> I wanted to show you guys what it feels like to be at the top of the world. to

answer the question, how tall can we actually build? Who pays for it? And is

it even worth it to keep building higher and higher? And what did we find out?

The higher the build, the stranger things get. So, the first thing you need to know is that there's not one single right way to

build a skyscraper. From the steel frame inside of the Empire State Building to

the more modern outrigger system that's inside one world trade.

>> We look at these structural systems we create for tall buildings as like

different species, different animals, you know, that work at different scales.

But unlike nature, we don't need to evolve from one to another. We can

create completely new systems. It's not really derivative from something before

or evolving for something for. >> Up until the Burge, all of these

buildings had something in common. A single tall support. You could add

what's called outriggers, which were mechanisms to connect the outer walls to

that central concrete structure. But there's one way that you can add support

to a super tall that's very simple. The breakthrough of the Burj Khalifa was

this three-part design that unlocked a new era of super tall

structures. >> We created this new species, this new system, and then we gave it a name. We called it the uh the buttress core.

This buttressed core allowed the Burj Khalifa to dwarf everything before it.

It's 828 m tall. And while the record for the world's tallest building is

usually beat by incremental jumps, the Burj Khalifa was over 60% taller than

anything else built before it. And nothing completed since has even come

close. The tripod form is extremely efficient. So, think of it as a

three-legged stool. When you have four on a on a stool, if one's kind of a

little off, you kind of feel it rock, but three is very efficient.

>> The wing-like design also reduces the need for materials that were

used to build earlier skyscrapers. >> There's actually more steel inside the

Empire State Building than there is in the Burj Khalifa.

>> So, what's it actually like to go up the world's tallest building? Well, we sent

a producer there to find out. >> Thanks, Dan. I'm going to show you the

full experience of at the very top of the Burj Khalifa. It's it's humongous.

It's gigantic and it's surrounded by all kinds of tall skyscrapers, but it

exactly dominates them. I can't even capture it in a horizontal format in the

widest of the lenses. You can see that the first thing to note is that the

experience of going to the top of the Burge begins long before you even reach

the building. You have to walk through the massive Dubai Mall just to get to

where the line starts. It turns out that going to the top of the Burge demands

endurance. The total cost of a trip like this with the VIP ticket,

getting there and souvenirs would probably run about $500. >> I'm embracing this view. This is what human admiration and vision can lead to.

I can see the infinity from here. Our producer may have enjoyed his trip, but

it got me wondering. Are these incredible feats of human engineering

just expensive tourist traps? Well, look at the numbers. The Burge could be

raking in as much as $700 million a year from over 9 million visitors. That's

twice the amount tourists spend to visit the Empire State Building and Eiffel

Tower combined. One way to think about it is that the Burge made back its $ 1.5

billion construction costs in just 3 years of tourism revenue. It

could be worth it to build tall just to stick a gift shop on top. The

buttress core has gotten us higher than ever before and a similar design is

being used in the Kingdom Tower in Jeda, Saudi Arabia. However, it might not be

the right form for a mile high skyscraper. >> I think there's there's a limit to how high this structural system is

appropriate. uh you know is it you know certainly a kilometer maybe one 1.2 km

at a certain point you have to create a new species a new animal a new

structural system can go that that high >> that's exactly what Bill's team did

later you'll see their design for a structure 10 times the Eiffel Tower that

overcomes all the limits of height but looks nothing like the Burge or the

Kingdom Tower. But first, let's look at why the Burge

itself broke with symmetry and why that lopsided look is one key to going

higher. >> Tell me, where are we at, Bill? What's

going on here? >> Okay, I'm here with Brad Young, who

who's uh runs the wind tunnel here at the S Soom. Brad and company spent like

months and months calibrating this wind tunnel. Uh so that it

accurately represents the velocity profile of wind that you see you see in

the real world. What we use here is good German very expensive styrofoam. Okay,

because the the model needs to be very stiff but very lightweight. Okay, so

Brad's firing up the wind tunnel. You'll see that there's a series of six fans at

the end of the tunnel. All right, here he is. is starting to fire up and um and

what the uh the wind tunnel does it uh it it shapes the the wind profile that

that matches what you see in nature. >> The secret to this carefully calibrated

wind tunnel, Lego bricks. They're used to simulate how trees and buildings can

affect air flow. So we use computational fluid dynamics that gives us a little

bit of a better graphical understanding of what's happening and allows us to

understand, you know, why some of the changes we're making to the building may

have the effect that we measure but we can't see. So this is a computational

simulation of what you're seeing in the tunnel. >> That computation is showing one of the key things that makes building super

tall so difficult. They're called vortices. So imagine you you

have a kind of a round shape and the the wind is blowing towards you. Um on the

other side of the building there's kind of this vacuum that that that happens

and then as the wind vortexes come through each side alternately they

create kind of like a mini tornado that that pulls on the building and and that

can be really dangerous. Uh especially if the building starts to move at its

own frequency >> and this frequency is the key thing to

watch for. If the timing of this wind sinks up wrong, this force can multiply.

You see this most often with bridges. The Tacoma Narrow's bridge, known as

Galloping Gertie, had a resonance that almost exactly matched the wind speed,

causing it to bend and twist in the wind until eventually it collapsed. So,

there's one key focus for super tall buildings. Confuse the wind. As the wind

hits the body of the building and organizes the vortices on either side,

it can begin to wreck the building from side to side. And so we want to disturb

that. And so we're confusing the wind at any every chance we get. The wind design

is the governing factor on the super tall. >> But there are a lot of different approaches to that.

>> Now often what we're doing is using texture or form to confuse the wind to

alleviate that behavior. But sometimes we actually accept the wind and we've done projects where we've actually brought the wind through the

body of the building. For example, or utilize spaces to ventilate the building

just like you would in a jet or in a high performance car.

Right here, 432 Park, you can see that there's empty floors on it. They're

called jump floors, and they're meant to let the wind pass through to cut down on

the sheer forces on the building. But there's actually nothing on those

floors. It's just empty. And it also makes the upper floors even more

expensive because they're even higher up. >> But despite the intricate work that goes into the structural engineering of a

super tall building, not everything can get worked out in a computer program.

>> It's quite surprising, but minor changes in the shape of the building can make

dramatic changes in the forces in the building. >> The Burj Khalifa was essentially reversed completely after wind tunnel

testing. The spiral originally went up clockwise but was changed to

counterclockwise because of these real life results. >> And the data we got back was not good. Okay. The the forces were too too large,

the move motions were too large. And so it's kind of a little bit ironic that if

the first uh shape and structural system had worked well, we might have stopped

there. But because it didn't, we had to make enough changes that we could then

actually go much higher. And the building changed in in height uh by 300

m. It's 300 m taller than when we started, which is essentially the height

of the Eiffel Tower. >> And there's one more trick that more

modern skyscrapers have to survive the wind that's actually inside the

building. >> Did we do that? >> Oh, it wasn't. Okay. We're going up a staircase from the

summit where tourists are allowed to go. There's extra steps up.

>> Ed, what what floor is this technically? >> That's 93. This is 94.

>> 94. >> 93 to 94. >> Got it. >> At the top of some of these buildings

are hidden monoliths, super heavy objects tuned precisely like a musical

instrument. It's called a tuned mass damper and it basically acts like a

super heavy pendulum that offsets the wind forces on the building and makes it

so that the people who are at the upper floors don't feel that sway at the top.

Every tuned mass damper is different because it's calculated to the size and

structure of the building. In Taipei, the Taipei Tower has a beautiful sphere

that's sort of a sculptural element that visitors to the building can go look at.

In Shanghai, the tune mass damper uses electromagnets to modify how it works.

All right, so now we're going to go inside to see the TMD at the top of one

Vanderbilt, which is the fourth tallest building in New York City. Let's go.

>> Do you do you do you remember how much it weighs?

>> Yeah, it's 500 tons. >> Wow. At a million lb. When you're doing

the calculations for something putting like something like this in a building,

what are the factors that you have to account for to make sure that you're

getting this the right size and positioning? >> A the classic example is the wine glass. If you take a wine a good crystal wine

glass and you flick it, you could hear it. Right.

>> Right. Right. It has certain to it. >> Just like that wine glass. Every

building has a resonant frequency. >> Right. >> Which we can calculate. We're We're designed for 110 mph wind and a

hurricane actually hitting >> Manhattan. >> Right. Right. Like a direct hit hurricane.

>> A direct hit hurricane. I don't I don't think that

uh building twice as tall as this is going to be an issue in the next 10

years. >> You heard it here first. >> Assum assuming somebody wants to pay for it

>> and actually has a use for a building that tall.

>> But here's the thing about TMDS. The Burge Khalifa doesn't have one. That's

because it has a buttress core design. It has concrete at higher floors and the

way it's designed to confuse the wind, it doesn't really need one. If we're

going to build a mile high skyscraper, we're probably going to need a TMD or

maybe more than one depending on how high up it goes. Let's be clear, all

these measures have less to do with preventing the worstc case

scenario of a building collapse and a lot more to do with the comfort of

people who are going to be living and working at the highest floors.

And as you could see, mitigating those factors can get very, very expensive.

But what if no one needs to go that high up in a building?

One of the cheat codes to adding height onto a building is to add a spire. Just

look at the Chrysler building. The architects of that built a spire inside

secretly as it was in competition with other skyscrapers at the time to become

the tallest. And in the last months of construction, they shot the spire up and

got the world record. That was until the Empire State Building was built.

But a spire is an easy way to add height onto a building. And on the Burge, the

spire is actually 244 m tall, which means that 30% of the structure is not

meant for regular visitors at all. The only people that are allowed to go up

there are technicians who have to change a battery on this specific

device that attracts lightning bolts. and a few lucky celebrities. That means

the spire on the Burj Khalifa alone would be the 11th tallest

building in Europe. But if we're only trying to go as tall as

possible, why not just build one giant uninhabited spire? If you broaden

the definition of the world's tallest building to the world's tallest

human-made structure, things start to look a lot different. 45 out of the top

50 tallest structures of all time are not buildings at all. And to

show you what I'm talking about, we're going on a little road trip.

We're about 15 or 20 minutes outside Hartford, Connecticut right now. And we

are approaching our final destination. Wow. I can see it now. That's why we're

here. Okay. The tower that we're going to see, the

WTIC or WHPX, which is the later call sign for the tower, is over 400 m tall.

That makes it taller than the Empire State Building, but it's not

even close to being one of the tallest masts in the world. The tallest radio

tower was actually the Warsaw radio mast, which was built in Poland

in 1974. And the signal from the mask could be heard as far away as the US and

Canada. But here's the thing about these towers. They're built for maximum height

with the smallest footprint possible. And when you're talking about a steel

tower that just goes straight up and down, well, you need something to tie it

down. This is the anchor for a guideline that you can see goes from there all the

way up to the tower. And each of these lines is kind of like

a finger trap. The more you pull on it, the tighter it gets, but if one of them

fails, it could be catastrophic. In 1991, during much neededed

maintenance on the Warsaw Tower, >> >> um the main guideline got disconnected and a gust of wind came and twisted the

structure and the entire thing collapsed. the tallest structure in the

world had collapsed and uh miraculously no one was hurt, but it wasn't a

one-off. Made it to the top. There's a few guys

working. I'm making a video about like tall structures, so I'm just taking a

video of the tower. I'm just going to take one quick shot just to show the

bottom because I think a lot of people don't realize that these things end in a

sort of a you that it looks like really unstable, right? Okay. So, we uh we

found out where we're we're not allowed to get this close, but there's a

facility here and there's guidelines in every direction holding this thing up. There have been at least nine collapses of

towers like this over 600 m. And that's because the guidelines and the way it's

set up are so fragile that if you lose the uh the support of one of them, the

tension in one of them, the thing will twist and come crashing to the ground.

Antennas like these almost always top out at around 2,000 ft. And

that's because any higher than that and they start to pose a risk to aircraft,

particularly small aircraft. But there's no reason that you couldn't

build something like this to surpass the Burj Khalifa and for a fraction of the

cost and material. Something like this is super cheap. It cost uh about

$500,000 and only took 30 days to build some of

the tallest masts of all time. Now, do you remember at the beginning of the

video when I mentioned the super tall structure that was designed by

the engineer behind the Burj Khalifa? Well, Bill Baker thinks an uninhabited

structure that goes straight up and down could easily hit 3,000 m, which

is well above our 1m limit. The Eiffel Tower is originally called the 300 meter

tower. If you look at the drawings, that's what it says, you know, in

French, of course. And so we thought, well, okay, that was,

you know, 1889. Uh, here we are in the in the 21st century. How about let's go

10 times as high, 3,000 mters. Okay, >> that's way over a mile high. In fact,

it's almost 2 mi. If you put that next to the Burge, you can see how tall it

really is. >> It behaves very well in the wind, both

because of the shape and also because of the porocity.

As it goes up, eventually it becomes so dense that we have to like make it

sparse again and stops us stop some of the pattern and then we it gets sparse

again and and eventually becomes solid at the very tip. >> Structures like these work well against

the wind cuz it's essentially hollow. The wind just kind of passes

through adding glass and floors and concrete and places for people to live

and the whole thing stops working. Man, Parar got Picar got to go

up to the top of the Burj Khalifa and I had to climb up Rattlesnake

Mountain to go look at a broadcast tower. Is that That's not fair. That's

not fair. Bill's reboot of the Eiffel Tower looks more like a

broadcast mast than it does like a functional skyscraper. There are no

apartments. There are no offices. It's actually designed to be a vertical farm

and tourist attraction. That made me wonder, how do we define what a building

actually is? Couldn't we have a few people living on the lower floors and

just stick an antenna on top? >> Oh, you you you've stepped on the third

rail, my friend. >> That's Daniel Safaric from the Council

on Tall Buildings in Urban Habitat. They're the ones who make the rules on

how to measure the world's tallest buildings. >> So, uh, the short answer is no. We don't count the antenna in the ultimate

ranking height of the building. We have three different types of

criteria. There's height to tip, which is the absolute tallest thing on the

building at any point in time. The problem with using that as your ultimate

height determinant is that it often changes. So, it's very likely to

be replaced or superseded by a different kind of technology several times over

the lifetime of that building. Take Chicago's Sears Tower, now called

the Willis Tower, and Koala Lumpur's Petronos Towers. Even though the

Petronos pair took the title of the world's tallest in 1998, the very tip of

the Sears Tower actually stands almost 100 m higher. The things on top of the

Sears/willis tower are antenna, and they have been different heights,

significantly different heights over the years. Whereas the spires, permanent architecturally designed fixtures on the top of the Petronos

towers and others like it have stayed the same. The so-called architectural

height which is the second criteria outstrips the other two. The third one is of course the highest

occupied floor. And according to the council to be considered a building

people must be able to occupy at least half the floors. So for our mile high

structure to actually be counted as a building, we could have 800 m of

habitable space followed by almost 800 m of spire alone. So let's recap. We know

we're going to need a new structural system, rigorous wind testing, maybe a

tuned mass damper at the top, and almost 50% of the building can be a spire. But

what would something like this actually be made of? Once you've designed a mile high building, the actual work has only just

started. And the first step is a strong foundation. It's not just about

digging deeper, but finding the right location. >> What's interesting about tall buildings is that a lot of times they're building,

you know, in in cities, okay? And where are the cities? A lot of times they're

in river valleys where there's ports and a lot of times they're places where

there's really terrible soil. And so so that's that's not unusual. The record

for the deepest foundations for a skyscraper goes to the Petronus Towers

in Malaysia. The building site actually had to be moved about 60 m to make sure

it was sitting on the right kind of rock. 104 concrete piles supporting it

stretch up to 114 m or 374 ft deep. That means 25% of the structure's height is buried deep underground. The strength

of concrete has been a big limiting factor for building high, but materials

have come a long way. Concrete especially has changed dramatically

since the 1950s. >> It's almost 10, 20, uh, 30 times stronger uh, than them. Uh, and why is that? There's been a lot of

innovation uh in in the material. Uh, you know, one such innovation called a

super plasticizer that helps reduce the amount of water that goes into concrete.

Now we're talking about ultra high performance concrete that can

really support, you know, theoretically support a mile if if if it's thick

enough. >> And these concrete developments were crucial when building the Burge. >> So one of the innovations was extremely

high pressure pump so it can pump it really high up. And it, you know, it's

pretty important that this is done very quickly because, you know, concrete

cures. Due to the heat of the desert, this concrete could only be pumped at

night, too. And it had to be filled with chips of ice to stop it setting too

fast. >> Pretty interesting to realize that, you know, all these small niche things are actually really what is is

making these things possible. And what feel like niche problems are going to be

the real sticking point when building super tall. Building a mile high

skyscraper in the heat of the Middle East will have entirely different

challenges to doing the same in cooler climates. Every expert I talked to said

that we can build taller, but each time there's going to be more and more

crucial considerations and less and less room for error. Just take the kilometer

high Jetta tower currently under construction. So the logistics or

strategy around getting that concrete up to over a kilometer

um is part of the design challenge that needs to be extremely well

coordinated because you're not going to go back in and alter the concrete during

construction to solve your problem. Um, we often kind of embed in our guys that,

you know, on these projects when you make an error, you can multiply that

error by a thousand times across the scale of this building. It's extremely

expensive to retrofit a building once it's already up. Look at the Empire

State Building. The owner spent a billion dollars modernizing it over the

last few decades. What most people don't know is that skyscrapers are only

designed to last about a century. The average age of the 200 meter building

that when it when it is being considered for demolition according to our research

is around 41 years which is pretty pathetic. >> What happens to buildings like the Burj Khalifa 100 years from now when they get

too costly to maintain? Is it simply left to crumble or pulled down at a much

larger expense? That's why Gil's firm made sure to use the best-in-class

vendors for everything on their upcoming project. >> When we first started this project, we went out and interviewed the best

elevator consultants in the world, the top five, we the top five mechanical

engineers in the world, um the top five plumbing engineers in the world,

structural engineers, uh because we knew we were on a path of doing something

that hadn't been done before. And so we learned a lot about the systems. Now

remember over 14 years you can imagine that those things change.

>> Those elevator consultants he mentioned, they're especially important. It seems

like the structural issues might be the biggest limiter for a super tall, but

it's actually elevator technology that still needs to catch up.

If you're in an 800 m tall skyscraper, no one is going to want to take the

stairs. So that's why elevators are probably the most important technology inside of a super tall. In a 500 meter elevator

shaft, there could be something like 27,000 kg of steel rope. And the reason

there's a limit of 500 m for an elevator is because after that point, the

elevator can't support the weight of the rope anymore. The solution so far to

this 500 meter limit is to have multiple elevators and sky lobbies where

passengers can change between them. But this takes up a huge amount of space.

And if there was a mile high building, changing elevators twice or more to get

to your apartment is going to be frustrating for anybody living at the

top. This 500 m limit looks like it's been broken by something called ultra

rope. It's an elevator rope made from carbon fiber and it'll be used in the

Jetta Tower. This would allow elevators to go up to a kilometer high. But if we

want to reach even higher than that, we'll need newer technologies. Again,

Franklidd Wright was actually one of the first to consider a mile high building

when he drew up the Illinois, a 528tory tower with parking for 100 helicopters.

He was using a tripod-like design way before anyone else had considered it.

But the most outlandish part of his design was actually the elevators.

The plan was to have 76 five-story high elevators that could

travel a mile per minute and be atomic powered. These would be mounted

on rails, kind of like vertical trains. And here's the thing, once the elevator

challenge gets solved, designs can veer into the fantastical. if we are beginning to, you know, fly cars or vehicles or drones

into the building. Um, if we're beginning to advance technologies for

elevator ring that can move sideways or can run on rails, um,

the sky's is the limit. Imagined in the 1990s, the X Seed 4000 is a 4 km tall

behemoth that would loom over Tokyo's Mount Fuji and be able to house a

million people. But even the director of the firm behind it said it wasn't meant

to ever be built. The tallest structure ever proposed by architects is

the Tokyo Tower of Babel. It looks similar to Exed, but it more than

doubles the height to 10 km. It was designed to house nearly the entire

population of the city of Tokyo. >> You could go probably 9,000 meters, you

know, height of a mountain like the Mount Everest. Uh the u at some point um

it'll just take so long to build you won't ever get there. And so you may may

never get completed. You know, the limit is going to be set by uh by time as much

as any time and political will and uh and financial resources.

The Tower of Babel would cost three quadrillion yen or $22 trillion. That's

14,500 Burj Khalifas. So basically a madeup amount of money. And yes, you may

have seen photos of an elevator to space or an orbital ring that surrounds the

entire planet. Structures so high they push out of the atmosphere. Those might

be impossible, but the reasons why are the subject for a completely

different video. So more than wind, materials, and technology, it turns out that the real limit will always boil down to the

bottom line. The top three tallest buildings in the world cost an average

of $2.6 million per vertical meter. There are so many reasons not to build

tall, and developers can make money just building regular height buildings. But

these projects are about so much more than economics. They're about putting

your city on the world stage. The purpose of a tall building is is

interesting. Uh I think a good example is the Eiffel Tower. It's not really a

building. It's it's a it's a restaurant. It's an observation tower.

But but it it's a placemaker. It tells you we're here. You can't imagine Paris

today without the Eiffel Tower or France or Europe or the world. If you're in a a

country or a city which has a lot of ambition and you're highly optimistic, a

a a distinctive good tall building is one way to to do it, you know, to to

kind of plant your flag. You know, >> when I first started the story, I have

to admit I was skeptical that buildings could get much taller. But now that I've

talked to the people building them, the question of a mile high tower isn't if,

it's a matter of when. And I guess the question is, how much would you be

willing to pay to buy a ticket to go to the top?

The last time anybody besides a fighter pilot was able to hit mock speed was in

one of these. But that was 20 years ago. The Concord didn't just hit mock speed,

it went double the speed of sound, flying from New York to London in

under 3 hours. Today, you can only go visit a Concord

in a handful of museums. It's a relic left behind by an industry that invested

in efficiency rather than speed. But look online and you'll see that there's

a huge appetite for supersonic travel. The race to supersonic is heating up.

I've talked to nearly all the companies building these new planes and I asked

them, "Why is it so hard to bring back supersonic?

and what's the limit to how fast a passenger plane can actually go. In

order to understand the challenges that they're up against, I decided to start

here at the Concord. So, my first impression of the plane is that the head clearance walking in is

extremely low. I'm 6'4 and I have to really uncomfortably duck down just to

get in this doorway. So, we're going to see what it's like inside. But it's

obvious that this plane's dimensions are totally different from normal commercial

airlines. First of all, the head clearance in here, thank God, is a

little bit better. Um, but I'm I am about touch if I stand up straight, my

head is touching here. So, it is it is pretty narrow and low. Here's my hand

against the window. Look at how small it is. When this plane was flying at such a

high altitude, if there was a failure of one of the windows, these small windows

were meant to slow that cabin depressurization. So, it was a safety

measure. And actually, on some of the newer planes that we're talking about,

they don't even have windows. Attention Concord passengers, on today's menu,

duck launch, caviar, and champagne. Lots of champagne. Always wanted to hold one of these. Um anyway, one of the things

about the Concord, it wasn't just about speed, it was about luxury. Every seat

on this plane was considered first class and the service was first class. There

was a culture created on this plane of frequent flyers. A lot of the time

celebrities were getting invited to the front to the cockpit and the pilots that

we talked to have some really fond memories of meeting those people,

interacting with them and and almost creating friendships with them. the rock

stars of that area, you know, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, they would

uh use it quite a lot and they'd certainly be there and I certainly

remember them. And I had a menu where I was collecting my favorite rock stars um

signatures. I sent it back to some I won't mention the name send it back to

somebody for that person to sign and they thought it was a gift for them as

it was their birthday and they walked off with it which was a bit of a blow to

put it malvy. This is the forwardmost cabin before we get to the front of the

plane and the cockpit and I'm comfortably standing up now finally. So

that might be explained by the fact that as you can see the body of the plane

gets sort of narrower towards the back. So we're in the front of the plane,

we're towards the cockpit. The view is extremely narrow. If this was a car, I

would not feel comfortable driving this on the road because the visibility down

to the ground is extremely poor. Hence, the droop snout design. So, the

Concord's droop snoot was a feature that allowed pilots to see the runway during

takeoff and landing, but then snap back into place when it was hitting

supersonic speeds over the Atlantic Ocean. The beginning of the end for

Concord came in 2000. After about 30 years of service, tragedy

struck. So, we're underneath the the plane now, and you could see the landing gear on each side. And um one of the things

that's understood about when the plane actually did crash is that there was uh

one of the tires hit something on the runway and it kicked up the piece of

debris into the jet fuel tanks, which are right here. And that's what caused

the fire that caused the the eventual crash. Concord did start flying again

not long after, but its fate seemed sealed. And the last flight was a few

years later on the 26th of November, 2003. So over 20 years later, have any

of these companies solved the big problems that Concord faced while it was

flying? Probably the most challenging obstacle these planes will have to

overcome is their noise. The sound of a sonic boom has remained the biggest

obstacle to supersonic flight since the very beginning. >> So far, 7,000 people have complained to the Ministry of Technology and to the

Noise Abatement Society. Only one man has seems to have come out in direct

praise of the boom, and that's a 74 year old age pensioner who claims that the

boom has cured him of his deafness. We got a purpose to stop the Concord. What's your objection?

>> In 1973, following a public outcry, the US banned overland flights for

supersonic jets, followed by most other countries. That's why the Concord was

only ever allowed to fly supersonic over water. Planes have been getting quieter

over the past 50 years, too. That's thanks to improvements in aircraft

design and more stringent government regulations on sound. So, a loudly

booming supersonic jet would be even more noticeable compared to modern

subsonic travel. So, how does a sonic boom actually work? Here's what happens

when anything travels faster than the speed of sound. So, sound is a wave of

pressure. And for a stationary object, it travels in concentric circles out

from where the object is. The waves of sound get pressed up against each other.

And that wall of high pressure, that is the sound barrier. Breaking that barrier

means an object is traveling faster than the sound it makes. It leaves behind a

loud shock wave, kind of like the wake behind a boat that's going really fast.

And that is what you call a sonic boom. If a plane booms too close to the ground, it can actually shatter glass.

Many people, including myself before making this video, thought that a plane

booms one time when it breaks the sound barrier and then it's quiet as it's

moving through the air. That's actually not what happens. As long as a plane is

traveling faster than the speed of sound, it's leaving that sonic boom

sound behind. For every,000 ft of altitude, the boom carpet left behind

the plane is about a mile wide. So, a plane traveling past Mach speed at

60,000 ft has a 60m wide swath of land underneath it that's hearing that boom

boom sound wherever it goes. And for those on the ground, that boom is about

105 dB. That's at least twice as loud as a normal plane flying overhead. And it's

equivalent to standing next to a chainsaw or a car horn. So, let's look

at our four planes. It's worth noting that I originally spoke to five key

players, but one of them went under while we were making this video, and it

just goes to show you how much of a challenge developing these planes can

be. Each of them has completely different approaches to supersonic

travel, and each faces different challenges. The X59, Boom, and Concord

all use similar technologies. Flying at 60,000 ft and hitting between Mach 1.4

and Mach 2. Those kind of speeds can get you from New York to London in three

hours rather than the usual seven. The Hion will use a ramjet engine along the

turbo fan to get it all the way up to Mach 5. That would get you from

New York to London in just an hour and a half. And the Stargazer is using a

detonation rocket engine, something you don't commonly see outside of missiles.

That might just do the same trip from New York to London in under 1 hour. So,

how are these four planes going to tackle the noise issue? Boom's overture

isn't looking to reduce the sonic boom at all at Mach 1.7. With overture 1,

we're starting really simple. We're putting sonic booms out over open ocean

where no one's there to hear them. >> US regulations still ban all commercial planes from going supersonic over land.

But researchers at MIT found that 78% of demand for supersonic transport was

overland routes. almost 40% of that was on US domestic flights. If these

regulations change, Boom says the overture could achieve a boomless

cruise, flying at just over the speed of sound over land without an audible sonic

boom. But this phenomenon requires specific atmospheric conditions to achieve. Flying any faster than that, without

making a lot of noise, requires some really innovative design, and that's

where the X59 comes in. The X59 isn't aiming for commercial supersonic flight

like the others. It's actually one of 66 Xplanes developed by the US government.

The X is for experimental. The first Xplane was the Bell X1, which was

the first plane to break the sound barrier in 1947.

The X13 tested vertical takeoff and landing. The X-15 was the fastest piloted aircraft that never left Earth's atmosphere, and

it hit Mach 6.7. It's taken NASA and Lockheed 6 years to

build a prototype X59. First off, X59's engine is on the top,

not underneath the wings. >> So, by putting the engine on top, we

kind of shield the shield that shock wave from reaching the ground.

>> Then there's the nose. It's a little hard to miss as it's 38 ft long.

The idea of minimizing the sonic boom is to keep those shock waves small uh weak

and relatively evenly spaced. So that long nose essentially starts that

process. It sets up those initial shock waves to be weak and and kind of equally

spaced along the first part of the airplane. >> And lastly, the light carbon fiber further helps to reduce the plane's

weight. Otherwise, the X59 is built from parts of other planes. It's got a T-38

cockpit, which is a favorite for test pilots, and landing gear from an F-16.

So, did NASA actually figure out how to quiet the boom?

>> We feel that we have. I mean, we have, you know, shown in a wind tunnel, you

know, in an experiment and in in experimental analysis, um, that an airplane can be shaped so that instead of producing a boom, it

produces a thump. Their aim is to reduce the boom from 105 to 75 perceived dB.

>> Uh that's equivalent to either a car door closing across the street or the

sound of distant thunder. >> As part of the quiet supersonic mission,

NASA has exposed communities to a simulated sonic thump. In 2018, they

conducted one of these surveys in Galveastston, Texas with 500 civilian

volunteers. This is in the eyes heard nothing marshal the squar heard a faint bump.

>> Eventually the actual X59 will make about 60 flights over a variety of yet

to be named communities in the US to collect more data. But there's another

much simpler way to reduce the sonic boom. Fly higher. Both the Stargazer and

the Hion want to fly much faster and much higher than the other supersonic

planes. It turns out like roughly above 100,000 ft uh you like a a sonic boom

above about 100,000 ft is inaudible to the human ear. Like the only we we can

measure it with scientific instruments, but you like it's inaudible to

the human. >> That's Dr. Andrew Dougleby, the CTO and

co-founder of Venus Aerospace. Just flying higher sounds like the easy

solution. But when you're at those kind of altitudes, a whole host of other

problems quickly appear. So, right here on this chart at 26,000 ft is the death

zone. That's where the air becomes too thin to breathe. It's why most climbers

need oxygen to summit Everest. Almost all planes cruise higher than this. But

the higher the altitude, the bigger the risk when something goes wrong.

>> When you're flying at 100,000 ft, if you lose cabin pressure, um, and you don't

manage it appropriately quickly, um, like your blood will boil.

>> Oh my god. >> So, it's you basically have to treat it

like a spacecraft cabin. Yes, airtight. >> Yeah. But uh I think the the solution

that you see at the end of the day will look much more like a hybrid between a

spacecraft cabin and an aircraft cabin today than just a pure aircraft cabin.

>> For high altitude military planes like the SR71, the pilots actually had to

wear sort of a modified space suit because of the danger of the altitude

and speed that they were flying. Are CEOs going to want a space suit up to

get to their meeting in Tokyo a little earlier? I'm not so sure about that. But

to be in a plane like this, there are so many things that could go wrong at a

high altitude that you really need to protect your body from a worst case

scenario. And it's not just the pressure at high altitudes. There's one

more problem with flying that high and that fast. The heat that could be

experienced on the outside of this plane could sometimes top 250° F. combined

with the fact that the exterior temperature was well below zero at the

high altitude -75. That heat and cold caused a lot of

stress on the outside of the plane. It meant that it needed a lot of

maintenance and it meant that it was a limit to how fast this plane could go.

Going faster than Mach 2, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, you need to get into exotic

materials. Aluminum like this plane is made out of just doesn't cut it anymore.

It's when you get really fast that heat becomes the biggest problem. aerodynamic

heating increases nonlinearly with speed. That means that as speed

increases, the temperature rise becomes more dramatic. What what hypersonic

really meant is the speed at which um and pardon my French, it's the speed at

which heat kicks your ass. Like it's it's where heat becomes the

defining problem. If you're trying to go make a missile, sure, maybe you want to

go hypersonic because you have other reasons to go really really fast to to

avoid defenses, right? There might be like military reasons to go

crazy, blazing, fast, hot, but I bet if I look at this from a I want to sell

commercial flights, how do I keep the cost down and competitive? I bet I don't

want to fly a Mach 5. So, one of the centerpieces of this museum is obviously

the SR71 Blackbird. You can see on the uh the tail fin here, there's the symbol

of skunk works, which are the people from Lockheed Martin, their sort of top

secret division that works on stuff like this. This plane broke speed records

going over Mach 3. It's one of the fastest aircraft of all time and

everything about it is built for high speed and to deal with heat. The SR71

actually reached 600° at Mach 3.2. And the glass in the cockpit here was

actually an inch and a/4 thick quartz material. If you were to touch that even

with gloves on, you would burn your hand. So underneath the plane, the tires again because of the heat and the speed that

it was traveling. These tires actually have inside of them nitrogen, not

oxygen. The oxygen would just blow up at the speeds that this was going and the

temperature it was hitting. And they also have a silver look to them because

they contain aluminum again to deal with high heat that the the plane was

experiencing. The only way the fuselage could survive these temperatures was to

make the entire thing out of titanium alloy, which is 10 times more expensive

than aluminum. It's important to note that things that go into space and

re-enter hit Mach speeds that are a completely different class. This thing

would re-enter the atmosphere somewhere between Mach 16 and Mach 20. And that's

why we always see on the space shuttles this black heat shielding on the front.

That's actually reinforced carbon. As it's re-entering the atmosphere, it's

exposed to heat that's on a different order of magnitude than anything that's

flying, you know, at 100,000 or even 180,000 ft. But even though these

hypersonic planes aren't going to be hitting space shuttle speeds, finding

solutions to these problems is going to take time and money.

The Overture has been in development for 10 years at this point, and Boom's test

plane just broke the sound barrier in late January 2025.

>> There we are. XB1 is supersonic, faster than the speed of sound.

>> The X59 is expected to take its first flight in 2025 and has already cost $632

million. That sounds like a lot, but building a plane is never cheap. Both the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner cost over

$20 billion to develop, and that's with huge manufacturing arms already in

place. The CEO of Boeing said if they were to develop a new plane today, it

would cost $50 billion. Exos was going to be the fifth plane on

our list. They were also aiming for a very achievable sounding Mach 1.8 plane

using already existing engine technology. They closed their doors completely in November 2024. I spoke

with the CEO before they went under and he was a little more realistic about

time frames for this technology. >> So, at least for the airliner, we don't

see that coming into the market until like mid to late 2030s, which I

think you know UBS or some other bank had a similar uh conclusion.

The speed of developing these planes isn't helped by the fact that

there's literally only one place you can fly supersonic planes over land in the

United States, the Edwards Air Force Base. We can take off and immediately climb up to 30,000 ft where we're now cleared to

go supersonic. And that doesn't exist basically anywhere else in the country.

Um, and certainly probably not even around the world. Edwards Air Force Base

was established around two dry lake beds. It's roughly 35ish square miles of

naturally dry, compacted surface that's hard enough to land airplanes on. There

are other areas, especially over the water, where you can be doing supersonic

flight test. Um, but that's not exactly a place you want to be if something goes

wrong during the flight test. I don't want to be over the water, and I

certainly don't want to be far away from a landable surface. But the area is not

completely uninhabited. We asked a few people in nearby towns what a sonic boom

sounds like. I've heard it described as a sound of freedom.

>> Well, sometimes you get the rumbling, the building will shake, and other times

it's just a loud like M80 or something going off, a big explosion.

>> So, when people come here and enough in the area, they hear the noise and the

first thing they want to do is is run out the store cuz they think it's

an earthquake. So, to me, it's funny and and I just look at the reaction and then

let them know it's a sonic boom. So NASA, Loheed Martin, Boom, Hermus, and other organizations building supersonic

prototypes will at some point be testing in this one strip of land in California.

And it's not just the test flights. Finding the space to test

engines is even more of a challenge. But that's changing. And we went to

Jacksonville, Florida to check out why. This is Cecil Airport. It's outside

Jacksonville. We're here for a press event. So, basically, Hermes is opening up a new facility here that's called HEAT, and it's going to be

for testing engines, and uh they've got their quarter horse prototype plane

inside the hanger here. So, we're going to get to check that out, which is

pretty cool. Let's go take a look at this plane. Wow, this looks crazy. Look

at this. So, in order to uh test the engines

associated with hypersonic flight, there's only a couple places in the

country that you can do it at the scale that we need, at the scale of the F100.

Um, and that primarily the kind of like go-to one is Arnold Engineering

Development Complex. Um, and that facility is uh bottlenecked in the

entire country because everyone wants to get in there. Um, and so what we want to

do is not only bring in something that will help us accelerate our road map

that isn't bottlenecked where everyone is trying to get there, uh, but also

increase the capability of the country So, this is the tunnel. This is the

inside of the tunnel where they're going to be testing things like the quarter

horse and other engines. And it's hard to tell, but it's super

super quiet. Herus, an Atlanta based firm, is arguably the furthest along in

testing their hypersonic prototypes. They're planning to modify the Prattton

Whitney F-100. That's the same engine that's inside an F-16. So what they're

doing is cocooning that engine inside of proprietary technology to take what was

an engine that could go Mach 2 and giving it the capability to go Mach 4,

5, and above. >> You spend a lot of time in Washington.

>> I do. >> And that means you're probably talking

to people from the Department of Defense. >> The systems you see the department investing in right now are are one-way

systems, right? You send them, they uh launch, and then they don't return. And

so every time aka >> missiles >> missiles uh $20 million a shot or more. Um and so the cost is really challenging

to scale. When you have a vehicle uh that returns the cost per effect of

those munitions significantly decreases and it would also have the impact of

unlocking a lot of private capital. Hypersonic weapons are at the center of

an arms race among the world's superpowers. That's because a hypersonic

missile remains within the Earth's atmosphere, unlike an ICBM, which goes

up in a sort of parabola, and then comes back down. In theory, it makes

hypersonic missiles harder to detect. The US has spent over $10 billion on

hypersonic weapons so far, about 3% of the overall R&D budget for defense. And

it seems to be with good reason. China may have already tested a

hypersonic nuclear weapon, and they've built wind tunnels that can test speeds

up to Mach 30. According to articles we've read, Chinese scientists have

patented an engine that can go up to Mach 16. And one Chinese company called

Space Transportation is building what they call a rocket with wings. Take a

look at this wild CGI video. Do you think that the United States is behind on hypersonic? I think it's an

incredibly difficult competition. Um we have a different approach in general um

to how you know China and Russia have have taken it. I mean the the the flight

tests kind of speak for themselves. The pace of flight testing um that China the

CCP uh have been able to demonstrate over the past decade uh exceeds ours by

an order of magnitude and I think that that speaks for itself.

>> So I guess the last question is when will you feel like hypersonic passenger

planes are a real thing? Ask me again once we've flown a hypersonic aircraft.

That's that's step one that we got to that we got to prove out.

>> So, we know it's going to take a long time before supersonic or even

hypersonic passenger planes are going to be in the air and development is going

to take a lot of investment. Another problem that Concord just didn't have.

The development of the Concord was completely subsidized by the governments

of France and the United Kingdom. Rolls-Royce, the engine manufacturer,

was actually governmentowned during the Concord era because it had filed for

bankruptcy. The airlines didn't even have to buy the planes.

>> I mean, initially, let's face it, the airplane was basically given to British

Airways. I mean, they didn't have to pay a scent for it.

>> That level of state investment just isn't happening today, and that's

definitely going to slow development. >> I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a

commercial supersonic around 2050. Um, and to kind of unpack that,

we would need to have both lowboom aircraft and very abundant, very cheap

SAFS in order for supersonics to succeed. And 2050 is about the time

frame that I think it could happen. >> That's Dan Rutherford. He's an

environmental engineer that's been researching aviation emissions and policy for about 15 years. SAF stands for sustainable aviation fuel. It's

still an emerging technology, but it's one that's going to play a crucial role

when it comes to these planes because of just how much fuel they need.

Let's compare fuel use against standard subsonic airline travel. Commercial

planes vary, but take the two most common planes flying today, the Boeing

737 and the Airbus A320. Now, this of course varies on route weight and lots

of other factors, but as a fairly high estimate, they both use around 3 tons of

fuel per hour. Now, compare that to the Concord, which used a massive 22.6 tons

hour and for a lot fewer passengers. Even if you were to calculate it per

distance, Concord gets 13.48 mp gallon to a trip 7's 80. Now, it's obvious that

jet fuel is different from petrol. It's actually closer to diesel. But for a

simple comparison, a full flight on Concord is the emissions equivalent of

every passenger on board driving from London to New York in a Ferrari 812

competition. And not only is it burning more fuel, but even the same amount of fuel use could be worse for the environment at

higher altitudes, too. Because supersonics would fly very, very high in

the sky, uh there's a concern that emissions from their engines will have a

disproportionate impact, especially on the climate. And just kind of ballpark

figure, if a if a plane is operating at say 33,000 ft, emissions from its engine

stays in the atmosphere for like 2 or 3 days. But if you take it and you make it

supersonic and you fly at 55,000 ft, um the what we call the resonance

time or the amount of time the pollution stays in the atmosphere is more like two

or three years. Uh, and that's very concerning both from climate change and

then for ozone depletion. >> How are these newer planes going to

solve this efficiency problem? Well, the truth is they really aren't. The main

problem is the faster you go, the less efficient travel becomes. In fact, Saudi

Arabia wants to invest in supersonics precisely because of this. They

highlighted the future of supersonic flight as a key focus in their oil

sustainability program. Here's a graph showing the drop off in efficiency at

greater speeds. The higher up on the graph, the more efficient the plane.

Boom is probably the closest of these projects to reality, and they claim that

the overture is 30% more fuel efficient than Concord, maybe moving them up here.

The Houseion will be using a ramjet and end up somewhere around here on the

graph, just beyond the SR71. The Stargazer uses a similar engine, but

also adds their brand new rotating detonation rocket engine for higher

speeds. Rockets are way more inefficient. And if you look at the

bottom of the chart, that's where you're going to see the rocket propulsion. Not

a lot of planes use rocket propulsion for that reason. Compared to the

Concord's 22 tons of fuel per hour, this thing burned 20 tons of fuel per second.

Now, it's not an exact comparison obviously because the planes that we're

talking about are not launching directly up to get out of uh Earth's gravity

well, but it just gives you an idea of how much fuel it takes to move weight uh

you know up into the atmosphere. I mean, you could kind of see the design

is different, right? They're like they're more compact. It's just about

throwing as much power through it as you can. Venus is targeting a specific

impulse of 1,250 seconds, which the company claims will put its hybrid rocket ramjet engine in line with standard ramjet performance.

But that's still 80% less efficient than the 747. And rather than 400 passengers,

it carries only 12. Engine efficiency may not be the sexiest

topic, but all of these planes will undoubtedly be worse for the environment

than subsonic travel we have now. It's not just the environmental impacts

either. This fuel costs a lot of money and it might just be the makeorb breakak

reason that flying supersonic just isn't profitable for these companies.

>> It's a it's a it's a lovely goal. Everyone wants to go higher, faster,

farther. We don't like to use that phrase too much, but you know, but at

some point they're they're limits. And in the case of airplanes, the limit for

speed is Mach 1, a little bit below it practically speaking to be commercially

viable. Beyond that, no. >> Here's a graph of jet fuel prices over

the last 50 years. This flat period of low prices was Concord's era. Since

then, fuel prices have shot up. So, while a trip on the Concord in 1999

costs about $154 per passenger in fuel, that flight today would cost over $700.

And for Boom, the numbers are looking much worse. They've made a commitment to

sustainable jet fuel. Today's airplanes are actually only 50/50 compatible with

sustainable aviation fuel and overture are designing to run on up to 100%

sustainable fuel. >> Sustainable jet fuel is a type of jet

fuel made from either renewable sources like plants or algae or repurposed waste

that's intended to have a lower carbon footprint. >> But the thing to know is that SAFS remain very expensive and very

rare. So typically uh SAF costs between two and five times as much as fossil jet

fuel and it's only uh it only accounts for 210 of 1% of fuel use today. So it's

very much a nation technology. So if boom achieves their 25% more efficient

than Concord claims and SAF costs the $8 per gallon that it cost recently that

means the fuel alone for each passenger on a flight from London to New

York would be around $1,500. If SAF hits the highs of $10

that it did multiple times last year, that would be almost $2,000 in fuel

costs for every single passenger. Those are really rough estimates, and maybe Boom will manage to squeeze a little more efficiency out of

their planes. But it gives you an idea of just how expensive these fuel costs

could be. We reached out to Boom about this, and they told us they're

aiming for a $5,000 roundtrip ticket. If that's true, $3 to $4,000 of that would

be fuel alone. They told us, "We've designed Overture to be profitable for

airlines at fairs, similar to first and business class. That includes fuel

costs, which we expect to go down over time as the supply of staff increases

along with demand. And there's one other big problem with this plan. SAF often

isn't actually as sustainable as it sounds. Well, there's a lot of diversity

hiding under that term sustainable aviation fuels. A SAF can be

produced in a sustainable way with a good feed stock and reduce emissions by

80% or more compared to fossil jet fuel. But it also can be produced in

a way that actually makes it more polluting than fossil jet fuel. So to

take an example, if you take palm oil that's derived from um like a deforested

area and turn that into a saff, then that's actually going to have higher

life cycle emissions than fossil jet fuel just because of all the carbon you

released when you cut down the forest. The US government is aiming for

3 billion gallons of SAF supply in 2030, which is um you know 100fold or more

increase from today. So those would be SAS produced from corn or soy that offer

modest if any greenhouse gas benefits. It's going to be a tough task to balance

out fuel costs, environmental damage, and heat problems, all while making a

comfortable and affordable ride for passengers. Now that we've seen all the supersonic prototypes, who's actually going to fly

on these things? All the CEOs we talked to said similar things.

>> I think it's uh typically the the business traveler, the folks that you

would see um flying in uh business class or first class today. When we talk to

people who are the most frequent international travelers in in business

class and first class, 97% of them say they want supersonic flights.

>> You land in Japan at 2:00 p.m. your time, but it's more like 7:00 a.m. their

time and you, you know, take an Uber or you ride a taxi to the factory. You're

able to have a meeting with whoever you're meeting with for like 3

hours. You you can then board a flight and get back home in time for dinner.

And in a world of super fast internet and remote calls, do we really need to

be flying these CEOs across the planet at hypersonic speeds? And

finally, for the nearly 10% of CEOs who are super commuters, traveling 100 miles

or more to work, one study found that they consistently underperform their

localized counterparts, causing their firms to lose value and their tenure to be shorter. It's even worse if they own a boat or live near a

golf course. It turns out the only person who would actually fly supersonic

and be home in time for dinner was the pilot of the Concord.

>> I would drive my wife early in the morning to the station, our local

station. She get on the train, commute into the city, and I would go to

Kennedy, get in my Concord, fly to London, go swiftly through customs and immigration and come out the other side

and get on as a passenger on the evening Concord out of Heathrow,

and I'd get back into uh Kennedy, get in my car, drive up to

Katona, and pick my wife up at the station, she

having been to work all day. And me too, I suppose.

>> But even for the ultra wealthy, are they going to pick speed over comfort? When

you can already fly in luxury on a private jet, is the few hours saved

going to be enough to entice people back to supersonic? Could there be a faster

supersonic future? Maybe. But it's not happening anytime soon. And there's a

lot of reasons that people should think about and be concerned

about what the implications of that future might be. This is my first time

inside of a Whimo, and we're going down the windiest street in San Francisco.

Even though it looks like no one's driving this car, not this Whimo, not

Tesla in full self-driving, none of these cars are fully autonomous, no

matter how good they seem to be at navigating the roads. Whimos only

operate in specific geoence locations, and Tesla's full self-driving mode requires eyes on the road and hands by the wheel. Wh Don't do that. And when

any of these things get stuck, they require the intervention of a human

to tell it what to do. >> Hello, this is Katy with Fleet Response.

>> So, I should just close the door? >> Yeah.

>> Okay, cool. I'm going to do that. >> Self-driving cars are coming soon to a

city near you. But we still don't know how many humans

it takes to drive them. So, why is it so hard to get robo taxis right?

And which company could be the first to unlock this trillion dollar market?

There are two main players already vying to bring robo taxis to American

roads. Whimo and Tesla have two very different approaches to autonomy. And

when you see them side by side, that's extremely clear. The Whimo has lidar,

radar, 29 cameras all around the vehicle. The lidar spins out laser

pulses to build a highresolution map of nearby cars, cyclists, and pedestrians.

Radar uses radio waves to track how fast objects are moving and how far away they

are, even through rain, fog, and dust. Cameras read colors, signs, and signals.

In case you're wondering what happens if you touch one of these things, literally

nothing. It's spinning at a speed that's not unsafe, and it doesn't break it to

do that. So, but don't do that at home. Tesla has just eight cameras barely

visible and all. Elon Musk has called LiDAR a fool's errand and something that

is expensive and unnecessary. Tesla's camera only approach has an advantage

cost. It's way cheaper to have a self-driving car navigate with cameras

and AI than to have all the additional sensors that a Whimo does. But there's a

downside. Some of the experts I spoke to said the cameraonly approach will never

truly be safe. If you're serious about self-driving, you don't have just a

single sensor. >> Using camera only is like tying one hand

behind your back when you could also use a lighter. It's certainly taking the

hard path. >> And why that matters is because this car

right here, if Tesla can prove that this car is safe enough and can self-drive

everywhere in the country, every Tesla on the road today could become a cyber

taxi overnight. fundamentally two different approaches to how self-driving cars navigate. >> Please close the right side rear door.

Thanks. >> Now, let's talk about what makes them different from human drivers. There's a very long list of fairly normal driving

scenarios that robo taxis struggle with that aren't an issue for any normally

skilled human driver. Here's one. Teslas don't always stop for school buses.

>> It just carries on. >> It was 100% when we first started

testing. It was 100% of uh of the time. >> That's Dan Odow. He's a critical systems engineer who designed the software that

runs in F-35 fighter jets and nuclear bombers. >> The kids would line up and watch us run over the mannequins. the kids in the

school, their parents would come out or the teachers would come out and say, "Oh

my god, it ran over that little kid who's just walking across the road."

Over the years, Dan has probably spent millions of his own dollars trying to

show how Tesla's full self-driving software has major design flaws like

Tesla's driving on the wrong side of the road. There can be a do not enter sign

on both sides of a street saying do not enter and it'll go right down that

street because it doesn't see those signs. and even failing a driving

test. >> Get me out of here. >> Would have failed the test. >> Even after paying for two Super Bowl

ads, Dan said he was shocked at the response. >> 90% agree that this should be banned immediately. Why does Nitsa allow Tesla

full self-driving? >> And it did make a nice splash, but Tesla

didn't do a thing. >> Well, that's not entirely true.

The company did send the Dawn project a cease and desist letter. Dan thinks that

people should boycott Tesla until the company proves that their full

self-driving software is safe. >> Pull the product off the market FSD.

That doesn't mean pull the Teslas off the market. You can still drive

your car. You assign 10 engineers or 100 engineers or whatever it takes to do

it and you fix that problem and and now you can go back on the road.

Before the Tesla stands jump into the comments and say, "Oh, version 14 of FSD

is so much better." Well, the Dawn Project tested the latest version two,

and guess what? The Teslas are still passing school buses and ignoring the

school speed limit zones. >> Just to be clear, they have made

improvements. One out of every five times, it will not stop.

>> But it's not just Tesla. Whimo is under investigation in Austin, Texas for

passing school buses. And in Santa Monica, a Whimo hit a 9-year-old outside

of a school during dismissal. Thankfully, the child wasn't seriously

injured. I was holding off on explaining this until now, but for the rest of the

video, there's a concept you need to understand. The SAE six levels of

automation. Let's start with level zero. Level zero is a car that has no

automation. That's most of the cars on the road today. Level one automation is

when the car can steer or break on its own but not both at the same time. So

that's kind of like the lane assist in my mom's Honda CRV.

>> Wow. >> I really do think it is. >> It's the first time you used it. >> I didn't even know I had it.

>> Level two sounds simple, but it actually is more complicated, and it's where most

of today's self-driving hype lives. Level two is when the car can steer and

break on its own, but it requires the human to still be paying attention to

the road. And even though it seems way more capable, Tesla FSD is still only a

level two driver assist program. >> Oh, it it gave me a warning that I took

my eyes off the road for too long. >> And that allows them to evade all the

robo taxi regulations because the robo taxi regulations only apply

when you say that you're level three or above. But here's the thing about level

three. It comes with what engineers call the handoff problem. It means that it's

automated until suddenly it calls for human assistance and you need to step in

right away. Level four is where things start to look autonomous. There's nobody

in the driver's seat. And yes, Whimo is level four most of the time, but

sometimes they get stuck. And when they get stuck, Whimo says, "Well,

there's just sort of phone a friend." And that friend helps the robo

taxi complete the driving task, which makes them partially a driver.

>> Level five means that the car can drive itself anywhere, at any time, and under

any circumstances. It's the holy grail of autonomy, but it doesn't exist yet.

>> And there's another thing that's keeping robo taxis from being fully autonomous.

Mother Nature. Not a lot of people on the roads today. It's one of the worst

snowstorms we've had in New York in a couple years now. But uh got to

go clean off my car. Comes with the territory. You know, storm like this

when you get like a foot of snow, you got to clean off your car a couple

times. It's so cold. It's 19°. For cameras and sensors, snow is especially problematic. It can

erase lines on the road and make everything look like a blank white

sheet. Plus, those snowflakes can create noise inside the LAR and radar

sensors and even block the cameras. Whimo says their cars are already

driving year round in snowy conditions in 10 states, including New York,

Michigan, Colorado, and Minnesota. In addition to earlier testing in

California, the Jaguar Ipace Whimos already have sensor cleaning technology,

and the upcoming Ohhigh model will build on that with improved cleaning

technology for heavier weather conditions. Are you engineering for snow

now? Tell tell me more talk more about that. >> So that's that's happening in the next release, right? The newer version of the

car, right? The Ohigh, you know, is going to have, you know, cleaning

technology that's better than than our our our current version.

>> And so all of that, you know, gets us ready for uh for driving in in

heavy snow, >> right? >> On the other hand, you can see a lot of videos online of people using full

self-driving in their Tesla in snowy conditions like this one, and they say

it handles pretty well. And I am just so happy right now that FSD is

driving this way in this snow. Whimo admits that winter weather scenarios are

under represented in their training models. Now, in order to make up for

that training when they don't have cars in scenarios like this, they've added to

their simulated models to help train the cars to get better at dealing with

winter weather. Those simulations can also be used to deal with what

engineers call the longtail problem. Things like encountering wet cement or a

car hauling a tree that's swaying in the back or a man in a wheelchair chasing a

duck across the road. Those are all real life things that actually happened. When

I met with Chris from Whimo, he told me that the company's recently unveiled

world model can help tackle these rare safety cases. transform scenarios from a

dry condition to a snowy condition as an example. And this allows you to multiply

the data. And what we find is that while there are many many longtail scenarios,

we have a corpus of data that actually has allowed us to reach levels of

performance that are showing up in the in the result.

>> That was a Jaguar followed by the new Ohhigh model. Now, that Whimo World

model can help the cars learn from situations that the cars may never

actually encounter in real life. And some of the demonstrations they have on

their website include driving into a tornado and dealing with a charging

elephant in the middle of the road. >> The catch with the simulation is if the

simulation doesn't have something in it, then you'll never train against it. As a

really simple example, if your simulation doesn't have any moose in it,

the first time you see a moose, you're going to have an edge case you're not

trained for. So, simulations can help, but ultimately, if the edge case is not

in the simulation, you have not really solved the problem. So, by some

estimates, before they can truly say that these cars are safer than human

drivers, robo taxis should expect to clock billions or maybe trillions of

miles so they can see as many of these edge cases as possible.

>> Humans are not nearly as dangerous as the the self-driving car industry wants

us to believe. That's actually pretty good. We have a lot of fatalities

because there are trillions of miles driven. It's just a numbers game. But

there's no amount of computing power that can predict how the public will

react when something goes wrong. And that's why we're headed to the Mission

District. I'm on 16th Street in the Mission District outside Randa's Market.

I wanted to take you here because this is the location of one of the saddest

stories in the rolling out of Whimo so far. So, Randa's Market, there was a cat

here named Kit Kat who was adopted by the owner and lived here and was known

as the mayor of 16th Street. Everybody loved this bodega cat. Uh, we talked to

some of the guys who hang out on this block and they told me some nice stories

about the cat. >> We would roll around over here, get on

his back and I, you know, >> on the stomach and everything and

>> Yeah. >> Hey, all the homies, man. All the

homies. >> Yeah. Everybody. >> So, what was what was your reaction when you heard the news?

>> I didn't even cry. I was just really mad.

>> The story goes at 11:30 at night after the shop was closed up, the cat was here

on the curb. A Whimo pulled up to drop someone off and right as the Whimo was

pulling away, the cat darted under the car. A female bystander saw this and

tried to coax the cat out, but the Whimo started to drive off, killing KitKat. In

this case, a human driver might have seen the woman searching under the car

and investigated before pulling away. It led to a big public uh outcry. There

were protesters. There was a media conference here with some elected

officials. They now sell memorabilia merchandise. I paid 25 bucks

for this hat. Remember Kit Kat? There's a shrine here. And why is this

important? Obviously, Kit Kat wasn't the first animal killed by a self-driving

car and won't be the last. But you can see how when you have something as

beloved as this bodega cat, it really sets people off and it brings negative

attention onto this kind of robo taxi coming through their neighborhood.

>> Every time I see a Whimo, I spit on it. >> For real.

>> I'm not going to lie. >> We are going to be meeting with Whimo

this week. We're going to one of their lots. We're interviewing some of their

executives. If you could say a message to them, what would you say to those

people? >> Do they think they took responsibility for what what happened? >> Right. Right. Do they feel like they

took responsibility? >> They want to put it right correctly.

>> Yeah. In other words, they have a long way to go before they earn the trust of

the people. >> Oh yeah, definitely. >> Kit Kat remains a cautionary tale, but a single accident can bring down a

multi-billion dollar fleet. And in San Francisco, that already happened. Cruz,

which was operated by GM, suspended operations in 2023 after one of its cars

dragged a woman underneath it. She was seriously injured and that pretty much

was the death nail for that service in the city. So I have the

incident report here from the San Francisco Fire Department. They utilized

the spreaders and cribbing to remove the individual and she was later transported code three to San Francisco General Hospital with

significant trauma. Right now I'm under an underpass and uh I'm next to a

parking lot. But why am I here? Look through here.

You see that? This is what a robo taxi graveyard looks like.

The cars in there are literally sitting around just gathering dust and grime.

You would have thought that maybe they would have moved them somewhere else.

Between KitKat and cruise, it's clear that self-driving cabs pose a risk

to both pedestrians and pets. And even if that safety record improves, none of

these companies can yet answer the trillion dollar question. How many

people does it take to drive a robo taxi? Congress pressed Whimo on where

its remote assistance workers are located. Whimo says they had already

disclosed this to regulators in the press, but the hearing was the first

time many in the public had heard it. In what countries are these employees

located? >> The Philippines. >> Should be >> the Philippines. So they are in the

Philippines. Yeah, >> Mr. Pñena, that is completely unacceptable. And here's why. Whimo revealed they have around 70 remote

assistance agents on duty. Around half of them are overseas.

>> So if that remote person is in the Philippines, you have some issues of

jurisdiction and accountability. But whether it's 70 workers or 700, I had a

personal experience that tested the limits of what Whimo's remote assistants

are able to do. I was supposed to go pick up my colleague Lloyd and then head

to Mountain View to interview executives at Whimo HQ. He lives in an area with

terrible cell phone service. So when the Whimo passed his house, I had no way to

tell it to turn back around. I still don't have service.

>> And the app is not working. >> Okay. >> Now the app looks like this. >> This turned into a 30inut ordeal with a

remote assistance team. >> Uh even if you tried uh turning off and

opening your data as well, it's not really working. >> Uh I'll try that. >> Okay. Just let me know if there's still

an issue. Okay. >> They were unable to get the trip started

again and I had to wait for my coworker Lloyd to show up and save the day.

>> Lloyd, I am Dude, I told it to put Okay, first of all, cell phone reception in

your neighborhood is not great. Lloyd, help me. Lloyd, help me, man. Finally, Lloyd, who had cell reception,

was able to order a new robo taxi, and we continued on our way to Whimo HQ in

Mountain View. Nice cardigan. Bye-bye, Whimo. All right, let's see. Lloyd Lee writes for Business Insider

about self-driving vehicles. >> Really, the Smiths? In terms of like how

many humans are operating each robo taxi is kind of hazy because you have the

people in the call centers, the remote support agents, but you also have people

at the depot who have to charge and maintain these robo taxis and then of

course there's the engineers who are sort of supporting the whole robo taxi

push. >> In simple terms, why does it matter how

often a human has to intervene in these rides? I feel like it shows the maturity

of the technology and or another way to put it um you know how autonomous are

your autonomous cars if you constantly need a human holding its hand.

>> That was made brutally clear in December 2025 when a major blackout in San

Francisco showed how fragile current AV systems are. More than 800 Whimo vehicles were in the outage area and experienced over 1,500

stoppages. Whimo says 96% of those stoppages resolved autonomously, but the

remaining vehicles blocked intersections and created problems for first responders and other drivers. Something as common as a blackout should have been

part of the simulation. And even if it was, Whimo looked like they weren't

prepared. So today, I'm at Whimo's San Fran Depot to see how the humans behind

these robo taxis are keeping them on the road. There has to be at least

60, 70, maybe 100 people working here right now. There's a big crew of people.

It looks like there's a bunch of bunch of different job functions. Everyone's

wearing yellow work vests and uh they're servicing these Whimos as they come in.

You can see the charging stations here. We've got our our gloves,

our spray bottles, vacuum cleaners. It would seem that they go through a ton of towels

based on the fact that they have one for Wednesday, one for Tuesday, one for

Monday. That's Monday's towels. One day of towels and that's all the dirty

towels. There's different lights, colored lights on each of the vehicles. And there's a chart that I guess is to let the workers

know what kind of service each one of those vehicles requires at the time.

You've got things like a biological slashlost item, which I'm guessing is

like, you know, food or maybe someone threw up in the back or maybe there's

um, you know, something that what I did like an idiot is leave their wallet in

the back, which by the way I was able to retrieve. Thank you, Whimo. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Oh. Oh. Ah. Yes. Thank you, Whimo. Thank you, Whimo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank

you, Whimo. >> The robo taxis do not have to be

fully autonomous for this to make sense as a solution. The number is never going

to be zero. If you have the same number of people involved in the robo taxi, but

they're outside of the car instead of inside of the car, I don't see how you

make this economically viable. I didn't get this conversation on record, but I

did meet someone while I was here who's a Whimo driver. And that means that

basically he gets paid to sit in the driver's seat of the Whimo and either

drive manually and his moves, everything he does is recorded and sent back to

train the data. Or he's driving in autonomous mode and

he does what he calls triage. So, he uses these buttons on the

steering wheel to send data back to the developers. One thing that stuck to me

is that he told me that there are stretches, especially when you're

driving around in autonomous mode, that he starts to drift off and um the seat,

the front seat actually notices and buzzes or shakes him awake. Uh which I

thought was pretty funny. So, while the future of self-driving cars might look

sleek from the outside, there's humans at every step of the way driving

these things to train them, tagging data on the back end, cleaning them,

servicing them, handling remote operator calls, and uh getting shaken awake when

they fall asleep at the wheel. How would you characterize the moment we're in

right now in terms of the deployment of robo taxis, at least in America? People

like to think that we're 99% there because there are hundreds and

in one case a couple thousand robo taxis out there on public roads driving around

and it feels like we're almost there. That it's almost solved. It feels

like it's 99% done. But I think of it a different way. The difference between

having a couple hundred robo taxis and a couple million robo taxis

is dramatic. There's still many, many issues with safety and deployment and

scalability. And so I think of it as well, we're done with the first 99%, but

we still have another 99% to go. >> Now we're up to full speed on the

freeway. It's going 65. And uh not bad, not terrible. If it's not clear from the depot, owning and

operating a fleet of vehicles is an astronomical cost. So that's why anybody

who's trying to make a robo taxi business work is trying to reduce those

costs as fast as possible. And their newest generation of cars are actually

going to be not the Jaguar Ipace which cost an estimated 150K, but they're

going to be based on the Hyundai Ionic and that is estimated to be about half

the cost. What remains unclear is how much that cost reduction will help Whimo

close the gap in pricing with other ride share services like Uber and Lyft. So I

downloaded this app. It's called Hackne and um it basically compares the prices

between Uber Lift and Whimo. The price the price that came up on the Whimo is

$135. Just regular UberX is $23. So it's even twice because of the the surge pricing and it's got $1191. So in this case,

Lyft would have been the winner. According to analysis by journalist

Malik, Whimo needs to be targeting more expensive rides, like $30 a pop, just to

make the numbers work on their current $126 billion valuation. But right now,

it seems like Whimo is more in a spaghetti phase. They're throwing

everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. In Nashville, Lyft manages the

fleet for Whimo. And in Dallas, Avis takes that job. In Austin and Atlanta,

Whimo rides are booked through the Uber app, but Uber is responsible for

managing the fleet. >> We've tried to keep all of our options

open, keep all the doors open, and and so we're we're learning a lot right now

from the different types of models that exist in each of these markets and are

going to continue to explore uh as we expand to more cities. We recently

shared that we've been uh doing deliveries with Door Dash.

>> Whimo may be taking that partnership literally. They've been paying Door

Dashers to show up at Stranded Whimos just to close the door.

>> I don't think we're at a point in time where we want to say this is the one way

to do it and this other way is not the way to do it. It's it's so early in the

widespread deployment of these things that I think it's it's premature to kind

of declare one way or the other. >> Now Tesla's model is radically

different. They're selling cars to consumers today with the promise that in

the future they'll become self-driving cabs that can earn money for the owners

when they're not using them. >> It will be like an Airbnb thing. You can

add or subtract your car to the fleet whenever you want. Your car gets added

to the fleet and it just makes money for you while you're gone.

>> Yeah. Markets seem to be bullish on Tesla getting their cyber cab business off the ground. Morgan Stanley analysts expect 1

million cyber cabs on the road by 2035. And this chart shows how they're

projecting that robo taxis will take over a third of all ride share miles in

the years to come. But overall self-driving car use will remain pretty

flat. But if robo taxis remain a novelty, how will these companies

deliver on their biggest promise that their cars are safer than human drivers?

Every year there are over 40,000 deaths on American roads. That makes this

country the most dangerous developed nation to drive in. That's a death rate

of about 12 people per 100,000 population. There are several

explanations for this, including the fact that drivers are more aggressive

and distracted than ever before. The argument goes that robo taxis never

drive tired or get drunk and that they're already safer than human

drivers. And as we see more of them on the road, they could reduce traffic

fatalities to near zero. Whimo does have a pretty good record so far,

>> at least right now, on par with Uber and Lift drivers, which is to say that they

have accidents about four to six times more often than your average driver,

which is an amazing achievement. I I want people to understand like I think

Whimo has done a very good job of getting at least on par with a um a more

high accident population, but you know, still they've done a pretty good job.

>> But what if I told you that some people have already seen enough to say that

robo taxis will actually make streets more dangerous and that they're willing

to go to extreme lengths to prove it? In 2023, as robo taxis started to take over

the streets of San Francisco, a group of activists calling themselves safe street

rebels started staging protests. Basically, they figured out that if you

take an orange traffic cone and put it on the hood of a Whimo, it can stop it

dead in its tracks. It was us showing through a very uh

passive and peaceful object of just a cone that this technology is not as good

as it seems. We never ever once uh destroyed a car. We were never vandals.

We were also showing that the technology just in its inherent form didn't work

very well. >> For example, I don't think it happened

here, but in LA, you know, when you had some of these anti-ICE protests, people

really took their rage out on Whimos. I don't know if that was just convenience

or if that was like a targeted thing, but I did there's some pretty gnarly

videos of people just taking rage out on Whimos. >> Yeah, that wasn't safe street rebel. Um, but I do think it it speaks to something

that's people are really fed up broadly with big tech right now. They're really

fed up with the ways that corporations have gotten away with so much.

to see how many times Whimo has injured someone, injured someone's pet, injured

someone's loved one, caused havoc, blocked an emergency vehicle. To see all

of these times that Whimo has messed up, we have to ask who who's being

prioritized. Is it the driverless car companies or is it the people? And it

really feels like the driverless car companies. And I think people are really

fed up with that. >> Adding cars to the equation never makes

the situation safer. My biggest frustration that I have heard a lot is

they're the future. And it's just like we thought laser disc was the future.

>> Ren and Austin took us on a tour of their hometown to give us a look at the

car-free future they're hoping to build. >> Oh, there it goes. Yep.

Right past me. >> This is a slow street right here. The

intention of the design is that cars only drive to destinations on the block

they enter. They don't drive multiple blocks up and down the street. You can

see behind us right here a set of barriers in the street um that block the

incoming lane. >> Yeah. I mean, you can just see with the

sheer number of people riding past us, these are some of the most alive streets

in San Francisco. Yeah, slow streets work. There are very, very effective

design of traffic calming. But Whimos don't act like humans and traffic

calming is designed for humans. Uh they are not really understanding the

barriers, so there can be a lot of issues. >> There's one right here. actually looks like there's one.

So, this is a Whimo waiting in the middle of the intersection so that it

can get into a slow street and it's giving up.

>> They also showed us Sunset Dunes, which was a strip of Oceanside Highway that

was recently converted to a car-free park. >> It's just a wonderful place where everyone can come together and enjoy the

beach. There's something that a Whimo will never be able to do that public

transit and biking and slow streets do, which is bring community and get people

outside talking to their neighbors. Our slow streets are some of the liveliest

streets uh in our city where neighbors know each other. They host

really wonderful block parties. >> If the real goal is fewer people dying

on the road, autonomy isn't the only answer. It might not even be the best or

fastest one. Last year, Helsinki, Finland, announced something remarkable. Zero traffic deaths. Not zero pedestrian deaths. Zero traffic deaths, period.

They didn't get there with self-driving cars. They didn't wait for AI to solve

human behavior. They did it by slowing cars down. City officials lowered speed

limits across residential areas and the city center, enforced them with speed

cameras, and redesigned streets to make driving feel less comfortable. Roads

were narrowed. Trees were planted closer to traffic. The city invested heavily in

public transit, cycling infrastructure, and walkable streets. The logic was

simple. Slower cars means fewer deaths. And data backs that up. Drop a car's

impact speed from 40 kmh to 30, and the risk of killing a pedestrian is

cut in half. And here's a shocker. Half of traffic fatalities are the 9% of

people who still don't buckle up. What if we just make seat belts great again?

As we pour billions into teaching cars how to drive like humans, places like

Helsinki are quietly asking a different question. What if we just stop designing

cities that let cars kill people in the first place? And that may end up being

the hardest problem autonomy can't solve. So what happens next? Whimo keeps expanding. Tesla keeps shipping new

versions of full self-driving. And to be fair, there is real progress. In early

2025, Whimo reported zero at fault injury crashes across more than 7

million fully driverless miles. There are asterisks to that safety record.

>> And the reason that you're seeing very, very low highway miles out of Whimo is

because this is where it's really dangerous. When you're going 65 m an

hour, this is when you can kill someone. So, I do think that highway driving is

going to continue to be an albatross around their neck, as is scaling. I

think Whimo is the more that they try to increase the fleet size, the holes in

the dikes are really starting to show. >> Right now, what we see is Tesla is not

yet even into scale up mode. They're still trying to get their technology

reliable enough that they can start to scale without human drivers involved.

This is not an overnight success story. This has always been a multi-deade slog.

And now we're a decade or two in and there's another decade or two to go. So,

if whi modes remain a city-by-city grind and Teslas remain a driver assist

system, where will we see full level 5 drive anywhere anytime autonomy first?

Probably somewhere like the port you hear behind me. Oakland has one of the largest ports in the country. And we're standing here.

You can see a constant stream of large trucks and shipping containers getting

unloaded from cargo ships coming and going all day every day. This is one of

the busiest ports in America. >> I expect it's much easier to succeed and

we've already seen successes in things like transportation enclosed environments like ports or logistics hubs, things like this. Those are the

easy pickings and that's where it's much easier to have success. You could just

see these epic lines of trucks and every single one of these guys is in their

truck cuz they're moving up probably a 50 100 ft every few minutes. And just

imagine a world where they could leave their trucks and maybe uh you know go

take a break or whatever and it would still move itself into line into the

loading zone. That that's kind of the dream of of what autonomy would look

like in a place like this. I just felt like the robo taxi application at the

time didn't tick all the boxes. It wasn't as compelling of an opportunity.

>> Kodiak CEO Don Bernett worked on Google self-driving cars. He didn't leave

because the tech stopped improving. He left because trucking offered a more

realistic path to realworld autonomy. Kodiak's approach reflects where most

experts think autonomy will arrive first. industrial sites like the Peran

Basin where Kodiak already runs highly autonomous operations. >> We work with a company called Atlas Energy. They're a sand mining company

that provides fracking sand for the oil and gas wells. The misconception about

the Perian is that it's actually remote and therefore there's no traffic. These

roads are heavily trafficked. There's a tremendous amount of trucks going in and

out delivering supplies, delivering sand, delivering fuel, delivering water, delivering electricity. And by the way, when I say these trucks are driverless,

they truly have nobody in the cab. There's no observer and we don't require

remote monitoring. So they are truly on their own out there. We fully trust them

to do all the tasks that a human would normally do in the truck delivering

across that entire uh you know multi-hour uh load delivery back and

forth. >> In mining in the closed industrial environments, level five is a thing and it's been a

thing for a long time. Look, it's the perfect setting. Dull, dirty, dangerous.

You can control the environment. You can control the people working in that

environment. Rioento is the company I've worked uh with directly, but many others

have fallen suit since then. >> Automation, at least in terms of

self-driving trucks and things like that, is kind of old hat in your

industry already. Yeah, we've been on an autonomous journey for over 15 years at

Riotinto. Uh where we started off with building the operation center

which is right behind me here where there's 600 people controlling the vast

array of activity that occurs 1500 km away in the Pilra. The first technology

that we implemented was autonomous trucks. The way we control activity here

in the control room does vary from activity to activity. For example, our

autonomous drills can be operated of one person up to eight drills. For

autonomous trucks, one person can operate up to 20 trucks.

Despite the concerns and criticisms, the expansion of robo taxis seems

inevitable. I even saw Whimo in lower Manhattan. The company confirmed this

car was driving autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel.

This is the first time I'm seeing a Whimo in New York City. This is crazy.

Look at this. It's here, but it's got a guy behind it.

It's coming. It's coming to New York City. This is crazy.

There it goes. Right side right outside our office. After spending about 6 or 7

hours total in Whimos, my experience is that the Whimo driver feels like someone

who's just learning how to drive. A little too hesitant, a little too heavy

on the brake, and definitely making some decisions that I found to be

questionable. Oh my gosh, it's like driving with somebody who

learned how to drive a month ago. People cut these cars off a lot because they

know it's not a person, so they don't give a and then it just like like

jerk jerk jerk, you know? I'm definitely going to get motion sickness before the

end of this video. I'm going to barf. And every single time

it does something like that, if I had an Uber or Lift driver who did that, I

would be giving them a one or two star rating. I'm sorry. When I took

a test drive of Tesla full self-driving, it just felt way less hesitant and more

like a human driver. >> You know, there's a couple moments in

everyone's life when they interact with a piece of technology that just

absolutely blows their mind. I can't believe uh what we experienced just now.

and uh going to need to take a minute to process this.

>> So, are AVs actually safer than human drivers? That may be the wrong question.

>> When we say so many someone is safer than a human, right? It's a very weak

argument for the general public. >> Highle statistics about safety are just

not how people judge these vehicles. They judge them incident by incident.

And every weird maneuver, every viral video, and every news story about a robo

taxi doing something it's not supposed to do costs the industry more than any

highlevel safety statistic can buy back. If you're selling on perfection, every

picture makes you look bad. >> So, here's a different pitch for robo

taxis that Phil thinks might actually work. >> We try and make the fewest mistakes possible. We're transparent that we

fixed it, and when we fixed it, it's really stays fixed. And by the way,

um we're not going to hide anything. You can trust us to

be transparent, to be good road users. Nobody Nobody's perfect.

>> Not perfect, but always improving. Then you can market robo taxis to users who

have already expressed high interest in them. Parents who are too busy to shle

their kids to all the different places they need to go, and people who just

never want to deal with another person in the car. And here is where I'll leave

you. It's important to keep in mind that many companies have already tried and

failed in the robo taxi endeavor. Argo AI, the startup from Ford and VW, shut

down. Apple quietly scrapped their self-driving car program after spending

billions of dollars on it. And Lyft and Uber sold off their autonomous vehicle

units. But those ride share players are reinvesting in the technology and more

companies are entering the space. Zuks owned by Amazon is already operating in

Las Vegas and San Francisco. Tesla already has cyber cabs rolling off the

factory floor. Lucid unveiled their robo taxi concept and Nvidia wants to build

the technology stack behind all of it. >> It's more peaceful than humans are

driving. >> These robo taxis will continue to be a

mix of impressive, frustrating, and potentially dangerous. But whatever happens next, whenever you see a self-driving car on the road, know that

right now someone somewhere is behind the wheel. Since the beginning of time, men have tested their strength by lifting the

heaviest rocks they could find. And there are few lifting stones as famous as this one.

>> The Husel stone weighs 410 lb. That's about the size of a small car engine.

Not only might we see a new world record, we could be in the presence of a

new legend. He's done it. The thing that I noticed is that thing is heavy

on the chest. It's hard to breathe. That was the hardest thing about that.

>> The Husfel stone from Iceland is so iconic that replicas of it are used in

strongman competitions around the world. The legend goes that the

triangular mass was the gate to a pastor's sheep pen. But the first person

to lift it and carry it around the rock wall wasn't a man at all.

>> It was actually the pastor's daughter. If the story is true, that makes Lea Engles and Sandra Bradley some of the

only women to pick up the stone in over 250 years.

>> Yes. >> It's like a puzzle you have to solve

because everybody has different levers and advantages and and strengths.

>> Come on. Yes. >> What's been the reaction since you've done this lift? I can't count how many

times I've read that my spine is going to pop out my back or my uterus is going

to fall out. >> Extend. Extend. >> Elite athletes today are bigger, stronger, and can lift heavier weights

than ever before. Even in the lowest weight classes, they lift twice, three times, or

even five times their own body weight. Wow, that's a wild amount of weight.

>> The heaviest conventional lifts of all time are somewhere between,00 and,500 lb

and only a handful of athletes are capable of inching those numbers higher.

>> In this video, we're doing a deep dive into all the factors making this new era

of human strength possible. How how big can human muscles be? We don't really

know. >> And by the end, we'll answer the question, what's the maximum weight a human being can lift?

>> And away we go. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, HERE EDDIE HALL LIFTS THE HALF

500 KG. Until strongman Eddie Hall did it in 2016, people weren't convinced a

500 kg or about,00 lb deadlift was even possible. But records don't seem to be slowing down. In 2020, Edd's was broken by half

Thor Bjornson, the strongman and actor from Game of Thrones.

I doubt that you are human sometimes. Yeah. People have doubted it for a long time. Yeah. without proof that I'm

human. I tore a pack. Remember? Oh, that's true. >> In strongman competitions, the lifter is allowed to wear a suit and straps to

help with their grip. This differs from raw powerlifting in which the suit is

not allowed. It could be argued that raw powerlifting is a more pure test of strength. But as you could see from this chart, all of

the heaviest lifts of all time used some kind of equipment. And that allows the

athletes to add several more plates to their heaviest lifts.

And if we're purely talking about the heaviest weights a human can lift, an

elevated bar is an easy adjustment that allows strong men to lift way more.

Thor's 501 kg lift was with a standard barbell that sits 9 in off the ground.

But elevate the weight to 18 in and the world record climbs to 580 kg. And at 27

in off the ground, it stands at a massive 670 kg.

But for the strong men looking to prove themselves, the standard bar deadlift

has become one of the key benchmarks of human strength. That's like good

musicians, artist, anything. They they do masterpieces and it look like zero

effort. So I think my friend AI is a true artist in in the ways in the

manners of the deadlift. Yeah. Just wanted to say that. Thank you.

What is that in here? >> Other people have argued that the

ultimate test of strength is how much weight you can hoist over your head. In

that case, we'll have to look at Olympic weightlifting. But compared to the

recent string of record-breaking and strongman competitions, Olympic weightlifting records are a different story.

>> It certainly felt as though all of the biggest lifts were hit in the 80s. It

actually dropped off for 30 plus years. >> In the 1970s, the Soviet lifter Vicilia

Alexv set 80 world records. He was famous for increasing his lifts as

gradually as possible, sometimes by as little as 500 g. Because each time he

broke a record, he received a payout from the Soviet state. And

almost 50 years later, the Clean and Jerk world record now stands at only 11

kg more than his 256 kg best. Compare this to deadlifting where in the

last 50 years, the world records have risen by over 120 kg.

>> And it's really only since 2016, there's this one guy who's turned up from

Georgia, Lash Talakadzi, and he has started to break alltime world records

again. And because he's a super heavyweight, these are sort of the

absolute most weights that any human has ever put overhead.

>> He secured his third Olympic gold medal in the Paris games. What do you think it

is that is getting that getting him to be able to move that needle again in

terms of inching up these these weights? >> He's like a larger scale human. He's

extremely tall. So he's in proportion to the most athletic smaller weightlifters

just scaled up. And so that allows him because he's taller, he has a greater

distance to pull the bar, to accelerate the bar. The bar can reach greater

speeds. These lifts are incredibly impressive, especially considering that Olympians are always subject to drug testing

before they compete. >> You think that everybody's clean and

then you learn a little bit and you think that nobody's clean and then you

learn and you stay in the spot for much longer and suddenly you feel like you

actually have no idea what's going on. We'll get into steroids more later.

They're an open secret in strength sports. But steroid use can only enhance

what's already there. With giants like Eddie Hall, Halfthor, and Lasha roaming the Earth, we know that size matters.

Over the past 150 years of industrial civilization, people have just grown

bigger with easy access to lots of calories and eliminating a lot of the

things that used to kill us before we could grow up. But here's the thing,

science hasn't really cracked the code on what it takes to become super strong.

That's partly because elite athletes rarely take the time out of their busy

training schedules to sit for the kind of observation and testing that

scientists like to do. >> There have been case studies from very high-profile athletes in other sports.

Nobody really from strength and power sports. >> So that's why it was such a big deal when Eddie Hall agreed to go through a

series of tests at Laugh University in the United Kingdom.

>> Do you know what you are already? You know, I've been I've been treated as a

guinea pig for the last 10 years of my life. Really, every day's uh uh I'm sort

of poking and pruging at myself to see what I could do with my body. So, I'm

just used to it by now. Here, we're testing all the different variants of my

muscles and my and my tendons and ligaments and everything.

>> So, what did they discover? >> So, his overall lower body muscle mass

was bigger than any individual or groups that we've measured before, more than

twice that of untrained controls. The scans of Eddie's legs are on the left

and the images on the right are of an average person.

>> But what was really interesting is that there was a pattern to that muscularity.

Some muscles were only a little bit bigger actually, you know, maybe only 25

30% bigger than untrained controls. Other muscles were three times as big.

So 200% bigger. >> Three specific muscles in Eddie's leg

were much larger than anybody else. the sartorius, graasilus, and

semmitendinosis, also known as the guy muscles. >> The three muscles that help provide stability to the um thigh and hip

>> muscles that are really important for doing, you guessed it, really heavy

deadlifts. The team also discovered that when compared to other professional

athletes, Eddie is still in a class of his own. Quite similarly uh with his uh

counter movement jump power output, his peak power output, uh he was about 40%

more powerful than the highest values in the published research literature that

come from professional basketball players. >> On this chart, Eddie's the X in the top right corner.

When it came time to test the strength of Eddie's deadlift, he may have

accidentally given us a preview of where human strength could be headed next.

>> 3 2 1 >> That's 7,483 newtons. That's about 750 kilos. That's

equal to a force 250 kg more than the current world records.

>> I think I'll leave it to that guys pulling me neck.

>> Is that all right? >> Yeah. >> So, now we're getting a little bit closer to understanding the idea of

theoretical maximum human strength. take a massive human being, train them in a

few specific body movements, maybe feed them a little bit of steroids, and

pretty soon we'll have somebody who can deadlift 750 kg.

Sound about right? Well, what if I told you that the Guinness Book of

World Records records the heaviest lift of all time at over three times that

amount of weight? Jesus. >> That record belongs to this guy right here.

>> Hello. Uh yeah, I'm I'm Greg Ernst. Uh and uh I live in Nova Scotia. I'm a

farmer and a blacksmith and uh I guess I'm the guy so far that the man that's

lifted the most. >> He also sings gospel music with his

family in case that wasn't clear. In 1993, Greg set a world record with a

type of lift that you just don't see that much anymore.

>> For the past few years, Greg seems to be lifting everything and anything and

breaking records along the way. The oxen may not be impressed, but the crowds

keep coming back. Just two weeks ago, in a driving rainstorm at this country

exhibition, Greg did something no man has ever done. Using a specially built

platform, he lifted two Ford Festivas and their drivers. Total weight 5,340

lb. There was press there. There was a lot of people gathered and it was a real

uh spectacle. So, what what did you do to prepare for that? And what do you

remember about the day? >> It was wet. It it really it really

rained hard. It was so hard to keep your hand the the hand board dry enough that

your hands wouldn't slip off. That was the big problem.

>> And you got big hands. Let's see your hands. You've got gigantic hands.

>> The reason you've probably never heard of Greg's record is because a backlft is

sort of an oldtimey strongman thing to do. It's the kind of lift that you might

see before the days of television when strong men would travel around

attracting crowds to watch them do their feats of strength. In 1957, legendary

American strongman Paul Anderson allegedly lifted 6,270 lb, almost 1,000 lb more than Greg's record, but it was never verified,

unlike Greg, who had people from the Guinness Book on site when he did his

lift in 1993. Why do you think that the backlift is

not really part of most strongman competitions? And and do you think it's

something that should come back? I I would I think it should come back.

>> Greg only lifted the cars about an inch or two off the ground. In this footage,

it's almost imperceptible. >> I'll tell you the reason, and this is

what if there's anybody listening that wants to try this, which which I I

recommend, but you just got to be careful. Um, and that is and that is if you happen to hyperextend that knee, those knees, like

you get to the top and you bend your a little back bend in that knee and that

weight comes down, uh, it it'll tear your knee, it'll it'll

it'll just destroy your legs. >> And in addition to that high risk for

injury, it's just less impressive than some of the events you can see in

strongman competitions today. None of these events approach Greg's record, but

they're just really cool to watch. But the Guinness record isn't the only thing

Greg is known for. Remember the Husfel Stone? He set a new world record with

that as well in the early days of the World's Strongest Man competition.

It wasn't seriously challenged until almost 30 years later when Halfdor came

onto the scene. And there was one really important thing that Greg says set him

apart from his competitors. They always trained and competed completely

drug-free and it was a huge disadvantage when you were at World's Strongest Man. Uh because

there were there was virtually nobody who who did it that way. Well, my my

strength uh was I on the farm. So, I had dairy cattle, we had some beef, so I had

access to all the milk and meat uh that I that I wanted. Um, and so for

instance, you know, in the height of my training, I I I would uh down a five

pound roast, a beef roast a day, I would down two gallons of milk a day. If

somebody comes along and does it like like I did it,

fine. Like as far as I'm concerned, the guys with superior nutrition, if they

they to be on par equal, should you be about seven grand 7,000?

Just to make that clear, Greg's saying if we could get someone with modern

nutrition and training to do a backlift like he did, that lift could clock in

somewhere over 7,000 lb. That's almost six times the weight of the deadlift

record. >> And so they're just it's it's just something that uh your body is hooked up for.

>> And you're so you're so you're saying your body was hooked up for this

backlift? >> >> Yeah, my body was there's two things I was pretty bloody good at and that was

rock rock stone lifting and and this backlifting. And there's some guys that

are hooked up uh for overhead pressing for instance or bench pressing.

They can't they can't deadlift what they can bench, but they're hooked up for

bench. And then there's some guys that are great deadlifters.

>> What Greg is talking about is a concept known as leverage. Certain body types

are just built differently and those special proportions can give someone an

advantage when it comes to lifting weights. And that's why I called this

guy. >> Hey Dan. >> Hey. What's going on, Mike? >> Uh, nothing. Nothing. So, just uh got

back from work. >> Awesome. Uh, what do you do for a job?

>> Uh, I work a steel fabrication shop. I I uh run a CNC and weld mostly.

>> We're here in Allentown. We made it to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and we're going

to go meet with Mike Coons, who is a powerlifter, record holder, and is going

to help us understand a little bit more what goes into the strength requirements

to lift the biggest amount of weight possible. >> If we're talking about the maximum weight you can lift compared to your

body weight, Mike is the person to beat. He set a powerlifting world record for

his raw squat of just over 250 kg. That means he lifted over four times his

own body weight. And that's something these bigger lifters can't compete with.

Compare that to Eddie Hall or Hathaor who can only squat 2 and 1/2 times their

body weight. Okay, so let's go inside. Mike's competed in powerlifting since he was a little kid.

We spent a day with him to see how his unique proportions affect his strength.

>> Hey, Mike. >> Oh, hey there. >> How's it going, man? Nice to meet you. >> Yeah. Yeah.

>> That that I mean that's got to weigh what, like 70 lbs. No,

>> I'd have to Yeah. at least. I'd have to look at the the papers and stuff to see,

but yeah, this stuff's >> And this is Yeah. grade A572 steel, so

it's dense >> and stuff and everything. >> So, in other words, In other words, this is part of your warm-up, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think if it not a if not for powerlifting, a person of my

size wouldn't fare too well in this line of work.

>> Yeah, for sure. >> When you were like, let's say when you

were a kid, when you first started lifting, how old were you? I started

training uh about 10, 11 years old. >> Mike's first coach was his dad, Don. >> Hi.

>> Hey, I'm Dan. >> Hi. I'm Dan. I'm Don.

>> Good to meet you, Don. >> Good to meet you.

>> Yeah. This is Mike at 9 years old before he started uh training.

>> And he came home one day from school visibly upset and I said, "What's the

problem?" And it was his classmates were picking teams for sports and he's always

the one that gets picked last. And you know he he said they picked for baseball

in the last one. They picked for football in the last one. They picked

for basketball. I said, "Well, you're not built for basketball." He goes,

"Well, what am I built for?" And I'm thinking, "Okay, Dad, think quick." I

said, "You know what? You're built for power and we're going down in the

basement to lift weights. Let's go." And that's how it started.

All right. So, this is it. This is the uh this is the dungeon.

>> This is it. This is the uh the pit.

>> So, what do you have down here? That's that.

>> Well, we have a squat rack here. So, we do our barbell squats in here.

>> Uhhuh. >> And the uh the cross bars in case we

miss. >> Right. >> All right. Um I have a chin-up bar here. I do chin-ups, pull-ups, and I also do

inversion. This is This looks about the size of like the kind of plate you'd

have at like a Blink Fitness or something like that. But this is a 100

lb plate. >> Yeah. And these are And York >> Yorks run heavy. >> You know, if you stretch this,

>> that's feels stretchy. This feels stretchy. >> I'm going to try the try the squat suit. >> There's There's absolutely no stretch in

the Here, take this one back. There's no stretch in this. And the idea is that

it's keeping the hips tight, right? >> Correct. Y >> that's that's the idea of this. So, how would you describe the way that his body

works in in how it helps him for powerlifting? >> Well, his range of motion is advantageous to the barbell squat and to

the bench press, and it's very disadvantageous to the deadlift.

The best deadlifters have long limbs and a short spine. Mike's just the opposite.

>> So, to see how that works, it was time to hit the gym. We came to this gym to

see how Mike's leverages give him an advantage in two exercises, the

squat and the bench press. >> When I was younger, I could warm up

quicker, but now that I'm getting older, got to throw a couple more sets in, get

everything nice and loose. >> We slowed down this footage to see how

big of a difference it is between Mike's squat and mine. He just has much less

distance to cover based on his proportions. So, so basically the point Yeah. >> So, you've got you're missing a like

it's like about a 12 degree uh missing from straining out full extension. Plus,

you're also jacked. So, >> it's like when people say other

powerlifters, I wish you had your leverages. Yeah. Until you have to use

equipment or you want to grab something on a top shelf at the grocery store,

then you don't want my leverages. Then you see if you want them then.

And it's the same story with Mike's bench press. But here is where Mike's body starts to work against him. This motion

technically should be able to move the most amount of weight because you're

engaging your back, your arms, and your legs. Here, Mike has to start bent over

the bar, which makes it harder to initiate the lift and requires a bigger

surge of effort at the beginning. When it comes to the deadlift, a short

torso can handle a much heavier load. And that's why Stuart Jameson has been

called the most anatomically perfect deadlobida, a condition in which his spinal cord failed to develop properly.

and he's missing half a rib cage. But the length of his limbs in comparison

with his short torso gives him the perfect leverages for deadlifting.

So now that we understand the concept of leverages, let's return to the original

question. What's the maximum amount of weight that a human being can lift?

Right now, the world's strongest men are competing to break half Thor's record

and trying to deadlift 505 kg. The good news is that athletes like Thor and

Mitchell Hooper, the Arnold Strongman winner for the last 3 years in a row,

share a lot about how they train. These men will soon face off in a competition

to see who can lift 505 kg. >> I will pull. I will pull five. about the

dates and location that's still being finalized. >> Mitchell has outlaid his plan on his YouTube channel.

>> It's going to be a lot of volume in bodybuilding to grow some muscle

mass in two particular areas for me. One is going to be my legs and two is going

to be my spinal erectors. And meanwhile, Halfthor is already

making a 460 kg lift look easy. A lot of this training is not rocket science. It's using the basics of what

science knows about how to build muscle by approaching maximal effort and

strategically adding weight to get closer and closer to a goal. It also

requires proper nutrition and a lot of calories. Yes, I I cook all the food for

half for uh every day, six days a week. He has one cheat day.

>> Thor consumes nearly 10,000 calories daily. That's over three times the

intake of an average American. >> 350 g rice, uh 125 g tentalon, 100 g

vegetable. His go-to beverage is a smoothie made with Greek yogurt, orange

juice, and olive oil. >> I drink that with meals most of the