There's a lot of knowledge in civil engineering about how soils will react when subjected to heavy loads. When you take lightweight vehicles and granular soils of varying composition, it's a very complex modeling process.
Uniformity is the friend of scalability.
It's maybe an unrecognized fact of academia that what you spend a lot of your time doing is convincing people of your vision and raising funds to support your research activity. So in that sense, transitioning to a startup wasn't that big of a transition.
You have to force yourself to give up and to move onto something else. That's the way you grow as a writer, by trying new things and tackling new subjects. But it's difficult. There's part of you that doesn't want to give up because you realize that, in some way, you're surrendering.
Everybody likes driving through scenic, winding roads. It's hard to find people who like sitting in traffic in cities.
All the technology going into self-driving cars is robotic technology. It's not automotive. That explains why some of the traditional automotive players didn't develop this technology.
