
Zoox and Its $800M Robo Taxi Dream [video] - ed
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-17/robot-taxi-startup-zoox-has-800-million-and-a-wild-pitch
======
ucaetano
For reference, until Nov 2017, Zoox drove a cumulative 2200 autonomous miles
driven in public CA roads, with a ridiculously high disengagement rate of
1/430 miles.

[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/495c1aa7-2a3b-4dd8...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/495c1aa7-2a3b-4dd8-8922-f33470605cfb/ZooxInc.pdf?MOD=AJPERES)

For comparison, in the 12 months ending in Nov 2017, Waymo drove 352000
autonomous miles in CA public roads, with a disengagement rate of 1/5600
miles.

This article is a joke...

~~~
dmix
They incorporated in 2014... probably didn't start serious development until
they were properly capitalized in mid 2015 (with $40 million in July 2015 and
$250 million in Oct 2016 [1]). Waymo started 9yrs ago.

It's not bad being in 3rd place against Google and Cruise/GM in a few years.

This type of thing can improve rapidly as they start doing real-world
testing... which you cite yourself has merely begun (on real roads mind you,
not testing in closed environments). 2200 miles is hardly anything to measure
against. Which sounds like months of testing vs Waymo's years.

Not to mention they are developing full new vehicles as well, not just the
driving AI software. Which might be highly valuable to a major car company who
could acquire them at a significant multiple.

This type of pessimism based on a single metric is toxic and naive regarding
how tech companies are built.

...Not to mention there was no claim in this article that they were at Waymo's
level or anything but at a very early stage of development.

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoox#section-
locked-...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoox#section-locked-
marketplace)

~~~
argonaut
Only having a month of testing (or otherwise only having barely tested things)
is a _glaring negative_ , not a positive like you're framing it as.

The self-reported California metrics themselves cannot be relied upon since
the companies (Cruise and Waymo included), could be making it up (and indeed
have an incentive to inflate their numbers).

~~~
sempuki
In order to accrue miles you need cars and drivers, which is capital
intensive. One car can only drive so far. To get Waymo and Cruise numbers you
need Waymo and Cruise money, which Zoox is starting to have. You can expect to
see those numbers improve.

At the end of the day though, not all miles are equal. If one were so inclined
you could just drive up an down a big highway with autonomy engaged only once
merged. Obviously 100 miles of SF traffic is not the same as 100 miles of
staying in your lane on cruise control.

------
cmuguythrow
Seems like they're putting the cart before the horse no? Don't you need
functioning level 5 self-driving technology before you start optimizing for
something like rider experience? This seems to violate the classic startup
maxim to 'focus on just one thing and get it right'

~~~
dmitrygr

      > This seems to violate
      > the classic startup maxim
      > to 'focus on just one
      > thing and get it right'
    

And who said this maxim works? Lots of startups do a lot of things in common.
Doesn't mean those are all good ideas

~~~
cmuguythrow
You're right that this isn't a proven method of success, but the smell test
seems to tell me that it's harder to do two very hard things than it is to do
just one. They are simultaneously trying to redesign the auto experience AND
invent a technology that doesn't exist. If doing one made the other easier, I
would understand, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They are solving a
problem that doesn't exist yet.

------
olivermarks
'..in the next breath, though, he predicts the future for all of his
competitors—Alphabet, General Motors, Tesla, Apple, Daimler, et al.—if the bet
pays off: “They’re f---ed.”

This reminds me so much of dot com boom bravado and then hubris. If these guys
had built lots of different types of cars from the ground up - race cars,
customs, hot rods etc powered by different engine types - I would have more
time for their reinvention confidence. I like what they are doing but this
seems like pride before the fall

~~~
dunpeal
Standard founder bravado. This is basically part of their pitch.

"If we are right, then we're going to dominate the market that all the big
boys are investing billions to control."

(Not being disparaging at all - their value proposition actually looks
interesting.)

~~~
Fricken
Zoox is differentiated. They're the only autonomous vehicle outfit thinking
about a self driving car as a robot from the ground up, rather than just a car
with some sensors slapped on to it and a giant computer in the trunk.

~~~
throwawaymath
For those of us who don't have a background in robotics, do you mind giving a
short explanation on the difference between a robot and a car with
sensors/computers attached?

~~~
Fricken
Take a look at their prototypes, the wheels are all independently articulated.
A human would have a lot of difficulty handling a car like that, but for a
robot it's no big deal. This might be genius or it might be crazy, it really
depends on whether they can execute.

Zoox is the only company we know of that is building a robotaxi from the
ground up rather than just retrofitting a vehicle designed for something else.
Although Einride has a concept built for a highway freight hauler with no
driver cabin, and Nuro has several delivery vehicles built with no room for a
human on board.

The term 'self driving car' is kind of like the term 'Horseless Carriage'.
It's transitional.

~~~
igravious
You win the prize. First person to articulate clearly the differentiating
factor.

Give that, I'll say this. Mobile robot from the ground up = next level hard.
Level 5 autonomy = next level hard. Both simultaneously? Good luck.

Question though, what if there's a regulatory requirement for future vehicles
to have a mandatory human driver mode (manual override) that's a touch of a
button away?

------
ralusek
The claim that outfitting an existing car is the wrong way to approach the
remaining problems doesn't seem like a reasonable case to me, at least given
my understanding of what those problems are. Is the state of the technology
not currently limited by the type and quality of sensor data when it comes to
unfamiliar/unsatisfactory road conditions, as well as the shortcomings of
neural nets/alternative existing algorithms?

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
This resonates with me. The kind of company that makes a good human-driven car
is so far away from the kind of company that can develop a level 5 autonomous
system that to try to start up both at the same time would be simply
multiplying an already low chance of success by another low chance of success.

How about developing the world's leading level 5 system and then licensing it
to the all auto companies?

~~~
Fricken
L5 is science fiction, nobody has even an hypothesis about how to do that.
Zoox and the other major players are developing L4.

There is another interesting, but still young company called Aurora innovation
that has a very good team together that plans to develop and licence L4 to 3rd
parties. Aurora has partnerships with 2 of the top 3 biggest car manufacturers
in the world, VW and Hyundai, as well as with Byton, a Chinese EV startup
backed by big Asian capital. Zoox has a different plan.

------
wruza
Nothing but rage I feel looking at videos like this. Unbearably confident man
in a flat cap speaks about the technology of the century like it’s nothing,
and his handheld scientist (who actually google blah google stanford) will
make sure that shit get to work. Reporter never feels wrong or sceptic as he’s
born yesterday morning. “Hey, Jesse, double-check your AI doesn’t hit trucks
like these fools, okay?” — smiling man in flat cap unpacks last pack of
hundreds into counting machine, reloading misdetected papers back as it counts
to 500. “We’re to ship next year, two years max. Jesse and I work hard here to
deliver. We already drove the entire SF via keyboard, now just wait. Man,
that’s gonna be a thing!”

A whole essence of investments fraud, dragged to the edge of the sense. And
they politely call it ‘pitch’ in this thread. So cute.

~~~
prawn
What's the relevance of his hat?!

------
CPLX
For those of us that lived through the tech bubble of 1998-2001 the tone of
this profile feels _very_ familiar.

------
throwawaymath
_> In a distressing early sign for Zoox’s investors, Kentley-Klay also spent
$16,000 on a Sub-Zero office refrigerator because he thought it looked cool._

Let's say I'm an investor and a founder of a company in my portfolio does
this. What would be an appropriate response? This seems like a cartoonishly
gratuitous waste of capital.

~~~
throwawayjava
What would you do if _literally any other employee_ with a company card did
this?

You'd either fire them on the spot. Or, if that's not an option [1], quietly
figure out a longer-term strategy for eventually firing them.

Or, if you're a Nice Guy, you'd offer to let them stay on if they return the
gratuitous waste of capital and/or pay the company back.

I'll never quite understand why founders are treated as an exceptional case by
capital. Especially in hard tech fields like self-driving where the idea is
literally obvious to a five-year-old but the execution requires courting `the
best humans available.

\--

[1] e.g., an engineer with mostly undocumented knowledge of key parts of your
software or sales rep with close relationships to a client during a critical
time period.

------
cjensen
Self-driving is a software problem, not a hardware problem.

Investing in someone with zero useful ideas and zero ethics is not a symptom
of good investment skills. (Yes, tricking experts into talking to you is
unethical)

~~~
dsr_
That wasn't the only ethical lapse being gleefully mythologized in the story.

I half-suspected that they didn't bother taking out a permit for autonomous
vehicle, but I was pleasantly surprised to find them on the list:
[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/permi...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/permit)

~~~
Animats
It's not hard to get a California DMV permit for testing autonomous vehicles.
It's like a learner's permit. You have to have a licensed driver on board able
to take over. You have to have insurance. You have to report all accidents. No
driving for hire. No heavy vehicles.

That's what Uber considered over-regulation.

------
Animats
That's a decent level of performance. Local driving, freeway, local driving,
without (apparently) manual intervention.

Building a little vehicle for local transport is reasonable. At least five
other companies have built minibuses for parking lot shuttles and such.[1]
Nobody seems to have more than pilot installations. This is embarrassing.
Under 25MPH self driving ought to be within current technology. At low speeds,
you can stop fast enough that predicting the behavior of others isn't
necessary. Navya has a few installed systems, but they're either on dedicated
roads or under 10mph.

[1] [https://craft.co/local-motors/competitors](https://craft.co/local-
motors/competitors)

~~~
flukus
> This is embarrassing. Under 25MPH self driving ought to be within current
> technology

The fact hat it's not tells you all you need to know about self driving
vehicles. I'd expect full autonomous vehicles about a decade after we can hit
these easier targets.

~~~
Animats
Google built a little car without manual controls that was capable of under
25MPH travel in areas such as senior communities. They used to run it around
Mountain View. But they decided not to proceed with that as a product. Google
didn't want to run a car factory.

The "fake it til you make it" startups aren't succeeding at this.

------
bumholio
I think custom hardware would make sense on custom infrastructure: small 2m
wide tracks dedicated to rapid electric transit pods, tucked under and along
side the main roads. It would simplify the design a lot to the point where you
could build it using 80s technology, simple automation, since there are no
pedestrians or non-pod vehicles.

If you could build the pods on the cheap, cities would love it as an
affordable alternative to subway and tunnels - it's much cheaper to dig a 4x2m
concrete box under the main road then massive tunnels and stations.

In time, as the network expands, full self driving can be added and the
vehicles can exit the network and drive the last miles on regular roads to the
traveler's front door in the suburbs.

~~~
patrickg_zill
Actually a lot of this spending could be avoided if you could convince the
government to let you embed a single wire in the asphalt along with some RFID
tags.

Everything that is expensive and unreliable is because they assume an embedded
wire is not going to be allowed/done by the people managing the roads.

~~~
tomp
Why would the wire help you? If you needed precise location information,
couldn't the company just add some markers throughout the city? Either stamp
large QR codes on corners and traffic lights, or put thousands of Wi-Fi
routers around the town, that would help the vehicle triangulate... The latter
doesn't even require permission, just money!

------
oblib
This really is an ambitious project. I spent quite a few years building custom
cars and I have to agree that for the purpose they're aiming at what they're
doing makes more sense than trying to outfit an existing vehicle with their
tech.

For example, I worked with a company named "Mobility Engineering and
Development" outfitting Ford vans that C-4, C-5 quadriplegics could drive
while sitting in their wheelchairs.

Ford didn't redesign those very often so it was a very good choice for that
purpose, but it would be a nightmare to have to redesign what we were making
every 3 years to accommodate a new vehicle design produced by a 3rd party that
had no interest in what we were doing with them.

------
KKKKkkkk1
_Levinson, whose father, Arthur, ran Genentech Inc., chairs Apple Inc., and
mentored Steve Jobs, comes from Silicon Valley royalty._

If the reports that Apple is building a similar product are true, there's a
hell of a conflict of interest here.

~~~
mikestew
_(Because he chairs Apple, Arthur Levinson hasn’t seen any of this. “It’s not
that I don’t want to,” he says. “It’s just better to keep a little distance
and read about Jesse in the newspaper.”)_

------
dangerismycat
Ah, so even robot taxis block traffic when they stop. I guess pulling over to
the curb is too difficult a problem to solve…

------
dfischer
> _The pair have mastered the hyperbolic vernacular of the Silicon Valley
> startup scene. Text running around the wheel wells of the Zoox vehicles
> reads, “Infinity is enough,” a phrase the company has trademarked. Kentley-
> Klay’s own name is another invention. He was born Tim Kentley and adopted
> the Klay. “I have added Klay to my surname, as I find I just love making
> things and [sic] is a big part of me,” he wrote to the Zoox employees in
> 2013. “So, clay, or mud, is the primal aspect of this spirit, and ‘K’lay is
> a word play on that to keep the K in the mix of the evolving family name.”_

This... hubris hurts when it's not in the show Silicon Valley. At least the
show hurts good.

~~~
duxup
If I worked there I would feel the urge to urgently find a like minded
employee to talk to just so I'd feel better knowing that someone else thought
it was absurd.

------
sorenjan
So an idea guy that just needed some programmer to code together his
revolutionary idea actually found a programmer, a PhD from Stanford no less,
to agree to it?

------
dssu
With all these self driving companies, I ask. What is the lowest price point
they can get to for that product?

Cause if I can pay a highly reliable driver for less, what's the point?

~~~
Fricken
Obviously no robotaxi outfit has a viable business model if they can't
undercut a human driven Uber.

Zoox's initial fleet will be hand built, and will likely cost several hundred
thousand dollars a piece to manufacture, but hypothetically one could still
turn a profit on a robotaxi worth $300k.

Bullish analysts have speculated that economy class robotaxis will someday be
cost competitive with public transit, though I suspect it will take a while to
get there.

Of all the robotaxi companies out there showing real progress, Zoox is the
most differentiated, and is positioned well to avoid the race to the bottom by
capturing the premium end of the market, much like Apple has done with
smartphones.

Of course this is all contingent on Zoox's ability to execute. But even if
they fail miserably at developing their bidirectional robotaxi with
independently articulated steering and drivetrain for each wheel, their
autonomous OS is still very good. If we compare Zoox to what other companies
such as Apple, Intel, Baidu and Uber have spent to accomplish less, Zoox's
autonomous OS alone is arguably worth the $3.2 billion that the company is
being valued at. So it's not like they don't have a plan B.

------
smrtinsert
Welcome to Johnny cab!

~~~
agumonkey
An uncanny Batman begins reincarnation of the Johnny Cab

------
olivermarks
Great web presentation by Bloomberg IMO, video and typography complement each
other well.

------
Fricken
Check out those prototypes, man. Bidirectional robots with independent
steering + drivetrain for each wheel. I've been excited to see them in action
since Zoox's inception in 2013. Zoox is the coolest startup, I'm amazed how
far they've come, though they still have a long way to go.

~~~
floatrock
Cool, sure, but when $800M of capital is on the line, why is it important?

Yeah, everyone who has putzed with robots gets a tingle of excitement when
they build their first crab drive. It's neat, but also introduces a huge
amount of complexity and probably maintenance wear on the tires from non-
subdegree alignment at road speeds.

Tesla is struggling to mass produce electric-from-the-ground-up traditional
front-wheel-steering-only powertrains. What's the use case for this degree of
added complexity beyond some cute parallel parking?

~~~
Fricken
You don't have to look beyond Elon Musk to see that the half-crazy ideas are
the ones that get people excited. I've been following Zoox since it was
literally just a guy with some concept art talking people up in hotel bars at
tech conferences. It's in the article, why did Jesse Levinson, cream of the
crop in robotics talent decide to go with Zoox and not Google? Because it's an
opportunity to really innovate. Zoox has managed to get tons of great people
on board for that reason alone.

Otherwise you're right, it's very much an open question as to whether they can
make these radically different vehicles to automotive grade reliability.

------
ironfootnz
Another unicorn willing to be a sellout to big companies.

------
crb002
+1 for using three sensors. Visual only neural nets can be cracked with a
sticker.

------
dawhizkid
I’m getting Theranos level vibes

~~~
vasilipupkin
so, the reporter in your opinion is lying when he says

"...It’s in the city, though, where Zoox really shines. The screens inside the
vehicle show an overwhelming amount of information, as the computer vision
software keeps tracks of cars, people, stoplights, and road markers all at the
same time. Unlike many self-driving cars, it glides to stops. At an
intersection with a left turn, it allows oncoming traffic to pass and then
waits for some slow pedestrians. Overall, the vehicle performs so well that
you forget no one is driving. ....."

?

~~~
FrankBooth
so, you're saying it would be impossible to fake the demo with, for example, a
remote driver?

~~~
sflyt
It is impossible considering the network lag and unreliability when
transmitting all the 3D data to a remote location. It doesn't make any sense
at all. The remote operation can only help vehicles make decisions, while the
vehicle still needs to drive by itself.

~~~
rightbyte
The remote driving driver could in theory ghost the journalist car for low
latency. Just saying.

Coincidently Ericson and KTH (which Zoox has cooperated with) has done remote
driving over cellphone links over multiple miles.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cvSM7pbqZEM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cvSM7pbqZEM)

I'm not saying it's what happend. I mean Darpa challange was not fake so
Stanford has delivered in the area. But it's possible to solve the lag issue.

