Secretive Startup Zoox Is Building a Bidirectional Autonomous Car From the Ground Up (bloomberg.com) 93
A secretive Australian startup called Zoox (an abbreviation of zooxanthellae, the algae that helps fuel coral reef growth) is working on an autonomous vehicle that is unlike any other. Theirs is all-electric and bidirectional, meaning it can cruise into a parking spot traveling one way and cruise out the other. It can make noises to communicate with pedestrians. It even has displays on the windows for passengers to interact with. Bloomberg sheds some light on this company, reporting on their ambitions to build the safest and most inventive autonomous vehicle on the road: Zoox founders Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson say everyone else involved in the race to build a self-driving car is doing it wrong. Both founders sound quite serious as they argue that Zoox is obvious, almost inevitable. The world will eventually move to perfectly engineered robotic vehicles, so why waste time trying to incorporate self-driving technology into yesteryear's cars? Levinson, whose father, Arthur, ran Genentech Inc., chairs Apple Inc., and mentored Steve Jobs, comes from Silicon Valley royalty. Together, they've raised an impressive pile of venture capital: about $800 million to date, including $500 million in early July at a valuation of $3.2 billion. Even with all that cash, Zoox will be lucky to make it to 2020, when it expects to put its first vehicles on the road.
Re: wow bidirectional (Score:1)
hype like it's 1999! (Score:2)
Those of you holding Beenz will take a bath on the exchange rate.
Re: wow bidirectional (Score:2)
Re:wow bidirectional (Score:4, Funny)
Re:wow bidirectional (Score:4, Funny)
I have a backup system for that on my cars.....it's a bumper sticker:
"Horn broken.....watch for finger...."
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Presumably it not only has Reverse, but also four wheel steering. Doable I should think. ... But not everything that is doable makes sense to do.
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"it has reverse???! Truly we are privileged to live in these amazing times"
My car has that too. But if I do that, it's not very fast and after a few miles my neck hurts.
Bubble Ambitions (Score:5, Insightful)
If this company had the actual autonomous driving bit of the problem sorted, it wouldn't matter whether their vision for the product involved climbing into a 20 year old corolla through the sunroof. They don't seem to be offering any new breakthrough with regards to delivering a reliable and affordable self-driving solution.
I always wondered what it would have been like to live through the first dot com bubble. Now I realise that is involves real engineering getting pushed aside to make way for the hype merchants.
Re:Bubble Ambitions (Score:5, Interesting)
I always wondered what it would have been like to live through the first dot com bubble. Now I realise that is involves real engineering getting pushed aside to make way for the hype merchants.
Pretty much. It was really a completely insane time. It was like a huge pyramid scheme, and everyone involved knew it was one but shut up because we made so much money it was just too good to be true. It was also the last time you could actually make a fortune as an engineer. Because of the way this bubble worked: Some yahoo had some pipe dream idea "on the internet", hit on some VCs who had more money than brains who didn't know jack shit about the internet and only knew that it has to be the next big thing, that VCs pumped money into the yahoo who, as well, had no idea about how anything on the internet worked, so he hired engineers whose job was to make the pipe dream come true. We, in turn, started asking more and more ridiculous prices for our work (and got paid those ridiculous sums because money was no issue), we literally made millions in 2-3 months programming what could best be described as very shoddy CMS and POS systems. About half a year the pipe dream went poof, so no maintenance had to be done, ever, and we could move on to the next million-per-month project.
In the end, the pipe dreamer went broke, the VC lost his money and, well, guess who had that money. Which, by the way, should serve as a lesson: Money is never "lost". It's just with someone else now.
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replace "on the Internet" with "on the blockchain" for what it looks like today :D
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There's really no "autonomous driving" problem to solve. There are 5000 or maybe 50000 problems related to autonomous driving that need to be solved ... one by tedious one. But you're right that an old Corolla or a 1935 Chevrolet or a Model T that can operate safely on public roads without a human in charge would have a market.
As far as this thing goes. What the hell? The founders get to live in luxury 'til the funding runs out. And they could conceivably end up with a small piece of some lucrative pat
Re: Bubble Ambitions (Score:2)
The type that kills you. Duh.
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If this company had the actual autonomous driving bit of the problem sorted, it wouldn't matter whether their vision for the product involved climbing into a 20 year old corolla through the sunroof. They don't seem to be offering any new breakthrough with regards to delivering a reliable and affordable self-driving solution.
I always wondered what it would have been like to live through the first dot com bubble. Now I realise that is involves real engineering getting pushed aside to make way for the hype merchants.
You should check out TFA and in particular the video. They may not succeed, but they clearly have a lot of 'real engineering' going on. And the whole bi-directional, four-wheel-steering thing makes a lot of sense in the long run.
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The Onion hit the nail on the head quite a few times, back in the day. E.g.:
Species Of Blue-Green Algae Announces IPO [theonion.com]
AOL Acquires Time-Warner In Largest-Ever Expenditure Of Pretend Internet Money [theonion.com]
I remember one company getting funded whose business plan was.... no business plan. Their entire idea was, "we're a group of people who have organized ourselves into a company; you give us a business plan and funding, and we'll implement it." Got a couple million dollars, if I remember right.
More recently, they na
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The closest thing is how it was a year ago with anything Bitcoin related. Write "Linux" on anything, and you got tons of funding. Then, your company ended up on fuckedcompany.com when it went kaput come 2000-2001.
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Having started my company before the bubble burst and still in operation today I can tell you my experience.
It was much easier to sell a project. Back then, if it was on the web, people wanted it asap, almost no questions asked. Today there are so many options today customers are confused by all the competing options. Billing rates were higher 20 years ago than they are today, not adjusted for inflation.
People h
Great, just what the car industry needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another startup promising yet another car of the future while producing yet again nothing.
The spot for loudmouth marketeer in the car industry is taken. Musk has solidly cornered that position. And even he has more to show than some frames on wheels.
If you want to produce the car of the future, great. Absolutely. But don't call before it's done. We have had so many stories of so many startups pipe dreaming up what could be, I think it's about time we move on to actually, you know, making something that can be sold. Anything else just ain't interesting anymore.
Re:Great, just what the car industry needed (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to produce the car of the future, great. Absolutely. But don't call before it's done.
That's just not how the business world works. Investment is attracted to buzz. They don't have a choice if they want to secure funding.
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If you want to produce the car of the future, great. Absolutely. But don't call before it's done.
That's just not how the business world works. Investment is attracted to buzz. They don't have a choice if they want to secure funding.
No, it's not how the Tech Business World apparently works. In any other business, you actually have to have a working product and some sort of track record as a business before you can get people interested in investing.
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If that was true nothing would ever get built. Prototypes cost money.
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Why don't you think auto companies are tech companies? It's always been true to some extent, but it's even moreso now. Look at how poorly the market reacts when they make a nice profit. But get a whole bunch of press and the money just flows in.
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It looks more like they're slapping together some hardware, hoping that Google (or whoever) buys them out before the money runs out.
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1) Stop the frothing.
2) Make sure you actually understood what someone wrote when talking about your messiah.
3) Post.
Try to follow that order from now on, it makes you look less silly.
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Still trying to figure out what problem autonomous driving is trying to solve.
Well at least that's easy: it's the problem of road casualties/deaths, the vast majority of which are caused by driver error of one sort or another.
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What about 1) traffic caused by bad drivers 2) hours of our lives wasted every day by having to focus on roads while we commute.
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You may think it is a pipe dream, but autonomous driving obviously has extreme value when it finally works well enough.
In trucking [thetruckersreport.com] about a quarter of the total operating costs are for labor. You would also see slight reductions in fuel and cab costs when no human is involved. About $200 billion goes towards truck drivers pay per year. Some of this labor would transform from truck driving to just truck loading/unloading (and some new software/robotic jobs), but there are still significant savings from going
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Thats bad. That money should go to the executives and the 1%.
"This all comes down to investor profit and consumer savings."
Right, consumer savings. Sure.
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Re: But...why? (Score:3)
Yeah. That isn't how the real world works. How much "savings" have you received lately?
Metric buttloads. An equivalent TV to the one I purchased 3 years ago can now be had for less than half the price. The average car costs less today (when adjusted for inflation) than the average car did in 1999, despite having far more features, more power, and much better fuel economy. A decent computer costs half as much today as it did in 1999, even when not adjusted for inflation, and again with far better performance. Air travel is cheaper than ever. Gasoline prices (ignoring increased taxes, and
Re: But...why? (Score:2)
Even if what you say were 100% true it would be entirely irrelevant since the claim I was addressing was that reduced costs don't get passed on to the consumer. How exactly those reductions are achieved is irrelevant to the question of whether or not they're being passed on.
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Some of this labor would transform from truck driving to just truck loading/unloading
So the loader/unloader just goes along for the ride between deliveries? Might as well have him drive. For longer ranges where the labor is only needed at the end points, we already have these. They are called trains.
Then there is personal transportation, and the potential for far less car ownership if there is a fleet of far cheaper autonomous taxis.
Share a vehicle with a urine-soaked hobo.
It's harder to tell how much savings are there, but its likely very significant.
But it's my money. And I like spending it on cars among other things. Some might be way over the top when it comes to 'personal transportation' like my Porsche, but it's my money and savings isn't an issue. Plus, think of all the auto workers I'm supporti
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So the loader/unloader just goes along for the ride between deliveries? Might as well have him drive.
Nope. Trucks drive themselves between truck stops or freight depots, where they are united with drivers. For the foreseeable future, these drivers will handling driving in and out of town as well as parking and unloading. Eventually, they will be replaced with people who only unload the trucks; those people will eventually be replaced by robotic pallet jacks.
For longer ranges where the labor is only needed at the end points, we already have these. They are called trains.
Trains only go to a small subset of the places where cargo goes, because of a multi-pronged attack involving automobile companies, oil companies, and the federal government itself. Thanks to their influence, instead of a robust public transportation network, we got the interstate highway network and a shortage of non-car (or bus) transportation options for both passengers and cargo. I support installing more rail, and think it makes more sense than dicking around with smart roads, but it's a non-starter at this point. Securing right-of-way to build rail would be essentially impossible.
Plus, think of all the auto workers I'm supporting.
Those auto workers are also going to be replaced by robots soon. Not as soon as Musk thought :) but soon.
If I save money by using autonomous vehicles, you're not getting any of it. I'm buying a yacht.
It's not all about you. It's about the less fortunate working people who won't have to spend a large portion of their income on a car, because they won't need it any more.
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It's about the less fortunate working people who won't have to spend a large portion of their income on a car, because they won't need it any more.
Live on a bus or subway route.
Or call a cab (if you are wealthy). Cabs might be replaced by autonomous vehicles. But it won't make them cheaper. Not so the poor folks would notice. Most of a cab's cost isn't the driver or fuel. It's the medallion. Fix that situation first. But be prepared to fish a lot of bodies out of the bay before you are done.
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Medallions are expensive in NY, but in most of the world the driver is the largest expense.
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"Still trying to figure out what problem autonomous driving is trying to solve."
1. The problem of how to put bus drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers, etc out of work.
2. The problem of family members having to provide transportation for kids, the handicapped, the elderly.
3. The problem of kids getting exercise by walking or riding bicycles instead or riding in a powered vehicle like God intended.
And many other similar problems
Seriously -- once the bugs are worked out in a few decades, autonomous vehicles
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"yet they don't understand basics like suspension and alignment."
Probably won't go far or fast enough for its handling to be an issue.
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So basically, a rich kid from "Silicon Valley royalty" and his buddy got $800 million dollars to build a "perfectly engineered robotic vehicle", yet they don't understand basics like suspension and alignment. Good luck getting stable handling when your caster angle is tilted the wrong way in backwards mode.
Since you seem to think that you know all about it, maybe you could tell us what happens when you've got negative caster in the rear. I'm not an expert any more than I suspect you actually are, but from what I've read it won't cause any problems that can't be completely solved with torque vectoring.
royals (Score:2)
So confused (Score:1)
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Even the prototypes need steering wheels if they currently want to to be allowed on public roads since the States issuing the permit require them to have a backup human driver. And obviously, even the prototypes are not ready yet for testing on public roads.
And even if the prototypes were ready, I assume there is probably even more bureaucracy involved in getting them approved for the public roads.
That Thomas Wolfe is full of shit man! (Score:1)
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Do I want to ride in a bidirectional car? (Score:3)
Bidirectional vehicles make good sense for deliveries, I've posted about that here before. But do they make any sense for transporting passengers? I don't think that they do. The majority of people want to be seated facing forwards. Even though I don't generally get carsick, so do I. I just prefer to see where I'm going.
An automated delivery vehicle ought to have roll-up doors on all sides (so you don't have to step into it to get things out of it) and move bidirectionally, so that it never has to even think about how it will turn around. It just doesn't! This solves whole classes of problem. But I don't think it makes enough sense if you're transporting passengers.
Solving the wrong problem (Score:2)
Bidirectional vehicles make good sense for deliveries, I've posted about that here before.
Not unless you change an awful lot of existing infrastructure which was designed for vehicles that don't generally back up. Sure there are cases where it makes sense but a lot more where it doesn't. It's an utterly useless feature on the roads and arguably an unnecessary one when driving up to a loading dock though certainly more useful there. And if you design infrastructure to deal with mostly-forward driving vehicles then it renders the issue moot. Given that virtually all vehicles are going to be de
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Bidirectional vehicles make good sense for deliveries, I've posted about that here before.
Not unless you change an awful lot of existing infrastructure which was designed for vehicles that don't generally back up. Sure there are cases where it makes sense but a lot more where it doesn't.
There are no cases in which a bidirectional vehicle can't handle the road. If it doesn't need to go the other way, it just doesn't. But there are cases where a bidirectional vehicle is a benefit, like driving up a narrow driveway to deliver packages. No room to turn around? No problem.
Cost (Score:2)
Re: Have we gotten that lazy? (Score:2)
About 10% of all accidents occur while at least one vehicle is reversing, and they result in about 2,400 children being run over every year (in the USA). If you actually could entirely eliminate the need to back up it would have a decent impact on total damage, deaths, and injuries.
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Seeking idiot investors... (Score:2)
A secretive Australian startup called Zoox (an abbreviation of zooxanthellae, the algae that helps fuel coral reef growth) is working on an autonomous vehicle that is unlike any other.
So a "secretive" company nobody has ever heard, located in a location not renowned for technology or automobiles, of is allegedly working on a vehicle with features nobody asked for, using technology that isn't ready for public consumption in a market against much better funded and experienced competition? Do I have that right?
I smell someone fishing for gullible investors.
Do we want bi-directional cars on the road? (Score:3)
I'm always skeptical.. (Score:3)
..about a startup with a custom designed headquarters and a $16,000 refrigerator
A real engineering startup would have good tools, but an ugly, old building and a Costco refrigerator
This dude is a wannabe Steve Jobs
BULLSHIT (Score:2)
The world will eventually move to perfectly engineered robotic vehicles
Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT. I make a prediction:
People will NEVER fully accept so-called 'self driving cars' that they cannot directly control themselves with conventional controls
..and I'll stand by that with my last breath, and fuck you if you don't like my opinion, fanbois.
Finally! (Score:2)
"It even has displays on the windows for passengers to interact with."
So the kids can select 'Wash me' from a menu instead of writing it with the finger in the dust?
From the Ground Up (Score:2)
Of course they are going to start from the ground up. It's much easier to start from the tires than hanging things off of the roof.
Innovative car design (Score:2)
It only drives forward, and the only user control is a loud horn.
GET OUT OF THE WAY!