Secretive Startup Zoox Is Building a Bidirectional Autonomous Car From the Ground Up
Secretive Startup Zoox Is Building a Bidirectional Autonomous Car From the Ground Up
Published on July 18, 2018 at 01:00PM
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. Smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley sits the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The most distinguishing thing about the 426-acre compound is a 2-mile-long particle accelerator that cuts through the grassy hills of Menlo Park and onto the Stanford campus. It's a high-security jewel of American nuclear physics. It also contains a series of winding, out-of-sight roads that are perfect for quietly testing autonomous vehicles. Somehow, Kentley-Klay persuaded someone there to let him use an old firehouse at the complex as Zoox's first proper headquarters. [...] From those first days, Zoox and its founders had a clear picture of the vehicle they wanted. It would have an identical front and rear, and would be easy to service on the rare occasions when it wore out its built-in redundant parts. Each wheel would have its own motor, so the vehicle could make precise maneuvers in tight spaces and park just about anywhere. And its array of sensors and cameras would be seamlessly integrated, not jammed onto an existing vehicle. Lines of LEDs on the front and rear of the vehicle would send signals to other drivers, such as alerts that the robot taxi had spotted an obstruction up ahead on the road. Similarly, its directional sound system would let out a bleep or a blurp to tell a pedestrian in a crosswalk that the vehicle saw him, or to sound an alarm to the driver of a fast-approaching vehicle that he needed to get off his smartphone and hit the brakes to avoid a wreck. Early on the Zoox engineers considered a giant airbag that would envelop the vehicle before an accident; they ultimately went with more conventional airbags for the cabin. Zoox cars will come with high-end audio, plush seats, and some sort of conversational app for interacting with the riders.
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Published on July 18, 2018 at 01:00PM
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. Smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley sits the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The most distinguishing thing about the 426-acre compound is a 2-mile-long particle accelerator that cuts through the grassy hills of Menlo Park and onto the Stanford campus. It's a high-security jewel of American nuclear physics. It also contains a series of winding, out-of-sight roads that are perfect for quietly testing autonomous vehicles. Somehow, Kentley-Klay persuaded someone there to let him use an old firehouse at the complex as Zoox's first proper headquarters. [...] From those first days, Zoox and its founders had a clear picture of the vehicle they wanted. It would have an identical front and rear, and would be easy to service on the rare occasions when it wore out its built-in redundant parts. Each wheel would have its own motor, so the vehicle could make precise maneuvers in tight spaces and park just about anywhere. And its array of sensors and cameras would be seamlessly integrated, not jammed onto an existing vehicle. Lines of LEDs on the front and rear of the vehicle would send signals to other drivers, such as alerts that the robot taxi had spotted an obstruction up ahead on the road. Similarly, its directional sound system would let out a bleep or a blurp to tell a pedestrian in a crosswalk that the vehicle saw him, or to sound an alarm to the driver of a fast-approaching vehicle that he needed to get off his smartphone and hit the brakes to avoid a wreck. Early on the Zoox engineers considered a giant airbag that would envelop the vehicle before an accident; they ultimately went with more conventional airbags for the cabin. Zoox cars will come with high-end audio, plush seats, and some sort of conversational app for interacting with the riders.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Secretive Startup Zoox Is Building a Bidirectional Autonomous Car From the Ground Up
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