The co-founder, Tim Kentley Klay was somehow able to get Jesse Levinson on board, and Jesse Levinson had no problem getting infinite street cred on board. So they were able to attract a lot of key, original robotics talent before the hype got out of control.
For a long time though, they were low on funds, so they did lots of closed course testing, and it wasn't until they closed a large funding round that Zoox began on public roads, and they performed quite well right out of the starting gate.
Now Zoox and it's competitors are lost in an endless wasteland of testing, development, and validation. It's futile to attempt to do a comprehensive analysis between the different players, they all have their quirks, but Zoox has built all the critical infrastructure needed to do full scale testing, and they're eyeballs deep in it like everyone else.
However, Zoox has stormy waters ahead financially. They need another $2 billion to stay abreast in this never ending race. It's getting harder to visualize scenarios where that happens.
What nobody can do well enough to build a competitive and scalable robotaxi service is prediction in multi-agent scenarios. The AI for that just doesn't exist.
On top of this, there's a liability and ethics issue. We accept teenagers for getting drunk and killing people, but we cannot accept an autonomous car that cannot navigate a roundabout which would otherwise be easy for a person, sober or otherwise.
Robotaxis are Rube Goldberg machines, there are so many moving parts. The running joke at Waymo for a while was "How many engineers does it take to operate a self driving car?"
Everybody was convinced deep learning would give us all the magically brilliant AI we needed to make this work. With perception and classification problems the robotics industry was able to go from "impossibru" to "holy shit it works" over the space of a couple years, it was really exciting. In hindsight it's easy to see that the exciting and game changing breakthroughs were in fact a long time coming, and that the real rate of progress in open world robotics is in fact excrutiatingly slow and bespoke. Nobody has an ace up their sleeve.
I could envision a scenario where a city council of a less populated city with lax regulations could deploy robotaxis to their economic advantage. Do you think we'll get there soon?
So in the scenario where predicting pedestrian/cyclist behavior holds up progress for a few more years. And given how the market has turned in SV and beyond, what's your read on how the space will play out? For example, car companies can't keep funding Aurora/Cruise/Argo because they will be facing very tough consumer climate, so the fight for funding internally will be even fiercer. Softbank funds Nuro and its portfolio of companies (WeWork and others) have been duds.
Google is expecting a bad 2020 ad revenue wise, unclear what will happen in 2021. The founders stepped out last year and the narrative has been that Google is less focused on "moonshots" and more on core ad business.
Is there any other deep pocketed investors that will finance development of AVs for another 5 years? Who will acquire the ones that are independent? IPO doesn't seem likely for any of them correct?
It's possible that for self driving to work road systems will have to be more formalised to remove the ambiguous situations you've described. I can't imagine it working well in China or Indonesia where traffic flows much more like water in a stream and lanes are merely just suggestions.
