There are about 40,000 people killed in
car crashes in the U.S. every year.
That's an average of a 102 deaths
every day. We have two jumbo jets
crashing every week. Basically, that's how
many lives we lose every week in the U.S.
100 of people a day. That is horrible
and we got to change that.
Regulators and car makers have tried to tackle this
issue by adding seatbelts and airbags to
cars. But around the world, there are
countless people who are working to
solve the problem with a different
approach, by removing drivers altogether.
The number one reason I started working
on this technology originally is because
driving is just profoundly dangerous. I
don't think very many people appreciate
how unsafe it is to drive a car. Jessie Levinson has been working on
self-driving car tech for 13 years. In
2014, he co-founded Zoox's
and set out to build a new type of
vehicle from the ground up. I think we
can do a lot better. The primary way is
by using autonomous technology to avoid
accidents, 94% of which are caused by
pretty obvious human mistakes and human
errors. The other thing is we can use
this opportunity to create a safer
fundamental vehicle architecture. So that
even if somebody else runs into us, the
people inside our vehicle or as safe as
possible.
Zooks plans on building an autonomous
ride-sharing service, that will operate
in cities. You should look at autonomous
as two different areas. One is autonomy
as a feature and there's autonomy is a
service, which is taking a passenger
safely from point A to point B. And there
are the companies, like Zoox's, that are
being built from the ground up to be
these autonomous mobility companies.
But Zoox's faces big competition. It is
widely believed that the two leading
developers of self-driving vehicles are
Waymo and GM Cruise. Because they have
so many miles under their belt, Waymo
and Cruise are believed to be ahead of
everyone else in terms of how quickly we
might see these vehicles, these
self-driving vehicles out on the road. That doesn't    mean that they have the market locked up.
Compared to all of the different players in the space Zook's, is an outlier. In addition to developing
the autonomous tech, it is also
building the vehicle from scratch.
We can create an amazing product experience and
also a vehicle that has much higher
safety redundancy and robustness, then
you can do by retrofitting a car. And
then our goal is to provide that as a
service. So you would use it like you use
Uber and Lyft but instead of getting in
the backseat of a stranger's Prius,
you're getting in a beautiful robot
that's comfortable and safe and
tailor-made for this application. There
are going to be carriage seating. That
means people gonna look at you; very
social. The other thing we've talked
about is it's gonna be bi-directional;
can go in two different directions. Which
means no more three-point turns. Put that
in a city, it's gonna be much safer
moving around. There's all kinds of
things we get to do when we remove the
driver and the steering wheel. That's
what could kill you in a crash. Now we
have a chance to totally reconfigure
what that internal airbag system is
going to look like and make it safer
than anything that's on the road today.
The company showed us prototypes of its
carriage vehicle. Which is primarily for
testing purposes on closed tracks. But
Zoox's has not yet revealed what its
taxis will actually look like. In the
meantime, the company is testing its
software out on the streets of San
Francisco with a fleet of Toyota's
outfitted with sensors and computers. But
some experts are skeptical that testing
on public roads will lead us to safer
autonomous vehicles.
Michel de court thinks that testing
these dangerous situations and
simulations could be a better and more
efficient way to make these vehicles
safe enough for the road.
He also said that clearer regulation is
needed and compared the autonomous car
industry to the early days of aviation.
But getting the public to trust a vehicle without the
driver behind the wheel, is probably the
biggest hurdle that Zoox's and the
others face. Earlier this year, a
self-driving Uber killed a pedestrian
in Arizona raising concerns about the
risks of the technology. The safety
concerns that are out there, will limit
how quickly those building robo-taxis
actually roll out their fleets. You will
see them initially in geo-fenced areas
and then they'll slowly spread out from there.
There will be a lot of consumer
resistance. The notion of handing over
control to a computer. I expect there to
be a very short amount of time until the
general public will accept that. A lot of
people just don't want change and this
could be the most significant change in
a hundred years. Literally transforming
our society, in ways we've never imagined
before. Well such a future is enticing.
Accident free roads will still take some
time. There's no doubt that autonomous
drive vehicles eventually will be safer. The transition, however, that's gonna take
a long time. And I mean like 15, 20, 25
years. It's not gonna be overnight that
we see robo-taxis but when we do, if
there is an overwhelming majority of
them on the road, they will operate safer
than if people are driving.
