<\/p>\n
The road to autonomous vehicles is long and arduous, and it has already taken one high-profile victim: GM\u2019s Cruise. Elon Musk has been promising autonomy in Teslas for years. It\u2019s still not here.<\/p>\n
Jesse Levinson, co-founder and CTO at Zoox<\/a>, Amazon\u2019s robotaxi subsidiary, will be the first to tell you that autonomy is very hard to do.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the olden days of 20 years ago, AI wasn\u2019t very popular, and most people thought it was a stupid thing to work on,\u201d Levinson said. He thought inventing a car that could drive itself was \u201ccool,\u201d adding that \u201cI was pretty convinced that someday in my lifetime, cars would drive themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, 11 years after co-founding Zoox, Levinson discovered that autonomy is \u201ca super-hard problem. If you really want to remove the driver, it has to be just profoundly good. It can\u2019t just be like, \u2018Oh, if you drive it for an hour, sometimes it works.\u2019 That\u2019s cool if it\u2019s a driver assistance system. But if there\u2019s no driver, it has to work \u2026 99.9% [of the time] \u2014 a lot of nines.\u201d<\/p>\n This week, Zoox agreed to recall<\/a> 258 vehicles due to unexpected braking issues following two accidents<\/a> involving its test vehicles in May 2024, according to Reuters and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These vehicles, which had human safety drivers, braked and caused motorcycles to rear-end them. Two motorcyclists had minor injuries.<\/p>\n Not only is autonomy a hard problem to solve, it\u2019s also costly, Levinson said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s taken longer [to get to self-driving vehicles] than we thought,\u201d Levinson said during a session at last week\u2019s HumanX conference in Las Vegas. Also, \u201cit\u2019s much more expensive relative to what we thought than it is time-consuming. \u2026 We\u2019ve been spending a lot of money.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the problem is self-inflicted. Zoox decided to re-architect the traditional car by removing the steering wheel and braking and acceleration pedals, which became the cause of an intense internal debate.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of really good engineers wanted to put a steering wheel and pedals in the robotaxi and keep that for a while until we can show that we don\u2019t need to disengage very often,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was like a little bit of a comfort blanket kind of a situation.\u201d<\/p>\n But Zoox wanted to differentiate itself from other carmakers that say their vehicles are autonomous but in reality are merely driver-assistance systems. So it decided to go all in and change the concept of a car itself.<\/p>\n \u201cWe started with a blank sheet of paper and we were able to do some things that in retrospect feel pretty obvious, but nobody was thinking about them because they were so constrained by the legacy of cars,\u201d Levinson said.<\/p>\n Read more<\/strong>: Amazon-Owned Zoox Expands Operation of Autonomous Cars in Las Vegas<\/a><\/p>\n Zoox is currently testing<\/a> its vehicles in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Austin and Miami. In Las Vegas, it plans to launch<\/a> a paid service to the public later this year, according to Las Vegas Weekly.<\/p>\nCopying From Jet Technology<\/strong><\/h2>\n