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.