Indeed. They're able to raise lots of cash with presentation skills, but in reality their business plan is completely bottlenecked on super reliable perception/intent prediction AI, on which they aren't showing evidence of an advantage.
It's frankly sloppy that the reporter doesn't mention it. He also incorrectly reports that Waymo only tests in places like Arizona.
"Overall, the vehicle performs so well that you forget no one is driving."
Jesse Levinson, the guy leading autonomy at Zoox is a big scoop, he gets huge respect in the robotics community. When you got a top talent like that, it tends to attract more top talent. I'm really impressed by how much Zoox has accomplished with so little. Last I heard they had about a dozen test vehicles noodling around parts of San Francisco, but with this new cash injection you'll probably be seeing a lot more sensor riddled flat black Toyota Highlanders in the Bay Area in the coming months.
It should be emphasized that fully validating an autonomous vehicle well enough to remove the driver is no small feat and they have a long way to go, I'm betting against their 2020 target for a commercial rollout.
I'm somewhat baffled by how much spite a tech news site like HN has for technology companies that are actually innovating and solving hard problems. Zoox didn't drop out the sky yesterday, they've been at this for years, you just haven't been paying attention.
He said "no one is driving" Now, maybe he is full of shit, but those words are pretty definitive.
also, why does it have to be vision only and no maps? the goal is not some pissing contest of who has the cleverest algo, the goal is a working product. Of course, it's going to include maps.
The reason I'd want to see a vision-only mappless demo is because Lidar and HD maps are a crutch, which make it easy to create a 90% functional demo, yet are insufficient to cover the long tail end, which is inherently a computer vision problem. There is not enough information density or semantics in Lidar data to make high level judgements, which makes it useless for many relevant corner cases. Meanwhile, vision has all the information but it's a hard yet necessary AI problem to extract it.
The goal is a working product indeed, but if it involves teleoperation, human annotation for maps, and over-relies on Lidar, it will be a slow and unreliable AI granny driver, which will penetrate at most 1% of the market. There is a whole lot of unscalable human effort being swept under the rug in most autonomous demos, so don't believe everything you read in the media.
What was wrong with the turn? They had to wait until they could confirm that the second oncoming car would actually slow and complete their turn before it was safe to continue. That's how many humans would handle that situation too IMO.
how many companies that you know of that are working on self-driving cars have done this? had a reporter do a similar route in a car driving itself? I know nothing of this company but they are either completely insane or have a high degree of confidence in their product, or the reporter is lying. I have no reason to suspect the reporter of lying in this case.