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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

I've been accused of working for Waymo and Cruise too, because I defend them against the unfounded bullshit you guys spread about them. And about me, too, apparently. I'm a self driving car nerd, I moderate a subreddit dedicated to the subject under the same username I have here, and I've been following the industry, the technology and it's players since the DARPA days. Relative to the rest of the industry Zoox is doing incredibly well, so if you want to challenge me about something, how about instead of making up teleological conspiracy theories, challenge me on the facts.

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I'm interested in the facts of what they're doing so well - do they have deployed systems taking passenger rides? This is/was my industry, so I'm not just asking idly.

As an aside, the lack of clarity about who you do work for is probably what's contributing to the "teleological conspiracy theories".

Zoox did several years of closed course testing and started on public roads in San Fransisco about 1 year ago with just 10 cars. Last fall they did a press event and took a few dozen journalists around for rides and everyone had good things to say about the performance of their vehicles. Their first set of disengagement reports for 2017 had them at 1 every 430 miles, which is worse than Waymo or Cruise, but way ahead of everyone else, and especially impressive given how few test miles they had racked up at the time. It lends credibility to the claims some have made that Jesse Levinson is the brightest guy in the industry.

Ashley Vance for Bloomberg did a big puff piece on Zoox a month ago, the video is pretty interesting, it's the first we've been able to see of their prototypes in action, and I had been waiting years to see if they were actually following through with their original vision:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-07-17/zoox-and-it...

A couple days ago some pics of an unidentified av test vehicle was spotted, and one of the smart guys in my subreddit called it out as a zooxmobile with an new sensor configuration arranged to match the configuration of their protoypes:

https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/08/21/unidentifi...

Rock on, dude. Eff the haters. People love to make claims like above or downvote as soon as a positive comment is posted on something they don’t like or someone else comes to their enemies defense.

So... Are you in any relationships with them?

I know a programmer who worked for BioWare in my home city who has been with Zoox for about a year. I met him once, years before he left for SF, because we have a mutual ex-girlfriend. So yeah, I'm right up in there.

Here we go. Gotcha! Mutual interest

Hey, as someone who is just observing this and doesn't have a dog in the fight -- thanks. (I am assuming that -- although you didn't say it -- this is a full disclosure of ALL your conflicts of interest.)

I am not quite sure what I believe about when it is appropriate to accuse someone of having undisclosed conflicts of interest. But I am certain that the best way to respond to such an accusation is with a full disclosure of all conflicts of interest. Regardless of whether the accusation was appropriate, the disclosure ends the issue. And conflicts of interest (to one degree or another) are perfectly normal and do not invalidate a person's opinions or eliminate them as a useful contributor to the discussion.

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