Zoox - The self-Driving car that could beat Uber

Image Source : Bloomberg

Zoox, a self driving car startup is close to raising 500 Million Dollars at a 3.2 Billion Dollar Valuation as reported by Bloomberg Business Week. Given the competition it faces in the space of autonomous Cars from giants like Google, Daimler, Lyft and Uber, that valuation might seem crazy. In order to understand the valuation let us get a bit deeper into the spaces of autonomous driving and how Zoox is different from the competition.

App Cabs not only have to provide a healthier means of earning to Drivers while operating with same fuel costs as traditional Cabs but they also have to be dependent on the work hours put in by the Drivers for Revenue. In India the increasing ride cancellation rate by App Cab drivers is also leading to a lot of disenchantment among users. Given this situation, it is no wonder that all the major companies are looking for the most obvious solution - removing the Driver completely. 

Image Source : Bloomberg

All the major companies have concentrated their efforts in fitting existing Cars with the Technology. Zoox, on the other hand aims to change the concept of the Automobile itself - designing a Car for the Autonomous Technology. Their Car has the following features:

1. It is completely electric.
2. It traverses equally in forward and reverse directions which means that it does not have to turn to go in the opposite direction.
3. It has special screens on its windows to display customized welcome messages.
4. It can automatically make noises to communicate with pedestrians.
5. It can rotate the orientation of its wheels to align them in a 90 degree angle to the body to allow it to traverse like a crab (say bye bye to the parallel parking woes)

Here is a glimpse of  how a Zoox Car perceives the world around itself:

Image Source : Zoox

As you might have guessed from studying the screenshot, the blue boxes are what its AI identified as Cars, purple boxes are people, red boxes are red traffic lights and green boxes are green traffic lights. The thing that differentiates the use of AI in image/pattern recognition from autonomous driving is that in autonomous driving, the AI also has to predict outcomes in the near future to avoid collisions. So basically it not only has to identify the objects it senses correctly but also predict the path they are going to take or not take.

Zoox started in a Garage with just 6 people and now has around 500 employees working at a 130,000 square feet headquarter in Foster City. They are aiming to put their first vehicles on the road by 2020.

Here is there story as covered by Bloomberg:

When do you think autonomous cars like these will become reliable enough to become commonplace around the world? Do leave your comments and reactions below and don't forget to subscribe.