Earlier quoted context omitted.
Relative to competitors Zoox's automous OS is doing quite well and doesn't get enough respect. Relative to the objective everybody is fucked.
Could you provide more context on the first part.
The co-founder, Tim Kentley Klay was somehow able to get Jesse Levinson on board, and Jesse Levinson had no problem getting infinite street cred on board. So they were able to attract a lot of key, original robotics talent before the hype got out of control.
For a long time though, they were low on funds, so they did lots of closed course testing, and it wasn't until they closed a large funding round that Zoox began on public roads, and they performed quite well right out of the starting gate.
Now Zoox and it's competitors are lost in an endless wasteland of testing, development, and validation. It's futile to attempt to do a comprehensive analysis between the different players, they all have their quirks, but Zoox has built all the critical infrastructure needed to do full scale testing, and they're eyeballs deep in it like everyone else.
However, Zoox has stormy waters ahead financially. They need another $2 billion to stay abreast in this never ending race. It's getting harder to visualize scenarios where that happens.
What nobody can do well enough to build a competitive and scalable robotaxi service is prediction in multi-agent scenarios. The AI for that just doesn't exist.