You might say the startup is now without its ... driver.
Sorry.
Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment history suggests that you have some relationship with Zoox that you're not disclosing. You've commented on Zoox several times before in an overly enthusiastic manner. You've also commented several times before on autonomy and your comments have been called out for astroturfing in a couple of instances. Readers please beware and take this comment with a grain of salt.
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 do…
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".
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment history suggests that you have some relationship with Zoox that you're not disclosing. You've commented on Zoox several times before in an overly enthusiastic manner. You've also commented several times before on autonomy and your comments have been called out for astroturfing in a couple of instances. Readers please beware and take this comment with a grain of salt.
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 do…
So... Are you in any relationships with them?
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 do…
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...
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 do…
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.
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#26I don't have a strong opinion on Zoox, this CEO, or even this story, but there sure does seem to be a lot of frustration in the self-driving world. Leaves me with two thoughts: * There's a lot more runway for these bike sharing startups then I thought there'd be. * Self driving is hard. (^^ Copied from a duped post)
* There's limits to current AI/ML technology that create a hard ceiling and extends timelines long beyond the current hype cycle and nobody wants to admit it or else funding might stop coming in.
Exactly this. The hype was all in the prototyping phase of the technology, going as far as you can get to make a demo and impress some investors. Progress looked like it was happening quickly because a controlled demo could be made with existing technology.
Now that it's time to build full production systems the hardest problems and edge cases need to be addressed, which could be ignored for demo systems, and the solutions aren't available without some new research developments.
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#27Of what I've heard of Zoox (admittedly 2nd or 3rd hand), there definitely has been some precidence for "engineering to fit design goals" rather than "fitting design around engineering realities". Wouldn't surprise me if this non-technical CEO was part of this.
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#28"Without a warning, cause or right of reply the board fired me".. There is more from Tim Kentley's twitter: https://twitter.com/TimKentleyKlay He just posted a bunch of messages he got from his team at Zoox. Seems like a lot of employees really liked him and his leadership.
I'd be curious how many of them were engineers.
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#29Of what I've heard of Zoox (admittedly 2nd or 3rd hand), there definitely has been some precidence for "engineering to fit design goals" rather than "fitting design around engineering realities". Wouldn't surprise me if this non-technical CEO was part of this.
I fail to understand the issue here - Successful companies do often stretch the limits of engineering to fit design goals (assuming that the design is an informed one to begin with). If design was always fitted around what is known to be possible with engineering, we would have much less innovation around.
Re: Driverless Startup Zoox Suddenly Removes CEO
#30Of what I've heard of Zoox (admittedly 2nd or 3rd hand), there definitely has been some precidence for "engineering to fit design goals" rather than "fitting design around engineering realities". Wouldn't surprise me if this non-technical CEO was part of this.
Also, wasn't this practice (i.e. engineering to fit design goals) what made Apple successful in releasing the iPod, iPhone, etc?
I am an engineer but welcome the perspective of designers and believe anyway that both need to work hand in hand.
In the case of driverless vehicles however, I am not sure the focus should overly be on design because this is a very hard problem that has yet to be solved, and maybe there was a way of designing a vehicle that was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, while mostly focusing on the technical challenges that must be overcome to get us to autonomy.