Is Zoox Ready to Launch This Year?

According to an Allied Market Research report, the global autonomous vehicle market is expected to grow from $54.23 billion in 2019 at 40% CAGR to $556.67 billion by 2026. The autonomous vehicle market is flooded with several players ranging from traditional car manufactures such as GM and Ford to focused players such as Waymo and Zoox.

Zoox’s Offerings

Zoox was founded in 2014 by artist-designer Tim Kentley-Klay and Dr. Jesse Levinson. Australian designer Tim comes from a background of animation and film post-production while Jesse Levinson had formerly led Stanford University’s self-driving car program and had worked with Sebastian Thrun, director of Google’s self-driving program.

Over the next few years, the engineers at Zoox worked towards their vision of building a safe robot taxi into reality. They began to build a car that looked the same from the front as from the rear – the objective being that replacement parts, as and when needed, would be easy to service. Each wheel was attached to its own motor to make movement more precise. Sensors and cameras were seamlessly integrated into the vehicle. They incorporated LEDs and sound capabilities to communicate with other drivers, passengers and pedestrians. In the future, Zoox wants to operate its own robot taxi service as well.

Today Zoox has some 6 prototypes. It now has more than 500 employees and a 130,000 square foot facility as its head office. It is already running prototypes of its technology in Las Vegas. Zoox’s ambition is to make a car that needs no steering wheel, brake or accelerator and has seats where all passengers face each other. Zoox is targeting to commercially release this vehicle this year. But it has kept most of its progress under wraps.

Zoox’s Competition

The autonomous vehicle industry is a capital intensive industry with several players in the field. Besides traditional automobile manufacturers like GM and Tesla who are partnering with or creating their own autonomous technologies, there several other new age technology companies like Alphabet and Uber who are also working on their variants of self driving taxis. Zoox believes that it is different from all of these because it is not only designing its own software that will power the cars and the ride hailing app, but also the basic car itself. Additionally, Zoox claims that its rides will be a lot safer because they are all being tested in busy city streets instead of on quiet suburban ones.

While Zoox may be ready to reveal its vehicle this year, the industry still has to deal with several regulatory concerns. The recent Tesla and Uber accidents while on self-drive mode have made the government authorities more cautious about allowing autonomous vehicles on the streets. Companies are lobbying with the government bodies to allow for more freedom to test and operate these vehicles to help improve AI and machine learning capabilities of these vehicles. Recently, the federal government granted some relief when it outlined guidance developed with the White House on how more than 30 federal departments and agencies will promote unified federal rules on self-driving cars. This will help migrate away from the present scenario where the laws governing self-driving cars vary by state, making it easier for the industry to test these new cars.

Zoox’s Financials

Zoox has raised $955 million in funding so far from investors including Alium Capital, Grok Ventures, Visionnaire Ventures, AID Partners Capital, Thomas Tull, David Spector, ARCHina Capital Partners, Composite Capital Management, Blackbird Ventures, and Threshold. Its last venture round was held in July 2018 when it raised $465 million in a round led by Grok Ventures at a valuation of $3.2 billion. In October last year, the company issued a $200 million convertible note to source funds. It will be interesting to see if, and what, Zoox unveils this year as the market is looking for a radical product from the company.