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Secretive Startup Zoox Is Building a Bidirectional Autonomous Car From the Ground Up (bloomberg.com)
A secretive Australian startup called Zoox (an abbreviation of zooxanthellae, the algae that helps fuel coral reef growth) is working on an autonomous vehicle that is unlike any other. Theirs is all-electric and bidirectional, meaning it can cruise into a parking spot traveling one way and cruise out the other. It can make noises to communicate with pedestrians. It even has displays on the windows for passengers to interact with. Bloomberg sheds some light on this company, reporting on their ambitions to build the safest and most inventive autonomous vehicle on the road: Zoox founders Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson say everyone else involved in the race to build a self-driving car is doing it wrong. Both founders sound quite serious as they argue that Zoox is obvious, almost inevitable. The world will eventually move to perfectly engineered robotic vehicles, so why waste time trying to incorporate self-driving technology into yesteryear's cars? Levinson, whose father, Arthur, ran Genentech Inc., chairs Apple Inc., and mentored Steve Jobs, comes from Silicon Valley royalty. Together, they've raised an impressive pile of venture capital: about $800 million to date, including $500 million in early July at a valuation of $3.2 billion. Even with all that cash, Zoox will be lucky to make it to 2020, when it expects to put its first vehicles on the road.
I always wondered what it would have been like to live through the first dot com bubble. Now I realise that is involves real engineering getting pushed aside to make way for the hype merchants.
Pretty much. It was really a completely insane time. It was like a huge pyramid scheme, and everyone involved knew it was one but shut up because we made so much money it was just too good to be true. It was also the last time you could actually make a fortune as an engineer. Because of the way this bubble worked: Some yahoo had some pipe dream idea "on the internet", hit on some VCs who had more money than brains who didn't know jack shit about the internet and only knew that it has to be the next big thing, that VCs pumped money into the yahoo who, as well, had no idea about how anything on the internet worked, so he hired engineers whose job was to make the pipe dream come true. We, in turn, started asking more and more ridiculous prices for our work (and got paid those ridiculous sums because money was no issue), we literally made millions in 2-3 months programming what could best be described as very shoddy CMS and POS systems. About half a year the pipe dream went poof, so no maintenance had to be done, ever, and we could move on to the next million-per-month project.
In the end, the pipe dreamer went broke, the VC lost his money and, well, guess who had that money. Which, by the way, should serve as a lesson: Money is never "lost". It's just with someone else now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.