'Robocab' Tested At Altamont Unveiled

FOSTER CITY, CA – A Peninsula company unveiled an autonomous ride-hailing vehicle Monday that it’s trumpeting as the future of urban transportation, but not everybody is on board with the new technology.

Foster City-based Zoox, which was founded six years ago and was purchased by Amazon in June for $1.3 billion, designed the box-shaped vehicle to be omnidirectional with no steering wheel.

The Zoox is designed to transport passengers through dense urban environments, the company said.

The company released a video on its YouTube channel showing a Zoox chauffeuring passengers through downtown San Francisco (about 16:30 into the clip).

Zoox claims in a news release to be “reinventing personal transportation—making the future safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable for everyone.”

The carriage-style designed cabin features two rows of seats facing each other.

“Revealing our functioning and driving vehicle is an exciting milestone in our company’s history and marks an important step on our journey towards deploying an autonomous ride-hailing service,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans said in a statement.

The Zoox tops out at 75 mph and has safety features not found in conventional vehicles, the company said.

The Zoox was tested on a track at the former Altamont Raceway Park in Tracy, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Jesse Levinson touted the Zoox’s safety features the company said aren’t found in conventional vehicles.

“Safety is the foundation of everything we do. Building a vehicle from the ground-up has given us the opportunity to reimagine passenger safety, shifting from reactive to proactive measures,” Levinson said.

Zoox is among a crowded field of autonomous vehicle developers that includes Google’s Waymo, Uber, Tesla, General Motors and Ford, among others.

But the new technology has its critics. According to an independent analysis, the claims of developers such as Zoox that autonomous vehicles will make roadways safer are unproven.

Safety concerns surfaced after a 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg was fatally struck by an autonomous vehicle operated by Uber in Tempe, Arizona.

According to an analysis conducted by the RAND Corporation, the public is being asked to take on faith vehicle safety promises from Silicon Valley developers with billions of dollars in investments on the line.

The analysis concluded that it could take up to hundreds of billions of miles in real-world driving environments to establish safety in terms of fatalities and injuries, “an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate performance prior to releasing them for consumer use.”

“Our findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability. And yet, it may still not be possible to establish with certainty the safety of autonomous vehicles,” the report said.

Other concerns about autonomous vehicles include their vulnerability to being hacked, which could gridlock entire cities according to a Science Daily analysis.

The RAND Corporation in a separate analysis cited ransomware and information theft through hacking among the potential vulnerabilities hackers could exploit amid the proliferation of autonomous vehicles.