Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson doesn’t believe Tesla will launch a robotaxi-hailing service in California (or anywhere else) next year, despite Elon Musk’s recent claims.
“The fundamental problem is that there is no technology that works,” Levinson said Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “And I would like to distinguish between driver assistance systems that, by the way they work, are what we drive most of the time, except when they don’t work. , and then the user has to take over, unlike systems that operate so reliably and robustly that they don’t even need humans.”
Levinson went further and specifically pointed to Tesla’s decision to rely solely on cameras to power its driver assistance systems. “Our view is that to make a robotaxi that is not only safer than humans, but especially safer, we need a lot more hardware than Tesla is putting into its vehicles,” he said.
Levinson’s comments come just weeks after Musk unveiled Tesla’s so-called “CyberCab” robotaxi prototype. Musk also announced at the Cybercab event that he wants Tesla to allow its Model 3 sedan and Model Y SUV to operate as robotaxi in California and Texas by the end of 2025.
Levinson said he uses Tesla’s fully self-driving (supervised) software “about once every two weeks.” And while he said it was “impressive,” he also said it was “a little stressful.”
“Usually it’s doing the right thing, then getting into a kind of false sense of satisfaction, and then doing the wrong thing,” he said. ‘I think you’re saying, ‘Oh, my God!’”
Levinson went on to say that he believes FSDs are “about 100 times less safe than humans if you look at all publicly available metrics.” (Tesla publishes a quarterly safety report claiming that it causes fewer crashes than cars without driver assistance features, but these self-reported statistics have been criticized for being selective.)
The mention of Tesla came as Levinson announced that Zoox will launch custom robotaxi in the San Francisco and Las Vegas markets in the coming weeks. The company plans to offer it to its early rider program in 2025.
