LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. — For Aicha Evans, the road to a “robo-taxi” is as much a journey to culture-shifting change as it is for leadership in a multibillion-dollar industry.
The Silicon Valley company has been steeped in secrecy for most of its five years of existence. Few have seen its electric car, described in a Bloomberg News report as a “carlike robot about the size and shape of a Mini Cooper.” What tests it has performed of its software system have been in Toyota TM, +0.41% Highlanders traversing the streets of San Francisco and Las Vegas for several months. A commercial pilot is expected in 2021.
A fleet of some 40 vehicles were manufactured in the East Bay, and the mystery robo-taxi is being tested at an undisclosed location, also in the region. Building a truly autonomous robo-taxi service “is a MASSIVE undertaking,” Brett Battles, a partner at AV8 Ventures, an early-stage venture fund, told MarketWatch in an email message. “Zoox has already raised almost $800M and will likely need more. They also need millions of road miles to train all the AI and computer vision algorithms .”
Until it surfaces, expect to see plenty of Evans, an engaging sort who has recently raised her profile with speaking gigs at this week’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Southern California, and at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco earlier this month.