Zoox Robo-Taxis Show Progress, But Wider Rollout Is Slow (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: In Las Vegas, one of the most visible demonstrations of autonomous vehicles is Zooks. It's small, driverless, and for now, free to use. I'm going to order my Zooks, pretty easy, all on an app. Okay, so 45 minutes later, let's get in. Okay so the next thing is close the doors, it's already told me to do so. To continue, press the close doors button, and fasten your seatbelt. So far so good, the doors have closed, the seatbelt is on, and we're going to start the ride. My first observation is, no driver, no pedals, no steering wheel, but it feels quite normal. Clearly one of the big questions is, how does the Zooks know where it's going? Well it's a combination of LiDAR, radar, and infrared cameras, and of course, AI. Zooks says these tools help the vehicle to navigate. Cameras help it see, radar detects the distance, size, and speed of objects, LiDAR creates a 3D map of its surroundings, AI blends the data together to deliver the journey. Looking around the cabin, there is an emergency button up here. So far the vehicle has handled a left and a right turn, it's also stopping at traffic lights right now. We're on a bit of a junction actually, and we're in the middle lane, but it seems to be able to navigate quite complicated roads pretty well. A notable design feature of the Zooks is the fact that you're not facing forward like a traditional car behind a driver, but you're actually facing inward. So there's two seats here, this one and the one next to me, and the same on the other side of the cabin. So opposite me is producer Frankie, and we can really enjoy each other's conversation, facing each other and looking out these big glass doors and the sunroof. So lots of light and quite a sociable space really. One of the cool things I think is that you've got this little pad beside you, you can set the music and the climate, charging. You can pop your phone down here and charge as you go.

[00:02:16] Speaker 2: Hi, good afternoon riders. Thank you for riding Zooks. We ask that you thoroughly come over the cabin, and when the doors open, watch your step as you exit for any oncoming pedestrians, cars and bicycles. Thank you for riding Zooks. We appreciate you.

[00:02:30] Speaker 1: Quite a lot to take in in just 15 minutes of driving in this Zooks, but it got us from A to B fine, and it was a comfortable ride. Zooks only exists in carefully mapped, limited environments, like certain streets in Las Vegas and San Francisco. It's common for robo-taxi firms to test their vehicles in this way, before rolling out to a fully paid-for service to the public.

[00:02:55] Speaker 3: Robo-taxis are city by city by city. No one's going to throw a switch, and then all of a sudden you can go coast to coast, with no need for a steering wheel in the vehicle ever.

[00:03:06] Speaker 1: There are other robo-taxi firms in the race too. Chinese tech giant Baidu offers paid robo-taxi rides across dozens of cities in China. It's partnering with Uber and Lyft to bring their driverless tech to the UK. And rival firm Waymo operates their more traditional-looking autonomous robo-taxis across five US cities and Japan. The company is testing their tech in London, with plans to roll out the service to the public later this year.

[00:03:38] Speaker 4: Very much looking forward to the technology coming to the UK, seeing how it copes with the UK road environment, which is a little bit different to American roads. We tend to have a little bit less space to play with on UK roads, we're a bit more of a confined kind of environment, so seeing how it can cope with that, and seeing how it can cope with maybe higher levels of walking and cycling as well, will be really, really interesting.

[00:03:59] Speaker 1: Do you think this technology will make our roads safer?

[00:04:02] Speaker 4: Yeah, so I think there's massive potential for the technology to help. So we can expect machine drivers to actually be quite good at the task of driving. Of course it's going to take a while to really hone those machine driving skills, if you like, but I think it does offer us huge promise.

[00:04:22] Speaker 3: But there are concerns. The companies will tell you, oh, we're very, very safe, but what they mean is, based on limited data and limited numbers of vehicles, they're addressing most of the safety problems they know of. That does not guarantee they'll be safe when there's a million vehicles, because rare events will start happening all the time.

[00:04:43] Speaker 1: So will self-driving cars be common in our cities? Well, the answer is yes, but not soon, because there needs to be changes in law, technology and public trust. For now, the future is still being tested.