Almost every taxi ride in an Australian capital city will be driverless within a decade, reckons the Melbourne designer who created the world’s first purpose-built robotaxi.
Tim Kentley Klay founded Zoox in South Melbourne, drawing up a vehicle with no steering wheel, and gas pedals. Amazon bought the company in 2020 for $US1.2 billion ($1.7 billion).
Its toaster-shaped cars, which operate in San Francisco and Las Vegas, are the first robotaxis to charge passengers for a ride with no driver at the steering wheel.
The cars steer themselves through traffic using cameras and spinning laser sensors that build a live picture of the road, checked against high-definition maps of the streets they are allowed to use. Staff sitting in a control room can be called on when a vehicle gets stuck, but nobody is driving.
“Australia will be a great fit for the tech, although due to its size, obviously not a prime market in terms of revenue share,” Kentley Klay said.
“By 2036, I’d think practically all but long-range rides in Australia’s capitals will be autonomous. People prefer the service: clean, private and safe. And for a time, lower cost, too.”
But before that, he said, comes the shake-out of the sector.
“In front of us, in my view, is the commercial battle royale, when the proverbial and literal rubber will hit the road and a price war looms to shake out the players that didn’t lean out their stack in time,” he said. “That war will happen in the US in the next three years, and the winners will then spread globally.”
Kentley Klay won’t be there at Zoox to see it. The company’s board, which included billionaire Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, removed him as CEO in August 2018, a month after the company raised $US500 million at a valuation of $US3.2 billion. He said at the time that he had been fired “without a warning, cause or right of reply”. Amazon bought the company 22 months later.
The entrepreneur now runs HYPR, a San Francisco robotics company he founded in 2020, with Australian venture capital firm Blackbird among its financial backers. Its cars teach themselves to drive using a neural network running on about 33 watts of computing power.
The prize for the dominant players is growing quickly, with Goldman Sachs expecting the robotaxi market to be worth close to $US19 billion in sales by 2030.
Alphabet’s Waymo is the clear frontrunner, with about 4000 cars across 15 US metropolitan areas doing roughly half a million paid trips a week. Zoox is far smaller, with about 100 vehicles, but its Californian plant can build as many as 10,000 cars a year, and US regulators last month cleared it to charge for rides in up to 5000 of them within two years.
Zoox’s cars have logged more than three million driverless miles (4.8 million kilometres). However, they are barred from driving in heavy rain and snow and using roads with a speed limit above 45 miles an hour (72km/h).
Tesla, meanwhile, has begun volume production of its Cybercab, which also has no steering wheel but has yet to win approvals to carry passengers. Chinese carmaker XPeng told a Melbourne event last month it plans to commercialise robotaxis alongside the electric vehicles it sells here.
Growth has come with a lengthening list of failures. Waymo has issued three federal recalls since December, including for cars that drove into flooded roads. On July 4, its vehicles blocked intersections around San Francisco’s waterfront fireworks and several had to be towed after their batteries died in the gridlock. One caught fire after rolling over a firework with passengers inside.
Australian roads are not ready for the robotaxi onslaught by any measure. Automated vehicles cannot legally operate here, and transport ministers have agreed only to conditional deployment in select locations from 2027. A review a decade ago counted more than 700 legislative barriers.
Waymo has spent a year working on the problem, hiring lobbying firm GRACosway to register on its behalf in four Australian states. Documents released under freedom of information laws show Transport for NSW warned the company in January that a trial would need seven stages of approvals, ending with the transport minister.
NSW Premier Chris Minns has said he supports a Sydney trial and would ride in a robotaxi himself.
Asked about its Australian plans this week, Waymo said it had no updates to share.
Australians remain sceptical about driverless cars. A recent survey of 562 people found 47 per cent regard autonomous vehicles as a desirable way to travel, but 74 per cent want the option of human control.
One Aussie who’s enthusiastic is Kentley Klay.
“Autonomous technology would take us from the age of the automobile to the age of robotics,” he said. “Just as the invention of the internal combustion engine took us from the age of coach-building to the age of the automobile.”
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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