Aussie capitals ‘will be driverless within a decade’, says robotaxi pioneer

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.”

“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.