Hi everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes.

Joining me now is my Forbes colleague, Alan Owensman, a senior editor and author of the current climate newsletter.

Alan, thanks so much for coming back on.

Hi, Brittany. Good to be with you today.

You and I have talked about the competition in the Robotaxy space,

and before we compared Tesla's Robotaxy to one of the industry's leaders, Waymo.

You said Tesla's version was a disaster waiting to happen.

Now you're saying forget Elon Musk's company completely.

A different Robotaxi could be a bigger competitor to Waymo.

Talk to us about it.

Absolutely. Yeah. So yesterday I spent

time with Zooks at their new factory in Hayward, California. It's in the Bay Area, not far from

Oakland. Zooks is owned by Amazon. So, you know, like Waymo, it has a massive, you know, giant parent company that's able to fund it,

and over time, we'll want to utilize it. Zooks has been around for a while. They've been a little

lower key. They were next month, July will mark their 11th anniversary, so over a decade of

operation. They got a lot of attention

early on. They had one of their co-founders, Tim Kentley-Clay was an interesting character,

kind of a high-profile guy. He's not with the company anymore. But their other co-founder,

Jesse Levinson, the CTO and co-founder, has been with the program from the get-go. And Jesse's

overseen the development of their

system. He's coming out of a Stanford University computer science background, so, you know,

heavy AI guy for a very long time. But Zooks is an intriguing potential rival to Waymo, because while their system is very similar, they've tested and developed

...