Hello and welcome to the Automotive News Shift podcast, where we bring you the latest on automotive technology, trends, and transformation.

I'm Molly Boygan, tech and innovation reporter at Automotive News.

Our guest today is Dennis Fritch, Vice President of the Safety and Motion Division of

Omovio.

He spoke to our own Jerry Hirsch, managing editor at Automotive News, about how Omovio is improving

breaking performance.

Basically, all OEMs are very interested in driver technologies.

The question is, which one is finding the one who is bringing it first into application

and then in which application? But first, let's talk about the week. For that, I'm joined by my

colleague Lawrence Iliff, who covers Tesla, Lucid, Rivian, Vinfast, and Robotaxis for automotive

news. Hi, Lonnie. Hey, it's great to be here. Great to have you. So Lonnie,

your story about Zook's Robotaxies published last week. What did you learn about what the company

is up to? I think what's really interesting is that Zooks is now getting into the cycle that we

saw with Waymo where they do early testing in cities, and then they do testing with the actual

vehicle they're going to use in cities, and then they deploy and open it up. So Zooks just started

in September with public rides in Las Vegas, and then they moved into San Francisco, you know,

in kind of a small area. But now they say that they're going

into Austin and Miami, and then they have plans for a bunch more cities. So it looks like they're

kind of getting into this, you know, positive, you know, circle of going to a city, working it out,

and then they're going to open their apps.

And one thing I find really interesting about it is that now they're kind of ahead of Tesla.

I mean, maybe not in a total way in terms of technology or vehicles or money or whatever, but in deployment, they're head of Tesla.

...