Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host.

We've talked a lot lately about... I'm Pete Bigelow, your host.

We've talked a lot lately about electrification, electric vehicle charging, and other energy-related topics in the transportation world. But I would be remiss if we overlook the fact there's also a lot of developments in the autonomous vehicle realm as well.

We have Weymo doubling its coverage area in Phoenix, crews popping up operations in Dallas and Houston which follows the earlier

expansion in Austin and Zooks the company building its own bi-directional

robot taxi in-house is blazing a new path in terms of figuring out how to meet

existing federal safety standards and get its vehicles on the road. The latter is the

subject of our episode today. My guest is Amanda Prescott, the The give us an overview of the company's strategy and then a deep dive into how

Zooks went about meeting regulatory requirements and self-certifying that

its robot taxi meets those requirements rather than applying for an exemption request like others.

That's an important topic and not without controversy.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has launched a query and T Zuc's self-certification, and the whole industry is closely watching what happens here.

Without giving any more away, I am pleased to bring you this conversation with Zook's director,

Amanda Prescott.

Amanda, welcome to the podcast.

It's great to have you here today.

Thanks so much for having me on, Pete.

I'm really excited to chat.

Kick this off. Tell us a little bit about what you do at Zooks.

Yeah, absolutely.

I am the director of homologation, vehicle systems, and feature integration at Zooks.

I came to Zooks in 2017,

...