 This is MXUX, this is a video about Amazon's recent purchase of Zooks and I think just about Amazon in general. I'm going to talk about the design of the Zooks, the issues I think there are, their goal of getting into the self-driving and then we're going to have a summary of, excuse me, what we did here. So let's just get started with this slideshow real quick here. Alright, this is the Zooks, this is the vehicle, this is a purpose-built vehicle, people move their autonomous electric taxi. It's got four-wheel steering and it's ambidextrous, ambidextrous or whatever. You can see it's got a lot of hardware on it, we'll go over that later. What I just want to point out right now is we have seats facing each other. So someone's always going to be sitting backwards. And we have a kind of a shielded view here and there's a small view here. And I'm going to go to the next slide, it's going to show that these front and rear windows are blocked about up to here. So really it's kind of claustrophobic in that you don't have a lot of visual cues of where you're going. It's like you're in a funhouse, I think. Anyway, that's how I would feel. I wouldn't feel comfortable. This is more of a detail, this is the front and the rear of the Zooks. It's hard to tell from the pictures, but this is blocked. And this is open, but that is out of the line of sight. So the area that's open is out of the line of sight of the passengers. So they have this little window here, these two windows, and then they have a sunroof. But they don't have any cues of whether they're going forwards or backwards. I don't think there's a lot of cues in any case, but I don't think a lot of people notice this. They didn't release a lot of detailed pictures of the interior of this vehicle, but these are some things that I personally noticed. Anyway, this also has four-wheel steering and it can go 70 miles an hour. So imagine yourself being in this compartment and not being able to see where you're going. I don't know. Anyway, let's move on to the next slide. And again, these are the seats and, of course, designed before COVID. So I don't know, maybe they could put a shield up in here or something, but anyway, they're facing each other. And you can see there's not a lot of view here, you know? I mean, it's okay, but these headrests are blocking and then behind the headrest is blocked as well. So really, you got like a panorama roof up here. And then you got like this wall of windows here with thick frames and you have nothing on this end. It's up high. You just see the light coming over the transom kind of over the seats. So it's kind of a weird seating arrangement. And of course, someone's always going to be sitting facing backwards in this thing. And just by way of comparison, this was the prototype and it was, you know, much bigger inside. And, but just to give you an idea, it was roomier versus Zooks is quite, quite small. Now, this is a sample of a Zooks self-driving system. And I'm going to play this video. And what's interesting is, you see the hood of the car here? This isn't done in the Zooks vehicle. This is done in a, you know, RS or some kind of three box sedan. And anyway, it's they chose to use a car to demonstrate it. But anyway, you could see it's got this, I believe they use mapping as well as the onboard sensors. I believe they map the streets. They use some satellite based mapping as well as to as well as mapping these objects. This is, you know, pretty much, we've all gotten so bored with these self-driving systems now. It's really amazing. But that gives you an idea of their self-driving system. And we just saw that. Let's go to the next slide. Now, this is, here's the interesting thing. There's a notice down here. You can't read it. It says, driving autonomous on closed city streets. This was in San Francisco, but this was closed off. All of this was rehearsed. These are extras. You know, these cars are rentals probably. And it's made to look like it's live, but it's not. It's stagecraft. So let's just play this video real quick here. And it being stagecraft and it's still quite slow. And you can see it's stopping for some vehicles there. And it's, again, quite slow. I think Tesla's going to beat them. It's like Jimmy DeSnail. What does that Elon must say? DeSnail? Anyway, that's a tunneling. Anyway, it's pausing here for people walking in front of it. And again, this is on closed streets. These are all actors. This is all staged. I mean, it's not a pusher, okay? But this demonstrates the four-wheel steering, the front and rear wheels steer. Now, can you imagine being in that thing facing the wrong way with four-wheel steering and not being able to see where you're going? Just my opinion. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy. But it doesn't sound too inviting to me. Personally. I don't know. All right. That's the end of the video there. That gives you an idea. And again, that's their system, but that was on a closed, you know, a very small type down at the bottom. It closed the closed street, closed street, closed demonstration. And we just saw that. So let's go to the next. Okay. Clean up in Zooks, Iowa. What is Amazon thinking? Got Zooks plus Amazon here. There's your Zooks taxi. And what's this? Uh-oh. What's that? All right. I'm going to try to explain this. Clean up in Zooks, Iowa. This is through my own research. I mean, I thought about this and I looked a couple of things up. And I just, I thought it would be an interesting video. This is a motion sickness study. It's from this site called Research Gate, which is really cool. You can discover all kind of scientific research. You can hire researchers. It's a bunch of PhDs and stuff. This is a study that I'm quoting out of here that was written by these four guys. I want to give them all credit. And motion sickness and automated vehicles with forward and rearward facing seats. Orientations. Well, it's just what I was talking about. I was surprised to find this actually. And this is February 2019. So according to the data, this video, this is fairly recent. And this is a PhD, it's probably a thesis for a PhD or, but anyway, this is the study. And these are the people that were quoted as being authors on this study. Because, you know, you can look this up for yourself. Again, this, I highly advise this. I recommend this site. It's great. I mean, it's got all kind of information on it. Anyway, this is an abstract. This is their abstract, which is kind of like a, you know, the executive summary that comes before the thing. But anyway, automatic vehicles, blah, blah, blah, cabin design, no physical driving controls. Okay. One common concept for an automated vehicle is to have both forward and rearward facing seats. And it says traveling backwards can increase the likelihood of experiencing motion sickness due to the inability of experiments to anticipate the future motion trajectory. And I think this goes into play with them having their vision blocked as well. So not only are they facing the wrong way, they can't see what's in front or behind respectively in the vehicle. Aim to empirically evaluate the impact of seating orientation on the levels of motion sickness. Automated vehicles with forward and rearward facing seats. And it just says how it was done, blah, blah, blah. The participants conducted tests twice, forward and rearward seating, randomized crossward design. Levels of sickness was reported was relatively low with an increase in the mean level of sickness recorded when traveling rearwards. As expected, this increase was particularly pronounced under urban driving conditions. It concluded that rearward traveling automatic vehicles will compromise the passenger experience. And they kind of understate things there, but what they're saying is it's very uncomfortable and I guess you wouldn't want to do it for any length of time. And that vehicle can go 70 miles an hour. They're planning on highway speeds with that. Anyway, significant increase in the mean level. And this is a second study that was done and there's more detail on that. You can read that. They go into facing backwards does what you think would do. And this is another study by increased bone vibrations, reduced blah, blah, blah, automated vehicles. And that's by these guys right here. And this is February 2020. And this is off the same site. Signs of APs with respect to motion sickness is distressed and concludes the design should maximize for the ability for occupants to anticipate the future motion path of the vehicle. That's the blocked windows I was talking also been demonstrated as a significant increase in motion sickness within an AV concept in a real world or when fitted with rearward staking as facing seats. So again, anticipation of the future motion is blocked and rearward facing seats significant increase in motion sickness. The study demonstrated by if you made people stare down at the floor at one spot, they didn't get sick. But when they when they're not told to stare at one spot on the floor, 100% of the passengers noted increase in sickness in a similar urban AV driving environment facing rearwards. So 100% the benefit that forward seeing passengers joy is a plethora of anticipatory clues from the road ahead, which is completely blocked. So in other words, not only is that people sitting backwards, it also removes the cues, the visual cues that allows you to anticipate what's going to happen next. In your route, 100% they're an increase in reported sickness. If you stare at a spot, maybe they could put a dot on the floor, say that lights up when it starts moving, then you stare at that. I don't know. Anyway, these are two studies, both of them understated, but they indicate, you know, statistically significant outcome. So I guess the real world will be the real test on that. So is the zoos an autonomous vomitorium clean up in zoos aisle one? I shouldn't have made that's not fair. But anyway, you got everything blocked off. You got them facing the wrong way. You got four wheel steering. It's going 70 miles an hour. Everybody's in there. It's like a funhouse ride or something. I mean, you know, get the pixie dusk. It's like the TILTA world, the carny. I don't know. Just a conclusion I came to. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I don't know anything. So now let's talk about Amazon. So all right, so let's say, all right, well, they didn't buy it for the taxi. They bought it for the autonomous driving system. That's what they want to get into. Taking his talent to great disruptor to the autonomous vehicle space, purchase of zoos, 1.2 billion. Amazon plans to work with zoos to create a fleet of self-driving taxis in competition with Alphabet's Waymo, which is nowhere. Anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is the e-commerce giant in a position to dominate yet another industry? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Zoos marks Amazon's biggest investment to the autonomous vehicle sector. Second largest acquisition they did after Zappos, which is the shoe company, and Whole Foods, which was actually quite a bit more, but cool into Zappos. The country company was marked down from 3.2 billion in value. That's what it was valued at in 2018. So its stock has dropped between the lines, perhaps self-driving, not working out quite right, I don't know. Struggle with management turnover, and they put a billion dollars into this project since the beginning. So, paid 1.2 billion, value had dropped from 3.2 billion, billion invested and had a lot of management turnover, so this is out of force. And, I don't know, I guess it's a deal, you know, got a deal with it, 60% off. Now this is the technology that they bought, and Elon Musk, I'm just going to paraphrase what he has said on this type of system is, it's so expensive to outfit a car with all these sensors that, you know, there's some question as to whether it would be economically viable. And I believe this system also used mapping, so I think the area has to be mapped where it's in. But let's just go through, this is their video from their website. This is the full stack, got a little stutter there. That's the Zooks, and now look at the sensor array they got on here. They got those things, those are the LIDARs, I believe, and then these are what, I'm not sure, ultrasonic or cameras, but perhaps cameras, so, and then they've got the computer system in the bay, and there's their self-driving and autonomous driving, and I believe that's the mapping they have, and anyway, it's kind of a standard kind of a thing. I'm going to try to find, yeah, let's just go through these sensors again. You can see what they have here, and look at this. All these things, all these things, all these things. That's three layers of sensors. There must be, you know, 50 sensors on there, something like that. Anyway, that's what Amazon bought, and this is super complex LIDAR mapping-based system, and again, I believe Elon Musk, who we might consider to be one of the leaders in this field, has, you know, said that these LIDAR mapping systems aren't viable. Well, I guess they're viable in constrained areas, but anyway, LIDAR is definitely against them. Anyway, very complex self-drive, very complex. Now, just by way of example, this is comma.ai. I don't know if you've heard of open pilot. This is, there you go, this is driving itself, obviously. There's no one in the driver's seat. This is a 100-mile ride they did, 100 miles hands-free. In this Toyota, and this is the comma.ai, the comma one, or the... This little thing up here is what's driving the car. And that is the motherboard off a Samsung phone that's in a 3D printed case, and it's got a USB cable that goes down and hooks into the port that the digital connect port in the car. And now, and it gets the power from this camera up here. So it's got its own camera on it, and it's pretty much so, it is self-contained, and it plugs into the car, and it uses an existing, so these are cars that have driver assist systems. They have steering and braking and gas in them. But this provides the visual driving, okay? And it takes over control of the car and drives the car. And the thing is, this is open source, and you could download it. Anybody could download it. It's George Holtz, who was initially hired by Elon Musk to work on his system. And he told Musk, he goes, I'll make a better system than when you got, you know? And he goes, oh, well, okay. And he goes, all right, I'll tell you what. I'll do it for, I forget what the figure was. It's like $12 million. And Elon said, okay. And then after Holtz started working on Elon, he goes, well, according to an interview, well, I have to, I am the one that's going to decide whether it works or not, and whether you get paid or not. And Holtz wanted to do an independent tribunal or something to check it out. Something like that, allegedly. So he, you know, pulled him to piss off and started his own group. I think he's in San Diego now, and he's got like five young guys and their rightness. And this is, again, it's all open source. It's all on the internet. You can download this system. And this hardware, you know, is already available. And, you know, I'm sure you can make your own one of these or you could buy them from him. But anyway, I'm just saying, as an alternative to the Zook system, this is, and this operates off a cell phone camera, basically. And this has no mapping and no lidar and visual. And it's, you know, this George Willis guy fights something. He hacked, he was the first one to hack an iPhone. Anyway, I never heard of him until recently. I was so, I'm going to do a video on this. I think this system is fascinating. But again, open source. Okay. You can download the source code from the internet. Okay. No problem. Of course, he's always updating it, but it doesn't matter. Anyway, yeah, you buy this little unit and you stick it on. It's a thousand bucks. And I'll show you. And then you hook it into your car's computer system. And you got to have the self-driving in place already. No navigation program. I don't believe this navigates, at least not yet. But that's all you do. And turn this thing on and it drives. And he's been really ingenious the way he's collected the data for this and everything. And you're upgrading it all the time. Anyway. And again, this is a 100, they did 100 miles without an intervention. So, and that's real world. And they do these dodgy tests. They take the car out and let it drive itself. It's quite hilarious. You can check out some of the videos. But this is real world. This is not a closed street. And that's highway speed. Anyway, fascinating. So, if they wanted a driving system, they could have downloaded this. Technically. I mean, I know it's not that easy, but. And then just so we know, this is the unit right here. And again, this is based on a Samsung phone motherboard. I think they do some minor. But they got a camera watching the driver. And if the driver, you know, falls asleep or whatever, it will shut the thing off. But comfortably on your windshield, includes infrared camera for 24 seven driver monitoring. That's this draws power from your car. Custom cooling has integrated Panda and OCPD port. The comma two pairs with the comma connect app. And provides video storage and drives and camera access. So anyway, you buy the hardware and you download the app. Then you go into the open source hardware and then there's some other features. And I'm not sure if you have to buy a fairly cheap subscription at stores or driving data. I'm not sure, but it's about a thousand bucks. And then so that's it. It's the whole system right there. And on the other side of this, there's like a regular cell phone camera. Crazy works. And these are the these are the most compatible cars. And they're all recent models and they have and they have driver assist in them already. They have like, you know, driver assist systems, lane keeping. They do lane keeping and emergency braking and cruise control. They're not self driving systems. They're just driver assist. As long as you have this, I don't know what level it is driver assist functions of adapt. These are the cars that work best platforming functions of adaptive cruise control and automated lane centering. So these are the two systems you have to have in place on the highway. And then stop and go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, these aren't the only ones. These are the ones they recommend. It's pretty crazy. Like I said, I'm going to do a video on this. So by way of summary. Amazon bots flailing. I'll call it flailing not failing flailing self driving car company for a billion dollars. It's got a carny ride design. I don't want to minimize it. These guys work so hard on it. But the research was there. Anyone could have found it. And in their autonomy, you know, they haven't. I mean, there's there's more video of doing autonomous highway driving city driving. I don't think they I don't know it's questionable. Like I said, that was on a closed course, the sample they have on there. It's not a pusher, but it's not publicly demonstrated autonomy on open roadways. And you know, Amazon is doing this and then they made this giant investment in Rivian, which keeps allegedly getting in trouble for hiring ex Tesla people that are taking IP with them allegedly. And they want to make their own Amazon basics van through Rivian who still hasn't really built a vehicle. Again, I don't know. I don't know what Amazon's I mean, I don't know. What do I know? Maybe it's a good idea. Seems to be another way to do that. But you know, you got that workhorse. A bunch of other places. Oh, workhorse. Let's talk about workhorse. This is a little video I did. You can check it out. It's about Amazon's drone delivery program. I got to tell you, you got to watch this video. I go through it. They spent a billion dollars and then they gave it up and they outsourced it to like a German company and Australian company. And there's a punchline to all this. It involves workhorse, the truck company workhorse that's going up now, which is probably what they should have bought. You know, anyway, the point is that you can watch that video. That's one of my videos just go online. So is Amazon losing it? Did Amazon make the right decision to buy Zooks? In the long run will it work out? I don't know. 1.2 billion, you know, billion here, billion there. Pretty soon you're talking about a lot of money. Who said that? Some senators said that. Anyway, like I said, this video here, they dismantled their drone. They were 12 years on their drone program. And they ended up, you know, basically giving everybody the heave-ho and outsourcing everything to third parties. Unbelievable. Anyway, and, you know, they've lost control of the program. This is just kind of an aside. But Jeff Bezos allegedly wants his girlfriend's brother to pay his $1.7 million legal fees for defending against the case the brother brought against Jeff Bezos, which evidently allegedly was a bogus case. I don't know that much about this. This is all alleged. But the brother sued Bezos for saying he released some videos and Bezos and then there was lack of evidence on that. So it was a mistrial. So Bezos is now countersuing to collect a $1.7 million of fees. Okay. $1.7 million in legal fees. He just spent $1.2 billion. Okay. Is the rich guy in the world running the most valuable public company there is? I don't know. Anyway. I don't know. I think, you know, like I was looking at BlackRock, you know BlackRock, the investment bankers or whatever. I'd say, well, you know, and if BlackRock's investing in something, it's got to be good. Well, it turns out BlackRock has so much money. They basically invest in everything. And I don't know if this is where Amazon is. Are they losing their, their edge? I don't know. This is a, you know, strange. But I think he and Musk are, Bezos and Musk are, you know, deathmatch or something. But anyway, the point is, I don't know about this. I hope they don't run it off like they did with the drone program. Anyway, that's my take on the subject. I thought this would be an interesting video. I'm going to get back. I'm going to make some app terror videos and some other videos. I just wanted to kick this one off. Creepy music starting to play here. And anyway, that's it. I hope you liked the video. I'm not a financial advisor. And I'll put a link to that blimp video on here. And thanks for watching. Hope you liked the video. All right. Let those links come up. All right, guys. Thank you.