Cofounder, Zoox
Search every verified Tim Klay interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Tim Klay, cofounder of Zoox, appeared in two recent videos discussing developments at Zoox and his work with a new AI system called Hyperdrive. In a July 2026 episode of the show "Shotgun with Marwan," Klay demonstrated a system his company Hyperlabs built that uses an Nvidia AGX computer running at about 33 watts to drive a Tesla through San Francisco, calling it "hyperdrive." He stated that the system was created by four software engineers, three algorithmic architects, and one info engineer over about two years. Klay said his motivation for moving from computer graphics to robotics was the belief that around 2012 a transition from the automobile era to the robotics era was beginning, and that the power-to-weight ratio of Hyperlabs' system is "probably unmatched on the planet right now." In a June 2026 episode of "Inside The Ride: Scaling Zoox," Klay described Zoox's latest software release, stating that it quadrupled the size of the geofence in San Francisco, added major pickup and drop-off locations in Las Vegas including the airport, and began driving robotaxis in Austin and Miami for the first time. He said the release improved the vehicle's ability to handle dense junctions, lane changes, and unpredicted turns. Klay noted that when Zoox first drove on public roads the vehicle could get stuck every few hundred trips, but that with recent progress it now gets stuck in "many, many tens of thousands of miles." He attributed this improvement to custom hardware that is "very redundant" and "fail operational." In a selected quote, Klay stated that Zoox's approach "took longer, took more money, but we actually end up with a better, safer, more comfortable, more enjoyable experience that actually will have better unit economics."
“In our new release, we've more than quadrupled the size of the geoence. It contains more than half of all ride hailing trips that start and end in San Francisco, which is super cool. In Las Vegas, we uh significantly expanded where we can drive. We added tons of major pickup and drop off locations, major hotels like Ar...”
“It took longer, took more money, but we actually end up with a better, safer, more comfortable, more enjoyable experience that actually will have better unit economics.”
“The only way you can really validate these systems is having a fleet and driving a lot of miles, and stochastically sampling the environment and having data to show that you're statistically safe.”
“I think Tesla is definitely going to solve full autonomy and I think they're going to do it at scale and faster than anyone else because Tesla can do that and put it in their fleet which is already at scale.”
“I'd like to thank the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, for presenting this award.”
“I've long believed that imagination is the origin of value, because you can see not what is but what is to be.”
“I'd like to congratulate Abigail — she searches for life north of the common line; she might want to try Venus.”
“It's important that the people who are really out there making change get recognized — that's not me, but it's many that have been recognized tonight.”
“I think for me, my journey in robotics started around 2012 when I was watching from Melbourne what Google was doing with their self-driving car program. Sitting here today, looking back, they kind of lied to us — they made it look a little bit easier than what it actually is.”
“AI and mobility — autonomy and mobility — is about much more than just incremental adaptation to the automobile. This technology is going to reboot mobility as we know it.”
“What let us switch from one mobility age to the next? Arguably it was the invention of the internal combustion engine — the right exploitation was to get rid of the horse, change the architecture of the coach and get through to something like the Model T Ford. The people that won weren't the coach builders; it was peop...”
“Our insight at Zoox is that AI mobility will take us from the age of the automobile into the next mobility age — we think that's robotics. We're bringing a narrow AI, a kind of horse-level intelligence to the vehicle and taking the human out of the loop; Zoox was founded to ask what the full realization of AI mobility...”
“We're on a five-year vehicle development program kicked off in 2015 and we're having to conclude that in 2020 and be ready to scale a fully autonomous mobility service in cities.”
“We're not secretive at all internally; being in stealth mode is about focus. We don't want to shout with a megaphone to our competitors 'this is how we think this can work' because that's part of our competitive advantage.”
“We had to go to the market and ask for an unusually large amount of money — our Series A was about $250 million — because the complexity of what we're doing is not cheap. We found investors prepared to make that big bet: DFG, Tencent, Lux Capital, Blackbird and others who are looking to work with founders who want to c...”
Building a robotaxi from the ground up means making decisions that no one has ever had to make: from sensor architecture to ...
The Camberian Explosion ...
Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson, co-founders of autonomous-vehicle startup Zoox, detail a not-too-distant future when we’ll get into their cars and do nothing other than say where we need to go. In conversation with Stanford Professor of the Practice Tina Seelig, the two entrepreneurs explain how self-driving cars work and how their fleet of electric vehicles could make owning a ride obsolete. View more clips and share your comments at http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMat...
Tim Kentley-Klay, co-founder and CEO at Zoox, talks about how his biggest worries as an entrepreneur are the risks that his team ...
Tim Kentley-Klay, co-founder and CEO at autonomous-vehicle startup Zoox, discusses the costs and benefits of industry ...
Zoox Co-Founders Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson make the case for a fleet of autonomous vehicles that is owned and ...
Tim Kentley-Klay & Jesse Levinson Zoox Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson, co-founders of autonomous-vehicle startup Zoox, ...
At the Autonomous Driving congress in Berlin, we.CONECT spoke with Tim Kentley-Klay, CEO and Founder of Zoox - A Level 4 ...
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