Jesse Levinson on autonomous vehicle safety
From Society Signature Symposium 2025 - Jesse Levinson and Maya Ajmera · · SocietyforScience
“The biggest technical challenge was building a safety case, which is basically a set of quantitative arguments that when we put this vehicle on the road with all of our autonomy software, it will be able to drive safer than a human in the same environment. And that's just so much work because you have to not only make it that safe, but you have to prove that it's that safe.”
On , Jesse Levinson, Cofounder at Zoox, spoke about autonomous vehicle safety during Society Signature Symposium 2025 - Jesse Levinson and Maya Ajmera on SocietyforScience.
About Jesse Levinson
Jesse Levinson, co-founder and CTO of Zoox, stated in mid-2025 that the company was ready to deploy its purpose-built robotaxi on public roads in San Francisco and on the Las Vegas Strip, describing the vehicle as having no manual controls and being designed for riders. He noted that Zoox had achieved an internal safety readiness bar requiring the vehicle to be "many, many times better than humans" at avoiding collisions. Levinson attributed the decade-long development timeline to the difficulty of building a comprehensive safety case, which he described as a set of quantitative arguments proving the vehicle is safer than a human driver)Skip to content Levinson has contrasted Zoox’s approach with that of Tesla, stating that Tesla lacks the technology for driverless operation without a human and that its system is "about 100 times less safe than a human." He emphasized that Zoox uses a hybrid architecture combining neural networks with direct 3D structure measurement and explicit safety encoding, rather than relying solely on end-to-end machine learning. Levinson also discussed Zoox’s hiring philosophy, saying the company values critical thinking over domain-specific knowledge, and noted that most new hires have not previously worked on autonomous vehicles.