That's a no. He literally does not say it did not disengage. Given the sloppiness of the story, there's no way to infer whether or not he saw zero disengagements or twenty. All I know is there reporter was impressed, but I don't know how knowledgable the reporter is.

Ashlee Vance has been covering autonomous vehicles for years. Zoox did years of closed course testing before rolling out on public roads last summer, and last fall they held a press event and took a dozen or two journalists out for 10 minute rides around SF, all the journalists had good things to say about it.

Jesse Levinson, the guy leading autonomy at Zoox is a big scoop, he gets huge respect in the robotics community. When you got a top talent like that, it tends to attract more top talent. I'm really impressed by how much Zoox has accomplished with so little. Last I heard they had about a dozen test vehicles noodling around parts of San Francisco, but with this new cash injection you'll probably be seeing a lot more sensor riddled flat black Toyota Highlanders in the Bay Area in the coming months.

It should be emphasized that fully validating an autonomous vehicle well enough to remove the driver is no small feat and they have a long way to go, I'm betting against their 2020 target for a commercial rollout.

Ashlee Vance is a general technology reporter, not some autonomous car expert. The article was pretty obviously arranged for by Zoox and meant for PR. I'm not affirmatively saying they faked the demo, but it is still a demo for a journalist. They have every incentive to make it look good. So given that the journalist didn't go out and say outright that there were no interventions or human inputs, you really cannot just take the demo at its word.

Yes, it's true. It's just a demo, Ashlee Vance isn't going to ride around in Zooxmobiles for months to see everything they can and can't do. Yes, it's PR. Ashlee Vance isn't going to get a ride in a Zooxmobile unless they give him permission to. And yes, it's true, Zoox has every incentive to make a working robotaxi, and it's a work in progress.

I'm somewhat baffled by how much spite a tech news site like HN has for technology companies that are actually innovating and solving hard problems. Zoox didn't drop out the sky yesterday, they've been at this for years, you just haven't been paying attention.

What are you talking about?

He said "no one is driving" Now, maybe he is full of shit, but those words are pretty definitive.