Tag: Transportation

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Uber is exploring autonomous bikes and scooters

Uber is looking to integrate autonomous technology into its bike and scooter-share programs. Details are scarce, but according to 3D Robotics CEO Chris Anderson, who said Uber announced this at a DIY Robotics event over the weekend, the division will live inside Uber’s JUMP group, which is responsible for shared electric bikes and scooters.

The new division, Micromobility Robotics, will explore autonomous scooters and bikes that can drive themselves to be charged, or drive themselves to locations where riders need them. The Telegraph has since reported Uber has already begun hiring for this team.

“The New Mobilities team at Uber is exploring ways to improve safety, rider experience, and operational efficiency of our shared electric scooters and bicycles through the application of sensing and robotics technologies,” Uber’s ATG wrote in a Google Form seeking information from people interested in career opportunities.

Back in December, Uber unveiled its next generation of JUMP bikes, with self-diagnostic capabilities and swappable batteries. The impetus for the updated bikes came was the need to improve JUMP’s overall unit economics.

“That is a major improvement to system utilization, the operating system, fleet uptime and all of the most critical metrics about how businesses are performing with running a shared fleet,” JUMP Head of Product Nick Foley told TechCrunch last month. “Swappable batteries mean you don’t have to take vehicles back to wherever you charge a bike or scooter, and that’s good for the business.”

Autonomous bikes and scooters would make Uber’s shared micromobility business less reliant on humans to charge the vehicles. You could envision a scenario where Uber deploys freshly-charged bikes and scooters to areas where other vehicles are low on juice. Combine that with swappable batteries (think about Uber quickly swapping in a new battery once the vehicle makes it back to the warehouse and then immediately re-deploying that bike or scooter), and Uber has itself a well-oiled machine that increases vehicle availability and improves the overall rider experience.

Uber declined to comment.

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Sony venture arm invests in geocoding startup what3words

Sony’s venture capital arm has invested in what3words, the startup that has divided the entire world into 57 trillion 3-by-3 meter squares and assigned a three-word address to each one.

Financial details were not disclosed.

The startup’s novel addressing system isn’t the whole story. The ability to integrate what3words into voice assistants is what has piqued the interest and investment from Sony and others.

“what3words have solved the considerable problem of entering a precise location into a machine by voice. The dramatic rise in voice-activated systems calls for a simple voice geocoder that works across all digital platforms and channels, can be written down and spoken easily,” Sony Corporation’s senior vice president Toshimoto Mitomo said in a statement.

Last year, Daimler took a 10% stake in what3words, following an announcement in 2017 to integrate the addressing system into Mercedes new infotainment and navigation system—called the Mercedes-Benz User Experience or MBUX. MBUX is now in the latest Mercedes A-Class, B-Class cars and Sprinter commercial vehicles. Owners of these new Mercedes-Benz vehicles are now be able to navigate to an exact destination in the world by just saying or typing three words into the infotainment system.

Other companies are keen to follow Daimler’s lead. TomTom and ride-hailing services like Cabify recently announced plans to enable what3words navigation to precise locations.

And more could follow. The startup says it plans to use the investment from Sony to focus on more initiatives in the automotive space.

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Veteran Googler heads to Lyft to lead team of 1,000-plus engineers

Eisar Lipkovitz, a veteran Google executive who most recently led the video and display advertising team there, is leaving the company to head up engineering efforts at Lyft .

As executive vice president of engineering, Lipkovitz will be leading Lyft’s engineering team, which now eclipses 1,000 people.

Lipkovitz’s hiring comes on the heels of massive growth at Lyft, specifically its engineering team. The ride-hailing company’s engineering team doubled in size in the last year. It also follows the hiring of another Google engineering veteran Manish Gupta, who joined Lyft in August as vice president of engineering to build out the ride-hailing company’s business platforms, including enterprise, partnerships and healthcare.

Gupta will report to Lipkovitz.

“It’s clear that Lyft is tackling one of the most interesting and world-changing engineering challenges of our lifetime, and the team has done an exceptional job innovating through dispatch, matching, pricing and mapping to create the overall experience,” Lipkovitz said. “The work Lyft is doing intersects with my passion of operating extremely complex systems efficiently while developing strong leaders in tech, and I couldn’t be more excited to join the team.”

Lipkovitz will report directly to Logan Green, Lyft’s co-founder and CEO. Luc Vincent, who is vice president of Lyft’s autonomous vehicle technology program, operates separately.

During Lipkovitz’s 15 years at Google, he led the team that built Google display, video and apps advertising products. He previously worked on the infrastructure behind Google Search. He also worked at Akamai.

Lyft has aggressively ramped up its staff and coverage in the U.S. over the past two years. And it’s paid off. The company’s ride-hailing app has more than 96 percent coverage in the U.S. and 35 percent market share.

It has also expanded Lyft Business, the company’s enterprise unit, through partnerships with organizations and companies like Starbucks, LAX,  Allstate, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, JetBlue, Delta and Blue Cross Blue Shield, as well as rolled out various other products such as a monthly subscription plan called Lyft’s All-Access.

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Flash, the stealthy e-scooter and ‘micro-mobility’ startup from Delivery Hero founder, raises €55M Series A

Flash, the stealthy mobility startup from Delivery Hero and Team Europe founder Lukasz Gadowski, is de-cloaking today, with news that the Berlin-based company has raised a whopping €55 million in Series A funding.

Despite rumours that multiple VC firms would be involved, the bulk of the new funding comes from Target Global via its mobility fund, which led this round and was already an existing backer of Flash. Others participating in Flash’s Series A include Idinvest Partners, Signals Venture Capital and a number of unnamed angel investors.

Notably, Gadowski is listed as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Target Global, and has been broadly working in the mobility space for the past two years. Rather quietly, he is also an investor in Grin, the Mexico City-based electric scooter company backed by Y Combinator.

In a call with Gadowski, he filled in many of the blanks relating to his new venture, including positioning Flash as a “micro-mobility” company that wants to solve the last-mile transportation problem. The startup is initially entering the e-scooter rental space, but this is just the beginning, he says. More broadly, the way he and his team think about Flash is that it is “unbundling” the car, with new forms of transport.

“In a few years time, micro-mobility will look very different from today,” says Gadowski, revealing that before founding Flash last year, he also took a hard look at new forms of aviation.

Even though it is still very early days for Flash, the startup already boasts a current team of more than 50 full-time employees, recruited from the likes of Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb. Alongside Gadowski, the other Flash co-founders are Carlos Bhola (Corp. Development) and Tim Rucquoi-Berger (Supply & Operations).

“This is not a scooter” – Flash branding in stealth mode

Notably — and definitely quietly — Flash is already operating in Switzerland and Portugal, with plans to launch into France, Italy and Spain in spring 2019, and in the rest of Europe in summer 2019.

The existing launches have been soft-launches, to say the least, with Flash e-scooters not initially carrying the company’s branding, instead sporting the label “This is not a scooter,” part in-house word play, part a statement of intent. Not just another scooter company might be an even more apt label if Gadowski’s longer-term ambitions are realised.

Perhaps more of a product-market-fit trial than anything else, Flash has initially used off-the-shelf e-scooters at launch, whilst simultaneously developing its own hardware and technology. The startup is headquartered in Berlin, but Gadowski tells me the team was first posted in China, establishing a supply chain and other partnerships that he believes can help give Flash the edge.

I put to him a common belief amongst some VCs that the e-scooter space in Europe is heading for a bloodbath that will continue to see a huge amount of venture capital pumped into the space, and subsequently many losers and a lot of money lost.

Recent raises by European e-scooter startups include Wind Mobility ($22 million), VOI ($50 million and Tier (€25 million). Meanwhile, Taxify has also announced its entrance into e-scooter rentals, and Bird and Lime have received substantial investment from three of Europe’s top venture capital firms. Index and Accel have backed Bird, and Atomico has backed Lime.

Gadowski appears for the most part unfazed by the swelling of competition coffers, although he does concede that the current “land grab” is forcing Flash to move slightly faster than it might have done otherwise. In some ways, he would have preferred to continue a more staggered, cautious roll-out, describing the startup as “product-first and multi-vehicle,” and says its customers are not just users of the service but local residents more broadly and the authorities with which it needs to coordinate. “Mistakes can be a lot more serious than at Delivery Hero, safety is involved,” he cautions.

The size of recent funding rounds in the space has also surprised him. However, he doesn’t think this is a “Facebook scenario,” where there will only be a single winner. Several micro-mobility companies can happily co-exist, he says, and the early movers are helping to pave the way for others, including Flash.

I suggest that the e-scooter land grab at its current pace also has a high chance of provoking a backlash amongst consumers and/or authorities, perhaps after a more serious safety accident or other source of reputational damage. Gadowski concedes this is definitely a “short-term” risk, but says there is so much determination by governments and local authorities to solve congestion and the last-mile problem, he doesn’t believe it will be a long-term one.

Finally, I asked Gadowski if he is considering acquiring smaller e-scooter startups in Europe (or perhaps elsewhere), as part of a roll-up strategy that would help the company leapfrog competitors. He declined to rule out acquisitions entirely — Delivery Hero was very effective in this regard — but said it doesn’t make much sense right now as hype in the space has pushed valuations way up. A more likely scenario, he says, is investing in or acquiring startups that can help with other aspects of the business, such as in the supply chain.

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How Lyft envisions bringing VR and AR to your ride

Lyft is exploring ways to integrate virtual reality and augmented reality into your Lyft rides, according to a couple of patent applications TechCrunch came across today.

The first, filed in July 2017, is for “providing a virtual reality transportation experience” that would respond to real-world forces and events that happen during your ride, like sudden stops, turns and bumps in the road. Over time, the VR system would be able to predict those bumps and turns in the road.

“For instance, the virtual reality transportation system accesses the historical information for each maneuver along the route and identifies previous inertial forces that transportation vehicles have experienced in the past for the same turns, merges, stops, etc,” the application states. “In some cases, the virtual reality transportation system determines (e.g., calculates) an average of each of the previous inertial forces for the maneuvers along the travel route to predict the inertial forces that the passenger will experience.”

From there, the VR system would generate a virtual experience with virtual interactions based on the real-world environment. Specifically, the VR system may include, “but are not necessarily limited to, virtual collisions with objects, virtual turns, virtual drops, etc.”  That sounds mildly horrifying, but it would definitely make for an unforgettable ride. Other ideas of virtual experiences feature a game with lasers and flying saucers.

During your ride, Lyft envisions passengers being able to share their VR experience with people in other cars, or those waiting for a pick-up.

This is likely possible in part thanks to Lyft’s acquisition of Blue Vision Labs, an augmented reality startup, last year. Blue Vision, for example, offers collaborative augmented reality to enable people to see the same spot in space.

Holoride’s in-car VR solution is the best thing at CES 2019

Lyft’s other patent application, also filed in July, seeks to provide information to passengers using augmented reality. This one seems to be less about entertainment and more about practical information.

In one example, Lyft would generate virtual objects to overlay on a passenger’s real-world surroundings in order to help with the pick-up or drop-off process. Based on historical data, Lyft envisions identifying the ideal pickup location based on the passenger’s current location, traffic conditions and transportation restrictions.

TechCrunch has reached out to Lyft and will update this story if we hear back.

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Ford’s iconic F-Series trucks are going electric

Ford’s legendary and popular F-Series pickup line will soon have electric options, the company announced today. The move is intended to “future-proof” the enormous truck business against rising gas prices and regulations favoring electric vehicles over internal combustion.

Jim Farley, Ford’s president of global markets, announced the news at a press conference in Detroit. As reported in the Detroit Free Press, he specified that there will be both pure/battery electric and hybrid options — they aren’t dipping their toe but jumping in at the deep end.

Ford has been leaning into electric harder than ever over the last year, detailing an ambitious $11 billion plan to offer 40 electrified vehicles by 2022; some of those are entirely new cars, like the “Mustang-inspired electric crossover” coming next year, while others will be electric versions of classic lines like the F-Series.

Ford gives the first peek at its Mustang-inspired electric crossover

Tesla is also planning an electric pickup, but that company’s success in the luxury sedan market is unlikely to translate directly to the much different truck market. Rivian has one entering production, but it’s hard to imagine the brand breaking out of a rather small niche with its first model.

Ford knows that trucks and utility vehicles are its stronghold: it dedicates 90 percent of its capital to that side of the business. A million F-Series trucks sold last year, and even if a tiny percentage of those were to be electric it would be a huge barrier to entry for companies with less reputation.

As more evidence of the company leaning into the renewable future, Ford announced last year that it would stop selling all but two cars in the U.S.: the Mustang and Focus Active. That doesn’t include SUVs and trucks, of course, but one senses there will be a similar shift once those product categories are ready to be similarly phased out.

Ford detailed more general plans for its various regions and businesses in a press release.

“Over the last 19 months, we have worked to reshape and transform our company – sharpening our competitiveness, taking actions to improve our profitability and returns, and investing in our future,” said president and CEO Jim Hackett in the release.

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Riding the RV revolution, Outdoorsy fuels up with $50 million in fresh funding

Outdoorsy is building for the road ahead. The three-year-old company, which connects customers with underused RVs and other trucks big enough to camp in overnight, just raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from earlier backers Aviva Ventures, Altos Ventures, AutoTech Ventures and Tandem Capital.

That puts its total funding, in less than year’s time, at $75 million. (We’d separately reported on its $25 million Series B round last February. It has now raised $81.5 million altogether.)

It’s easy to understand why investors are excited about Outdoorsy, which moved its headquarters from the Bay Area to Austin six months ago, partly to get closer to its base of customers, as well as to take advantage of attractive tax incentives. The company is capitalizing on a global trend of millennials who want to stay overnight at places other than hotels, which are often expensive and located in commercial districts that can’t provide the same authentic experience of staying in a neighborhood.

Yet Outdoorsy is taking things a step further, so to speak. As cofounder and CEO Jeff Cavins notes, even with Airbnbs seemingly everywhere, there remain plenty of places where it makes even more sense to rent an RV and set up a grill, including at a beach, beside a lake, or right outside events like musical festivals and car races. That’s saying nothing of traditional camping spots, like Yosemite and Yellowstone Valley.

It’s easier than ever thanks largely to Outdoorsy, too, says Cavins. Earlier on, the company logged serious time with outfits like Aviva, a British insurance company that is not only an Outdoorsy investor at this point but which was convinced by Outdoorsy to create an insurance product expressly to cover RVs as distinct from more accident-prone vehicles with which they’ve long been lumped, like dune buggies.

The math was easy to grasp, offers Cavins of the argument Outdoorsy made. “Most recreational vehicles really aren’t driven around much. They are used for camping purposes. Some people do cross-country stuff, but most people don’t like driving so much on their vacations, so there isn’t a lot of mobile time with these units.”

Such products have been meaningful for both sides. Outdoorsy says it’s been able to price that insurance for “basically the cost of what you’d pay for a beer each day.” Meanwhile, by offering U.S. and Canadian RV owners up to $1 million in protection, and even more protection for its European users, Outdoorsy says it has managed to sign up 31,000 vehicles to date. These include a mix of traditional RVs, camper vans, towable campers, and trucks that are rented for six days on average and that produce, on average, $1,900 in income for their owners over that same six-day period.

And that’s mostly in North America. Outdoorsy thinks that as it expands more aggressively in Europe and Australia and New Zealand, among other places into which it’s rolling, it will have closer to 65,000 vehicles available to rent on its platform by year end.

Not that expanding geographically is all the company has in mind. On the contrary, says Cavins, Outdoorsy is evolving into a kind of recreational marketplace, one with many more premium services beyond those in introduced last year, which including insurance and roadside assistance. For example, it more recently began inviting customers to finance their vacations through Outdoorsy, which has partnered with the lending company Affirm toward that end. It now offers trip and travel insurance to offset cancellations. And Cavin says the company is rolling out a spate of other new premium services in roughly one month

Outdoorsy also ushering in a new wave of entrepreneurship, by Cavin’s telling. Vehicle owners set their own pricing, with the help of tools provided by Outdoorsy, and they ultimately keep between 75 and 80 percent of what they earn, he says, adding that for some of its customers, those rental fees are beginning to produce meaningful revenue.

He points to one customer that he says is generating more than $1 million — quickly noting that this customer owns between 50 and 55 RVs. But he insists that while “most users start with two vehicles, we have some that get to four, then 20, then they hire hire their own mechanic and cleaning crew.”

What about those stretches of time when it isn’t a holiday and it isn’t summer and fewer people are looking to rent RVs? Cavins admits the market slows down markedly at times, which is why Outdoorsy is building up a business in New Zealand and Australia. Outdoorsy wants to take advantage of summer somewhere all year round. Still, says Cavins, the market is hotter than you might imagine. “Come May, it’s now very hard to get your hands on an RV.”

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Getaround early investor sues car-sharing startup for $1.79 million

Getaround is getting around the courthouse. One of the car-sharing startup’s early investors, Geoffrey Shmigelsky, is suing the company, alleging fraud and unfair conduct.

“Our client supported Getaround and Mr. Zaid from the very start, only to be swindled out of $1.785 million that went straight into the pockets of Mr. Zaid’s family and friends, as we allege,” Gaw | Poe LLP Partner Samuel Song said in a statement. “Our client deserved better than this from a person he had supported and trusted for years, and we’ll do what it takes to get what rightfully belongs to him.”

Getaround, however, says “these claims are totally unfounded and we’re looking to get the case dismissed,” Getaround Director of Marketing Communications Jacqueline Tanzella told TechCrunch over the phone.

Specifically, the lawsuit alleges Getaround executives tricked Shmigelsky into selling his shares to their friends and family for $1.79 million less “than what they knew they were worth.” Early last year, investors became interested in purchasing Shmigelsky’s shares, the lawsuit states. But because Getaround is still a private company with scarce public financial information, “they struggled to value Plaintiff’s shares.” That’s when Shmigelsky said he asked Getaround CEO Sam Zaid for the information.

The lawsuit alleges:

Mr. Zaid saw an opportunity and agreed to help. Getaround had a contractual right of refusal to purchase any shares Plaintiff tried to sell, under the same terms and conditions of any sales agreement that Plaintiff entered into with a prospective buyer. Thus, Mr. Zaid was in a position to provide information designed to drive down the value of Plaintiff’s shares, and if Plaintiff agreed to a transaction at a lower price, Mr. Zaid could cause Getaround to exercise its right of first refusal to buy Plaintiff’s shares at a large discount off its true value. Moreover, since Getaround also had the right to assign its right of first refusal to whoever it wanted, Mr. Zaid could cause Getaround to exercise its right to purchase Plaintiff’s shares (at a discounted price) and then gift that opportunity to Mr. Zaid’s friends and family.

Based on the information Zaid and Getaround CFO Adam Kosmicki provided him, Shmigelsky alleges he sold 300,000 shares at $1.80 per share. He also alleges Zaid and Kosmicki concealed the information that Getaround was on the verge of closing an $18 million funding round priced at $7.75 per share. After allegedly invoking its right of refusal, Getaround bought back Shmigelsky’s shares at $1.80 per share.

But since those deals were not yet finalized and still in discussions, Tanzella said, “we were legally bound not to disclose anything that wasn’t complete and to fruition.”

Getaround then allegedly allowed Zaid and Getaround CTO Elliot Kroo’s family and friends to buy those shares for $540,000. Had that stake been valued at $7.75 per share, Shmigelsky would’ve made $2.33 million.

“It’s a really unfortunate situation,” Tanzella said. “I know the team did the best they could.”

Getaround also pointed out that the company helped facilitate the sale of Shmigelsky’s shares on the secondary market five times.

“This complaint seems to be driven by seller’s remorse,” Tanzella said.

Shmigelsky seeks no less than $1.79 million for compensatory and special damages. Getaround, however, does “plan on having this fully dismissed in court,” Tanzella said.

You can read the full complaint below.

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Flaws in Amadeus’ airline booking system made it easy for hackers to change passenger records

You might not know Amadeus by name, but hundreds of millions of travelers use it each year.

Whether you’re traveling for work or vacation, most consumers book their flights through one of a handful of bespoke reservation systems used across the commercial aviation industry. Amadeus is one of the largest reservation systems, serving customers of Air France, British Airways, Icelandair, and Qantas and more. And each reservation system has to be able to talk to each other through the global distribution system backchannel.

Without these interconnected systems, most governments have no idea who’s coming and going.

Even in this day and age of passwords for everything and facial recognition at the departure gate, all that sits between you and someone rebooking a flight is a passenger’s surname and the booking reference on your ticket, known as the passenger name record — or PNR.

But these outdated and archaic passenger records systems needed to share travelers’ data internationally never considered security on the scale that’s needed today, and are woefully inadequate in keeping passenger records safe.

Israeli security researcher Noam Rotem knows all too well.

He found that any airline using Amadeus made it easy to edit and change someone’s reservation with just their booking reference number. No surname needed. In some cases, he didn’t even need to obtain someone’s booking number.

Rotem explained in a write-up, shared with TechCrunch before his public disclosure, that he could plug in anyone’s booking reference in a buggy web address on Israeli airline El Al’s website — in spite of being required to enter a surname on the website’s check-in page.

That not only lowers the bar for someone wanting to manipulate a person’s booking, such as changing seats and rerouting frequent miler numbers, said Rotem, but it’s also easy to obtain a person’s personal information, such as their phone number, and email and home addresses, from the airline.

How secure is the six-digit booking reference itself? History says that it’s still far too easy to obtain.

If your six-digit booking reference isn’t already on your boarding pass, ticket or luggage tag, you’ll still find it embedded in the barcode. That barcode, decrypted several years ago, can be easily read by most mobile barcode apps, making it easy for criminals to walk around the check-in area or departure’s lounge and scan a photo of your ticket when you’re not looking.

Worse, the average hacker wouldn’t have to leave their house. Dozens of people post their boarding passes — and their barcodes — to Twitter and Instagram every day, under the hashtags #boardingpass and #planetickets.

Some of the many boarding passes posted to Twitter and Instagram in a single day. (Image: TechCrunch)

But Rotem said that inherent weaknesses in how reservation systems generate passenger name record numbers in the first place made it easy to brute-force any Amadeus-linked airline website with a hacker’s own generated booking references.

Because Amadeus’ system didn’t limit how many requests could be processed at any given time, Romet could run a script generating booking references at random, which he says were “simply guessed,” then plugging them into the vulnerable web address and waiting for a positive response to return.In some cases, the script found booking references attached to real customers. Because parts of each Amadeus-generated booking references are sequential, it makes it easy to continue the attack on passengers with similar or the same surname. And, there were no rate limits, allowing the researcher to run as many requests each minute as he wanted, speeding up the process. (TechCrunch saw a short video of the script generating booking reference numbers, but didn’t verify any as logging in with someone else’s booking reference would be unlawful.)

A skilled attacker could, for example, use this technique to book their own flights or siphoning off accumulated air miles. A bored hacker, however, could wreak havoc on any number of passengers’ credit cards.

In all, Amadeus’ website claims it supports more than 200 airlines. We were curious how far the vulnerability went.

Using cookie data collected from El Al, TechCrunch was able to find dozens of other affected airlines using data collected by RiskIQ, a cyber threat intelligence firm, which scours the web for information. “During RiskIQ’s crawls, our crawlers act like the browser they are instructed to emulate, which means they will maintain cookies and other site-specific metadata,” said Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at RiskIQ.

We reached out to several of the larger airlines believed to be affected by the vulnerability, but nobody from Air France, British Airways, Icelandair, and Qantas commented when reached prior to publication.

When reached, Amadeus confirmed it was alerted to an issue and took “immediate action,” said a spokesperson. “We are working closely with our customers and we regret any disruption this situation may have caused.”

“We work with our customers and partners in the industry to address PNR security overall. The airline industry relies on IATA standards that were introduced to improve efficiency and customer service on a global scale. Because the industry works on common industry standards, including the PNR, further improvements should include reviewing and changing some of the industry standards themselves, which requires industry collaboration,” the statement added. “At Amadeus, we give security the highest priority and are constantly monitoring and updating all of our products and systems.”

Rotem suggested bot protection mechanisms and limits to how many requests can be submitted during a certain period of time could prevent automated attacks in the future, but that the underlying problems remain. That isn’t likely to change without an industry-wide effort to change how reservations are made.

In reality, we’re stuck with PNR for a while — and it’s a problem that’s not going away any time soon.

Got a tip? You can send tips securely over Signal and WhatsApp to +1 646-755–8849. You can also send PGP email with the fingerprint: 4D0E 92F2 E36A EC51 DAAE 5D97 CB8C 15FA EB6C EEA5.

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Self-driving car startup Zoox gets a new CEO

Self-driving car startup Zoox has selected its new CEO following the unexpected firing of co-founder and former CEO Tim Kentley-Klay in August. Aicha Evans (pictured above), Intel’s now-former chief strategy officer, is joining Zoox as CEO and member of the board of directors on February 26.

“I’m thrilled to join Zoox and challenge the status quo with an autonomous mobility system built from the ground up,” Evans said in a press release. “Mobility is approaching a major inflection point, and Zoox has set itself apart from entrenched players as the only company creating a solution purpose-built to meet the needs of a fully autonomous future. I look forward to helping the company’s exceptionally talented team continue to grow as we unlock more technical and commercial milestones.”

Evans spent 12 years at Intel, where she was responsible for leading the company’s transition from a PC-centric business to a data-centric one. She also served as a general manager in the communication and devices group.

Last month, the California Public Utilities Commission granted Zoox a permit to participate in the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot. During the testing period, Zoox must have a safety driver behind the wheel and will not be allowed to charge passengers for rides. And, as part of the program, Zoox must provide data and reports to the CPUC regarding any incidents, number of passenger miles traveled and passenger safety protocols.

Zoox’s long-term plan is to publicly deploy autonomous vehicles by 2020 in the form of its own ride-hailing service. The cars themselves will be all-electric and fully autonomous.

To date, Zoox has raised more than $750 million in venture funding. TechCrunch is expecting to chat with Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson a bit later today. We’ll update this story following that interview.

Zoox CEO and co-founder Tim Kentley-Klay is out