Zoox's Maddening Struggle to Make Robo-Cars Safe--and Prove It

Here's the deal, says Mark Rosekind. Around him, some 400 workers clack away on computers, or roll out yoga mats in the central "town hall" space, or tend to the startup's fleet of self-driving, golf-cart-on-steroids prototypes. The deal is that in spite of all this kind of work--work that has put autonomous vehicles on the streets of cities around the world--regulators don't know how to ensure the potentially life-saving technology won't instead make roads more dangerous. "A company might think it's OK because it checks some box," says Rosekind, whose job is to help Zoox solve this puzzle. Maybe its robo-car has amassed 50 million of miles of data, or has executed a perfect three-point turn, or reliably pulls over when a wailing police car appears behind it.