How Zoox is Directing the Future of Autonomous Vehicles with Bruce Baumgartner, VP of Procurement & Strategic Partnerships
How does a company control its own destiny? Bruce Baumgartner, Vice President of Procurement & Strategic Partnerships, reveals how it’s possible to control your own destiny by making key decisions in service of a higher calling.
Fate is often associated with the divine. It’s this idea that things are pre-ordained by a higher power and that outcomes are out of an individual’s control. There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of life that can’t be controlled. But there’s another way to look at destiny — it can be about making foundational choices that give a particular vision the best chance to be realized over time.
Then, the outcome may look predestined to an outsider, but in reality, destiny is being determined by an established mission, the major choices that underpin it, and the many smaller decisions, adjusted as needed, made to achieve it. This does not mean there will never be setbacks or failures. It simply means this mentality increases the opportunities within one’s control to move ever closer to the goal.
Bruce Baumgartner, the Vice President of Procurement & Strategic Partnerships at Zoox, a vertically integrated autonomous vehicle company, that appears destined to build a fleet of autonomous taxis.
But is Zoox’s desire to control its destiny only about succeeding at building autonomous vehicles, or does it have an even higher mission it’s striving to achieve?
“As I started to learn more and more and more about the space, which was certainlyfairly nascent at the time, I felt like the technology was inevitable,” Baumgartner said. “The ability to do what we’re trying to do is it’s coming. It’s really a matter of time. And ultimately there’s no guarantee any one company that’s chasing this can pull it off, but the way that Zoox is thinking about it, that really resonates with me.”
What made Zoox stand out in the autonomous vehicle space was the decision not to concentrate on transforming the software of existing cars, but to build something from the ground up.
“Robo taxis, they’re not out there,” says Baumgartner. “If you have the technology to do it, why would you not start from a clean sheet of paper and really re-envision what this can do and I that’s the thing that Zoox, the magic it’s always had, and what it’s really stayed true to.”
It takes fortitude for a company like Zoox to go its own way and say, “We are going to build cars ourselves,” especially where there are larger manufacturing companies eager to act as big brother or sister. Vertical integration is a more complicated route, but when it is done correctly, the benefits can be significant.
Baumgartner says the advantages of vertical integration touch different aspects of the company.
“Managing every aspect of the supply chain allows us to, from the outset, select our partners carefully; as carefully as we possibly can,” he explained. “So, by doing that and controlling the supply chain, as we mature as a company, as we learn things internally and or simply want to make a different decision about our supply chain strategy, we can just do it.”
To find out how Zoox uses vertical integration to be able to achieve its destiny, the different pillars it is exploring to ensure sustainability, and how its ground-up approach will help it to succeed in putting fleets of autonomous taxis on the roads, tune into Business X factors.
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