Today Las Vegas, sometime later Austin and other cities.
Five years after its splashy $1.3 billion acquisition of Zoox, Amazon has officially entered the U.S. robotaxi race, which to date has been dominated by Alphabet’s Waymo.
Zoox’s first public launch kicks off Wednesday on the Las Vegas strip. The company is offering free rides from a few select locations, with plans to expand more broadly across the city in the coming months. Riders will eventually have to pay, but Zoox said it’s waiting on regulatory approval to take that step.
Amazon is jumping into a market that’s all about the future, but one where Waymo has a major head start, having offered commercial driverless rides since 2020. Earlier this year, Waymo said it surpassed 10 million paid rides, and the company now operates in five cities, with Dallas, Denver, Miami, Seattle and Washington, D.C., coming next year.
Tesla, meanwhile, began testing a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in June, though with human supervisors on board.
But unlike Waymo and Tesla, Zoox’s electric robotaxi doesn’t resemble a car. There’s no steering wheel or pedals, and the rectangular shape has led many in the industry to describe it as a toaster on wheels. Zoox co-founder and technology chief Jesse Levinson says, “We use robotaxi or vehicle or Zoox.”
“You can shoehorn a robotaxi into something that used to be a car. It’s just not an ideal solution,” Levinson told CNBC in an interview in Las Vegas. “We wanted to do that hard work and take the time and invest in that, and then bring something to market that’s just much better than a car.”
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Zoox’s Las Vegas depot spans 190,000 square feet, which is about the size of three football fields. At the facility, the company houses the dozens of vehicles set to start operating around the city. Smartphone users will be able to order them from Top Golf, Area15, Resorts World Las Vegas, New York-New York Hotel & Casino and Luxor Hotel & Casino.
The robotaxi features two rows of seats that face each other and can transport up to four people at a time. The front and rear are identical, with bidirectional wheels that allow it to move forward or backward without turning around. The vehicle can run for 16 hours on a single charge.
Floor-to-ceiling windows provide a sightseeing experience for passengers who want a clear view of the endless rows of casinos. But the interior design is meant to enable easy conversation with fellow riders.
“It’s not a retrofitted car,” said Zoox CEO Aicha Evans. “It’s built from the ground up around the rider.”
I’ve compared the Zoox-mobiles to the microtransit shuttles that Metro is using around Houston, though I think those actually have room for six. I suppose there’s no reason why these things have to look like regular cars, assuming the public doesn’t seem them as too strange to take seriously. I’m sure it’s cheaper to manufacture them like this, and that may be a competitive edge for them. The current route map in Vegas is about the size of our microtransit service areas, too. Maybe these things won’t be safe to drive on highways, or even higher-speed thoroughfares. If so, that’s certainly a limiting factor. I don’t know enough about their model yet to draw any conclusions.
More details from TechCrunch:
The company spent six years developing its technology before unveiling its purpose-built, electric, autonomous robotaxis. Zoox then began testing its cube-like vehicles on public streets in Las Vegas in 2023. Initially, the test area was a one-mile loop around the neighborhood where its Las Vegas facilities are located in the southwest region of the city. The testing area inevitably grew to encompass the public streets around its depot, the length of the Strip, and some of the roads adjacent to it.
Earlier this year, the Foster City, California, company launched a Zoox Explorer program — a limited pilot aimed at early public riders, in Las Vegas. Wednesday’s launch opens the service up to any adult who downloads the Zoox app on iOS and Android devices.
While the new robotaxi service covers the Las Vegas Strip, riders cannot be picked up or dropped off just anywhere. For now, the service can only be accessed at five designated pickup and drop-off destinations, including Las Vegas landmarks like Resorts World Las Vegas, AREA15, Topgolf, New York New York, and Luxor. A Zoox spokesperson said the company will continue adding new destinations in the coming months.
It’s unclear how long these rides will be free as the company said it needed “regulatory approval” before it could charge for them. While Zoox doesn’t explicitly list which regulations it needs to meet, the requirement is likely connected to a recent agreement with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the federal agency that oversees vehicle safety standards.
Last month, the NHTSA gave Zoox an exemption to demonstrate its custom-built robotaxis on public roads. That decision cleared up a long-standing debate over whether Zoox’s custom-built autonomous vehicles complied with federal motor vehicle safety standards, which typically require vehicles to have features like a steering wheel and pedals. But for now, the exemption only allows Zoox to demonstrate the robotaxis, not operate them commercially.
They’ve been testing in Austin since last July, and Miami for as long. They’re building a fleet operations depot in Austin as well. I have to think it won’t be too long till they take the training wheels off, assuming they don’t have any regulatory hurdles to clear. Avride, ADMT, and Motional are also out there, presumably wanting to not fall further behind. Reuters, the Associated Press, and the Las Vegas Sun have more.