Zoox robotaxi at Resorts World Las Vegas
Zoox
Zoox, Amazon’s robotaxi unit, has started offering rides to the public, at no charge for now, from multiple set locations in Las Vegas, hoping its custom-built electric vehicles that lack steering wheels, pedals and conventional controls will distinguish the autonomous ridehail service from Alphabet’s Waymo.
Starting today, a few dozen Zoox vehicles will be picking up and dropping off passengers at five locations around Sin City, including Resorts World Las Vegas, the Area 51 entertainment complex and Top Golf driving range. Anyone who downloads the company’s ridehail app can use the service, for now at no charge, in part because of the limited service area.
“This first phase is not that commercially interesting because it’s a limited service,” CTO and cofounder Jesse Levinson told Forbes. Over time, the operational zone in Las Vegas will expand and the service will operate as a more flexible ridehail service. “We’ll be adding destinations in the coming months and tons more next year. Once we believe we have a big enough service offering to charge, we’ll do that. That’ll be in a few-ish months.”
And ahead of scaling up the commercial service, “the learnings are really, really important to us,” CEO Aisha Evans said.
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Unlike Tesla’s robotaxi pilot in August, Zoox’s public program has no human safety techs riding in the vehicles, making it more of a technological competitor to Waymo, which offers its commercial service in five major cities and urban regions and is preparing to add many more. What sets it apart is its bespoke four-passenger vehicle, combining aspects of a small van and the sliding doors of a transit rail car. The bidirectional vehicle, with an identical front and rear, is also packed with sensors, including eight laser lidars; 10 radar units; 18 cameras; eight microphones (to hear emergency vehicles); and four thermal cameras to detect humans and animals in murky weather, dim lighting and fog. (By contrast, Tesla relies mainly on eight cameras as its primary sensor.)
Zoox robotaxi on the Las Vegas Strip.
Zoox
The launch of a public service is a big step for Foster City, California-based Zoox, which was acquired by Amazon in 2020 for $1.2 billion and has been testing in Las Vegas since June 2023. Its next big challenge is how quickly it can scale up, generate substantial revenue and operate profitably. Since Amazon bought it, it’s unclear how much additional funding the retail giant has provided; pre-acquisition, Zoox raised a total of $1 billion from investors, including Lux Capital and Atlassian CEO and cofounder Michael Cannon-Brookes’s Grok Ventures.
Evans said the company isn’t planning any additional fundraising at the moment, and declined to provide details of continuing funding and resources from Amazon. She also said Zoox isn’t under any immediate pressure from its parent to hit specific financial goals. “We have our own internal pressure to deliver on our commitments and essentially go all the way to building this business, which is what we intend to do.”
At the end of 2024, Zoox began production of robotaxis at a 220,000-square-foot factory in Hayward, California, where it’s building up its fleet from about 50 vehicles currently on the road in California and Nevada, to hundreds and thousands over the next few years. Waymo also operates a robotaxi factory near Phoenix, but it’s not building vehicles from scratch: instead, it installs high-tech hardware into electric Jaguar IPACE SUVs and Zeekr microvans for its fleet, with Hyundai Ioniq 5 hatchbacks to follow later this year.
A recent waiver from the Trump administration that allows Zoox to launch its service using vehicles without conventional controls and side mirrors and its overall support for autonomous driving technology have been helpful up to this point, Evans said.
“It’s good for the AV industry and it’s good for the nation,” she said. “The AI industry is something that’s really important for the U.S. from a societal standpoint and also from a global standpoint.”
San Francisco has also been a primary testing ground for Zoox since its creation 11 years ago and a similar public launch of the service, also free for an initial period, is likely to happen before the end of the year. Evans wouldn’t confirm or elaborate, but said, “that’s a reasonable assumption.”