Amazon’s Driverless Cab Company Zoox Revs Up ‘Toaster Taxis’

Amazon hopes ride-hailers love direct eye contact because its carriage-style robotaxis feature four seats facing each other. After cutting the ribbon on a new factory in California, Amazon is ramping up production of its bidirectional, self-driving cabs ahead of a planned launch in Las Vegas later this year. The Bay Area facility currently churns out one robotaxi a day, but Zoox hopes to boost that rate to three an hour by next year.

After buying Zoox five years ago for $1.3 billion, Amazon is prepping a big push onto the roads of major cities (first, Las Vegas and later, San Francisco, Austin and Miami). But rivals are already there.

The Road More Traveled

Alphabet’s Waymo said it provides 250,000 rides a week in its self-driving cabs, up from 10,000 two years ago. Riders can hail a driverless Jaguar from Waymo’s app in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo also recently applied for a permit to operate in New York City, where state law will require a driver, though the company is pushing to change that provision. 

So far, Waymo is the only fully operational self-driving taxi service in the US, but Tesla is trying to join it ASAP:

• CEO Elon Musk promised in 2021 that Tesla would have a million robotaxis on the road by now, which … didn’t happen. Tesla did, however, put a small group of robotaxis on the road in Austin, Texas, last weekend, which Musk described in a virtual victory lap as “the culmination of a decade of hard work.”
• Regulators are investigating Tesla’s self-driving tech in connection with fatal accidents as critics raise red flags about its robotaxi’s lack of lidar and radar, which Waymo and Zoox use. Waymo and Zoox have been investigated after incidents including erratic driving. 

Yellow Light. Zoox is trying to join a race that Waymo’s already a few laps into, but Waymo may have made the road a little smoother. Waymo eased riders into the concept of driverless taxis with its fleet of Jaguars, which look like regular cars with some extra gadgets whirring around. Zoox’s autonomous taxis don’t even have a steering wheel, so Zoox has planned a marketing push to persuade riders to hop into its toaster taxis. What’ll probably be more important for swaying would-be riders is how safe upcoming robotaxi rollouts are.