Zoox, an Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, is set to roll out dozens of its purpose-built robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas, starting with employee rides in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood and the Las Vegas Strip. “We have achieved that internal safety readiness” required to launch the service, said co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a decade after Zoox was founded and four years since it was acquired by Amazon and unveiled its purpose-built robotaxi. In that time, the nascent autonomous vehicle industry has gone through the full hype cycle that led to multi-billion-dollar valuations and later a wave of shutdowns and consolidation. “We still exist,” Levinson said, in a nod to the tumult the industry has gone through in recent years.
Levinson said Zoox is going to take a “measured approach” to rolling out its robotaxi service, and noted that his company has been working closely with local and federal safety regulators. “I can say that in the next few weeks, we’re actually going to have a couple dozen Zoox robotaxis across our Foster City, San Francisco and Las Vegas, geofences that will expand several fold over the next year,” he said. “And then, you know, 2026 is when we’re going to really start cranking out production vehicles at very large scale.”
He also said Zoox will launch an “explorer” program of early riders who will be able to use the robotaxis for free before opening the service up to paying customers. (Rival Waymo operated a similar invite-only early rider program before opening its service to the paying public.) These early riders, or explorers, will gain access to the Zoox vehicles early next year starting with Las Vegas, Levinson said. The Zoox AVs will operate throughout the “most busy 16 hours” of the day, Levinson said, noting that it’s “so boring at four in the morning, we don’t think we would learn very much.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Read More
