Amazon-owned Zoox will begin charging passengers for driverless robotaxi rides in Las Vegas on 10 August after receiving US regulatory approval to commercially operate its purpose-built autonomous vehicles without steering wheels or pedals.
The launch marks Zoox’s first commercial service and follows a temporary exemption granted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), allowing up to 2,500 of its custom-built vehicles to operate over each of the next two years despite not meeting federal requirements for conventional human controls. According to Reuters, the company will charge fares using a base fare plus time and distance model, with pricing intended to be comparable to the “comfort” tier offered by existing ride-hailing services.
Zoox has spent the past year offering free public rides in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin and Miami while testing its service. The company said its fleet has travelled more than three million miles on public roads and carried nearly one million passengers since those trials began, although it remains significantly smaller than rival Waymo, whose robotaxis have logged more than 220 million miles and complete around 500,000 trips each week across 11 cities.
Unlike many competitors, Zoox has developed its vehicle from the ground up rather than adapting existing cars. The electric vehicle features two inward-facing rows of seats, operates in either direction without turning around and incorporates software designed to inspect cabin cleanliness and identify items left behind. Jesse Levinson, co-founder and chief technology officer, told Axios: “Because we’re vertically integrated, we can do things that other companies can’t.”
The NHTSA concluded Zoox’s vehicle provides safety equivalent to vehicles complying with federal motor vehicle safety standards, while imposing additional reporting requirements covering incidents such as crashes and inappropriate stops on public roads.
The company has issued several software recalls during the past two years, most recently in July after one of its robotaxis struggled to detect heavy smoke at an emergency scene.
The commercial rollout intensifies competition in the US robotaxi market, where Alphabet-owned Waymo already operates paid services in multiple cities and Tesla has begun introducing its own autonomous ride-hailing offering.
Speaking to CNBC, Zoox chief executive Aicha Evans said: “However hard it was to build the technology up to get up to this point, there’s a new hard that’s coming, which is paid operations,” adding that her priority is establishing a “stellar, lovable commercial service.”
Zoox ultimately hopes to manufacture 10,000 robotaxis annually, although it has built just over 100 vehicles so far. Levinson said Amazon, which acquired the company for $1.2 billion in 2020, expects to invest “double-digit billions” to scale the business over the long term.
