Amazon’s Zoox is launching its robotaxi service in San Francisco, offering free rides through parts of the city as it accelerates its attempt to challenge Waymo’s early lead in the race to transport passengers in self-driving vehicles.
The expansion, announced on Tuesday, will be confined to a few major San Francisco neighborhoods and limited to people who signed up on a waiting list to ride in Zoox’s gondola-shaped robotaxis, which have no steering wheel. The San Francisco launch comes less than three months after the Amazon-owned robotaxi company launched its first ride-hailing service along the Las Vegas strip.
Zoox doesn’t charge people to ride in its robotaxis, something Waymo has been doing since debuting in Phoenix five years ago. The free rides are a major milestone before charging fares like Waymo and traditional ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, as Amazon tries to make inroads in autonomous driving – a journey that began in 2020 when the e-commerce Goliath bought Zoox for $1.2bn.
after newsletter promotion
California regulators still have to approve Zoox’s application to charge for rides in San Francisco – a clearance that Waymo received in August 2023 after overcoming safety concerns raised by city officials. Since then, Waymo’s robotaxis have become a familiar sight throughout San Francisco, where some tourists now make a point of hitching a ride in a self-driving car along with hopping on one of the city’s fabled cable cars, which have been operating for 152 years.
Waymo, which started as a secret project within Google in 2009, also operates its robotaxis in San Jose and Los Angeles in California, Atlanta and Austin, Texas, with plans to expand into New York City, Washington DC and London next year.
In another sign of Waymo’s accelerating growth, its robotaxis began extending their routes beyond city streets and on to highways in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona. And on Tuesday the company announced plans to expand into five more US cities: Dallas, San Antonio and Houston, Texas, and Miami and Orlando, Florida. However, passengers will not be able to ask for rides in those five cities until next year.
Just as Waymo has already been doing, Amazon is gearing up to bring Zoox’s robotaxis to other major cities, including Austin and Miami. To help Zoox realize its ambitions, Amazon converted a former bus factory into a hi-tech robotaxi plant in Hayward, California – about 25 miles (40km) south-east of San Francisco. Zoox eventually hopes to make as many as 10,000 robotaxis annually at the plant.
