The first Zoox robotaxis will soon be available for public riders in Las Vegas, Nevada and San Francisco. Photo from Amazon.
HAYWARD, CA – Amazon is gearing up to make as many as 10,000 robotaxis annually at a sprawling plant near Silicon Valley as it prepares to challenge self-driving cab leader Waymo. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also vying to join the autonomous race.
The 220,000-square-foot robotaxi factory announced Wednesday heralds a new phase in Amazon’s push into a technological frontier that began taking shape in 2009, when Waymo was launched as a secret project within Google.
Amazon began eyeing the market five years ago when it shelled out $1.2 billion for self-driving startup Zoox, which will be the brand behind a robotaxi service that plans to begin transporting customers in Las Vegas late this year before expanding into San Francisco next year.
Zoox, conceived in 2014, will try to catch up to Waymo, which began operating robotaxis in Phoenix nearly five years ago. Waymo expanded to San Francisco in 2023 and then Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. Waymo says it already has more than 10 million paid rides while other would-be rivals such as Amazon and Tesla are still fine-tuning their self-driving technology while tackling other challenges, such as how to ramp up their fleet.
Amazon feels like it has addressed that issue with Zoox’s manufacturing plant that spans across the equivalent of three-and-a-half football fields located in Hayward, California — about 17 miles north of a factory where Tesla makes some of the electric vehicles that Musk believes will eventually be able to operate without a driver behind the wheel.
“It’s an exciting time to be heading on this journey,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans said during a Tuesday tour of the robotaxi factory that she co-hosted with Jesse Levinson, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
Although Zoox will be lagging well behind, it believes it can lure passengers with vehicles that look more like carriages than cars with seating for up to four passengers. Waymo, in contrast, builds its self-driving technology on to cars made by other major automakers, making its robotaxi look similar to vehicles steered by humans. Zoox isn’t even bothering to put a steering wheel in its robotaxis.
Tesla is still angling to compete against Waymo too, although it remains unclear when Musk will fuflil his long-running promise to build the world’s largest robotaxi service. Musk is aiming for a limited rollout of Tesla robotaxis in Austin this Sunday, although that date could change because Musk is “being super paranoid about safety.”
