Amazon-owned AV company Zoox will start rolling out dozens of its purpose-built autonomous vehicle in San Francisco and in Las Vegas in the coming weeks, co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson announced on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage.
Levinson said that Zoox will start offering rides — starting with employees — in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, and on the Las Vegas Strip. Levinson told TechCrunch on the sidelines that Zoox is starting with SoMa even though it’s more difficult in part because the company has a operations in the area.
“We have achieved that internal safety readiness” required to launch the service, he said on stage.
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.”
In San Francisco, Levinson said Zoox hopes to steadily expand beyond the SoMa neighborhood, and eventually, into surrounding cities like Foster City, where the company is already operating the vehicles.
In Las Vegas, Levinson said Zoox is working with “many” of the resort-hotels up and down the strip to pick up and drop off passengers at the entrances. “We’re not ready to share which hotels those are, but we’re not going to just be driving up and down the strip,” he said.
Zoox will continue to scale, geographically and by its fleet size. Zoox uses suppliers for its vehicle components and then assembles the robotaxis in house at facilities in Fremont and Hayward, California, Levinson said.
“We actually do it ourselves, which is really cool,” he said. “We have the facilities to produce tens of thousands of our own robotaxis, which is really cool, but we do get a lot of the components from suppliers all over the world, and then we kind of put them together. So it’s not quite as involved of a manufacturing process as a regular car, but it’s still very sophisticated.”
