San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, which is already teeming with robotaxis from Alphabet’s self-driving arm Waymo, will soon welcome a new fleet of driverless vehicles.
Amazon-owned Zoox, which has designed what it calls “purpose-built” robotaxis, will be deploying its vehicles in San Francisco “over the next couple of weeks,” company co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson said at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday. The rollout will begin in SoMa, before eventually expanding to more areas of the city.
Unlike the retrofitted Jaguar I-Pace vehicles that competitor Waymo operates, Zoox’s robotaxis don’t have a steering wheel, pedals or driver’s seat. Instead, there are two seats on each end that face toward a spacious center and sliding doors on each side of the vehicle. That’s why Zoox calls it a “purpose-built” robotaxi: it’s made simply for passengers, right out of the gate.
San Francisco’s SoMa, or South of Market, neighborhood has been a hotspot for autonomous ridehailing companies like Waymo and Zoox to test their tech, undoubtedly because it presents all the obstacles a self-driving vehicle may encounter: pedestrians, vehicles, bikers and buses, to name a few.
Waymo began operating its ridehailing service in San Francisco in 2022. General Motors-owned Cruise also opened up its driverless fleet to the public that year but suspended operations in 2023 after one of its vehicles struck a pedestrian. And Tesla CEO Elon Musk earlier this month unveiled a prototype of the company’s long-awaited Robotaxi, saying he expects the company to roll out fully autonomous, unsupervised driving in Texas and California next year.
Zoox will welcome passengers in phases, starting with early riders called “Zoox explorers,” who won’t have to pay for the autonomous ridehailing service. The company says it’ll share more details about that program early next year. From there, it’ll expand the service and start charging for rides throughout San Francisco and Las Vegas.
“We are going to take a measured approach,” Levinson said. “We don’t have hundreds of robotaxis ready to deploy, and we’re not covering all of San Francisco just yet.”
He added that the vehicles are equipped to drive any time of day, but “we probably will not be operating at 4 in the morning” because it’s a slower time and therefore less useful for gathering vehicle data.
“We’ll be operating about 16 hours a day in San Francisco, but the most busy 16 hours a day,” Levinson said. “We’re gonna drive when people are out there because our safety case is ready for that.”
Expanding into Las Vegas
In preparation for commercial service, Zoox has been operating a test fleet of retrofitted Toyota Highlanders in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Miami and Austin, Texas, as well as around the company’s headquarters in Foster City, California.
Las Vegas and Foster City are the first places where Zoox has deployed its ground-up robotaxis, but just for employees. Currently, the vehicles operate a few miles away from the Vegas Strip, in preparation for that debut.
Levinson says Zoox is working with resorts along the Strip to be able to pick up and drop off passengers at a hotel’s main entrance.
“We’re going to start with a couple,” he said, “and then try to quickly expand that so that eventually, we can drive anywhere.”