Robotaxi service Zoox is operating in Las Vegas — but might not come to Phoenix

MARK BRODIE: A new robotaxi service started taking fares this month. Zoox, which is owned by Amazon, is now collecting payment in Las Vegas; it’d been operating for free there for several months.

My next guest describes the cars as a kind of cute toaster on wheels — in that they’re square and boxy, but look like they have a personality.

Joann Muller is transportation correspondent at Axios, where she writes the Future of Mobility newsletter.

I spoke with her earlier, and we started with what’s different about this company and their vehicles from what folks may be familiar with, with other autonomous vehicles.

Full conversation

JOANN MULLER: Well, Zoox started out, it was a startup like everybody else, and they got purchased by Amazon at a time when they probably really needed the extra capital. And it was an interesting acquisition at the time. Everyone assumed, myself included, that Amazon wanted to buy Zoox so that they could deliver packages with the Zoox robotaxi.

But in fact, it’s always been focused on passengers and ride-hailing. And what’s different about Zoox from other autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo is that they are doing it all. They designed a vehicle from the ground up that is meant to be a robotaxi. It’s not like they’re putting self-driving technology onto an existing car, which is what Waymo has done. If you’ve ever ridden in a Waymo, you watch as the steering wheel turns miraculously by itself.

There is no steering wheel in a Zoox. And there’s no brake pedals, there’s no human controls at all. And so they call that a purpose-built robotaxi. But Zoox is different for other reasons in that they are besides designing the vehicle, they’re manufacturing it, they’re going to operate their own depots, they’re controlling the experience inside the vehicle. And so it is a very vertically oriented strategy, but probably comes with some more risk that way as well.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. So why are they deciding or why did they decide to roll out in Vegas as opposed to anywhere else?

JOANN MULLER: You know, I don’t know exactly. I mean, Nevada is one of the few states that’s been very friendly toward autonomous technology, even from the beginning. Texas is another one, so you see a lot of robotaxis in Texas.

As far as Las Vegas, it’s a relatively concentrated area, the Strip. We all know what the Strip is like, and these vehicles can kind of go from one popular destination to another. It doesn’t go everywhere. Zoox has started small, but there’s enough demand, I think, in that concentrated area that they can really get some some volume going.

MARK BRODIE: What will it take for Zoox to be a real competitor to a company like Waymo, which seems to have a foothold in a lot of communities already, including here in Phoenix?

JOANN MULLER: Well, Waymo has an enormous head start on everyone, and Zoox has about 100, 110 vehicles right now. Waymo has like 3,500, almost 4,000 in 11 cities. So, you know, what will it take? It will take time. It will take a lot of technology to continue building out what they’re doing.

I think Zoox is very different. They just are they’re going to be slower and more deliberate. They’ve got their cars running in San Francisco now, and then they’ve also targeted, I believe, Austin and Miami as their next markets. But they’re still, you know, what Zoox does is they have a traditional car with their software on it, and they drive around and kind of do all the training with a normal car. But then they have to deploy the vehicle itself, and so that takes another sort of layer of testing for the vehicle itself to deploy.

And it will be slow. And so honestly, I don’t know that Zoox will catch up to Waymo.

MARK BRODIE: Do you get the sense, and maybe is there a sense in the AV world, that certain cities may just be like one-horse towns? Like, might Zoox just decide, "Look, in a place like Phoenix, Waymo has this, as you referenced, this enormous head start. It’s maybe not worth it to go there. Let’s try somewhere that doesn’t have autonomous vehicles already."

JOANN MULLER: I think you’ve identified something that is a very real consideration. Because let’s face it, there’s not that many like, each city’s not going to need that many robotaxis. They will be generally focused on the center city, and so they’ll just kind of zip around back and forth and they’re in constant motion.

You don’t need 1,000 or 5,000 of these in one city. So once a company gets a foothold, there might be room for another one, maybe three total, but I don’t think that you can have a lot of players in each city.

MARK BRODIE: You also write, Joann, about Zoox maybe doing things a little differently in terms of their safety data and sort of giving potential riders a look, pardon the pun, under the hood. What are they doing differently there?

JOANN MULLER: Well, just this week, Zoox released what’s called its Safety Case framework. It sounds very jargon-y and so forth, and only a couple companies have done the same thing, Waymo being one, and Aurora, which is a truck, autonomous trucking company. But what they’re trying to do is just show the public and, frankly, the policymakers how they evaluate their own safety, because there are no federal regulations for autonomous vehicles.

The Department of Transportation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is beginning to work on performance standards for AVs, but this is many years away: three, four, five, who knows how many years it will take. And so for the time being, these AV developers kind of largely determine themselves when their cars are safe. And so we have no idea how they decide that. And so transparency is very important.

MARK BRODIE: Have you ridden in a Zoox?

JOANN MULLER: I have! I’ve ridden in a Zoox in San Francisco, and I was with some Zoox officials at the time doing an interview, in fact, in the back of or in the car. What’s nice about a Zoox is it’s, I call it like a high-tech stagecoach. The seats face each other, right? So you can have a conversation. There’s four seats, and so some people have to ride backwards.

And the car, the vehicle itself, is bidirectional, so there’s no front or back. It doesn’t do U-turns. It just gets somewhere, and then it just begins going in the opposite direction. Now the front is the back, the back is the front. And it was a San Francisco’s a very complicated city to drive around in, and there’s all the hills and intersections and stoplights and stop signs, and it was it was good. It was quite good.

You know, there were one or two moments where I was like, "Oh, this is a little uneven," let’s say, but generally speaking, it was fantastic. And it was a funny thing that happened: there was a car that was kind of tailgating the robotaxi, and the robotaxi, the Zoox robotaxi, honked and said basically, "Get off my tail!"

MARK BRODIE: Really?

JOANN MULLER: I thought that was quite interesting. I had never experienced that before.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Joann Muller, transportation correspondent at Axios, where she writes the Future of Mobility newsletter. Joann, thanks as always. I really appreciate it.

JOANN MULLER: Thank you, Mark.