Zoox Robotaxis Get Official Nod in The USA
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
A six decade old regulatory barrier preventing experimental self-driving concept vehicles from real-world, commercial operation has finally cracked.
In a historic decision, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has officially granted Amazon subsidiary Zoox a commercial exemption to deploy custom, purpose-built electric robotaxis as a paid ride-hailing service. This is the first time US federal regulators have cleared a passenger vehicle built from the ground up, completely devoid of human driving controls. The Zoox pod has no steering wheel, no brake pedal, no accelerator and no rearview mirrors. Better yet, the vehicle has no front or back, allowing it to pull into tight urban areas and roll out without ever needing to perform a U-turn.
Passengers sit in a spacious, face-to-face interior with two rows of bench seats, which is a very different and much more sociable layout to traditional seating in cars.
Zoox’s permission takes the industry into a new stage, where taxis without steering wheels will become familiar on US streets. The future is most likely to be for vehicles that are built solely for passengers. It will force competitors to pivot toward custom cabin-style architectures to remain competitive. Old retro-fitted cars operating as taxis, such as Waymo's fleet, are very likely to start feeling outdated.
Since Amazon acquired the autonomous vehicle developer Zoox in June 2020 for approx. $1.2 billion, free public testing of Zoox robotaxis has been quietly underway in Las Vegas and San Francisco, clocking hundreds of thousands of miles for around half a million passengers. Clearing the federal road block was the final economic hurdle required to turn Amazon’s massive investment into a revenue-generating business.
