LAS VEGAS—It’s the wheels that set the Zoox robotaxi apart: the four positioned at the outer corners of this pod of a car can’t be confused with any other vehicle on today’s streets.
There’s also no steering wheel. Zoox’s battery-electric conveyance distills the self-driving taxi concept to a compact essence. With no driver controls inside, the interior is given over to space for four passengers and whatever belongings fit on the floor. There’s no trunk or frunk because the electric motors fit above each axle. And because both sets of wheels have the same steering and power, with matched pairs of sensor pods at each end, the car is bidirectional.
Even the wheels on a Zoox robotaxi look unusual. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
“This thing can go 75mph either way,” co-founder and chief technical officer Jesse Levinson said at the start of a roughly 40-minute test drive here at CES.
We, however, never got above 45mph, Zoox’s current operational speed limit. At this stage of testing, the self-driving-car startup that Amazon bought in June 2020 is not venturing onto highways yet. Our ride avoided Interstate 15 and instead stuck to a variety of suburban streets over to the Strip and then back to Zoox’s facilities southwest of that casino corridor.
A Sunday Drive
The car generally handled accelerating, braking, and turning smoothly and correctly but could get a little skittish when approaching lines of traffic cones, a frequent sight in this perpetually-under-construction city.
Sometimes it would brake haltingly if some of these cones edged into our lane. In other cases, it responded by changing lanes. The first time, it had the car lurching slightly, much as a human driver would, as it assessed the path of the car behind and whether its driver would let us in.
Close to the end of our ride, the Zoox drove between two rows of cones and then halted in apparent puzzlement, as if it were a cat that had just encountered a Roomba. After a minute, the car reversed out of that impasse—a move that Levinson explained required an authorization from a human supervisor—and then angled forward into a lane to the left of the traffic-cone alley.
Those lane changes and other turns all felt slightly weird not because of how the car drove but because of the absence of clicking-turn-signal sounds inside it.
We also saw the car slow before speed bumps and properly brake for a pedestrian outside the Luxor casino, the only interaction we had with a non-vehicle road occupant during the entire drive in this car-dominated city.
Gadgety, Inside and Out
Zoox employs an extensive suite of sensors—short- and long-range LiDAR, radar, visual and thermal cameras, and external microphones—to detect its surroundings and neighbors.
Those sensor pods mounted on the upper corners of the robotaxi helped make it easy to spot, as we realized when other drivers took note of our sci-fi ride. At one stoplight, the driver of a Tesla next to us grabbed his phone to take a few pictures or record some video. At another, a couple in a Jeep waved hi and started to roll down their windows—which would not have allowed a conversation, because you can’t open the windows on a Zoox robotaxi.
If the looks of a Zoox vehicle didn’t tell you that it was a self-driving car, these plates should clear things up. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
A Zoox can direct a honk in a particular direction with a beam-forming speaker system and can also play recorded messages to first responders. The company also says it’s evaluating ways to use those exterior speakers to talk to pedestrians and bicyclists, hopefully to say some version of “I see you in the crosswalk and am stopping for you.”
On the inside, a Zoox has two pairs of seats facing each other, with a Qi charging surface (which worked with my Pixel 9 Pro), a USB-C charging port and a cupholder for each passenger. There’s no dashboard, but a touch screen on the wall next to each seat lets you start and end the ride, change the soundtrack, and adjust the temperature. You’ll be able to stream from your phone via Bluetooth audio, but that feature wasn’t available on our test drive.
There’s also a camera mounted in the ceiling for safety purposes, with buttons to contact support in an emergency. If I had to get out of the car in a hurry, an emergency-release button behind my seat would open the sliding doors; Zoox also has an airbag system that deploys from multiple sides in a crash.
Ramping Up to Commercial Service
Zoox first put one of these robotaxis on public roads in February 2023 outside its Foster City, California, headquarters and is now also testing these cars in San Francisco and its test fleet of customized Toyota Highlanders operating on roads in Austin and Miami. But charging for service remains farther down the road.
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Levinson said Zoox rates will be “similar” to existing ride-hail rates because “we don’t want this to be an expensive, luxury vehicle.” As with Uber or Lyft, you’ll use the company’s app to book a ride.
Zoox is also working out some engineering challenges; Levinson mentioned that while they’ve designed the robotaxi to run for 16 hours on a charge of its 133 kWh battery, “we’re a little short of that range” in part because the air-conditioning system can draw too much electricity during hot desert afternoons.
Zoox is also working to expand where its robotaxis can operate to include not only highways but service at Harry Reid International Airport here.
And as our experience with traffic cones might suggest, Zoox is also still working out some areas of autonomous driving. The company’s test Toyotas caused two crashes in 2024 when they braked sharply and unexpectedly, which led to an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (PDF) that is still in progress.
But Zoox also has the advantage of an uncongested road ahead. GM permanently parked its Cruise robotaxi effort last month after a series of crashes that did not help public perceptions of self-driving safety. And while Tesla says it will introduce a robotaxi and showed off concept vehicles at an event last year, those plans must be seen in the context of Elon Musk’s history of vaporous Tesla announcements.
In the real world of rubber on roads, Zoox only has one competitor, one that already has paying customers and is backed by a tech giant with even more immense resources than Amazon: Google’s Waymo subsidiary.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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