Amazon's Zoox Eyes Joining Leagues Of Waymo In 2025, To Offer Rides To Public 'Quite Soon'

Amazon.com Inc.’s AMZN autonomous driving unit Zoox is reportedly looking to begin offering rides to the public “quite soon.”

What Happened: Zoox co-founder Jesse Levinson told CNBC that the company intends to offer rides to the public and significantly grow its fleet of self-driving vehicles in 2025.

Zoox is currently testing its vehicles on the roads of San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Foster City, California.

According to CNBC, the company will first launch commercial services in Las Vegas, followed by San Francisco. The company will launch an “early rider program” in Las Vegas in the coming months and open rides to the public later this year, the report said.

Zoox is also eyeing expansion to Miami and Austin, Levinson told CNBC, without detailing a timeline.

"I don't want to imply that it'll be a commercially meaningful business this year … but it's going to be useful in terms of customers will be able to get value out of it and actually use it to go places. We're excited for that," Levinson told CNBC. "We've taken a pretty conservative and steady approach to scaling and rolling out, just because of the safety-critical nature."

Why It Matters: Zoox, once operational, will be up against Alphabet’s GOOG GOOGL Waymo which is already operating its robotaxis in Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Tesla Inc. TSLA is also looking to join the robotaxi business in 2025. During the company's third-quarter earnings call last year, Elon Musk said that the company expects to start a ride-hail service in Texas and California starting next year, subject to regulatory approval, with Model 3 and Model Y vehicles equipped with its full self-driving (FSD) driver assistance technology.

However, the vehicles might not all operate as driverless robotaxis but with a driver as some states demand it until the company touches certain milestones in terms of miles and hours driven, the company then said. Musk, known for overestimating his company’s products, expressed confidence about the company operating driverless paid rides sometime in 2025 despite its FSD technology not achieving fully autonomous driving yet.

Levinson in October dismissed the possibility of Tesla deploying autonomous vehicles without safety drivers in California this year, alleging that the EV giant lacks a technology that works.

Tesla is faced with a lot of regulatory hurdles that they haven’t even started trying to climb yet, Levinson said at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 event in San Francisco. But the fundamental problem, he said, is that Tesla doesn’t have a “technology that worked.”

Check out more of Benzinga's Future Of Mobility coverage by following this link.

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