Zoox

Zoox is a California-based company that designs autonomous ride-hailing vehicles “from the ground up”. It started in 2014 with the aim of building purpose-built, zero-emissions vehicles for autonomous ride-hailing, together with its own end-to-end autonomy software. On June 26, 2020 Amazon announced an agreement to acquire Zoox, which it said would continue to run as a standalone business.¹ The Las Vegas Sun describes it as Amazon’s self-driving vehicle subsidiary.²

Its robotaxi is a boxy vehicle with carriage-style seating and no manual controls, and it began carrying public passengers in Las Vegas on September 10, 2025, to a small list of spots on and near the Strip.² On July 30, 2026 NHTSA issued a temporary exemption allowing Zoox’s purpose-built robotaxis, which have no steering wheel or foot pedals, to give paid public rides: up to 2,500 vehicles a year for two years, under enhanced oversight. Smart Cities Dive called it the agency’s first such exemption.³ Zoox said it would start charging Las Vegas riders on August 10, 2026, aiming “to be competitive with ride-hail services’ ‘comfort’ level pricing”. It also said it had driven more than 3 million miles on public roads and carried nearly 1 million riders across Las Vegas, San Francisco, Miami and Austin (company-stated).² Its website now lists six cities under “Where to Ride”: Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin, Miami, Atlanta and Los Angeles.⁴

People still back up the driverless system. According to a report Zoox filed with NHTSA, after one of its robotaxis drove through an active fire scene in Las Vegas on June 20, 2026 with no passengers aboard, a human operator remotely piloted the car away, and Zoox issued a software recall for 105 vehicles. In spring 2025, a software defect linked to an April 8 collision led Zoox to pull 270 vehicles off the road temporarily; they were back by May.² Zoox appears in our feature on robotaxis and the taxi driver’s job, which compares operators’ stated figures, and in our explainer of the SAE driving levels, where its purpose-built vehicle is a Level 4 example.