Amazon’s Zoox has begun . It has deployed a small fleet of retrofitted test vehicles throughout the city for the purposes of mapping and data-collection. They won’t be available for public rides just yet.
The company is sending out manually-driven Toyota Highlanders at first. These have been equipped with Zoox’s self-driving tech and will gather mapping data. Broader autonomous testing will start in LA this summer. This will happen after the Highlanders gather enough data regarding “driving conditions, potential roadwork, city events” and other potential surprises.
After that, it should send in the actual robotaxis, which operate . The vehicles are already but, again, not with commercial passengers. These areas include Foster City, San Francisco and Las Vegas.
Zoox says it should begin offering public rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year. It’s also testing manned robotaxi drives in Miami, Austin and Seattle. This is done with a Highlander and a human safety operator behind the wheel.
This expansion is happening just a few weeks after the company issued a software recall on 258 of its vehicles, due to issues with the driving system . The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received two incident reports involving motorcycles crashing into the back of Zoox vehicles due to this hard braking.
Rival Waymo is the only autonomous vehicle company right now that offers actual paid rides. The Alphabet-owned company provides this service in several cities, including , Phoenix and . It plans on expanding to Atlanta, Miami and in the next two years.
