A new fleet of self-driving taxis is ready to hit the streets this year, rolling out first in Las Vegas.
The Amazon-backed vehicles are ten years in the making, and the company says they want to redefine transportation.
“Our vision of the future is not as many people will need to buy their own car,” said Zoox co-founder Jesse Levinson.
Zoox is on a mission to transform what driving looks like. Their robotaxis are autonomous vehicles that cater to the rider’s experience.
“It’s a really nice premium experience. “It’s safe, it’s consistent, it’s clean and it’s much more efficient,” said Levinson.
Zoox robotaxis don’t look like standard cars. They have four seats inside the vehicle, and riders face each other, sitting in rows of two.
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“We wanted to really create a social experience. Before cars, there were carriages, and they were like this, because that is actually the natural way you want to interact with people,” said Levinson.
Riders will be able to call their taxi on an app. Zoox says their rides will be competitively priced to other existing offers.
“Over time, as the technology becomes more ubiquitous and lower cost, we will be able to lower the cost as well for our customers,” said Levinson.
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To make sure their robotaxies are safe, Zoox has been testing on a few hundred vehicles with the same technology and sensors.
“We’ve tried to make it the safest possible vehicle, not only from a sort of autonomy perspective, but even just from a passive crash perspective. So, for example, we have this amazing inverted double-horseshoe airbag system that will envelop all the passengers when there’s a crash, and it’s super safe,” said Levinson.
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While testing is always ongoing to make sure the robotaxis are consistently safe, one autonomous vehicle expert says self-driving cars could make public roads safer.
“It is a defensive style of driving. It is inherently safe. The decisions that get made by our technology move much, much quicker than the human brain,” said Gatik Vice President of Government Relations and Public Affairs Rich Steiner.
Zoox robotaxis will start their first public rides in Las Vegas and then in San Francisco. The company is focused on starting in dense cities, and then eventually expanding over time.
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