Zoox’s Steering-Wheel-Free Robotaxi Faces California’s Toughest Test

Zoox is taking baby steps in San Francisco as it works through California’s commercial approval process for a radically different kind of autonomous vehicle. The self-driving subsidiary acquired by Amazon in 2020 for an estimated $1.2 billion currently offers free demonstration rides but has not secured authorization to charge passengers.

The company has formally applied for a deployment permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, a necessary precursor to receiving commercial clearance from the California Public Utilities Commission. California uses a two-tiered regulatory system: the DMV approves the safety of driverless technology for testing and deployment, while the CPUC regulates passenger service and fare collection.

“We are trying to get it as quickly as we can, but it is a couple-month process,” said Carly Wyatt, Zoox’s vice president of communications and marketing. “We own the fact that we’re taking these baby steps.”

Federal regulators have already cleared a path for Zoox’s custom-built vehicles. In July, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration granted the company a temporary exemption from several Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Those standards traditionally mandate physical controls including steering wheels, brake pedals, windshield wipers, and rearview mirrors.

The two-year federal exemption allows Zoox to manufacture and deploy as many as 5,000 of its bidirectional passenger pods and collect fares on public roads. The vehicles have no traditional driver compartments, unlike the modified conventional luxury vehicles used by Waymo: Jaguar I-PACE electric SUVs equipped with external sensors.

Zoox’s symmetrical, carriage-style pods use four-wheel steering and a compact, turquoise cabin in which passengers sit facing one another. The design is being introduced in San Francisco while local regulatory hurdles and Waymo’s market dominance slow the rollout of autonomous vehicles on city streets.

In Las Vegas, Zoox has already launched paid commercial rides at rates slightly higher than conventional ride-hailing services. Its San Francisco operations remain non-commercial, however, and the company’s free passenger program operates along fixed routes to the Ferry Building, the Painted Ladies, the Castro district, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as eight partner restaurants.

Zoox initially launched free passenger rides in November and expanded the program in June to connect riders with local landmarks and businesses. In May, it opened a physical “Rider Lounge” storefront in downtown San Francisco, where pedestrians and tourists can inspect the custom-built pods.

The company has also sponsored local cultural events, including the Stern Grove Festival, the North Beach Festival, and the Flower Piano exhibition in Golden Gate Park. The localized, “community-first” marketing approach is intended to ease public anxiety and build familiarity without relying only on digital promotion.

Waymo’s scale remains difficult to match. The company began in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project and became an independent Alphabet subsidiary in 2016. It recently secured an additional $16 billion in funding and now operates approximately 4,000 vehicles across 15 cities, generating more than 500,000 weekly passenger rides.

Zoox operates about 100 vehicles and records roughly 10,000 weekly rides across its U.S. test sites. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said the industry still faces a basic familiarity problem: “While one brand may be larger in the category and more prominent in the category, many people don’t know anything about the category.”

California’s regulatory environment has drawn heightened scrutiny after setbacks involving other autonomous-vehicle developers. In October 2023, the California DMV suspended the deployment and testing permits of General Motors’ Cruise division after one of its robotaxis struck and dragged a pedestrian who had been thrown into its path by a human driver.

The Cruise incident led to a nationwide halt of its operations, the resignation of its chief executive, and intense pushback from local emergency officials and residents. Alphabet-owned Waymo has also faced scrutiny after minor incidents, including one in which a vehicle struck a local bodega cat and another in which a vehicle collided with a telephone pole.