Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi service is launching a new round of tests in a potentially risky place–a city full of people who can pass laws that could put its business on a much rougher road.
The company that Amazon acquired in 2020 announced the addition of Washington, DC, to its road-test road map on Tuesday. The District is Zoox’s eighth test market, following Atlanta, Austin, the Bay Area, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and Seattle.
Washingtonians and visitors to the nation’s capital should not expect to see Zoox’s battery-electric, bidirectional, pod-shaped vehicles just yet. Instead, Zoox will start by sending its testing vehicles–Toyota Highlander SUVs festooned with an array of camera, radar and LiDAR sensors and operated at first by safety drivers–to begin creating a high-resolution digital map of the city.
Zoox predicts that autonomous testing will happen later in 2025 but does not offer a timetable for launching robotaxi service in its custom-built, four-passenger vehicles, which can look a bit like toasters on cartoonishly large wheels and are devoid of pedals, steering wheels, and other traditional car controls inside.
(Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Zoox only has one market with rides available to the public: Las Vegas, where in early September it began offering free transportation (paid service will come later) after months of testing up, down, and around the Strip. That puts Zoox relatively behind in the race to make self-driving taxis a commercial reality.
Tesla’s robotaxi launched service in Austin in June, but has already drawn the attention of federal road-safety investigators after some early crashes.
Waymo, owned by Google’s parent firm Alphabet, occupies a lane of its own by virtue of having staged a far more extensive rollout of its converted Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles. That service now transports paying passengers via its app at fares that can roughly equal Uber and Lyft’s pre-tip costs around Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco; Uber users in Atlanta and Austin can also summon its self-driving rides. Waymo is also testing in other cities, New York the most notable (and challenging) among them.
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The Zoox announcement outlines how DC incorporates challenges of its own: “a complex and unique street layout” that includes “many traffic circles, diagonal avenues, and high pedestrian and bicycle traffic,” plus distinct seasons that can include the occasional blizzard.
But that statement glosses over two other types of road occupant that can complicate driving in the District: the motorcades transporting various VIPs that can stop traffic for minutes at a time, and the Waymo robotaxis that began their own test drives there in 2024 to prepare for a commercial debut now planned for 2026.
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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