Zoox — Amazon's Robotaxi Without a Steering Wheel

Zoox is Amazon's autonomous ride-hailing company. Founded in 2014, it chose not to retrofit existing cars and instead designed, from scratch, an electric robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals: a boxy vehicle with no front or back that drives in both directions, with passengers seated facing each other. Amazon announced an agreement to acquire Zoox on 26 June 2020. On 10 September 2025 Zoox opened rides in this purpose-built vehicle to the public on and around the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada. Rides were free at first; on 30 July 2026 Zoox received a federal exemption from NHTSA allowing it to charge fares, and it began paid service in Las Vegas on 10 August.

What is Zoox? The choice not to convert a car

According to Amazon's announcement, Zoox started in 2014 with the vision of purpose-built, zero-emissions vehicles for autonomous ride-hailing, together with an end-to-end autonomy software stack. Many rivals, Waymo among them, fit sensors and systems to production cars from established carmakers. Zoox said in a 2026 announcement that it was founded on the belief that reinventing mobility means starting from scratch.

According to CNBC, Zoox was valued at $3.2 billion in a 2018 funding round, but suffered management turmoil, including the firing of co-founder and CEO Tim Kentley-Klay that year, and in April 2020 it cut about 100 jobs, roughly 10% of its staff. Amazon did not disclose the price; the Financial Times had reported that it would pay more than $1.2 billion. The announcement said CEO Aicha Evans and co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson would continue to lead Zoox as a standalone business.

December 2020: the purpose-built vehicle revealed

According to Amazon, on 14 December 2020 Zoox showed its fully functional vehicle for the first time.

Zoox says it created the first vehicle with bidirectional driving and four-wheel steering; that is the company's claim. At the time it was testing in Las Vegas and the San Francisco Bay Area.

A car without a steering wheel, and federal rules

A vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals does not fit the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), which were written for human drivers. Tesla's Cybercab faces the same problem, and GM's Cruise abandoned its purpose-built Origin without winning the approvals it needed (see Cruise's suspension).

According to Zoox, in 2025 the administration and NHTSA opened a new exemption pathway for American-built automated vehicles without traditional manual controls, and in August that year Zoox became the first AV company to receive a demonstration exemption under it. That allowed demonstrations and free rides on public roads, but not fares.

10 September 2025: open to the public in Las Vegas

On 10 September 2025 Zoox opened its app-based ride-hailing service to the public on and around the Las Vegas Strip. Zoox described itself as the first company in history to provide fully autonomous ride-hailing in a purpose-built robotaxi. CEO Aicha Evans said Las Vegas, a city famous for unforgettable moments, was the ideal place for its debut.

In San Francisco, where Zoox says it has tested since 2017, it began free rides in November 2025 for early riders in a programme called Zoox Explorers, covering most of SoMa, the Mission and the Design District. In March 2026 Zoox said that in less than a year since launching in Las Vegas its robotaxis had driven nearly two million autonomous miles and carried more than 350,000 riders.

Recalls and safety

As it expanded, Zoox filed a series of software recalls.

• March 2025: after two incidents in which its retrofitted test vehicles, which always carry safety drivers, braked and were rear-ended by motorcyclists. NHTSA had opened a preliminary evaluation in May 2024
• April–May 2025: after an unoccupied robotaxi made contact with a passenger car in Las Vegas. Zoox paused driverless operations, found the root cause and updated the software across its fleet
• May 2025: after an e-scooter rider struck a stopped robotaxi in San Francisco and fell next to it, and the vehicle then began to move
• July 2026: according to Quartz, covering the entire 105-vehicle fleet, after a robotaxi in Las Vegas failed to detect heavy smoke and drove into an active fire scene in June

Quartz reported that the recall followed a warning from NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison that the agency had identified a pattern of driverless vehicles interfering with first responders. Zoox says that because it owns and operates its vehicles, it can push software updates to the whole fleet quickly.

2026: the day it could charge fares

On 30 July 2026 NHTSA granted Zoox a temporary exemption. According to Quartz, it covers eight safety standards, among them windshield defrosting and light-vehicle braking, and lets Zoox put vehicles without steering wheels or pedals on the road, up to 2,500 a year for two years. According to Reuters, NHTSA determined the vehicle was as safe as an equivalent vehicle meeting federal standards, but imposed additional reporting on crashes and inappropriate stopping. Zoox calls it the first-ever NHTSA commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi.

Zoox says that since launching in Las Vegas and San Francisco it has welcomed more than half a million riders, with another half a million on its waitlist. According to Reuters, Zoox had until then been carrying passengers for free in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin and Miami as part of testing, and Las Vegas fares from 10 August were set at a level similar to the "comfort" tier of other ride-hailing services. To charge fares in California, Zoox still needs permits from the state's Public Utilities Commission and DMV.

Social impact

Zoox's path showed how much of the rulebook for cars assumes a human driver. Zoox says it is working with NHTSA towards changing the safety standards themselves, so that autonomous vehicles can be deployed without vestigial elements that only matter to human drivers. Companies like Waymo that use conventionally controlled cars do not need such exemptions, which puts the two on different regulatory tracks (Quartz).

Its relationship with ride-hailing work is changing too. Through its partnership with Uber, riders will be able to hail Zoox vehicles in Uber's app as well as its own, so human-driven cars and robotaxis will sit side by side in the same app. In China, Baidu's Apollo Go has raised the same question.

Zoox's parent is Amazon. Levels of automation are explained on the SAE levels of driving automation page, and the wider story is in the autonomous driving timeline.