The boring parts of driverless cars are on Aicha Evans’s mind.
As we rode through the streets of San Francisco in her company’s autonomous vehicle, we talked through all of the back-end things required to launch a robotaxi service later this year.
“Right now, tiny, small, medium, large,” the chief executive told me about her strategy for scaling Zoox, Amazon.com’s gamble on the technology. “We’re still putting the foundation in place and making sure that everything that we’ve said we were going to do, we’re doing.”
Her approach is rooted in sweating the small stuff. It’s a belief at odds with the Silicon Valley mantra of move fast and break things—and borne of the fact that execution is key to making robotaxis work. And small stuff really isn’t so small: Safety procedures; maintenance efforts; charging infrastructure.
These are the kinds of logistical issues that turned Amazon into a retail behemoth.
That’s a striking contrast to the go-quick, go-bold approach taken by Elon Musk and others who have heralded the coming age of robot cars.
The Tesla CEO for years has said the electric-car maker was on the precipice of deploying driverless vehicles. He once suggested he would have one million robotaxis deployed by 2020.
Amid that hype, Zoox seemed destined to be an also-ran. Alphabet’s Waymo had long ago embraced the boring side of fleet management. And it is way ahead in the race, having already deployed robotaxis in San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Zoox is aiming to launch its robotaxi service later this year. -
Now Zoox is fighting it out for the No. 2 spot with Tesla, which still hasn’t demonstrated vehicles on public roadways without humans behind the wheel.
A decade ago, the driverless-car industry was becoming brash and boastful as billions of dollars were invested in the idea of robot vehicles changing modern life. Then people got hurt. And investors woke up to the harsh realities that deploying robotaxis wasn’t going to be as simple as unleashing a Roomba in the living room.
Instead, it was going to take years of painful effort building out the operational side of things. Ultimately, Uber Technologies and General Motors abandoned their billion-dollar robotaxi efforts.
That could have easily been Zoox’s fate, too.
After a long run as a senior Intel executive, Evans took over Zoox in 2019, toward the end of the gold-rush era of autonomous vehicles. She looked at the company’s finances and moved forward selling it to Amazon in 2020—a move mocked by Musk, who jabbed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos a copy cat.
“It takes a lot of capital and a lot of patience to do this,” she told me later during a recording of the Journal’s “Bold Names” podcast. “We needed to solve that.”
When I first began writing about Zoox in 2016, it was a tiny startup. It had an air of mystery and a founder savvy at drumming up publicity amid promises of launching a robotaxi by 2020, or mobility service as he dubbed it.
“You can really think of it as Disneyland on the streets of perhaps San Francisco,” co-founder Tim Kentley-Klay, an Australian entrepreneur, said at the time. He left the company in 2018.
It was his vision for the current look of the Zoox vehicle, unlike other cars on the road. Boxlike with a wheel at each of the four corners—it shares more design cues with a toaster than K.I.T.T. from TV’s “Knight Rider.” Its doors slide open from the middle to reveal a lounge-like interior with a row of two seats on each end of the cabin.
While Evans kept the vision for the Zoox design, she took her foot off the accelerator. She needed the guts—and Amazon’s cash—to slow down, to stop talking to the press, to stop making big promises to excite investors.
Instead, she needed to start figuring out how to make it all a reality. It needed to evolve to a new phase: tiny.
Today, she understands why Zoox required its showman days—startups often do—but it had to evolve into an organization with processes and plans.
“Big, bold transformative things don’t get done in a linear way—you have to have that audacity to get started,” she told me as we rode through the city talking about her early days at Zoox. Then, “the question is: Can you manage through the phases?”
The stakes were evident as we crept through traffic. As a man with a pet carrier hesitated to cross through passing cars, we came to a jarring stop.
Evans seemed pleased, pointing out the man. The car was navigating the messiness of city life.
Aicha Evans has been at the helm of Zoox since 2019. -
“Community trust is really important,” Evans said. “This is one of those businesses where if you go too quickly the probability just rises that something not great happens.”
Meanwhile, Musk has continued to profess his vision for Tesla as a robot company, helping fuel investor interest and a sky-high valuation. He has argued the millions of Tesla vehicles currently on the road feed his AI data, allowing his teams to develop robot vehicles that have experienced all sorts of unexpected situations. He revealed his vision for a sleek, two-seat robot car last fall at an event held at Warner Bros. studios that included dancing robots
Tesla has said it plans to deploy test versions of its robot vehicles this year. So far, it hasn’t provided the kind of details that Zoox and Waymo have shown for their operations.
Like Waymo, Zoox has built a call-center-like operation that monitors its vehicles in real time and can remotely help vehicles deal with issues. There are also operations to keep the vehicles clean and maintained.
Now, Zoox is close to deploying its taxis for the public—initially with free rides to select participants this year as part of an early rider program in Las Vegas and San Francisco. That will be followed later this year by a paid service first in Las Vegas.
“We’re at the end of the tiny and entering the beginning of the small,” Evans said.
A Zoox driverless car goes for a test drive in San Francisco. -
