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I Hitched a Ride in San Francisco’s Newest Robotaxi

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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.”

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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.
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.