By Michael Lietke, Associated Press
HAYWARD, Calif. (AP) – Amazon prepares to make 10,000 Robotaxi every year at a vast factory near Silicon Valley. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also competing for joining an autonomous race.
The 220,000-square-foot Robotaxi Factory announced on Wednesday a new phase of Amazon’s push to the technical frontier that began to take shape in 2009 when Waymo launched as a secret project within Google.
Amazon began paying attention to the market five years ago when it paid $1.2 billion for autonomous driving startup Zoox.
Invented in 2014, Zoox began operating Lobotaxis in Phoenix almost five years ago, and is about to start operating Lobotaxis before expanding in San Francisco in 2023 to Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. Waymo said there are already more than 10 million paid vehicles, but other rivals like Amazon and Tesla are tweaking their autonomous driving technology while tackling other challenges, such as how to strengthen their fleet.
Amazon feels it is tackling the issue of a Zoox manufacturing plant that spans three half football fields in Hayward, California. Tesla is about 17 miles (27 kilometers) north of the factory that makes electric cars that it believes masks can ultimately drive without a driver.
Since moving to the former bus manufacturing plant in 2023, Zoox has turned it into a high-tech facility where gondola-like vehicles have been assembled and tested along the assembly lines of 21 stations. For now, Zoox has only made one Robotaxi a day, but hopes to stir them up at the speed of three vehicles per hour by next year.
By 2027, Zoox hopes to create 10,000 robotaxi in Hayward for fleets that hope to bring to other major markets, including Miami, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Zoox plans to assemble Robotaxis in the US, but company officials say about half of the parts are imported from abroad. Waymo is also planning to expand to Atlanta and Miami, taking the first step towards bringing Robotaxis to the most populous US cities with disclosure of applications to begin testing vehicles in New York on Wednesday.
“It’s an exciting time to head on this journey,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans said he was co-located with Jesse Levinson, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, on a tour of the Robotaxi factory on Tuesday.
Zoox is behind, but believes it could seduce passengers with a vehicle that looks like a carriage sitting for up to four passengers. In contrast, Waymo has built autonomous driving technology on cars created by other major automakers, making it look similar to human-controlled vehicles. Zoox doesn’t even bother to put the steering wheel on the Robotaxis.
As they continue to test Robotaxis in Las Vegas, Zoox recently attacked the partnership to ride a guest at Reorts World. We are also testing Robotaxis in San Francisco. There, Waymo has already transformed driverless cars into daily premises in a city that has been famous for cable cars since the 1870s. While testing in San Francisco last month, a slight collision between Zoox Robotaxi and someone on an electric scooter last month led the company to issue voluntary recalls to update its autonomous driving technology. No injuries have been reported in the incident.
Tesla still fishes to compete with Waymo, but it remains unclear when Musk will burn his long-term promise to build the world’s largest Robotaxi service. Musk has yet to give up on his goals, but his current ambitions are more modest than in 2019. When Tesla predicted that he would run 1 million Robotaxis by now. He is currently aiming for a limited rollout of Tesla’s Robotaxis in Austin this Sunday, but that date could change as Mask is “ultra paranoid about safety.”
In contrast, Zoox plans to operate between 500 and 1,000 Robotaxi in small to medium-sized markets, and according to Evans, it plans to operate around 2,000 Robotaxi in the major cities that are ultimately operating. The company believes that each robotaxi produced under the Hayward Project should be on the road for about five years or around 500,000 miles
Original issue: June 18th, 2025, 2:07pm EDT
