This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN, Financials) is taking another step into the robotaxi race, and this time it’s marching directly into Waymo’s home turf.
Amazon-owned Zoox has begun deploying its fully autonomous vehicles onto the streets of San Francisco, putting the business in more direct confrontation with Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL, Financials).Zoox’s automobiles are unlike any typical automobile. They have no steering wheel or pedals, are bi-directional and seat four people facing each other.
The business has now clocked over 3 million autonomous miles and carried close to 1 million passengers, The Wall Street Journal reported. Zoox also began charging for rides in Las Vegas on Aug. 10 after gaining a government exemption to operate vehicles commercially without conventional driver controls. San Francisco is a bigger test.
Waymo has a large presence there already, so Zoox has to show its purpose-built strategy can function at scale in one of the most scrutinized autonomous driving markets. In 2020, Amazon acquired Zoox for roughly $1.2 billion. The company is still small relative to AWS and e-commerce, but the possibility is considerably bigger if robotaxis become commonplace.
That’s why this expansion is worth keeping an eye on. Amazon is not only financing an autonomous-driving experiment anymore. Now it’s starting to take that experiment out into actual cities, with paying consumers and a well established rival waiting in the wings.
