Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle startup Zoox has announced plans to start testing its driverless cars in Seattle, Washington. The company is said to have conducted a small pilot in the city back in 2019 as an independent entity before Amazon acquired it in June 2020. In addition, Zoox is currently testing its vehicles in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Foster City, California, as part of its plans to launch fully autonomous vehicles aimed at the robotaxi market in the near future.
While road-testing originally started in Las Vegas back in 2019, the company got its permit to test driver-less automobiles on public roads in California last year, becoming the fourth company to do so after AutoX, Nuro, and Google's sister company Waymo. The permit, however, does not extend to all public roads in the state, but it allows the company to test its vehicles without a human driver behind the wheel.
Talking to TechCrunch, Zoox's cofounder and Chief Technology Officer Jesse Levinson said that there were multiple reasons why the company picked Seattle as its next testing destination. Firstly, the company wanted to test the vehicles in the city's notoriously bad weather. Some autonomous cars have had problems in snow and heavy rain over the years, so testing in Seattle will be an excellent way to address those concerns for the company. The second reason for Zoox's interest in Seattle is its network of tunnels that would pose an additional challenge to the technology.
Zoox Will Be Testing Custom-Fitted Toyota Highlanders in Seattle
Seattle's policy towards autonomous vehicles is yet another reason that makes it a region of great interest for the company. Levinson says that the city is "way up there" on the list of places to launch the service commercially when the time comes. Another reason for choosing Seattle was because the company wanted to take advantage of the abundance of high-quality engineering talent in the city. The proximity to Amazon's headquarters is likely another reason for the company expanding to Seattle, although Levinson insisted that the two companies will operate separately for now. They could, however, collaborate on various projects in the future, he said.
Zoox will not be testing its in-house vehicles in Seattle but will instead send out retrofitted Toyota Highlanders as part of its "Level 3" testing fleet, equipped with a boatload of sophisticated sensors and its custom self-driving software. With Waymo and myriad other self-driving startups expanding operations rapidly, it will be interesting to see whether Amazon's financial muscle will ensure that Zoox stays at the forefront of the self-driving revolution once the technology becomes ready for prime time.
Source: TechCrunch