After a six-year gestation period, Foster City, CA-based new-mobility startup Zoox Inc. has revealed a functional, electric, autonomous vehicle for urban environments designed and manufactured in the U.S. The company, which became an independent subsidiary of Amazon this year, says it is the first in the industry to show a driving, purpose-built robotaxi capable of operating up to 75 mph (120 km/h) in either direction.
The vehicle is also unique in offering bidirectional driving capabilities, so no reversing is necessary in congested city centers, and the ZF-supplied four-wheel steering provides an 8.6-m (28.2-ft) turning circle for easy maneuvering.
Zoox was cofounded in 2014 by Jesse Levinson, now Chief Technology Officer, and Tim Kentley-Klay with a vision of purpose-built, zero-emissions vehicles designed for autonomous ride-hailing along using an inhouse end-to-end autonomy software stack. (The company’s name was inspired by Zooxanthellae: mobile, algae-like organisms that are powered by photosynthesis.)
The founders had a vision to combine artificial intelligence, robotics, and sustainable vehicle design and energy to reinvent personal transportation and make the future safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable for everyone. The company will provide mobility-as-a-service in dense urban environments in shared fleets of all-electric vehicles is to reduce congestion and pollution in cities.
It built and tested its first autonomous prototype in 2015, conducted its first test of bidirectional driving in 2016, and finished its first autonomous loop in downtown San Francisco in 2017. Zoox received California permits to transport passengers autonomously with a safety driver in 2018 and transport passengers autonomously without a safety driver in 2020.
“Revealing our functioning and driving vehicle is an exciting milestone in our company’s history and marks an important step on our journey towards deploying an autonomous ride-hailing service,” said Aicha Evans, Zoox Chief Executive Officer. “We are transforming the rider experience to provide superior mobility-as-a-service for cities. And as we see the alarming statistics around carbon emissions and traffic accidents, it’s more important than ever that we build a sustainable, safe solution that allows riders to get from point A to point B.”
Zoox is now led by Evans and Levinson. Other key leaders of the company’s over 1000 employees include Chief Safety Innovation Officer, Mark Rosekind; Chief Finance Officer, llan Hart; Chief People Officer, Erika Linford; General Counsel, Chris Nalevanko; SVP of Software, Ashu Rege; VP of Procurement and Strategic Partnerships, Bruce Baumgartner; VP of Vehicle Development, Andy Piper; and VP of Manufacturing Operations, Corrado Lanzone.
At 3630 mm (142.9 in) long, the vehicle has one of the smallest footprints in the automotive industry. The 1936 mm (76.2 in) tall vehicle features a four-seat, face-to-face symmetrical seating configuration with no steering wheel and is capable of SAE Level 5 automated driving.
Its 133-kW·h battery pack, split in two under the two bench seats, is one of the largest in electric vehicles shown to date, allowing operation for up to 16 h on a single charge. The vehicle sends sound signals to identify itself for pickup, and its lighting system constantly signals other road users what it will do next.
The vehicle has more than 100 safety innovations, including a novel ZF-supplied roof/seat airbag system for bidirectional vehicles and carriage seating for all four seats. The supplier was able to overcome the challenge of the “camp-fire seating” position, with two forward-looking and two backward-looking passengers, to provide five-star crash-safety protection.
Initially, the vehicle will drive in predefined areas using geometric and semantic maps. The sensor suite of 14 cameras, 20 radars, and 8 LIDARs provide overlapping, 270-degree, fields-of-view at all four corners beyond 150 m (492 ft), eliminating blind spots and allowing the vehicle to track surrounding road users at long range.
“Building a vehicle from the ground-up has given us the opportunity to reimagine passenger safety, shifting from reactive to proactive measures,” said CTO Levinson. “These include new safety features such as our airbag design, redundant hardware throughout the vehicle, a unique sensor architecture, and a custom AI stack that detects and mitigates potential risks.”
The vehicle’s autonomy is made possible by a high-performance, energy-efficient compute platform from Nvidia. Zoox and Nvidia announced their partnership in 2017, and Zoox is an alumnus of Nvidia’s Inception accelerator program for startups.
For robotaxis, achieving Level 5 autonomy requires compute with enough headroom to continuously add new features and capabilities. Nvidia enables this level of performance by starting with the infrastructure for training and validation and extending to in-vehicle compute. The vehicle can be continuously updated over the air with deep neural networks that are developed and improved in the data center.
The open and modular nature of the Nvidia platform enables robotaxi companies to create custom configurations to accommodate new designs, such as Zoox’s symmetrical layout, with cameras, radar, and lidar that achieve a 270-degree field of view on all four corners of the vehicle.
“Robotaxis are set to transform the way we move,” Danny Shapiro is Nvidia’s Senior Director of Automotive, wrote in a blog post. “Experts at UBS estimate these vehicles could create a $2 trillion market globally by 2030 while reducing the cost of daily travel for riders by more than 80 percent. With greater affordability, robotaxis are expected to decrease car ownership in urban areas—a recent survey of 6500 U.S. drivers showed nearly half would be willing to give up car ownership if robotaxis became widespread.”
Zoox is currently testing its vehicle in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Foster City. Its near-term goals are focused on testing on private roads with moderate pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and subsequently progressing to testing it on public roads. “Coming soon” are commercial operations in San Francisco and Las Vegas.
