Zoox robotaxi launches in Las Vegas
148 comments
·September 10, 2025_fat_santa
rurp
Certain road hazards are a much bigger issue on the strip than most roads. Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles. It looks like the initial service area is tiny but if Zoox handles those cases well it's a solid technical achievement and bodes well for expansion.
schmidtleonard
AWS Re:Invent is in December, so it's also a good time to show it off to potential evangelists (they've been teasing it for years).
krschultz
The Highlanders are testing vehicles: https://zoox.com/journal/autonomous-zoox-testing-vehicle
amenghra
Vegas is also good for many other reasons: year round good weather, lots of tourists in need of taxi services, too hot to walk, too drunk to drive, etc…
AnimalMuppet
It still snows in Vegas from time to time. Also, sandstorms are not great for visibility.
monero-xmr
#1 place cabbies have tried to scam me. #2 being Boston. Uber is such a blessing
jen20
Interestingly Vegas is the only place I will use a cab over Uber or Lyft or (preferably) Waymo. Using the Curb app to pay electronically you avoid most of the BS with cash and "their card machine being broken", and once you've done it a few times you know the actual correct routes between places.
badc0ffee
San Francisco, too. I'm so glad for Uber.
One downside to Uber in Vegas is that airport pickups happen in some hot parking garage far from the terminals.
acjohnson55
Baltimore was infamous for this when I lived there 15 years ago.
phkahler
>> though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
The robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.
Stratoscope
I think that comment meant that the Highlanders have drivers.
AnimalMuppet
It may be a maze of roads to the backs of casinos, but it's still a small maze of roads. I would expect the mapping of it to be very precise by now.
jewel
The front-to-back symmetry is interesting. It may cause some confusion for other drivers, in some limited circumstances, when they can't tell which way the vehicle is facing.
It appears, based on my study of the footage on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIRW8bfy4kE, that it could possibly switch which side is the front and the back by just changing the color of the lights. With RGB LEDs that would be pretty easy to do. But my question is, when would that be useful?
It would be neat that it could pull into a driveway and then leave in "reverse", but that doesn't seem like it'd come up that often for a robotaxi.
The back wheels look like they can steer. That's useful for parking in tight spaces.
jerlam
I wonder if there are barf bags for the backwards-facing passengers.
jen20
London Taxis have been configured this way since at least the 1950s and people don't seem to have any problem with it?
wmf
They can switch sides. They showed a demo of pulling into a parking space then driving straight out.
pfooti
These little front-back symmetric buses (as well as engineering-outfitted minivans) are pretty common in the mission in SF as well. I see them all the time in a very small (four or so blocks around 16th and folsom where my pottery studio is) area, but I think they're all still just test driving.
As a waymo user, I'm looking forward to a little more competition in the market. I quite like waymo, but driving price down woudl be great.
jerlam
I poked around on their site and read the press releases; Zoox seems to be limited to only pickups and dropoffs at a few set locations.
> Simply open the Zoox app to take a ride from several destinations on and around the Strip.
This puts it dramatically behind Waymo where I can walk out on any block in the coverage area and tell it to take me to any other block in the coverage area, not to mention Uber and Lyft.
I'm sure Zoox can improve this, but right now it resembles a self-driving shuttle more than a taxi service.
maelito
The most useful thing I expect from robotaxis is speed regulations.
What's considered normal for humans, driving higher than the speed limits, will not for automatic cars.
ratelimitsteve
I disagree wholeheartedly. I think the most useful thing about robotaxis is that you can count on them to pay attention and react within a given timeframe and that speed limits will either be expanded greatly, eliminated or calculated as a function of the capabilities of the individual hardware in question rather than our best guess as to how an average person would probably react. I'm looking forward to driverless cars careening about at 200+ mph because they can actively communicate and coordinate with traffic around them in order to do so safely.
echelon
I'm reminded of this prescient scene from the movie Logan:
techterrier
no thanks, I don't fancy dodging 120mph robots when I'm crossing the road, or breathing in the extra pollution that this would create (even if its an EV!)
riffraff
I think you misinterpreted, OP meant that robots will respect the rules, which humans typically don't, e.g. driving at 50 where the limit is 30.
techterrier
in which case I apologise :)
I've seen plenty of robotaxi huckers advocate for speed limits 'appropriate for robot response times'
cyanydeez
yes, but no. Yes, they'll do it for now. No, once they're as normal as humans, they'll definitely be tweaked to maximize profit. And that will include as much speeding as risk/reward dictates.
So yeah, they'll do the same thing as humans eventually.
bluGill
I expect robots to run at 120mph only when it is safe. Meaning I can safely cross the road, if they are going 120mph it is because they have correctly figured out I'm not going to cross the road in front of them.
orionsbelt
I have a good sense of what Waymo and Tesla’s capabilities are, but not Zoox. Can anyone here clue me in on how Zoox compares?
oooyay
Zoox is funded by Amazon and is built from the ground up to be a robotaxi fleet with a custom car. There is no steering wheel afaik.
Announcement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation/zoox-headquarter...
mandeepj
> Zoox is funded by Amazon
Amazon owns it, not just funded them.
> There is no steering wheel afaik
Maybe the control is in a remote centre then
_fat_santa
I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around, we actually got stuck behind one trying to make a right turn onto LV Boulevard (the strip) and seemed to be far to cautious.
sxp
https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2025/02/03/2024-disen... says it's about 40% as good as a Waymo if you use disengagement as a metric.
adrr
They are the second company to launch robotaxi services in the US.
standardUser
Cruise was technically second, for whatever that's worth (apparently not much).
techterrier
Hopefully some genius will figure out a way of joining lots of these together into a 'gigapod'. That might have enough capacity to actually work at city scale.
leetharris
I am getting so unbelievably tired of this smug comment. It reeks of reddit spam.
We all know trains would be nice. Unless you have some plan to rework our government into something that will allow for innovation here, then I prefer to see progress, even if it's not ideal.
JumpCrisscross
> getting so unbelievably tired of this smug comment
It's a dumb comment. But I find it interesting in how it reveals opportunities to leverage bridging expertise.
The infamous Dropbox comment [1] illustrated the complete lack of domain knowledge in marketing, sales and generally how non-tech people work that was commonplace among coders. A lot of people made a lot of money, and made a lot of other peoples' lives better, but bridging that gap.
This bus meme, on the other hand, illustrates a complete lack of domain knowledge around marketing and, in all likelihood, how governments and public transit work in the real world.
AnimalMuppet
I don't think the idea was trains at all. I think the idea was, if we're going to have N of them driving down The Strip, it would be more efficient to join them physically together than to have them maintain normal inter-car spacing.
And that could work, if the car in front can communicate power/brake/turn commands to the cars in the chain. And if you could dynamically drop cars out of the middle when needed. And if you could dynamically add cars when they're neighboring and going the same way. All those could be tricky, but they seem quite solvable.
Osyris
Perhaps maybe we add common places where it regularly stops and you can get on/off?
kfajdsl
I understand that you're being glib about buses or trains, but the driver is a large part of the operating costs of a bus, and additionally driverless buses might make more frequent but smaller buses more economical.
lazyasciiart
There are driverless light rails already, and there are cities that have built dedicated streets for buses which would be the first place I’d try actual driverless vehicles.
mortenjorck
The reductive "you just invented $existing_thing" framing is so tiresome.
There are so very many opportunities for a better surface transport system than buses. Dynamic routing and scheduling, capacity somewhere between a city bus and a taxi, and potentially better economies of scale all make this far more appealing than what exists today.
Also – and I know acknowledging this will not go over well in some circles – requiring an app and a credit card will go a long way toward keeping riders of a certain disposition off the vehicles. No, it's not a perfect proxy for who will and won't make riding unpleasant or unsafe, but riders will intuitively understand it even if they don't want to think about it, and it will make a difference.
amenghra
An automated van that has roughly regular routes but goes slightly out of its way to pick up/drop off people would be a good middle ground between taxis and buses —- not unlike Jeepnys in the Philippines.
bluGill
No, it is a terrible middle ground. They work only for people who are okay with being late to a meeting once in a while, or people who are okay with arriving far too early and then waiting once they get there. People who value their time want something predictable so they can arrange their time around things they understand.
signatoremo
Will they also stop in front of my house? Or can they be summoned on demand?
I already commute by train. I’d like to have something more flexible.
PhunkyPhil
You say this in jest, but Uber is trending towards this right now:
https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/uberx-share/
Convergent Evolution happening in realtime- it's almost as if community pooled forms of transportation are the most efficient...
smelendez
The route share option, which does sound like a minibus/dollar van, is interesting.
I've tried the current basic share option and it's not great, and I say that as someone who used pre-pandemic UberPool. You typically don't save much off a standard UberX ride, it's only available for exactly one person, the arrival estimates are wildly optimistic, and if the other rider isn't in the car they seem to never be ready when you get to their pickup location.
It's unfortunately, but the current pricing model seems to attract passengers who really don't want to be paying for an Uber but at least this way they can save a couple of bucks, which means they're typically in a stressful situation. Very different vibe from the old, social and wildly cheap UberPool, but that probably was never sustainable.
mensetmanusman
Wework gigapod so you are always working in a mobile office. Realestate hack.
standardUser
Putting aside their merit as urban transport, robotaxis can completely solve transportation in less dense areas, something no train can accomplish. It will be particularly valuable to the aging populations in a lot of small towns and rural areas.
ricree
Just about a year and a half too late for https://longbets.org/712/
Although from the article, it sounds like this might not be servicing a wide enough area to win the bet even if the time was extended a couple years.
dingnuts
no the bet is lost on every count
1 it's not fully autonomous, there's a remote operator
2 not a wide enough service area as defined in the bet
3 it's a pilot program, also excluded in the bet
4 it's also a year late and the bet is very much still lost
lol but we're going to have self driving cars by 2015 guys!
wedn3sday
Is the remote operator actually driving under normal conditions, or do they just step in during an exigent circumstance?
CSMastermind
I was just there last weekend and saw them everywhere. My buddy asked about it and I'd never heard of the company before. They're definitely distinctive.
Seems like robotaxis are getting ready for a big expansion, I see Waymos all over Orlando even though they don't offer service here.
tracker1
I worked in Chandler, AZ when Waymo started testing their cars, so it's funny that I don't really think much about them at this point.
nharada
Congrats to the team! It's no small feat to launch to the public in this space, and from the amount of testing I've seen Zoox doing it certainly seems like they've put in the work. Best of luck!
sgnelson
I feel like robotaxis are just electric bikes and scooters of 2025. I very well could be wrong (I think I am) but that's the vibes I'm getting from the robotaxis industry right now.
dewitt
> robotaxis are just electric bikes and scooters of 2025
Ubiquitous, and life changing for the millions of people who use them daily?
techterrier
Deployed recklessly, inevitably cluttering our pavements, filling our canals amoung other antisocial externalities that taxpayers get the bill for?
fyrn_
No way will that happen with how expensive robotaxis are to make
JumpCrisscross
> that's the vibes I'm getting from the robotaxis industry
…what does this mean? Are vibes another way of saying you feel like it without evidence?
standardUser
In the US, there's a good chance that AVs will become dominant in 10 years time. In China, it's all but guaranteed.
Apollo One has already launched service in the UAE and is expected to launch in Singapore and Malaysia by the end of the year. They're also expected to start testing in several European countries by the end of the year. The question I have at this point is, will only China benefit from launching this new global industry, or will the US manage to also be competitive on a global scale?
speed_spread
This being Vegas, they should make it possible to bet that you'll
- get lost
- be late
- collide with a moving car
- collide with stationary object
- run over a pedestrian (bonus for multiple!)
I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around. They seem to have a mix of robotaxis (like the ones pictured) and decked out Toyota Highlanders that look like Waymos but not as well "packaged", though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only operate in/around the strip). On the one hand all they really have to navigate is the strip which is just one giant straight road. But on the other hand most casinos on the strip have their entrances in the back and once you get off the strip and try to go up to one of these casinos it's a maze of roads. But that only speaks to the technical hurdles, I'm sure a big part of the calculus is that Vegas is very much a "novelty" kind of place and folks are much more likely to give it a shot when there.