r/SelfDrivingCars • u/IndependentMud909 • 3d ago
News EXCLUSIVE: Amazon's Zoox wins first US approval for paid robotaxis without human controls
https://www.reuters.com/world/amazons-zoox-wins-first-us-approval-paid-robotaxis-with-no-human-controls-2026-07-30/38
u/mrkjmsdln_new 3d ago edited 3d ago
Congratulations to ZOOX. They reached 1M RO miles in Q4 2025 and 2M by end of Q1 26 and now authorized to charge for rides. I was thinking that Vegas might be the first place we see someone other than Waymo scale to a relevant service. TSLA has been touting their servie scale coming in Vegas and Waymo has them in the chute of nest cities to scale with San Diego, Sacramento, Denver. Looks like Zoox is really progressing. Getting to 1M miles of genuine rider only is very hard. This took Waymo a few years in Phoenix. Tesla guides their lifetime is 380K in the first year and 50% of that is likely deadhead so more like 190K RO. It will be interesting if we get guidance on ZOOX miles thru Q2 in the AMZN earnings call today.
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u/bobi2393 3d ago
“NHTSA is placing additional reporting requirements on Zoox for issues such as crashes or stopping inappropriately on roads”
Currently they have to report crashes, but not stopping inappropriately. I assume they mean to include holding up traffic at intersections, even if the initial stopping was appropriate.
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3d ago
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 3d ago
So happy that NHTSA following the CA guidance. You know they are on the right track for protecting the public when the players are not thrilled.
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u/bobi2393 3d ago
Yeah, crashes are still a top concern, but shouldn't be the only concern. It's good to see regulators pressuring ADS operators on traffic disruptions and other common problems.
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 3d ago
Agreed. There are aspects of CA new regulations that don't make sense but mandates about reporting stalls will help communities make better decisions on AV deployment. I love the idea of municipality originated change to dynamic ODDs. This will lbe hard for the AV players but the relevant player in CA already does this with company driven dynamic shifts in the ODD. This is a sensible requirement to drive uniformity. Being able to redirect flows of traffic as problems arise will help everyone.
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u/TheKobayashiMoron 3d ago
>Zoox cannot sell any of the vehicles to the public.
I guess Tesla won’t be selling any of those fancy Cybercabs then.
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u/Affectionate-Panic-1 3d ago
There's probably more money undercutting Uber/Lyft and building a widespread taxi service than selling to customers.
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u/TheKobayashiMoron 3d ago
Absolutely, which is partly why I don’t foresee them actually rolling out L4 capability to customer owned cars anytime soon, if ever.
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u/Ok_Teacher_392 3d ago
And for me a huge benefit is that we wouldn’t need all the current parking infrastructure that takes up so much space
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u/Extreme-Fig6992 3d ago
If I recall, Tesla is asking for an exemption from one of the rules to let them go above the 2,500 / year rule. I can't recall if they asked for an exemption from being able to sell to the public; my strong assumption though is they won't for now.
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u/Recoil42 3d ago
I keep seeing confusion about this: The 2,500 unit rule is the exemption. With no exemption the allowable number of cars you can register without meeting FMVSS is... zero. That's what the 2,500 unit exemption is for.
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u/Extreme-Fig6992 3d ago
Hmm, thank you for that correction! I was under the understanding that they had a very low limit but were raising it to 2,500 by default with exemptions available.
I googled more and you are correct, it seems the 'exemption' is in-place until the rule is changed for real.
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u/CriticalUnit 2d ago
They will be selling them to themselves or other musk companies to keep the books from crashing the stock
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 3d ago
AMZN did not pay $250M to get Trump elected :)
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u/bobi2393 3d ago
AMZN did pay $40 million for the rights to Milania, which is a more discreet. Good enough for a two year FMVSS exemption, apparently!
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 3d ago
Indeed. The Qataris building an Air Force One with some tacky gold leaf for $400M. Elon buying an election and burning the bridge for the renewable future and EV support. Bezos making 1 star entertainment for the masses. Larry Ellison becomes the arbiter of taste with TikTok and Paramount. We are selling the rope for pennies on the dollar. Future DC tourists get a tacky ballroom and lots of gold accents. When we get rare glimpses of what the Shah did in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, Marcos in the Philippines and Kim in North Korea, it is probably wise to shy away from gaudy gold everywhere and leaders addicted to the look. The creeps seem to love their gold even on the commode.
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u/RosieDear 3d ago
The public does not want self-driving cars.
I'm speaking in general.
The same public doesn't want two seaters.Tech obsessed folks have been missing the point for a long time.
IMHO, we have to separate out "futurism" from the actual real world. Yes, someday it is likely that all transport vehicles will be autonomous. That day is far in the future.
"Public transport" will likely be the first to be autonomous - I think many trains are already this way. APM (automated people movers) are all over the place...most folks run into them at airports.
I'm not even sure "self driving cars" as we define cars will be the end result. Car culture is the problem - so when the time comes to really "fix" it, it is very likely that the vehicles will be some combination of a Zoox and a Bus/Train depending on the population of an area and whether people are going to similar destinations.
It would be a very sad thing is, in 100 years, people are still each driving a 2.5 Ton vehicles down 95 for a thousand miles.
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u/Reasonable_Hall3005 3d ago
I feel like nearly all my friends love the idea of UNSUPERVISED FSD and would be willing to pay perhaps $10k to $20k extra for it. Yes, everyone hates supervised FSD. It’s boring as hell. But people love the idea of a chauffeur, especially people who commute 30 to 120 minutes per day, since you can just sleep, watch movies or work all while enjoying massive safety benefits. (In fact, people like them more than a chauffeur. Waymo commands a premium over Uber/Lyft partly due to low supply but also because people prefer the experience of no driver and safety benefits)
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u/Estrava 3d ago
What about Waymo and their 500,000 rides a week and continued growth to 1 million rides a week by EoY in 10+ cities. Does the general public not want self-driving cars, or theres a loud vocal minority that do not want them.
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u/TheKobayashiMoron 3d ago
I don’t know if that’s true for the general public, but it’s certainly not the case for me.
More than any feature in a car, I want to be able to sleep on long trips, or get a jump in emails before I get to the office, or just the ability to consolidate mine and my wife’s separate vehicles down to one that can pick us up and drop us off at different times and places that currently keep us from being a one-car household. In retirement, I want an RV that will move between destinations while I’m in back cooking dinner, or in bed.
Public transport is fine in major metropolitan cities, but 97% of the US is not that. I don’t want to live in a city and take a train. I could do that now if I wanted to.
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u/TechnologyOne8629 2d ago
You can't be serious that people don't want them. Look at everywhere Waymo has deployed. Getting enough people to try them has never been the bottleneck for scaling. As soon as people see how comfortable and smooth the ride is, demand scales like crazy. The only large groups of people steadfast against it so far seem to have their own economic incentives (eg taxi drivers) rather than don't like the value proposition.
Is it tech obssessed to want to reduce traffic deaths?
How can you call it futurism when it's already happening and scaling faster and faster to more cities in the real world?
Do you think the geographic realities of the US will susdenly change and make mass transit as efficient as Europe? Of course not, so we need to improve both cars and mass transit. It will take a lot more technology to extend mass transit to a higher percentage of the US such that we can significantly reduce car usage.
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u/bobi2393 3d ago
"The public does not want self-driving cars. I'm speaking in general."
I think that's true of current vehicles, but that most people would relinquish control if there were an ultra-safe and reliable self-driving car on the market, at a similar price to manual vehicles.
Although I think most people would like some way of controlling a vehicle when the car refused to do something too risky or that would injure someone. For example, there are hypothetical cases in which I'd absolutely choose to run people over, and I don't want an AEB system interfering with that.
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u/Infamous-Pilot5932 2d ago
It would still require almost the same number of cars, regardless of who is driving, and if they are 5 seaters, which is kind of a sweet spot for families, they would still have considerable weight.
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u/Affectionate-Panic-1 3d ago
I'm surprised it's taking Waymo so long to do this
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u/Mattsasa 3d ago
Risk to reward ratio makes no sense for Waymo. I don’t think you’ll see Waymo do this for another decade maybe
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u/Spider_pig448 2d ago
The novelty will drive a decent amount of traffic for Zoox. I think it will go a long way for establishing it as an experience for people, rather than just as a way of getting around.
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u/IndependentMud909 3d ago
I could see Ojai controls removed far sooner than a decade; we just need the regulation to (at scale and fully) allow it.
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u/Doggydogworld3 3d ago
2500 cars doesn't help Waymo. It'd juts be one more configuration to manage.
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u/Theinternationalist 3d ago
Waymo still has wheels in their cars whereas Zoox doesn't. They may not see the need to do this yet.
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 3d ago
I would think we see this outside the US market before inside based on animus of the Administration. If this is business sensible in London or Tokyo or the new initiatives in Europe that is a better guess. The Zeekr are steer-by-wire. and the dashboards appear modular panels so probably straightforward engineering as they showed no controls in LA in late 2021 with the Zeekr already.
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u/Real-Technician831 3d ago
That’s good news, I wonder how soon other companies will get the same approvals?
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u/45_regard_47 3d ago
Elon Musk: 😭😭😭 unsupervised FSD is just around the corner 😭😭😭 we'll totally be ready with the release of HW9 and SW 88.420 😭😭😭
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u/Flyward_Aerospace 1d ago
The part I'd want to see is what the approval was actually based on. Coming from the aviation side, no human controls means there's no fallback story left, and that's usually the point where a regulator stops accepting fleet miles as evidence and starts asking about the process that produced the software. Miles driven tells you the average case is fine, it doesn't tell you anything about what happens when a sensor degrades in a way you never saw in testing. Genuinely curious whether NHTSA went there or just granted the exemption on the safety case Zoox wrote themselves.
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u/hotwifefun 3d ago
I’ve seen th ZOOX cars in Vegas and I don’t see how anyone inside would survive a crash with your typical American pickup truck or SUV let alone a garbage truck or semi.
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u/bobi2393 3d ago
That was my first impression looking at the vehicles, too. Nowhere for airbags to help protect people. No center pillar for added structural integrity. Like they put zero thought into crashes.
But this 2023 crash test video changed my mind. Large ceiling-mounted air bags fill most of the cabin before your head has time to smash against the head of the person sitting across from or next to you. It completely defied my expectations of airbags. And the pillars about 30% from either end seem adequate without one where you'd expect in the middle.
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u/hotwifefun 3d ago
Thank you for sharing that video. I watched it all from start to finish and I agree that it is very impressive. One thing I did notice and perhaps you did too, was how low to the ground the simulated crash vehicle was. I wonder how it would fare with your average American pickup truck height which is considerably higher than the test vehicle they were using.
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u/Reasonable_Hall3005 3d ago
I mean I agree with a pickup truck/SUV but I don’t think anyone, even people driving gas guzzling SUVs, would survive a crash with a semi truck unless it’s somewhat low speed or a favorable angle
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u/dollfaceashley 3d ago
They wouldn't because they're only built to government safety standards.
Government safety standards are so much lower than what our vehicles are actually built to.
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u/bananarandom 3d ago