Zoox CEO Says Robot Taxis Are Still Years Away From Industry’s Holy Grail: New York City
New York City has all the right characteristics to be ideal terrain for robot taxis like those being developed by Amazon-owned Zoox. Few people in Big Apple car ownership and residents rely on public transit and ride-sharing apps like Uber And Lyft.
“That is Saint Holy Grail for businesses,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans said on stage at Fortune’s Brainstorm Technology Conference in Park City, Utah, on Tuesday. “But it wasn’t easy.”
There’s one big problem for Zoox and other robotaxi companies looking to expand into the Northeast: snow.
Zoox’s autonomous driving technology works through maps, Evans explained, and differences in how snow is plowed or falls can change the roads from those maps. In an interview after his on-stage speech, Evans said Luck that all the robotaxi companies are doing more research to be able to operate on snow, but they haven’t figured it out yet. “I don’t want to mislead people into thinking this is just an extension of what we’re doing,” she said. “It requires some additional improvements.”
New Yorkers who have seen videos of friends in San Francisco or Los Angeles getting rides in self-driving cars may have to be patient. Evans told Fortune after her onstage speech at the conference that widespread deployment in New York may not happen for a while, though “certainly within a decade,” she said.
While self-driving car rivals like Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise have improved traditional cars by adding sensors and cameras, Zoox is focused on developing a completely new kind of vehicle, with no steering wheel or pedals for the driver.
Zoox has been slower to move than Waymo and Cruise, both of which have launched commercial robotaxi services in San Francisco (Cruise has since escaped Zoox, founded in 2014 and acquired by Amazon in 2020, has yet to launch a commercial passenger service, although it began offering employee shuttles early last year in Las Vegas and Foster City, California.
When asked about this, Evans dismissed the idea that being first to market is important.
“In tech, sometimes being first is good. And sometimes it’s not,” Evans said in the interview, noting that she tries not to think about it. “Are we doing the right thing? Are we moving at the right pace? Are we learning the right things? That’s really what we focus on.”
Read more content from Brainstorm Tech 2024:
Agility Robotics’ humanoid robot Digit is hard at work in its first real job—at a Spanx factory.
CEO Daily provides key context for the news leaders need to know from across the business world. Every weekday morning, more than 125,000 readers trust CEO Daily for insights from—and inside—the C-suite. Follow now.
