Zoox begins offering robotaxi rides in San Francisco, facing off with Waymo (www.cnbc.com)

Amazon-owned Zoox has started letting select San Francisco users hail its driverless, box-shaped robotaxis through a new "Zoox Explorers" program, offering free rides in SoMa, the Mission and Design Districts. Riders are being admitted from a waitlist as the company scales a fleet it says includes about 50 vehicles across San Francisco and Las Vegas; Zoox hopes to remove the waitlist by 2026. The rollout follows public pilot programs in Las Vegas and years of local testing (initially with retrofitted Toyota Highlanders), and marks the first time Zoox and Alphabet sibling Waymo will operate robotaxi services in the same city—Waymo opened to all San Francisco riders in June and has logged more than 10 million paid rides since its 2020 launch in Phoenix. The move matters because it intensifies direct competition between two deep-pocketed, mature robotaxi efforts and accelerates real-world validation of different technical and business approaches. Zoox’s vehicle is notable for being purpose-built with no steering wheel—a fundamental vehicle-architecture choice that affects redundancy, user experience, regulatory approvals and operational design—whereas Waymo has scaled rapidly using a different development pathway and extensive ride history. Both companies expanding freeway-capable services and city footprints raises the stakes for mapping, safety validation, fleet management and local regulatory frameworks, and will provide the AI/ML community richer real-world datasets and operational lessons about perception, planning and long-term deployment challenges.