Zoox is now welcoming its first public riders in San Francisco (zoox.com)

Zoox has opened its Explorers program to the public in San Francisco, inviting waitlisted riders to book free point-to-point trips within a service area covering much of SoMa, Mission and the Design District. The rollout — following Zoox’s commercial service start in Las Vegas in September and almost a decade of local testing since 2017 — uses the company’s purpose-built robotaxi and an app-driven waitlist model; riders are dropped close to their destination and given walking directions for door-to-door access. Zoox is also partnering with local businesses (starting with Tartine Manufactory) to pilot real-world usage patterns and rider flows. For the AI/ML community this is a notable production deployment of autonomy in a dense, complex urban ODD (operational design domain). Bringing vehicles into San Francisco provides fresh, high-value real-world data on perception, localization, planning and human–robot interaction across tighter streets, varied lighting, and richer pedestrian behavior than resort-strip environments. The Explorers program’s feedback loop and staged waitlist-based scaling let Zoox iterate on UX, safety policies, fleet management and edge-case handling before broader expansion — a practical case study in moving models from simulation and closed testing into noisy, live environments.