A six decade old regulatory barrier preventing experimental self-driving concept vehicles from real-world, commercial operation has finally been cracked. In a historic decision, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has officially granted Amazon subsidiary Zoox a commercial exemption to deploy custom, purpose-built electric robotaxis as a paid ride-hailing service. This is the first time federal regulators have cleared a passenger vehicle built from the ground up, completely devoid of human driving controls. The Zoox pod has no steering wheel, no brake pedal, no accelerator and no rear-view mirrors. Better yet, the vehicle has no front or back, allowing it to pull into tight urban areas and roll out without ever needing to perform a U-turn. Passengers sit in a spacious, face-to-face interior with two rows of bench seats, which is a very different and much more sociable layout to traditional seating in cars. Since Amazon acquired the autonomous vehicle developer Zoox in June 2020 for approx. $1.2 billion, free public testing of Zoox robotaxis has been quietly underway in Las Vegas and San Francisco, clocking hundreds of thousands of miles for around half a million passengers. Clearing the federal roadblock was the final economic hurdle required to turn Amazon’s massive investment into a revenue-generating business.
