While Waymos have become a staple of San Francisco life, the boxy, adorable Zoox robotaxis that have circled The Standard’s office for months have remained a novelty.
The Amazon-owned company has been testing its driverless (and steering-wheel-less) vehicles in SoMa, the Mission, and the Design District since November, but they’re not publicly accessible — so it was thrilling when two reporters received an invite to take a spin in the toaster on wheels.
To catch our ride, we arrived at Zoox’s SoMa outpost, a sprawling warehouse filled with Toyota SUV test vehicles and dozens of carriage-style robotaxis painted “aloe” green. The vehicles move bidirectionally (meaning they’ll never need to make a three-point turn), and the doors slide open instead of swinging out, so they won’t accidentally whack a passing cyclist.
The four seats in the gondola-style interior face inward, which means you can see everyone. It also means that two people will be moving backward. The Zoox app helpfully directs riders as to which side to choose if they get motion sickness — but if all four do, whelp, good luck. And no, you can’t open the windows.
We both boldly decided to take the backward-facing seats, and both ended up regretting it. Overall, you could describe the ride as a mental (and sometimes physical) roller-coaster.
When we first whirred off, our immediate reaction to being ferried backward through the streets was giddy excitement. The experience felt more like riding in an amusement park shuttle than a car. (Zoox cofounder Tim Kentley-Klay fittingly described his vision for the service as “Disneyland on the streets” in 2016.)
Each passenger has a personal screen to adjust the temperature in their quadrant. Unlike the climate control, everyone in the pod has to listen to the same song, chosen from an array of playlists, on the speakers.
Our choice? Greatest hits. “Walk Like an Egyptian” played as we glided past Costco.
Following the initial high, passengers can easily get pulled into the flow of conversation or thought (the Bangles are kind of underrated, actually) and forget that they’re cruising along in an entirely new type of vehicle.
Then, bam, suddenly you’re back to reality when the Zoox reacts to the world in a way you’re not expecting. At one point, one of us (Jillian) let out an audible yelp when the vehicle accelerated around a corner. The Zoox didn’t feel as smooth as a typical Waymo ride, especially when you can’t see the road ahead of you. We jerked several times as the vehicle contended with a bicyclist or abruptly hit the brakes. Neither of us is prone to carsickness, but when the time the trip ended and we started walking back to work, our bellies felt vaguely unsettled. Rya felt fully nauseous.
Jolts aside, we never doubted our safety during the ride. Perhaps we put too much faith in a vehicle that has already issued at least one software recall after a crash, but the litany of cameras, LiDAR remote sensing technology, radar, and infrared thermal sensors felt safer than our own obsolete eyes and ears.
A Zoox staffer provided a list of the car’s features, like how there’s a backup battery in case one runs out, twinkly overhead lights that turn on at night, and cordless phone charging. We learned that the robotaxis are named after Zooxanthellae, an algae known for its symbiotic relationship with its environment.
An unbuckled seat belt prompts the vehicle to pull over, and excessive movement may trigger a notification for a technician to check in through an internal camera, so sex in a Zoox could have an awkward conclusion.
Unrelatedly, if a technician who checks the vehicle at the end of a ride sees a mess left behind, they will recall it for cleaning. The company will also immediately let a rider know if they’ve left anything behind, through speakers outside the car.
Zoox will launch its paid ride-hailing service in Las Vegas before the end of the year and in San Francisco at some unspecified time after that. The company is testing its tricked-out SUVs in seven U.S. cities and recently announced a manufacturing hub in Hayward, to ramp up production of its not-car cars.
It’s easy to imagine a very near future in which you flip between apps for Uber, Lyft, Waymo, and Zoox and choose the fastest, cheapest ride to wherever you wish to go. The other companies have all become verbs — I’ll Uber there — and Zoox likely will too, once it’s widely available. When that time comes, we’ll add it to our rideshare rotation, though we’ll probably be calling shotgun for the forward-facing seats.