Lately the mobility company Zoox, bought by Amazon in June, revealed its electric, autonomous vehicle being designed for dense, urban environments. With the vision to make personal transportation safer, cleaner and more enjoyable, Zoox has now presented its first-generation of the robotaxi after working on it for the last six years.

The design is radical. With its length of 3.63 m, the vehicle features a four-seat, face-to-face symmetrical seating configuration. There is no steering wheel or cockpit and thus no driver’s seat or predefined front and rear. So basically nothing reminds of a traditional taxi. The vehicle is equipped with a 133 kWh battery allowing it to operate up to 16 continuous hours on a single charge and up to 75 miles per hour. Since both vehicle axles are steerable, the robotaxi is able to turn almost on spot. It can drive forward and backward equally well, which is pretty smart in dense environments. Besides it features various innovations such as a novel airbag system for bidirectional vehicles. The roof is equipped with six lidar sensors as well as multiple radar sensors and cameras providing a 270-degree field view of view at each corner. This eliminates typical blind spots and allows the vehicle to consistently track objects next to and behind it like pedestrians, bicyclists as well as other road users. The sensor suite allows the vehicle to see objects up to 150 meters away.

“Revealing our functioning and driving vehicle is an exciting milestone in our company’s history and marks an important step on our journey towards deploying an autonomous ride-hailing service. We are transforming the rider experience to provide superior mobility-as-a-service for cities. And as we see the alarming statistics around carbon emissions and traffic accidents, it’s more important than ever that we build a sustainable, safe solution that allows riders to get from point A to point B.” – Aicha Evans, Chief Executive Officer of Zoox

Pictures: Zoox
Text: Britta Reineke