The industrial design studio of robo-taxi company Zoox is tucked behind a password-protected door in an office near San Francisco. Inside, a small team of designers at the Amazon-owned startup have been tinkering with clay, carbon fiber, colors, and fabrics—largely in secret.
On Tuesday morning, Nahuel Battaglia, the team’s original designer, is shyly pointing to his decade-old sketches of the futuristic car he hoped to help build. The old drawings, in many ways, resemble the car that Zoox plans to finally debut for paying riders in Las Vegas later this year or early next in a high-stakes race to catch up to Waymo, the robo-taxi arm of Google’s parent company.
