New York City has all the right traits to make it ideal terrain for robotaxis like those being developed by Amazon-owned Zoox. Few people in the Big Apple own cars, and residents rely on public transit and ride-share apps like Uber and Lyft.
“It is the Holy Grail for the business,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans said on stage at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah, on Tuesday. “But it’s not easy.”
There’s one big problem for Zoox and other robotaxi companies eager to expand into the Northeast: snow.
Zoox's autonomous driving technology operates via mapping, Evans explained, and differences in the way snow is plowed or falls may alter the roads from those maps. In an interview after her on-stage talk, Evans told Fortune that all robotaxi companies are doing additional research to be able to operate in the snow, but they haven’t figured it out just yet. “I don't want to mislead people that it's just an extension of what we're currently doing,” she said. “It requires some additional innovation.”
New Yorkers who have watched videos of friends in San Francisco or Los Angeles hitching rides in self-driving cars may have to be patient. Evans told Fortune after her on-stage talk at the conference that broad deployment in New York might not happen for some time, though “definitely within a decade,” she said.
While self-driving car rivals like Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise have modified traditional automobiles by adding sensors and cameras, Zoox is focused on developing an entirely new class of vehicle, with no steering wheel or pedals for human drivers.
Zoox has moved at a slower pace than Waymo and Cruise, which have already both launched commercial robotaxi services in San Francisco (Cruise has since exited the San Francisco market after its self-driving license was suspended). Zoox, which was founded in 2014 and acquired by Amazon in 2020, has yet to launch commercial passenger service, though it started offering employees rides early last year in Las Vegas and Foster City, Calif.
When asked about this, Evans shrugged off the idea that being first-to-market was important.
“In tech, sometimes being first has been good. And sometimes it hasn't,” Evans said in the interview, noting she tries not to think about it. “Are we doing the right things? Are we going at the right pace? Are we learning the right things? That's really what we focus on.”
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