Amazon's autonomous vehicle subsidiary Zoox is making its boldest moves yet — significantly expanding its robotaxi service across Las Vegas and San Francisco while preparing to launch in Austin and Miami. With nearly two million fully autonomous miles clocked, over 350,000 riders served, and a landmark partnership with Uber now confirmed, Zoox is accelerating from early-stage pioneer to credible challenger in the rapidly heating US robotaxi market. This is what a year of growth looks like.
The Vehicle: Purpose-Built from the Ground Up
What sets Zoox apart from every other player in the robotaxi market is its vehicle. Rather than retrofitting an existing consumer car with autonomous hardware, Zoox built its robotaxi entirely from scratch — a fact that has significant commercial and operational implications.
The vehicle, affectionately nicknamed the "toaster" by riders due to its distinctive boxy silhouette, features no steering wheel, no pedals, and no driver's seat. Seats face each other in a social, carriage-style configuration for up to four passengers, with subway-style doors, in-seat controls for music and temperature, wireless charging, and a 16-hour battery life on a single charge. That extended range means Zoox's fleet spends significantly more time collecting fares than competitors whose vehicles require more frequent recharging.
Critically, Zoox operates with no safety driver — making it one of a very small number of fully driverless commercial services currently operating on public roads anywhere in the world.
Las Vegas: From the Strip to the Convention Centre
Zoox launched its first fully autonomous public ride-hailing service in Las Vegas in September 2025, initially serving destinations on and around the Strip. Since then, the Las Vegas operation has clocked nearly two million autonomous miles and carried over 350,000 riders — a remarkable milestone in less than a year of commercial operation.
The expansion more than doubles the number of accessible locations, adding the Las Vegas Convention Centre, most major hotels on the Strip, and introducing limited service at the T-Mobile Arena and the Sphere — beginning with employee passengers before opening to the public later in 2026. Preparations are also underway to connect Harry Reid International Airport (LAS), which served nearly 55 million passengers in 2025, representing a substantial future demand opportunity.
"This expansion marks a significant step forward for Zoox and is driven by the insights from our early deployments. This is our year of growth. We are actively implementing learnings to confidently and safely scale our robotaxi service across the country."— Aicha Evans, CEO, Zoox
San Francisco: Quadrupling the Coverage Area
In San Francisco, Zoox launched its Explorer Program in late 2025, initially covering a narrow area of the city's south-east. The 2026 expansion changes the picture dramatically — quadrupling the operational area to cover a large portion of the city's eastern half, including the Marina, North Beach, Chinatown, Pacific Heights, and the Embarcadero.
Rather than restricting access to residential areas as many competitors have done, Zoox is deliberately targeting high-frequency ride-hailing zones — where the majority of trips actually originate. The company plans to launch a paid robotaxi service in San Francisco in the second half of 2026, pending regulatory approval from the California Public Utilities Commission, and aims to remove the waitlist entirely as fleet capacity grows.
Next Cities: Austin, Miami — and a Growing Testing Footprint
Beyond the two established markets, Zoox has announced initial rollouts in Austin, Texas and Miami, Florida. Both cities have been tested since 2024 using a retrofitted fleet of Toyota Highlander SUVs equipped with sensors — driven by safety drivers to map roads and train the AI on local traffic conditions. Once the AI reaches a proven safety threshold in a given city, the software transfers seamlessly to Zoox's purpose-built driverless vehicle.
The initial Austin and Miami deployments will be limited to Zoox employees, family, and friends — consistent with the company's phased, safety-first rollout model. From there, a customer waitlist will open, followed by the Zoox Explorers pilot programme, and eventually full public service. Zoox has also announced testing deployments to Dallas and Phoenix, joining a broader mapping programme already underway in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington DC.
The Competitive Landscape: Positioning Behind Waymo
Zoox is positioning itself as the second-largest robotaxi operator in the United States, behind Alphabet's Waymo — which has surpassed 400,000 weekly rides across six metro areas and is targeting expansion to London and Tokyo. The gap remains significant, but Zoox's trajectory in 2026 represents a genuine acceleration in pace.
Where Waymo uses adapted versions of the Jaguar I-PACE and Zeekr, Zoox's purpose-built vehicle offers a genuinely differentiated passenger experience — and a fleet efficiency advantage through its extended battery life. The company has also moved ahead of Tesla, which as of early 2026 was only beginning to remove safety monitors from its Austin test fleet.
Zoox is also seeking a federal exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to commercially deploy up to 2,500 vehicles on US roads — a critical regulatory milestone that would significantly accelerate its path to paid, at-scale operations.
"We believe that we will create a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company just moving people around."— Jesse Levinson, Co-Founder & CTO, Zoox