Allison discusses the Zoox Robotaxi, an operational vehicle built for riders, not drivers, and funded by Amazon.
Zoox is a full Level-4 autonomous vehicle designed to hold four passengers and pick up, navigate, and drop off passengers in a city environment. The seating positions are symmetrical so each rider gets the same level of comfort and technology.
Zoox’s interior features include plenty of room to stretch out your legs, wireless charging for mobile devices, and a screen for each rider to check arrival time, location, and route.
Exterior features include four-wheel steering, allowing the vehicle to steer into tight pick-up spots and easily navigate busy city streets. Zoox is fully symmetric front and back, so it can travel equally well in either direction. Interchangeable headlight/taillight lighting on the vehicle tells other drivers which direction it is or will be moving. Zoox can also send external sound notifications to identify itself for a pickup.
Zoox is equipped with a full suite of sensors including optical cameras, Infrared cameras, LIDAR, and Radar, to support Level-4 autonomous driving. Zoox has a 133 kWh battery which allows it to drive all day.
Zoox is currently operating on a test basis on city streets in San Francisco and Las Vegas.
Learn more at https://zoox.com/
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Transcript of Video:
Allison explained Zoox by herself:
One of the vehicles that’s getting a lot of attention at CES is Zoox, and I’m standing next to it right now. This is kind of a proof of concept vehicle for allowing people to drive, maybe on a route that would be considered like a small shuttle service. Not autonomous driving all over the place, but this is an autonomous vehicle. It’s level four, which means it’s fully automated without a driver, and this is operating in parts of San Francisco where it’s on a fairly small loop, but here in Las Vegas it’s actually going out on the Strip.
The vehicle has an entry and exit door on both sides. It’s got sensors on the top four corners. It’s got LIDAR, it’s got radar, it’s got optical cameras and infrared, and there’s four of them which they actually overlap with each other, and this allows them to get full 360 degree view, and even if one of these got disabled in some way, the other three would still be able to give them full coverage of the road and everything around them.
Now we’re looking at it from this side right now, and we can see that there’s bench seating, and they’re facing each other, which might be kind of weird if you’re in a shuttle situation, but that’s still cool. Inside you’ve got what looks to be a phone display there. You can change the temperature, you can watch your maps and stuff like that. You can make contact with the driver services through an emergency button in the top if you’re nervous for some reason.
There’s also speakers all the way around the car, above where you would think the license plate would go in the front and the back, and I’m going to put my mic up against it here. Right now it’s playing music, but we asked why they would have speakers on the outside, and they said so that the people inside could speak to authorities if the car was pulled over, and also to speak to people that maybe are on the street. I don’t know, they said, “What if somebody’s banging on the car?” “Hey, quit banging on the car.”
So this is called Zoox Z-O-O-X, and it’s kind of a proof of concept, but it’s being funded by Amazon.