Amazon’s driverless taxi subsidiary Zoox has opened its first production facility for purpose-built robotaxis in the US and hopes to build more than 10,000 a year.
Amazon bought the start-up in 2020 for $1.2bn (£890m) with the intention of eventually launching a service akin to Google’s Waymo. Waymo began taking rides for its first commercial service in San Francisco in 2021, while Zoox is gearing up to start public rides in Las Vegas later this year, with San Francisco to follow.
The firm’s 220,000 square foot ‘state-of-the-art’ production facility is located in Hayward, California, and Zoox said it would be used for engineering, software integration, robotaxi assembly and storage components. The assembly line has also been designed to be adaptable to accommodate future design and feature changes.
“In an assembly facility focused on building autonomous robots, our Zoox crew remains an essential part of the manufacturing process,” the firm said in a blog post.
“Robots on the floor are primarily...