These days, the hype is all about AI and robots, but almost a decade ago, the tech du jour was self-driving. You couldn't swing a lanyard at CES for the latter half of the last decade without hitting a robotaxi; post-COVID, the number of startups has shrunk, but the technology has definitely matured. Go to the right cities—San Francisco and Austin, Texas, spring to mind—and you might see dozens of sensor-festooned vehicles among the downtown traffic.
The pod-like robotaxis belonging to Zoox stand out. Other robotaxi developers are retrofitting existing vehicles like Hyundai Ioniq 5s with sensors and the computing power necessary for self-driving. Zoox, which was bought by Amazon in 2020, did that with its test fleet, but as it starts to offer ride-hailing services—currently in Las Vegas and San Francisco—it's doing so with a purpose-built design that looks like it just drove off the set of a big-budget sci-fi production.
"A robotaxi is not a car; it's not a human-driven vehicle, and the requirements are wildly different, although it has to live in that world," explained Chris Stoffel, director of robot industrial design and studio engineering at Zoox.
DW Russian 
