Foster City, California, USA

“Revealing our functioning and driving vehicle is an exciting milestone in our company’s history and marks an important step on our journey towards deploying an autonomous ride-hailing service,” said Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox Inc.

“We are transforming the rider experience to provide superior mobility-as-a-service for cities. And as we see the alarming statistics around carbon emissions and traffic accidents, it’s more important than ever that we build a sustainable, safe solution that allows riders to get from point A to point B.” Jesse Levinson, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of the autonomous mobility company Zoox, along with Mark Rosekind, Chief Safety Innovation Officer and their design team, have designed the first fully functional, electric, autonomous vehicle for dense, urban environments.

Zoox is the first in the industry to showcase a driving, purpose-built robo-taxi capable of operating up to 75 miles per hour.

Since its inception in 2014, Zoox has combined artificial intelligence, robotics, vehicle design, and sustainable energy to bring its vision of reinventing personal transportation to life — making the future safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable for everyone.

Designed and manufactured in the U.S. , Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon, is the only vehicle to offer bidirectional driving capabilities andnfour-wheel steering, which enables maneuvering through compact spaces and changing directions without the need to reverse.

Building from the ground up gives us an unmatched level of control over the design process.

Design always includes some element of compromise, but other companies don’t get to choose where to make those compromises.

Zoox’s in-house design and self-driving teams working in tandem have the unique ability to deliver a vehicle and rider experience that are true to our vision of safety, sustainability, and elegance.

They want the riders’ initial experience to be everything they hoped riding in a self-driving vehicle would be.

Providing them with a delightful, tailored, and intuitive experience in a beautiful, comfortable, and timeless environment is something only Zoox’s holistic, collaborative approach to design can do.

Creating self-driving vehicles is a difficult AI challenge. Zoox is accelerating full autonomy’s path to market by (i) designing the vehicle’s form factor around optimal sensor placement, and (ii) embedding fail operational safety systems into the vehicle’s architecture at the outset.

Zoox can iterate rapidly and ensure success by controlling SW/HW integration. Our competitors are dependent on traditional automakers in a 100-year-old-industry.

The harmonization of complex SW and HW will enable a more seamless user experience with higher degrees of personalization and unique features that do not exist today.

Aesthetically, the vehicle is a “modern carriage” where the interior is dedicated to rider experience and the exterior is focused on self-driving technology.

At 3.63m long, the vehicle has one of the smallest footprints in the automotive industry.

The vehicle features a four-seat, face-to-face symmetrical seating configuration that eliminates the steering wheel and bench seating seen in conventional car designs. The vehicle also features a 133 kWh battery, one of the largest available

This symmetrical design is also reflected in the exterior. We’ve placed self-driving sensors on the outside four corners of the roof, giving our self-driving technology an unrestricted view of the vehicle’s surroundings.

This creates what we call a “quadrant design,” where each corner of the vehicle’s exterior and interior is exactly the same, and the vehicle’s appearance is mirrored front to back.

Together, these design and technical achievements result in a vehicle that’s uniquely suited to our mission to bring autonomous ride-hailing vehicles to dense urban environments.

Four-wheel steering means the vehicle can pull into tight curb spaces without parallel parking.

This gives Zoox an advantage at pickup and drop-off because we can quickly get to the curb and out of the flow of traffic, providing a better and safer experience for our riders and other road users.

The vehicle is bidirectional, so there is no fixed front or back end. It can pull forward into a driveway and forward out onto the road without reversing. In the case of an unexpected road closure, the vehicle can simply flip directions or use four-wheel steering to turn around. No reversing required.

Instead of swinging open, both sets of doors slide open to take up less space and avoid striking nearby objects or entering the path of a bicyclist.

Carriage seating, which consists of two rows of seats that face each other, provides a unique experience that facilitates socializing.

Each seat has the same amount of space and delivers the same experience—there’s no bad seat in the house.

Carriage seating also makes room for a wider aisle, allowing passengers to pass by each other without getting up or contorting into awkward positions.

Altogether, these design details give our riders freedom they can’t experience anywhere else, backed by our safety innovations not featured in conventional cars.

The vehicle design has more than 100 safety innovations not featured in conventional cars, including a novel airbag system for bidirectional vehicles and carriage seating that envelops passengers, which is equal to five-star crash safety protections for all four seats.

The vehicles utilize a unique sensor architecture of cameras, radar, and LIDAR to obtain an unrivaled 270-degree field of view on all four corners of the vehicle, eliminating typical blind spots and allowing the vehicle to consistently track objects next to and behind it, including pedestrians, bicyclists, and other road users.

“Safety is the foundation of everything we do. Building a vehicle from the ground-up has given us the opportunity to reimagine passenger safety, shifting from reactive to proactive measures,” said Levinson.

“These include new safety features such as our airbag design, redundant hardware throughout the vehicle, a unique sensor architecture, and a custom AI stack that detects and mitigates potential risks. Our vehicle has passed key FMVSS crash tests, and we are continuing to look for new, innovative ways to protect our riders and others on the road.”

Project: Zoox
Designers: Jesse Levinson and Mark Rosekind, Zoox Inc
Manufacturer: Zoox Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon