Amazon-owned Zoox said Wednesday it will start offering paid robotaxi rides in Las Vegas, Nevada, beginning Aug. 10, marking the company’s first commercial launch as it seeks to scale up and compete with Alphabet’s Waymo.
Zoox has been offering free driverless rides to the public in parts of Las Vegas and San Francisco, California, since last year. In July, federal regulators issued Zoox a temporary exemption from rules requiring human controls, giving it the green light to begin charging fares.
“However hard it was to build the technology up to get up to this point, there’s a new hard that’s coming, which is paid operations, where with the customer, there’s an expectation,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans said in an interview.
