Are Driverless Shuttles Finally on the Way?

• Autonomous vehicle developer Zoox begins testing its driverless shuttles in one area of San Francisco, for now accessible just to its employees.

• The Amazon-owned company plans to begin offering rides to paying passengers in 2025 in its four-passenger robotaxis.

• Driverless shuttles without driver controls that can carry multiple passengers to different destinations have been in development for some time, but have faced steeper hurdles when it comes to commercial rollouts.

Many current robotaxis are production cars modified with sensors and other hardware, but autonomous vehicle developers have also been working on robotaxis resembling vehicles you might have seen in a sci-fi film.

In accordance with genre conventions, these robotaxis of the future tend to look like small shuttle buses with sliding doors on each side, and feature no driver controls—or even a place for the driver. Seating is usually arranged conference-style, and the passenger capacity ranges from four to over a dozen. The robotaxis themselves also tend to be symmetrical in profile, so they appear about the same from the front as from the back, and can drive in either direction.

This is what autonomous developer Zoox has in mind as well, and this month the company revealed that it has started testing its driverless shuttle in San Francisco. But not all of San Francsco—just the SoMa neighborhood. And for now rides are open only to Zoox employees.

"Zoox is the only company driving a purpose-built robotaxi on public roads without traditional manual controls," said Jesse Levinson, Zoox co-founder and CTO. "This expansion marks our third city for our robotaxi operations, following Foster City and Las Vegas."

The company isn't new to the Bay Area per se, having been testing various prototypes with safety drivers behind the wheel in the city for years. But until recently, the company's production-aimed four-passenger robotaxi without driver controls has been testing elsewhere.

That's about to change as well as Zoox expands in Las Vegas operations—and welcomes its first paying customers.

"We are making significant progress towards welcoming our first public riders in Las Vegas in 2025," the company says. "We've recently deployed the robotaxi in a larger geofence in Las Vegas, including The Strip and surrounding areas."

Even though Zoox isn't alone in the robotaxi sphere with a custom-built autonomous vehicle, this bodystyle is seen as posing its own unique challenges for all robotaxi operators.

First, there is the question of manufacturing costs with a custom vehicle, as opposed to modifying an existing EV, especially in an industry that is facing some hard questions after billions have been spent on development. The advantages of a four-passenger autonomous vehicle without controls certainly include ride-pooling, or multiple passengers sharing a journey to different destinations, but the same could also be offered by production minivans.

Second, Zoox and other autonomous vehicle developers have yet to test out the reality of passengers sharing rides to different destinations. Outside of autonomous airport shuttles, which serve a very defined area, there hasn't been much testing of the convenience aspects of robotaxi shuttles.

For instance, would passengers prefer to ride alone, or would they be willing to share space with people they don't know if the price of that particular robotaxi was significantly lower?

Also, there is the issue of how many shuttles of this type would be needed to address demand in a particular area, as opposed to the number of car-based robotaxis doing the same. Would custom-built shuttles of this type be cheaper for a robotaxi operator to run, or would off-the-shelf EVs with the same sensors be cheaper?

Finally, there is the question of just when profitability is expected to be achieved, and what kind of scale would be needed to make this happen.

Zoox isn't alone in the robotaxi industry, and at the moment it's a different company that has most of the momentum in the SAE Level 4 sphere.

These questions have yet to be answered in real-world conditions, and Zoox's expansion of operations in 2025 should shed some light on our autonomous future.

Will driverless shuttles such as this one become commonplace in the robotaxi sphere, or will most robotaxis still be based on regular production cars? Let us know what you think in the comments below.