ZOOX!

[Liberal In Texas]

Coming to my town, apparently.

What is a Zoox?It has all the charm of one of those shopping carts with a kid car attached to the front, and all the cool of a Kia Soul, and Zoox could be coming to Dallas as the latest robotaxi-type affair. Amazon announced its Zoox is expanding, which sounds like a delicate personal problem, but is actually a “purpose-built robotaxi” and not, the company says, a car. Do you hear me? It’s NOT a car.

The company is now sending a testing fleet of retrofitted SUVs (which are cars) to manually map Dallas before moving on to autonomous testing. There will always be a safety driver behind the wheel to disengage the AI if needed. The testing vehicles will be in central Dallas neighborhoods, a press release from the company says. Once everything has been mapped and tested, the robotaxis follow. It operates the Zoox (I feel ridiculous right now) in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. and is also testing them in Phoenix.


https://www.dmagazine.com/micropost/what-is-a-zoox/

I am going to guess that in a few years robo taxis will be fairly ubiquitous. As we boomers start to get too old to safely drive, we'll have ways to run our errands and buy groceries.