{"id":93598,"date":"2026-09-11T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=93598"},"modified":"2026-09-10T15:30:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T21:30:20","slug":"can-zooxs-toaster-on-wheels-conquer-the-self-driving-car-capital-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/can-zooxs-toaster-on-wheels-conquer-the-self-driving-car-capital-of-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Zoox’s ‘Toaster on Wheels’ conquer the self-driving car capital of America?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Can<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When Vita Shafiro, 51, and her daughter Mikhaela, 15, recently walked back to their downtown San Francisco hotel after sightseeing, an odd vehicle caught their eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A boxy turquoise car with no driver\u2019s seat or steering wheel idled outside the Zoox Rider Lounge, an Art Nouveau-style storefront. Zoox, a driverless car company owned by Amazon, opened the lounge in May so that people could pose for photos in front of its self-driving cars and take a free ride in one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI said, \u2018Oh, look at that fun-looking vehicle,\u2019 and I wanted to take a picture,\u201d said Ms. Shafiro, who had heard of Waymo, the driverless car leader, but not Zoox. She and her daughter returned the next day and rode a Zoox to the Ferry Building, a landmark on the San Francisco waterfront.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSurprisingly, I felt really good,\u201d said Ms. Shafiro, who later took another Zoox ride to the Castro neighborhood, adding that she wanted to invest in the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of technology is full of rivalries \u2014 Amazon and eBay, Google and Yahoo, Uber and Lyft, OpenAI and Anthropic. Now a new matchup is taking shape in the nation\u2019s tech capital between Zoox and Waymo, which kicked off the autonomous car industry and is owned by Google\u2019s parent, Alphabet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waymo, founded in 2009 as Google\u2019s experimental self-driving car project, is by far the leader in the field. It began commercial driverless rides in 2018 and now has nearly 4,000 vehicles in 15 cities, including San Francisco and Phoenix, with over a dozen more towns to come. Its brand is widely known, and it recently raised $16 billion in new funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, Zoox, which was founded in 2014, has about 100 autonomous vehicles in its fleet. It cannot yet charge for a ride in San Francisco as it awaits state regulatory approval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Zoox is competing by betting that novelty, community good will and the rider experience inside its odd-looking cars \u2014 sometimes called \u201ctoasters on wheels\u201d \u2014 can win over a city that has become the center for autonomous vehicle experiments. While Waymo\u2019s retrofitted vehicles are an ordinary sight in San Francisco, Zoox\u2019s carriage-like pods with no driver controls still draw stares and phone cameras.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFrom the beginning, we wanted to take a community-first approach,\u201d said Carly Wyatt, Zoox\u2019s vice president of communications and marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since May, the company has hosted more than half a dozen events at its Rider Lounge, including a recent happy hour where the women-focused brand Une Femme handed out free cans of wine. Zoox has also sponsored local festivals like the Stern Grove Festival, North Beach Festival and Flower Piano in Golden Gate Park. And it has become a sponsor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, often bringing a vehicle to events so people can sit inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zoox has also forged deals with social media influencers and introduced advertising campaigns with slogans like \u201ca robotaxi from the future.\u201d In June, it began offering free rides from its Rider Lounge to eight restaurants and a handful of San Francisco landmarks like the Painted Ladies, the postcard-perfect Victorian houses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Wyatt said Zoox tried to operate like a small business \u201cthinking of food, all the amazing restaurants, the areas that people know and love \u2014 and then how do we bring the Zoox experience to life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Waymo, which retrofitted cars, Zoox chose to build its driverless vehicles from the ground up at a plant in Hayward, Calif., without traditional controls like steering wheels and pedals. The company has leaned into the design, treating it as an edge over rivals, Ms. Wyatt said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zoox is working to begin widely deploying a commercial service. In July, federal regulators granted it a temporary exemption from certain safety standard requirements that include having windshield wipers and rearview mirrors, so it could place up to 5,000 vehicles on the road over the next two years and start collecting fares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last month, Zoox began charging for rides in Las Vegas, its first paid service anywhere, at prices that were slightly higher than standard rides with Uber and Lyft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to charge for rides in California, Zoox needs a deployment permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles and authorization from the state\u2019s Public Utilities Commission. Zoox said it had applied for a driverless deployment permit through the D.M.V., but the utilities commission\u2019s public permit list does not show the company holding one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are trying to get it as quickly as we can, but it is a couple-month process,\u201d Ms. Wyatt said of the authorization. \u201cWe own the fact that we\u2019re taking these baby steps.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For now, Zoox offers only free demonstration rides in San Francisco, which began in November. The company completes about 10,000 rides a week in the United States, compared with Waymo\u2019s more than 500,000 rides a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waymo declined to comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

San Francisco has seen driverless cars come and go before. Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, pulled its autonomous vehicles off the road in 2023 after a series of mishaps, including one car\u2019s running over and dragging a pedestrian. Waymo has faced its own embarrassing episodes, such as when one of its cars hit and killed a beloved bodega cat last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, the autonomous vehicle race is heating up. Tesla said on Thursday that it would begin offering rides in its driverless Cybercab, which has no steering wheel. (The vehicle will probably not be broadly available for some time.) In London, driverless cars operated by Uber and the British autonomous vehicle start-up Wayve are available for ride-hailing this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Driverless cars remain in their infancy, which means the onus is less on companies to one-up their rivals than on spreading awareness of their services in the first place, said Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Wharton School. Driverless car companies are still selling the very concept of a driverless taxi, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhile one brand may be larger in the category and more prominent in the category, many people don\u2019t know anything about the category,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in San Francisco, Carrie Blease \u2014 who with her husband runs Wolfsbane, a Michelin-starred restaurant \u2014 joined a partnership with Zoox in June. The company reached out to her through a hospitality agency to feature Wolfsbane as a destination for Zoox riders, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Blease agreed to work with Zoox despite not being a \u201chuge fan\u201d of driverless cars, she said. Waymos are so common around her Russian Hill neighborhood that she often gets stuck behind one, she added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Zoox felt different and \u201ca little bit more local,\u201d she said, adding that \u201cthey look more interesting\u201d than Waymos. Ms. Blease said she was excited when a few diners arrived at Wolfsbane via a Zoox last month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Blease herself has never ridden in one. \u201cI\u2019ve just never done it,\u201d she said. \u201cI like the chatter of someone in the car.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Credits: The New York Times<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author: By Emmy Martin<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Kelsey McClellan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Vita Shafiro, 51, and her daughter Mikhaela, 15, recently walked back to their downtown San Francisco hotel after sightseeing, an odd vehicle caught their eye. A boxy turquoise car with no driver\u2019s seat or steering wheel idled outside the Zoox Rider Lounge, an Art Nouveau-style storefront. Zoox, a driverless car company owned by Amazon, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":93599,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"slim_seo":{"title":"Can Zoox's 'Toaster on Wheels' conquer the self-driving car capital of America? - Opini\u00f3n P\u00fablica","description":"When Vita Shafiro, 51, and her daughter Mikhaela, 15, recently walked back to their downtown San Francisco hotel after sightseeing, an odd vehicle caught their"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1015],"tags":[465,4537,1859,4536,4535],"class_list":["post-93598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-optv-usa","tag-amazon","tag-self-driving-car","tag-technology","tag-toaster-on-wheels","tag-zoox"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93600,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93598\/revisions\/93600"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}