Robotaxi companies are learning the hard way that operating driverless cars also means that there’s no one supervising what happens inside them.
Take Zoox, the Amazon-owned self-driving startup that’s been offering rides, free of charge, in Las Vegas and San Francisco since September. It claims that it’s served more than 500,000 passengers — while acknowledging that some of them haven’t exactly been sticklers for the rules.
“You’re not supposed to smoke in the vehicle. They smoke in the vehicle. And they’re smoking everything in the vehicle,” an exasperated Chris Stoffel, Zoox’s director of robot industrial design and studio engineering, told Fast Company in a new interview. “Like, how do we interact with that?”
Unlike its competitors, Zoox uses its own unique car that it designs and builds in-house. There’s no driver seat or steering wheel, let alone traditional car doors. Instead, it has two rows of face-to-face seats fitting four people, and sliding doors that part in the middle. It’s like a train car on wheels, if the train car was way smaller and looked like a minimalist toaster.
