Billions of dollars are being spent to bring self-driving vehicles to the road. Commercial autonomous vehicles like robotaxis may be first.
-acquired start-up Zoox is custom testing its cube-like robotaxis in the Bay Area, Seattle, and Las Vegas, without initially charging for rides.Chasing the opportunity, equity funding in AV tech companies eclipsed $12 billion in 2021, up more than 50% from 2020, according to CB Insights. The U.S. funding is dominated by Waymo, which topped out at $5.
Production of robo-vehicles is costly but pursued as another strategy to commercialize the market. Cruise has partnered with GM and Honda to mass-produce the Origin, an all-electric self-driving, shared vehicle due out within a few years from GM's Factory Zero assembly plant in Detroit. Amazon-owned Zoox has built dozens of custom-built, electric, autonomous robotaxis at its plant in Fremont, rolling out gradually.
For Zoox, supplying Amazon with last-mile deliveries from its shuttles is a possible scenario."We haven't rule this out as a use case," said Jesse Levinson, Zoox CTO and co-founder."Our business model is charging people money to take a ride. The biggest cost of a ride-sharing vehicle is the driver. We can amortize the cost of the vehicle by these fares over five years."
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