The autonomous-vehicle company Zoox had been talking to Amazon intermittently for a few years when the COVID-19 pandemic "threw some curveballs" at the startup, Zoox Chief Technology Officer and cofounder Jesse Levinson told Business Insider. In April, Zoox laid off 10% of its workforce.
While Levinson said Zoox wasn't in danger of going bankrupt (CEO Aicha Evans framed the situation in more dire terms in an interview with The New York Times), it was still in a difficult spot as it worked on a new funding round. Running an autonomous-vehicle company means paying hundreds of engineers, building or buying expensive hardware, and operating a fleet of vehicles loaded with sophisticated computers for years without meaningful revenue.
"Zoox is not a cheap company to run," Levinson said. Any serious self-driving company requires hundreds or thousands of skilled engineers, a lot of expensive hardware, and a logistics operation that allows for safely testing prototype cars on public streets.
But Zoox began to consider a wider variety of fundraising options, as Amazon started to think about taking the step it hadn't with its previous investments in automated-driving and electric-vehicle startups: buying Zoox outright.
"Both sides got very excited about that very quickly," Levinson said.
But each side had questions for the other. Amazon wanted to know that Zoox had the technology and talent to justify an acquisition. To prove it had made serious progress, Zoox took its Amazon counterparts on rides in self-driving test vehicles that navigated the crowded streets of downtown San Francisco, a city known for its difficult driving conditions.
Zoox, for its part, wanted to make sure Amazon wasn't going to mess with its long-term goal of building a robotaxi service.
"We have a pretty big vision, and it was important to us to achieve and fulfill that vision, not to do some small subset of it," Levinson said.
That vision involves redesigning taxis for a world without drivers. While most autonomous-vehicle outfits are focusing on building a computer-operated driving system that could apply to various kinds of vehicles and business cases, Zoox has remained concentrated on ride-hailing. Moreover, it has spent years designing a new kind of vehicle for the driverless age.
Levinson said Amazon made clear it wasn't going to force Zoox to shift its focus to package deliveries.
The closing of the deal, for a reported $1.2 billion, hasn't triggered any major changes in Zoox's long-term strategy or day-to-day operations, Levinson said. While he said he wouldn't rule out the possibility of one day using Zoox's tech for deliveries, the company remains entirely focused on ride-hailing.
Zoox offered more details on its robotaxi plans on Monday by unveiling the eponymous vehicle it intends to use in its forthcoming ride-hailing service. The company had once targeted a 2021 launch, but Levinson declined to offer a timeline during his Monday interview with Business Insider. Though the vehicle has the core features the company has been thinking about since day one — a symmetrical shape, carriage-style seating, and the ability to drive in two directions — the design has evolved from early prototypes that, according to Levinson, "looked like glorified golf carts."
Following the Zoox vehicle and the similar-looking Cruise Origin, Levinson said he thought more purpose-built autonomous vehicles would arrive in the coming years. But according to Levinson, Cruise and any followers will be playing catch-up.
"We're really happy to see other companies start to embrace some of the same ideas we've been talking about consistently since 2014," Levinson said. "Because we've had the consistency and that focus for the last six years, we've been able to make more progress."
Correction: An earlier version of this story said Zoox had to temporarily shut down its facilities twice this year. After this story was published, a Zoox spokesperson told Business Insider the company didn't close the facilities, but instead "had a small reduction in force and moved to minimum basic operations onsite per city and state guidelines."
Are you a current or former Zoox employee? Do you have a news tip or opinion you'd like to share? Contact this reporter at mmatousek@jkmperu.com, on Signal at 646-768-4712, or via his encrypted email address mmatousek@protonmail.com.
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- Former Zoox employees say the self-driving car firm had better offers than Amazon's $1.3 billion deal
- Amazon's $1.2 billion deal to buy Zoox shows just how hard building a self-driving car still is —and why even more startups could become buyout targets
