Ride in Zoox’s purpose-built autonomous robotaxi. Now serving Las Vegas. Download the app and ride in a Zoox.
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By _fat_santa 2025-09-1016:086 reply I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around. They seem to have a mix of robotaxis (like the ones pictured) and decked out Toyota Highlanders that look like Waymos but not as well "packaged", though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only operate in/around the strip). On the one hand all they really have to navigate is the strip which is just one giant straight road. But on the other hand most casinos on the strip have their entrances in the back and once you get off the strip and try to go up to one of these casinos it's a maze of roads. But that only speaks to the technical hurdles, I'm sure a big part of the calculus is that Vegas is very much a "novelty" kind of place and folks are much more likely to give it a shot when there.
Certain road hazards are a much bigger issue on the strip than most roads. Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles. It looks like the initial service area is tiny but if Zoox handles those cases well it's a solid technical achievement and bodes well for expansion.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-1019:511 reply > Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles
Have you been to San Francisco or LA?
By 0x457 2025-09-1021:35 Trust me, strip is much worse than LA and SF. People just forget most societal norms there.
Vegas is also good for many other reasons: year round good weather, lots of tourists in need of taxi services, too hot to walk, too drunk to drive, etc…
By monero-xmr 2025-09-1016:194 reply #1 place cabbies have tried to scam me. #2 being Boston. Uber is such a blessing
By dmd 2025-09-1022:58 "Sorry my card reader isn't working, cash only."
"Oh, sorry, I don't carry cash. Better luck next time man!"
"Oh it just started working."
San Francisco, too. I'm so glad for Uber.
One downside to Uber in Vegas is that airport pickups happen in some hot parking garage far from the terminals.
By cpursley 2025-09-2021:45 Fwiw I found it pretty well organized.
I remember once going on the way back a work trip on a whim, and regretting not checking that the weather was >100 degrees. That step outside was an oven.
By badc0ffee 2025-09-1022:31 It's also kind of far and inconvenient to get to. It's like the inverse of those shuttles that take you from the arrivals loop of the airport to the ass end of the casino loading dock of your hotel (and 10 other hotels. So, unlike Uber, not even remotely worth it).
By jen20 2025-09-1018:56 Interestingly Vegas is the only place I will use a cab over Uber or Lyft or (preferably) Waymo. Using the Curb app to pay electronically you avoid most of the BS with cash and "their card machine being broken", and once you've done it a few times you know the actual correct routes between places.
By acjohnson55 2025-09-1017:24 Baltimore was infamous for this when I lived there 15 years ago.
By AnotherGoodName 2025-09-1021:23 Also good from the tourist cities perspective. Self driving cars are absolutely a tourist attraction.
By AnimalMuppet 2025-09-1017:461 reply It still snows in Vegas from time to time. Also, sandstorms are not great for visibility.
By brookst 2025-09-1021:36 Both of which are considerably more rare than snow in Chicago or rain in Seattle.
By krschultz 2025-09-1016:16 The Highlanders are testing vehicles: https://zoox.com/journal/autonomous-zoox-testing-vehicle
By schmidtleonard 2025-09-1017:25 AWS Re:Invent is in December, so it's also a good time to show it off to potential evangelists (they've been teasing it for years).
By AnimalMuppet 2025-09-1017:451 reply It may be a maze of roads to the backs of casinos, but it's still a small maze of roads. I would expect the mapping of it to be very precise by now.
By lvspiff 2025-09-1112:06 What's not precise is road work closures, special event closures, detours due to event parking, random traffic patterns during various times of day and random signal availability for both gps and cellular due to massive buillding and parking garages. The randomness of it all is pretty crazy to me if they figure it out.
>> though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
The robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.
By Stratoscope 2025-09-1018:031 reply I think that comment meant that the Highlanders have drivers.
By paulnpace 2025-09-1019:09 Zoox calls the person in the self-driving test cars an "operator".
By Alive-in-2025 2025-09-1019:211 reply If by robotaxi you mean the vehicles used in the tesla test in Austin and now in the bay area, they are just regular model y with an emergency "stop so you don't kill me button" on the right side. They have a special version of the software that is unreleased. The current model Y's / "robotaxi" have all the regular hardware, including pedals and steering wheel and sensors. If you search, you can even find cases during the Austin Texas where the safety drier gets into the driver seat in a few situations.
We don't really know what a special robotaxi hardware would look like.
By decimalenough 2025-09-1020:11 It looks like this, and it launched to the public today in Vegas, that's why this is news.
The front-to-back symmetry is interesting. It may cause some confusion for other drivers, in some limited circumstances, when they can't tell which way the vehicle is facing.
It appears, based on my study of the footage on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIRW8bfy4kE, that it could possibly switch which side is the front and the back by just changing the color of the lights. With RGB LEDs that would be pretty easy to do. But my question is, when would that be useful?
It would be neat that it could pull into a driveway and then leave in "reverse", but that doesn't seem like it'd come up that often for a robotaxi.
The back wheels look like they can steer. That's useful for parking in tight spaces.
By wmf 2025-09-1017:40 They can switch sides. They showed a demo of pulling into a parking space then driving straight out.
I wonder if there are barf bags for the backwards-facing passengers.
By jen20 2025-09-1018:59 London Taxis have been configured this way since at least the 1950s and people don't seem to have any problem with it?
By shermantanktop 2025-09-1019:592 reply I routinely had 8+h drives in the rear-facing seat of my family's circa 1970 Plymouth Satellite station wagon growing up. Completely unsafe, and very boring, but I don't recall barfing.
My sister and I would pass the time folding up a piece of paper and each of us got to draw part of a person without seeing what the other had drawn. Sort of like visual madlibs.
By arijun 2025-09-1023:11 Congratulations, you don't have motion sickness. I think that post was referring to those who do.
For those people, rear-facing seats can exacerbate motion sickness. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...
> rear-facing seat of my family's circa 1970 Plymouth Satellite station wagon growing up. Completely unsafe,
I am curious: Unsafe because a " 1970 Plymouth Satellite" or because "rear-facing seat"?
By shermantanktop 2025-09-122:33 Both, plus absence of seat belts. Rear facing with no head support is a good way to snap your neck if you are wearing a belt, but because we weren’t, we’d probably be flying forward to the windshield.
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/img/pictonorzw/plymouth/1...
Looking at that picture, I see belts, but I do not recall those belts and suspect they were deeply wedged into the seat and forgotten about.
Plenty of transit all around the world has backwards-facing seats.
By arijun 2025-09-1023:13 Yes but usually you know which seats will be rear-facing.
By dilippkumar 2025-09-1021:35 Yay! A tiny minuscule bit of my code is riding on these. While I no longer work there, I am absolutely thrilled at this milestone
1. Congratulations everyone! Yay!
2. I absolutely recommend Zoox as a great place to work. Believes me, I’ve sampled many jobs, Zoox is up there with Google in terms of what the experience feels like in my experience.
3. Yay again!
