As Amazon’s Zoox ramps up its bid to compete with Google’s Waymo, cofounder and chief technology officer Jesse Levinson says one key feature sets the self-driving robotaxi unit apart from its rival.
While a Waymo’s interior resembles a traditional car—with two rows of seats and a screen or steering wheel on the front left—Zoox’s vehicle features two rows of seats facing one another, a configuration Levinson says is better suited for groups.
“It’s just a much better experience, so your time in the vehicle is dramatically nicer,” he said at the Fortune Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco earlier this month. “You have much more space. If you’re with friends, it’s dramatically more social, because you’re facing each other.”
Waymo has largely dominated the robotaxi space since its first public launch in 2020, with a fleet size of more than 2,000, which recently completed 100 million miles driven autonomously. The company reached 10 million rides across the five cities where it is operational in May, double the number of trips recorded five months prior. Zoox, by comparison, is playing catch-up. After launching its first public robotaxi service in Las Vegas with free rides on its app in September, Zoox will begin offering paid rides in Las Vegas in early 2026, and expects to do the same in San Francisco later in the year, Levinson said. A few weeks ago, the robotaxi service, with a test fleet of about 50 across the two cities, passed its 1-million-mile technical benchmark.
A new driverless experience
Levinson suggested that what separates Zoox from Waymo and even Tesla’s Cybercab (which is slated to begin production in April 2026, according to CEO Elon Musk) is that it was never designed to have a driver.
“The cars that have been designed over the last 100 years are for humans,” Levinson said. “All the choices, their shape, their architecture, what components they have in them—they were all designed for human drivers.”
Zoox can create a more pleasurable experience for users because it is not a traditional car retrofitted for autonomy, Levinson argued. He also said the battery life is longer than competitors’, an added safety feature that increases the likelihood a passenger will arrive at their destination, even if a hardware component malfunctions.
While Waymo is partnering with companies like DoorDash to deliver takeout and groceries, Zoox is less focused on automated delivery—an area Amazon has been developing outside the subsidiary, particularly by optimizing last-mile delivery to lower costs and improve reliability. Instead, Zoox is focused on building what Levinson calls “a whole new category of transportation,” designed solely to move people from one point in a city to another.
“So they’d love to save money, obviously, but that’s not as exciting as creating this market,” he said. “And the addressable market for moving people around cities is just profoundly huge.”