Amazon's Zoox robotaxis service to give free rides in San Francisco as its expansion accelerates

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Amazon's Zoox will start giving free robotaxi rides through parts of San Francisco as it accelerates its attempt to challenge Waymo's early lead in the race to transport passengers in self-driving vehicles.

The expansion announced Tuesday will be confined to a few major San Francisco neighborhoods and limited to people who signed up on a waiting list to ride in Zoox's gondola-shaped robotaxis, which have no steering wheel. The San Francisco launch comes less than three months after the Amazon-owned robotaxi company launched its first ride-hailing service along the Las Vegas strip.

But Zoox still doesn't charge people to ride in its robotaxis, something Waymo has been doing since its debut in Phoenix five years ago. The free rides are the next major milestone before charging fares like Waymo and traditional ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, as Amazon tried to make inroads in autonomous driving — a journey that began in 2020 when the e-commerce Goliath bought Zoox for $1.2 billion.

California regulators still have to approve Zoox's application to charge for rides in San Francisco — a clearance that Waymo received in August 2023 after overcoming safety concerns raised by city officials. Since then, Waymo's robotaxis have become a familiar sight throughout San Francisco, where some tourists now make a point of hitching a ride in a self-driving car along with hopping on one of the city's fabled cable cars that have been operating for 152 years.

Waymo, which started as a secret project within Google in 2009. also operates its robotaxis in San Jose, California, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Austin, Texas, with plans to expand into several other U.S. cities next year.

In another sign of Waymo's accelerating growth, its robotaxis began extending their routes beyond city streets and onto highways in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix. And on Tuesday announced plans to expand into five more U.S. cities: Miami; Dallas; San Antonio, Texas; Houston and Orlando, Florida. However, passengers won't be able to ask for rides in those five cities until next year.

Just as Waymo has already been doing, Amazon is gearing up to bring Zoox's robotaxis to other major cities, including Austin and Miami. To help Zoox realize its ambitions, Amazon converted a former bus factory into a high-tech robotaxi plant in Hayward, California — about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco. Zoox eventually hopes to make as many as 10,000 robotaxis annually at the plant.

FILE - People view a Zoox self-driving vehicle at the Zoox booth during the CES tech show, Jan. 7, 2025, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher, file)

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 1, 2026--

For years, Susan watched her two children collapse without warning. Episodes of sudden, full-body muscle weakness that came and went — sometimes lasting minutes, sometimes hours. Between episodes, they looked like any other healthy kids. And that was the problem.

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Susan, a single mother in a small town in New Zealand, took her children to doctor after doctor. Blood panels came back normal. She was told the symptoms were stress-related. No referrals. No follow-up. No answers.

She was raising two children with a condition no one could name — and carrying the weight of that question alone.

"I watched my children go from running and playing to being unable to stand," Susan said. "Every time I brought them in, the tests said they were fine. I started to feel like the system had decided I was the problem, not their symptoms."

After her own research, Susan ordered Dante Labs Whole Genome Sequencing for both children. The reports identified pathogenic variants associated with periodic paralysis — an ultra-rare inherited condition affecting approximately 1 in 100,000 people. Standard panels test just a few genes. Whole genome sequencing reads the full DNA.

The variants had been there since birth. Undetected.

When Susan brought the reports to her children's medical team, everything changed. Neurologists accepted the findings. Geneticists followed. Her children now have access to the specialists they needed — clinicians working to confirm the findings, identify triggers, and build a management plan.

"For years, no one listened," Susan said. "Now the best specialists are paying attention. Now my kids have a name for what is happening to them — and a medical team that believes it."

"Behind every genome is a person living inside questions that traditional technologies have not yet answered," said Andrea Riposati, co-founder and CEO of Dante Labs. "The genome provides an unbiased view of every person’s code. We built this company for families like hers."

Susan's name has been anonymized to protect her family's privacy.

About Dante Labs

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