Zoox Inc., the autonomous vehicle division of Amazon, plans to start fleet testing in its fourth and fifth cities as it expands to Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida.
Amazon acquired Zoox in July of 2020 but prior to that the company previously started robotaxi testing in San Francisco in 2018 and expanded testing to Las Vegas in 2019. It then expanded to testing in Seattle, Washington in 2021.
The company will map the cities and then deploy its Toyota Highlander test fleet that will be equipped with safety drivers.
The deployments will be used to gather data and gain insights and feedback from the vehicles as well as users of the autonomous vehicles. The goal, the company said, is to fine-tune its autonomous driving in dense urban areas, which is considered one of the more challenging driving scenarios.
Additionally, while Zoox will be following pre-planned routes for its fleet of Toyota Highlanders, it is also testing randomly selected point-to-point routes within a defined geofence.
Specifically, Austin has horizontal traffic lights, traffic lights hanging on wires, railway crossings and bad weather that test how an autonomous vehicle can handle the road. Meanwhile, Miami has traffic lights that are suspended diagonally across intersections. Showing how different cities will require the vehicles to react differently depending on the circumstances, Zoox said.
