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As Amazon’s Zoox ramps up its bid to compete with Google’s Waymo, co-founder and chief technology officer Jesse Levinson says one key feature sets the self-driving robotaxi unit apart from its rival.
While Waymo’s interior resembles a traditional car—with two rows of seats and a screen or steering wheel on the front left—Zoox’s car has two rows of seats facing each other, a configuration that Levinson says is better suited for groups.
“It’s a better experience, so your time in the car is better,” he said Fortune’s Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco earlier this month. “You have more space. When you’re with friends, you’re more social, because you’re facing each other.”
Waymo has largely dominated the robotaxi space since its initial public launch in 2020, with a fleet size of more than 2,000which is new completed 100 million miles driven autonomously. The company reached 10 million rides in the five cities where it operates in May, double the number of trips recorded five months before. Zoox, by comparison, is playing catch-up. After launching Las Vegas’ first public robotaxi service with free rides on its app in September, Zoox start offering paid rides in Las Vegas in early 2026, and is expected 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 the one million mile technical benchmark.
A new driver experience
Levinson suggests that what separates Zoox from Waymo and even Tesla’s Cybercab (which is set to will start production in April 2026according to CEO Elon Musk) so it was never designed to have a driver.
“Cars have been designed for the last 100 years for people,” Levinson said. “All the options, their shape, their architecture, what components they have – they are all designed for human drivers.”
The Zoox will create a more pleasant experience for users because it is not a traditional car retrofitted for autonomy, Levinson argued. He also said that the battery life is longer than competitors, an additional safety feature that increases the probability that a passenger will reach their destination, even if a hardware component does not work.
While partnering with Waymo companies like DoorDash to deliver takeout and groceries, Zoox is less focused on automated delivery—an area that Amazon is developing outside of the subsidiary, particularly in Optimize last-mile delivery at low cost and improve reliability. Instead, Zoox is focused on building what Levinson calls “a new category of transportation,” designed solely to move people from one point in a city to another.
“So they want 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 huge.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
