While most keep their eyes on Google-backed (GOOGL-0.76%) Waymo and Tesla’s (TSLA-0.04%) advancements in self-driving cars, there’s another major player gaining ground: Zoox (AMZN-0.25%).
Armed with a decisively quirky name, the Amazon-backed startup is bringing an offbeat approach to the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry. Unlike most of its rivals, Zoox’s eccentric car is designed to create a brand-new experience. And unlike its older competitors, Zoox isn’t interested in a simple improvement on the typical Uber (UBER-0.11%) or Lyft (LYFT-0.19%) experience.
Zoox was founded in 2014 by Tim Kentley-Klay, an Australian designer with no background in car engineering or artificial intelligence, and Jesse Levinson, who had helped lead Stanford University’s $1 million winning entry in a prestigious AV contest in 2007.
Despite its rivals, including Waymo and the late Cruise (GM-0.17%), having a decent head-start, Zoox moved quickly to catch up. It now tests its technology in a handful of cities, including California’s Foster City and San Francisco.
To get to that point, Zoox needed to hire a number of industry professionals — people who knew how to get things done and get them done well. Here’s why three of Zoox’s leaders left their established careers to help a company make self-driving cars that look like “hot dog toasters.”
“I love cars. I live and breathe automotive,” said Chris Stoffel, Zoox’s director of industrial and creative design. “I always want to have a vehicle create experiences. It can be mundane for people…that’s fine, but that’s not me.”
Before he joined Zoox in 2016, Stoffel had already developed an established career. He’s worked on Honda Motor Co.’s (HMC-0.14%) Acura MDX and ZDX, Tesla’s Roadster and Model S, and Google’s Chauffeur self-driving program.
But Zoox presented an opportunity that he hadn’t faced before — the chance to design a new vehicle essentially from scratch.
“The opportunity to [design] a vehicle from the ground up is very rare. You don’t get a lot of that in automotive today,” Stoffel said. “Usually you’re kind of just kind of continuing through it and tweaking the status quo. That’s not something that I personally resonate with, and especially that of a lot of the engineers and designers that Zoox [don’t] resonate with.”
And they’ve certainly delivered. There are many, many things to say about Zoox’s robotaxi, a four-weel steering, boxy shuttle with a distinct lack of a steering wheel or pedals — dull certainly isn’t one of them.
Although it may look strange, Stoffel explains that each part of the robotaxi was designed with purpose. For example, since the vehicle is driven by an automated system, Zoox made the vehicle bidirectional with a symmetrical design that highlights its maneuverability and makes the service more efficient.
The interior is designed to be akin to a lounge, equipped with individual chargers, cup holders, and climate control. It’s meant to allow passengers to either have plenty of room to relax or allow them to chat face-to-face.
Sensor pods are placed high and around the corners to give Zoox a great field of view and reinforce its “honest design,” according to Stoffel. That theme of “honesty” continues with the massive wheels marking the four corners of the robotaxi.
“[Industrial Design Lead] Nahuel Battaglia came up with this really great theme of this exposed wheel, kind of modern carriage,” Stoffel said. “It gives the vehicle a little bit more character, a little bit more approachability, a lot of honesty as well, with the way he’s designed it.”
Corrado Lanzone got his start working at the Istituto Italiano della Saldatura before his sprawling career at Ferrari (RACE-2.56%). Across almost two decades, Lanzone worked his way up from a process engineer to the luxury sports carmaker’s vice president of production.
In 2017, he and his family left Italy for San Francisco, joining Zoox as president of manufacturing operations.
“When I came here to support the founders and the company, I thought that this was a risk,” Lanzone said. “I was not coming here to have a comfortable job,” he said, adding that he wanted a personal challenge and to open a “new chapter” for his profession.
When Lanzone arrived at Zoox, the company was still designing its eventual robotaxi, which wasn’t officially unveiled until 2020. In preparation for that vehicle, Zoox relied on self-driving Toyota Highlander SUVs, which are still used for testing in areas around Austin, Texas, or Miami, Florida.
As the head of manufacturing, Lanzone works with suppliers to buy components and oversees Zoox’s efforts in scaling production of its prototype robotaxis, as well as the final assembly process.
Zoox presented an opportunity to do something new and complex. The design work at Ferrari was about giving drivers maximum power and control in cars built to dominate the racetrack. In contrast, Zoox’s customers never touch the wheel, nor do they — hopefully — need to outpace a speeding Max Verstappen.
“Here I found the kind of material that could interest me to a higher level,” Lanzone said. “What I want to do is use my experience that I accumulated after many years of hard work [at Formula One] to work on something that I thought is extremely valuable — safety on the roads.”
By far, the most commonly cited use case for AVs is the potential they have to make people safer. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), an estimated 40,990 people died on U.S. roads in 2023, the latest year data is available.
Many modern cars already use some level of driver assistance software, such as adaptive cruise control, for that very purpose. But AVs, like most emerging technology, have a lot of kinks to work out.
A safety scandal in late 2023 paved the road for General Motors to shutter Cruise last month, while Tesla’s tech has led to a barrage of lawsuits and federal investigations. Regulators began investigating Zoox last May over a handful of incidents.
Zoox says it makes safety a priority; its cars feature airbags that deploy from all sides of the interior and seatbelts that require all passengers to be locked in. Like other AV companies, Zoox also has a command center packed with human technicians ready to step in if necessary.
“In many ways, there’s no longer a captain of the ship,” explains Amanda Prescott, Zoox’s senior director of homologation, which puts him in charge of the company’s work to get its vehicles certified in compliance with regulations.
Prescott joined Zoox in 2017 after careers at both the NHTSA and Ford (F+0.15%), where she led hundreds of internal and government safety investigations into the automaker’s vehicles. The move to Zoox made sense, according to Prescott, who saw it as a chance to try something new.
It was about taking a chance that I may not get again, to try to do something fundamentally different and exciting,” Prescott said. “Why not take the plunge and see if you can change the future?”
By November 2023, Zoox said it had self-certified its vehicles met federal standards and had developed over 100 additional safety innovations, according to a blog post. Prescott said that’s a “proof point” that Zoox is meeting the bar for safety, although it’s worth noting that the NHTSA has an open investigation into that claim.
Currently, Zoox’s toasters are on the roads in Foster City, Las Vegas, and San Francisco in limited capacity. In Foster City, where Zoox is headquartered, employees and their friends and families are able to try out the robotaxi, while only employees are taking trips in the other two cities.
“It’s been tremendously rewarding. I’ve had the ability to grow myself as a leader, grow a tremendous team,” said Prescott, “all in the context of really thinking about how we transform mobility.”
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