Is the world ready for cars without a steering wheel and gas and brake pedals?
Amazon’s Zoox is preparing to publicly launch a robotaxi service with vehicles that have no steering wheel, no gas pedals, no brakes.
Driverless cars controlled entirely by computers are not science fiction.
Such vehicles, i.e. robotaxis, are already available in some markets, but in the case of companies like Waymo and Cruise (which has since stopped development of the autonomous taxi service), these are classic cars that have been upgraded with autonomous driving technology.
When we say classic cars, we mean vehicles with front seats, a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, etc.
But soon passengers could be transported in a car that is designed from the ground up exclusively for autonomous driving and in which there is no steering wheel and you cannot press the gas or brake, but can only be controlled by a computer.
We are talking about the autonomous vehicles of Zoox, a company that Amazon took over four years ago and with which it has big plans. Testing of their vehicles has been going on for some time at four locations in the USA – Seattle, San Francisco, Foster City and Las Vegas.
The latest information says that the day of launching the official service is getting closer, but it is not known if it will be available in all the mentioned locations or if it will start with one city first and depending on the impressions of the passengers, it will expand its services further.
Media speculates that the service could first be launched in Las Vegas. Zoox’s plan includes a large fleet of thousands of these vehicles on the road, and if things go according to plan, their number of vehicles would be steadily increasing.
It should be emphasized that so far it has not gone exactly according to plan and without problems, because Zoox’s autonomous cars have experienced two traffic accidents in which, due to their sudden braking, the engines hit the rear of the vehicle.
There were no serious injuries in those crashes, but it was enough for the US Highway Traffic Safety Administration to open an investigation into Zoox.
Given that some of the residents of American cities have not yet become accustomed to or adapted to autonomous vehicles that at least resemble classic cars, the question is how they will accept such an unusual design of robotaxis that have been developed exclusively as robotaxis.
Source: Tech Times
