Self-driving cars from Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla are studded with cameras and sensors. Some of them are pointing at riders. One afternoon this past summer, a self-driving Waymo pulled into a parking lot in San Mateo County, California, and stayed there until the police arrived. Local cops had gotten a 911 call from Waymo staffers--humans, it should be said --who were viewing the car's passengers through cameras installed inside the vehicle. It looked like two teens were shooting a black handgun out the window of the vehicle, playing with it and drinking between shots, a police report said.

Autonomous car manufacturers have long claimed that self-driving vehicles would reduce traffic accidents. Thus far, the stats are largely in their favor. According to a report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), Google's Waymo robotaxis were involved in roughly 65 percent fewer car crashes than human drivers last year. Waymo's own internal statistics, meanwhile, claim that the autonomous vehicles (AVs) reduce accidents with serious injuries by 94 percent. Some critics are understandably dubious, however, noting that more testing needs to be done before anyone can meaningfully certify these safety gains.

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Aicha Evans recalls the first time she saw the Zoox robotaxi, a driverless vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no front or back. "I fell in love," she says.

Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Mashable Selects Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series The carriage-style Zoox vehicles differ from Waymo's autonomous cars. Neal joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2024, editing and writing stories about digital culture and its effects on the environment and marginalized communities. He is the former editorial director of The Advocate and Out magazines, has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, Curbed, and Los Angeles magazine, and is a recipient of the Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for LGBTQ Journalist of the Year Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association (NLGJA). He lives in Los Angeles with his family. Paid rides on Zoox became available for the first time ever, with service launching in Las Vegas on Monday (Aug.

Zoox updated its driverless robotaxi with comfort upgrades and two-way audio. The autonomous vehicle is live in Las Vegas and San Francisco.

Amazon Zoox's latest robotaxi looks (marginally) less like a toy car Amazon Zoox's latest robotaxi looks (marginally) less like a toy car The company said it will soon begin large-scale production of its autonomous vehicle. Zoox, the self-driving startup that Amazon purchased in 2020, has showed off the new version of its autonomous vehicle that it says was designed for large-scale production. While it still looks like the old version the company introduced in 2020, the new vehicle comes with changes that improve its comfort for riders and make it easier to interact with. The company relocated the vehicle's bidirectional reflectors for better visibility and made them rotate colors to better distinguish its front from its rear, seeing as the robotaxi has a boxy form factor. It also gave the speaker and microphone on the door two-way audio capabilities to enable communication between riders and road users, as well as between first responders and Zoox support.

Amazon's Zoox robotaxi service offers free driverless rides to Las Vegas Strip locations including Resorts World, AREA15 and Topgolf as part of its public launch.

Two new self-driving car services--one in Atlanta from Lyft and May Mobility, another in Las Vegas from Amazon subsidiary Zoox--prove that the robotaxi race is still on. Now comes the hard part. Today, two robotaxi firms operating on opposite sides of the US say they're opening their services to the public. The Ann Arbor tech developer May Mobility has launched its self-driving car service on the Lyft app in a section of Atlanta, Georgia. Starting today, anyone who orders a Lyft in the area might be paired with an autonomous vehicle.

Whether due to consumer backlash or an aging EV lineup, or both, Tesla sales have again seen a global plunge, this time 13 percent last quarter compared to the previous year--proof that the electric automaker hasn't yet turned around a dismal year that saw public opinion of controversial CEO Elon Musk plummet. It could mean Tesla faces a second straight year of falling sales. And yet: Tesla is still the world's most valuable automaker by market capitalization, worth some 990 billion. At least some of that market confidence is likely traced to the happenings of June 22, when Tesla finally began allowing paying passengers to ride its autonomous vehicle service in Austin, Texas. The service rollout has been fairly smooth.

Visitors to CES this week had the opportunity to take a good look at an unusual local: a boxy little autonomous robotaxi designed and operated by Amazon subsidiary Zoox. Zoox has been testing on the Strip since November, though it began driving its purpose-built vehicle on Vegas public roads around its local headquarters back in summer 2023. This year, Zoox aims to begin offering service to the public, first though a "Zoox Explorer" program that allows outside riders to try the service for free. Unlike Waymo's robotaxis, which today are computerized Jaguar EVs, Zoox's AV doesn't have a steering wheel, driver's seat, or pedals. Its seats face inward, and the vehicle is designed to drive in either direction, fore or aft.