The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed how great a business Amazon is doing with its delivery services. No matter where you are in the world, you must have had seen an Amazon truck dropping parcels to their end destinations.
Now, it is seen that the delivery service giant Amazon is not all happy and pleased with just dropping off the packages. Its partner company Zoox for developing self-driving cars has created ‘RoboTaxi.’
It is an autonomous car with a capacity of seating four passengers at a time. It doesn’t have a driving seat nor a steering wheel, resulting in more room for delivering people. The RoboTaxi has sliding doors on each side, which resembles that of a carriage-styled vehicle.
The self-driving taxi resembles the look of a small subway car. Seats on its interiors are placed in a way that passengers would face each other while traveling. One of its most amazing features is the bidirectional driving capabilities that allow it to pave the way through narrow passages and reverse easily by maneuvering its wheel directions at a stand-still position.
A range of devices, including cameras, radars, and sensors, enable the Robotaxi to be careful of the blind spots and gives it a 270-degree field of vision. The robotaxi can go up to 75 miles per hour, hence making it that these sensors are important for its safe travels on the road. It also comes equipped with an airbag for each seat that maximizes safety in case of an accident.
The Zoox developed Robotaxi comes with a 133 kWh battery giving it a range to go on for 16 hours straight. It is in its testing phase in three cities, including Las Vegas, Nevada, California, Foster City, and San Francisco.
Zoox came into the autonomous cars business in 2014 and developed its prototype in 2015. It got to the SAE level-3 autonomy in 2017 and produced prototypes on its assembly line in 2019. Later, Amazon bought the company in May 2020. And plans to develop a ride-hailing service that aids in making the existing public transportation systems more effective.
“Revealing our functioning and driving vehicle is an exciting milestone in our company’s history and marks an important step on our journey towards developing an autonomous ride-hailing service,” said Zoox’s CEO, Aicha Evans. “We are transforming the rider experience to provide superior mobility-as-a-service for cities. And as we see the alarming statistics around carbon emissions and traffic accidents, it’s more important than ever to build a sustainable, safe solution that allows riders to get from point A to point B. And that’s something Amazon excels at,” he added.
