Tried out: Driving autonomously without a steering wheel with Zoox in Las Vegas

Contents

The operation of AI-controlled vehicles on public roads works. Google subsidiary Waymo has demonstrated this at the latest in complex US cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco. It doesn't always work perfectly, there are accidents and other problems, some regions don't want to allow the vehicles and colleague human also has to intervene now and then when the car doesn't know what to do. But the user experience itself is good, as we can confirm from trials in the USA: It's even a lot of fun to be chauffeured autonomously from A to B – and it is, at least currently, still comparatively inexpensive.

While most services currently still work with “normal” vehicles, i.e., not explicitly designed for autonomous operation – Waymo, for example, uses Jaguar electric models modified with LIDAR and sensors – Amazon subsidiary Zoox has pursued a different strategy. They built their own cars from the start. As a visit to the company's first public test field, the US gambling city of Las Vegas in the state of Nevada, shows, this has both advantages and disadvantages. In some cases, it's even quite adventurous, as a self-experiment demonstrated. But even here, a conclusion can be drawn in advance: The technology is astonishingly advanced, and one can only look forward to it hopefully coming to Europe one day.

The tiny app store problem

Anyone who comes to Las Vegas and wants to ride with Zoox faces a significant problem first: The official app for the ride service is only available for download in the respective US app stores. To circumvent the problem, you need, for example with Apple, an account registered in America, with which you then log into the App Store – iCloud can remain in Germany. Then the application can be found by searching for “Zoox”. Installation and setup are simple, although you should read the terms and conditions carefully: During the experimental phase, there are liability limitations that you must be willing to accept.

We had actually planned to drive with Zoox a bit further away from the Strip, i.e., the Las Vegas Boulevard South, to run errands. The place we wanted to go was just outside the service area, so we simply chose the nearest intersection within the Zoox area as our destination. We had initially assumed that Zoox works like Waymo: In the covered area, you can order a vehicle almost anywhere and be dropped off almost anywhere. However, Zoox responded to our attempts with the error message that there were no vehicles available for the desired location. In the meantime, the error also appeared that we were too far from a “pickup point”.

No free location choice yet

The solution to the puzzle: Zoox doesn't operate in free-floating mode like Waymo in Vegas, but rather like a slightly more flexible bus: at the time of our test, there were a total of eight stations that you could drive to and be picked up from. The problem is that the Zoox app doesn't make customers aware of this. Even on the Zoox website, this is only apparent by reading between the lines. So, anyone used to Waymo will be disappointed. We therefore had to do our errands on foot and by (boringly human-driven) city bus.

After we understood that Zoox operates on a station basis, nothing stood in the way of the first ride: We went near one of the locations marked on the map in the app. They are marked there as building icons for hotels, shopping bag icons for shopping opportunities, and strangely, knives and forks for the TopGolf sports facility. Currently served are, among others, the hotels Wynn, Excalibur, and Luxor, as well as the Fashion Show Mall shopping center.

Searching for the station

During daily operation, individual stations may appear and disappear – it remains unclear what drives this, possibly Zoox adjusts to traffic volume. Overall, the central area of the Strip is covered: from the north (Resorts World) to the south (Luxor, just before Mandalay Bay, which marks the end of the Strip).

The app recognizes when you are within walking distance of one of the stations. Only then is it possible to book the ride. Anyone who has been to Las Vegas will know that people walk quite a lot here, which also works well because most hotels are connected to each other via tunnels, bridges, escalators, and more.