Report: Zoox expands San francisco Service Area

My friend Rya Jetha reports for The San Francisco Standard today Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company Zoox is expanding its service area in San Francisco so as to serve more neighborhoods. Zoox’s HQ is located on the peninsula, in Foster City.

“Zoox is quadrupling its San Francisco service area for select riders, with operations in the Marina, North Beach, Chinatown, Pacific Heights, and along the Embarcadero,” Jetha wrote on Tuesday.

Of the new neighborhoods, Pac Heights is closest to my former home in the Richmond. I signed up for Zoox long ago, but never was willing to literally go across the city to the Mission or SoMA to try it out. By contrast, Waymo is available city-wide. I was in Las Vegas for a few days (post-CES) back in January, but never booked a Zoox while there. I’d love to try them out someday, ideally sooner than later, but at this point, I’m longing for Waymo to expand its own service area and start serving my corner of the East Bay—incidentally just over the bridge from tech hotbeds like Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and more. Regardless of the purveyor, autonomous vehicles as a category have utterly revolutionized my own autonomous, agentic, transportation needs—Lyft and Uber have their place, but Waymo takes the experience to the next level. Journalistically speaking, I’ve been in touch with Zoox’s PR team in the recent past, and my understanding is the company cares very much about accessibility, but that’s the extent of my interaction thus far. I’d love for the dynamic to change sometime soon.

Back to Jetha. Her dek is really good: “[Most] San Franciscans still can’t catch a ride—unless they work at Zoox, know someone who does, or make it off the waitlist.”