Amazon plans to open a San Francisco storefront designed to boost exposure for its robotaxi division and help the toaster-shaped Zoox buggies stand out in a crowded autonomous-driving playing field.
In November, the company began offering free test rides in select downtown San Francisco neighborhoods to people on its waiting list. The tech giant aims to take on Google’s Waymo self-driving cars, which have become nearly as ubiquitous as the city’s storied cable cars on the streets of the nation’s tech capital.
Now, Zoox aims to open a “rider lounge” in the city’s premier downtown shopping district to “showcase the Zoox experience” from a retail storefront — apparently the first of its kind — at 301 Sutter St. in Union Square, according to an application filed with the city.
Zoox began offering test rides in the city a week after Alphabet-owned Waymo, which has taken an early lead in the robotaxi race, announced it was expanding to operate on Bay Area freeways.
The sensor- and software-outfitted Waymo Jaguar I-Pace SUVs has a unified service area of more than 260 square miles. Meanwhile, Tesla’s semiautonomous robotaxi service, which still uses a safety driver and has a waitlist, operates limited Bay Area service, while Uber is set to launch a robotaxi later this year.
Zoox vehicles are the only purpose-built robotaxis on American roads that don’t have manual controls such as steering wheels or pedals. Unlike Waymos, which are essentially self-driving cars, Zoox vehicles have four inward-facing seats, like a small light-rail train car. Some have compared the boxy vehicles to a gondola on wheels.
San Francisco and beyond
Zoox has been gradually scaling its operations, launching limited autonomous ride services along the Las Vegas strip in September in addition to the pilot rider program in San Francisco late last year.
It is also testing its retrofitted Toyota Highlander SUVs in Dallas and Phoenix — equipped with its full sensor suite but staffed with a human safety driver — adding the two Sun Belt cities to existing sites that include Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., as well as the San Francisco Bay Area.
The planned Zoox lounge will have “dedicated areas featuring comfortable seating, Wi-Fi, charging, and complimentary food and beverages," according to the application to the city planning department, which adds that “no sales of any kind will take place” there. The space may also host “retail activations and cross-promotions with local restaurants and hotels.”
Zoox declined to provide further details on the planned rider lounge.
“We are continually exploring new opportunities to connect with future riders as we expand our service in San Francisco,” said a spokesperson in an emailed statement to CoStar News. “We do not have additional information to share at this time but will have more updates soon.”
There’s currently a long wait list to join Zoox’s “Explorer” program that offers test rides in only three downtown areas of San Francisco: SoMa, the Mission and Design District.
Zoox boasts wireless phone chargers, personal screens for each passenger to adjust the temperature in their quadrant and twinkly overhead lights.
“Enjoy the tunes you love with your favorite burrito as you move through your city” is one of the pitch lines on the Zoox website.
Industry pushback
The Silicon Valley company, based in Foster City on the Bay Area's Peninsula, launched in 2014 and was acquired in 2020 by Amazon for $1.3 billion. It is vying to be the first company to manufacture robotaxis in-house for commercial use and says the plant will create hundreds of jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area, as it hires for logistics personnel, operators and assembly specialists.
The company signed a lease in 2023 to take over the warehouse at 25810 Clawiter Road in Hayward, a city that has become a hotbed of industrial and logistics uses that go hand in hand with Silicon Valley’s innovation engine. Last April, Zoox significantly expanded its Bay Area office footprint, subleasing 200,000 square feet of Illumina’s campus at 200-800 Lincoln Centre Drive, near its Foster City headquarters.
California regulators still have to approve Zoox’s application to charge for rides in San Francisco — a clearance that Waymo received back in August 2023 after overcoming safety concerns raised by city officials.
Efforts to commercialize fully autonomous vehicles have run into roadblocks, including higher-than-expected costs and strict regulations, while companies have faced federal investigations and recalls following collisions.
Waymo began as a secret project within Google in 2009 and has faced public skepticism since the high-tech white vehicles appeared on San Francisco’s streets in 2021. Last year, public outrage ensued after a Waymo accidentally ran over a well-known neighborhood cat known as KitKat, which died from its injuries.
In late 2024, General Motors was forced to shutter its autonomous vehicle unit, Cruise, when the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its permit after one of its robotaxis dragged a pedestrian who had been hit by another, human-operated vehicle.
Still, Waymo’s robotaxis have become a familiar sight throughout the city, where tourists now routinely make a point of hailing a ride in a self-driving car along with hopping on one of the city’s fabled cable cars that have been operating for a century and a half.
Retail comeback
The three-story, historical corner building where Zoox aims to open its rider lounge was built in 1907, just after the great earthquake that leveled much of the city. Known as the Hammersmith Building after a jeweler that once operated there, it's notable for its art nouveau details and Parisian-style parasol-shaped awning.
Like many other charming buildings in San Francisco’s iconic downtown retail district, it has sat vacant since the pandemic hit in 2020, when shops shuttered in the wake of remote work and disappearing foot traffic.
But in recent months, stores and shoppers have returned to the city’s most prominent downtown retail zone, with a slew of notable new leases inked by businesses ranging from a Japanese clothing brand to a national telecom as life returns to downtown San Francisco, thanks in part to the artificial intelligence boom.
It wouldn’t be the first such high-tech showroom in the neighborhood.
Last year, a digital identity system called World being rolled out by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others opened a tiny but sleek store on Geary Street in Union Square as a flagship demonstration venue. It was one of six storefronts opened across the country to promote the technology that includes a melon-sized white orb equipped with a camera that scans your eye’s iris to verify that you’re a human being.