Zoox Brand Guidelines: Amazon’s Foster City Robotaxi Built Without a Steering Wheel

A company named after a marine organism.

Zoox was founded in 2014 — on 29 July, English Wikipedia says — by Tim Kentley-Klay, an Australian artist and designer, and Jesse Levinson, who had been developing self-driving technology at Stanford University. Its headquarters are in Foster City, California; Wikipedia shows early test vehicles at an earlier base at SLAC, the Stanford accelerator laboratory, in 2016.

The name is unusual. Wikipedia, citing a 2020 interview on the Recode Decode podcast, says it refers to zooxanthellae, single-celled marine organisms that live in partnership with corals — a comparison the company drew with a vehicle running on renewable energy and living alongside everything around it.

From the start Zoox chose a harder route than most of its rivals. Instead of fitting sensors to an existing car, it set out to design its own vehicle. TechCrunch described that in 2020 as one of the most expensive paths in the industry: a purpose-built self-driving passenger vehicle developed from the ground up, together with the software to drive it. While the vehicle was being built, Zoox tested its system on retrofitted Toyota Highlanders, according to Wikipedia, in San Francisco and Las Vegas.

In early 2019 Zoox brought in Aicha Evans, previously chief strategy officer at Intel, as chief executive, with Levinson as chief technology officer.

Amazon, then a vehicle with no front.

On 26 June 2020 Amazon announced that it would acquire Zoox. TechCrunch reported the same day that Zoox would continue as a standalone business, with Evans and Levinson staying in their roles, and quoted Amazon saying the aim was to help the start-up “bring their vision of autonomous ride-hailing to reality.” Wikipedia places Zoox today inside Amazon’s Devices & Services organisation, with no independent board of its own.

The vehicle itself was shown in December 2020: a fully electric, fully autonomous robotaxi. Its features, as Wikipedia lists them, are that it is symmetrical and bi-directional — it has no fixed front or back and can drive either way. When TechCrunch reported its first public-road tests in Las Vegas in June 2023, it described a vehicle built without pedals or a steering wheel, carrying up to four people at speeds of up to 35 miles per hour. Zoox said it was the first time such a vehicle had run on public roads in Nevada; tests with employees had begun in Foster City that February.

A vehicle without manual controls raised regulatory questions. Wikipedia records that Zoox self-certified in July 2022 that the vehicle met the US federal motor vehicle safety standards, that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a review of that claim, and that in August 2025 the agency granted an exemption covering Zoox’s purpose-built vehicles and closed the review. A further, commercial exemption followed in August 2026: TechCrunch reported that it lasts two years and allows Zoox to deploy up to 2,500 vehicles a year.

There have been recalls. Wikipedia records that NHTSA opened a preliminary evaluation in May 2024 after two crashes in which motorcyclists ran into the back of Zoox test vehicles. TechCrunch reported in May 2025 that Zoox had recalled 258 vehicles in March 2025 over unexpected hard braking linked to those reports, about 270 in April after a crash with a passenger car in Las Vegas, and then issued a second voluntary software recall in a month after a low-speed collision with an e-scooter rider in San Francisco on 8 May.

Robotaxis, trucks and sensors.

Self-driving and lidar companies sell something that is hard to photograph: software that makes decisions. Their public images therefore lean on a small set of recurring pictures. The most familiar is the robotaxi itself — often a white car or van with a sensor housing on the roof and smaller sensors at the corners — shown on a city street, at a kerb or at an airport drop-off.

A second picture is the view from inside the machine. Companies publish point-cloud renderings, in which a street is drawn as thousands of coloured dots, often bright greens, blues and magentas on black, with boxes marking cars, cyclists and pedestrians. Lidar makers add cutaway drawings of their sensors, showing the spinning or solid-state units that send out the laser pulses behind those images, and rows of compact sensor modules photographed like consumer electronics.

The other pictures depend on the business. Ride-hailing services show phone screens: a map, a pick-up pin, an estimated arrival time and a button to start the ride. Self-driving truck developers show tractor-trailers on long, empty highways, frequently in the desert light of the American Southwest. Driver-assist chip makers show circuit boards, dashboards and diagrams of cars wrapped in cones of sensor coverage.

Trade shows are another stage for these images: the CES technology show in Las Vegas and the IAA Mobility show in Munich are among the places where new sensors, concept vehicles and partnerships are put on display. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it operates and what regulators have recorded — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Las Vegas Strip to the airport.

Public service began in Las Vegas. Zoox says it officially launched rides on and around the Las Vegas Strip on 10 September 2025, through its own app, and describes itself as the first company to offer a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in a purpose-built robotaxi. “The idea for Zoox was never to make a car drive itself; it was about creating an entirely new mode of transportation,” Levinson said at the launch, in the company’s account. Rides were free at first. Wikipedia records that a waitlisted “Zoox Explorers” programme followed in San Francisco on 18 November 2025, in neighbourhoods including SoMa and the Mission.

Paid rides came the next year. TechCrunch reported on 3 September 2026 that Zoox had begun charging for rides on 10 August, after the federal exemption, and that it was extending its Las Vegas service to Harry Reid International Airport, with pick-ups near baggage claim at both terminals; the same report said Zoox would start testing in San Diego and Houston. Its website, in November 2026, lists Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin, Miami, Atlanta and Los Angeles under “Where to Ride,” while Wikipedia records Las Vegas as the only full commercial service and the others at stages from testing to announced.

The vehicle is the brand. Zoox’s website opens with the line “It’s not a car” and describes “a robotaxi designed around you”; the company has said it chose to design its vehicle from the ground up while others retrofitted existing cars. The cabin, as TechCrunch described it in 2023, carries four riders, and the company’s Las Vegas launch post describes it as designed for conversation and connection with friends and family.

For a design guide, Zoox shows a self-driving company whose identity is a vehicle shape rather than a sensor or a software brand. Compare Waymo, which TechCrunch called Zoox’s primary rival in 2020, and Cruise, the robotaxi venture backed by General Motors. For this guide we use a lagoon green, a sand gold and a sea-mist grey with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Zoox’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.