Zoox redesigned its robotaxi. The Amazon division now feels ready to charge passengers for rides. This assumes people will pay money to sit in a vehicle with no driver instead of paying money to sit in a vehicle with a driver they can blame when things go wrong.
The company plans to expand into additional markets. Markets filled with humans who currently enjoy the luxury of making eye contact with another human before that human drives them into a ditch. Zoox wants to eliminate the middle man. Just the ditch now. Pure efficiency.
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for over a billion dollars. Six years later the robotaxis still don't generate revenue. But they did get a redesign. New paint job probably. Maybe different seats. The kind of pivot that happens when engineers realize the technology doesn't work but the PowerPoint slides still need updating.
Retail traders see this headline and think transportation revolution. They picture themselves buying Amazon calls because a subsidiary nobody remembers finally decided to charge for a service it's been testing since the Obama administration. They'll check the stock price every four minutes. They'll tell their friends about the robotaxi expansion. They'll ignore that Amazon's market cap moves on AWS and e-commerce, not on whether a pod with wheels can navigate a right turn in Las Vegas without exploding.
The robotaxi burned cash for six years and now wants to burn your cash too. Progression.
Zoox executives probably sent a memo about this redesign. Probably used words like revolutionary and scalable and paradigm shift. Probably attached a rendering of the new robotaxi that looks exactly like the old robotaxi but in a different shade of silver. Then they scheduled another six years of testing before someone admits passengers would rather just take an Uber.
The expansion timeline remains unspecified, which is corporate speak for we have no f*cking idea when this happens.
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