Amazon’s autonomous vehicle unit Zoox is about to start testing its self-driving vehicles in Atlanta, Georgia, a precursor to eventually offering public rides in the city.
Zoox told TechCrunch on Tuesday that it has completed the “initial mapping phase” in Atlanta and will begin autonomous driving later this summer.
Atlanta is the seventh city in the U.S. where Zoox is testing its vehicles. The company announced its testing plans just one day after Waymo — along with partner Uber — said it would start offering rides in its own robotaxis to early access users in Atlanta ahead of a larger public launch this summer.
Zoox is taking a methodical approach to the rollout of its promised robotaxi service. In Atlanta, as in other cities, the company used modified Toyota Highlanders to record things like the geometry of each road and the location of traffic lights. It’s only after those steps that Zoox can start testing its autonomous vehicle technology in an area.
The company has progressed to testing its purpose-built robotaxi without a safety operator in California cities like Foster City and San Francisco, as well as in Las Vegas, Nevada. Zoox plans to offer public rides in the robotaxi in San Francisco and Las Vegas by the end of this year.
As part of that process, the company has been working out kinks in its autonomous vehicle technology. Zoox issued recalls in March and in May related to software updates meant to fix problems that its self-driving test fleet has encountered during testing.
This story has been updated to include information from Zoox that was not in its press release about how the company has already gathered mapping and other data in Atlanta.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.