In US Autonomous Robotaxi Wars, It’s Zoox 1, Tesla 0 – CleanTechnica

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Earlier this year, Tesla displayed some gauzy images of a robotaxi it might build someday, God willing and the creek don’t rise. Tesla stock rose significantly, if temporarily, on the news. The car itself was stupid — a fairly low slung two-seater with scissor doors like the original Lamborghini Countach. The car, as shown, is too low for many potential riders to get into and out of conveniently and it has limited ability to carry luggage and packages. In other words, as a sports coupe, it is fine. As a robotaxi, it is stupid. Oh, wait, I already said that.

A real autonomous robotaxi should be shaped more like a box on wheels, with a floor that is just a step up from the sidewalk, wide doors for easy access, and a high enough roof so ordinary people don’t have to bend themselves into a pretzel to use it. There have been a number of such vehicles proposed over the years because that is what makes the most sense. Tesla has shown shadowy images of one. Cruze, the autonomous startup backed by General Motors, did another. So has Zoox, the autonomous robotaxi company backed by Jeff Bezos.

A truly autonomous vehicle has no provision for a driver. No driver’s seat, no steering wheel, and no throttle or brake pedals. Such vehicles can be tested until the cows come home on private roads, but before they can be deployed on public roads, they need an exemption from the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which require cars and trucks to have steering wheels and pedals.

Zoox FMVSS Waiver Announced

On August 6, 2025, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it has “issued an exemption for Zoox driverless vehicles under its newly expanded Automated Vehicle Exemption Program. This is the first-ever exemption for American-built vehicles under the program.” Bloomberg reports the decision follows a lengthy period of negotiation between the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the company. Zoox first announced its driverless car designed without a steering wheel or pedals in 2022.

In June, Zoox opened a robotaxi production facility in California that will be capable of manufacturing up to 10,000 purpose-built robotaxis a year. CNBC reports that Las Vegas may be the first city to see Zoox robotaxis on its streets, perhaps before the end of this year.

Uber Ponders Its Autonomous Future

Uber is now caught in the crosshairs of the autonomous vehicle craze as it tries to assess how the technology will impact its future business model. Recently it announced a new partnership with Lucid and Nuro to build a fleet of robotaxis, but those vehicles, so far as we know, will still be FMVSS-compliant with steering wheels and pedals.

“AVs today are not profitable,” Uber CFO Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah said recently. “That has been a pretty consistent investment approach for Uber is we go into markets and go into products starting at a loss. We build scale, we build our experience, and then over time, we know exactly the levers that are necessary to turn to get that profitability.”

Bloomberg says, “Uber has operated an asset-light model ever since the company sold its autonomous car unit in 2020 — part of efforts to wind down cash-burning initiatives as a newly listed public company. It finally became annually profitable in 2023, showing that the business model of a software platform to match drivers with customers is just fine.” Readers will recall that Uber backpedaled furiously from autonomous technology after one of its test cars ran over and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, even though a human safety monitor was onboard.

Until the partnership with Lucid and Nuro was announced, Uber’s many autonomous partnerships mostly involved making its platform available for other driverless carmakers or tech developers to reach riders, as well as offering third-party services for fleet maintenance and depot operations. Is Uber, once known for hemorrhaging cash and now cash flow positive, comfortable spending on hard assets that may or may not bolster the company’s bottom line?

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi made clear during a recent conference call that he sees the biggest hurdle to commercializing AVs is not regulation, but convincing manufacturers to build and retrofit vehicles at scale and affordably. “What Uber is doing is showing manufacturers that it is willing to commit to having skin in the game for years to come, even if it means taking a loss now,” he said, according to Bloomberg. For now, Uber is asking for time and space to prove that its autonomous investments, however modest, makes financial sense. The company is piloting various business models with its driverless technology partners, including revenue-sharing and software licensing.

And What Of Tesla?

In 2023, Elon Musk announced Dojo, a supercomputer designed by Tesla and used to train the machine learning models for the company’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems, as well as its Optimus humanoid robot. It is based on a custom in-house chip known as D1 and was meant to be used in training AI models, Bloomberg reports. The computer takes in video data captured by vehicles and rapidly processes it to improve the company’s algorithms. In 2023, Morgan Stanley breathlessly announced that Dojo could add a half a trillion dollars to Tesla’s market value. Cathie Wood ran out an bought a bazillion shares of Tesla on the news.

How then to explain the news this week that Tesla is shutting down Dojo and that Peter Bannon, who was head of the Dojo program, has left the company, one of a number of talented people who have given Musk the grand kiss-off in recent months? We know many potential customers have decided not to do business with Ubersturmfuhrer Musk because of his outrageous political nonsense, but we don’t know how many in leadership roles at Tesla have also grown weary of working for a drug-addled nutcase, because everyone at Tesla is muzzled by nondisclosure agreements.

According to Bloomberg, Musk has ordered the effort to be shut down, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. The team has lost about 20 workers recently to newly formed DensityAI, and remaining Dojo workers are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, the people said. The company plans to increase its reliance on external technology partners, including Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices for computing and Samsung Electronics for chip manufacturing, the people said.

DensityAI is expected to exit stealth mode soon. Its focus is on chips, hardware, and software that will power data centers for AI that are used in robotics, by AI agents, and for automotive applications, among other sectors, Bloomberg says. The company was founded by Ganesh Venkataramanan, the former head of Dojo, and ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering. Perhaps the collapse of Dojo was preordained after Milan Kovac, the head of engineering for Optimus, and David Lau, vice president of software engineering, left Tesla earlier this year. Longtime Musk confidant Omead Afshar also parted company with Tesla recently.

Perhaps the most galling news for Elon this week is that Zoox — owned by rival multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos — has won approval to begin testing its fully autonomous vehicles while Tesla has nothing to show for its years of effort but a computer-generated image of a vehicle that is hardly fit for the task. That’s gotta hurt.