Zoox Woos SF Riders With Influencers as Waymo Holds Lead

Amazon's Zoox has roughly 100 driverless vehicles on the road in San Francisco and is trying to win rider attention with the playbook of a challenger brand: paid social-media influencers, sponsored community events, and, as Emmy Martin puts it for The New York Times, "wine pop-ups, festival sponsorships and a car built to be filmed."

The service itself is narrow. Riders drawn from a waitlist can take point-to-point trips only across SoMa, the Mission and the Design District, in Zoox's steering-wheel-free pods that seat four passengers facing each other. Waymo, by contrast, operates across a Bay Area service area of more than 260 square miles.

Zoox charges nothing in San Francisco. Its only paid ride-hailing service today runs in Las Vegas, and Amazon has said the plan is to launch a paid San Francisco service in the latter half of 2026.

The marketing push comes on the heels of a broader Waymo and Zoox expansion into new US cities in early September, which we covered here. It fits a run of coverage on the sector, our 58th autonomous-vehicles story in the last 90 days.