Zoox Gets a Ninth Zone for Its No Steering Wheel Robotaxi, and Room for 1,000 of Them

So basically: The feds just gave Zoox another spot to run its robotaxis. The NHTSA added Hayward, California as an approved area on Oct. 6, and the letter hit the public record Oct. 7. That makes nine areas where Zoox’s robotaxi, the one with no steering wheel and no pedals, can operate. The fleet cap stays at 600, and it can go up to 1,000 if Zoox asks.

Quick refresher on Zoox

Zoox is owned by Amazon. Its robotaxi doesn’t look like a normal car. It’s a little box on wheels with seats facing each other like a train car. No driver seat. No wheel. Nothing to grab.

That’s why Zoox needs special permission. Federal car safety rules were written assuming a human is driving. Stuff like where the steering wheel goes, how the windshield wipers work, mirrors, all that. A car with no driver can’t meet a bunch of those rules on paper. So back in July the NHTSA gave Zoox an exemption that runs through July 2028.

The catch is the exemption comes with conditions. One of them is that Zoox can only run in areas the NHTSA approves, one letter at a time. This is the third of those letters.

The nine areas

Here’s where Zoox is allowed to run now:

• Clark County, Nevada (that’s Las Vegas)
• San Francisco
• Foster City
• Hayward (new)
• Los Angeles, plus parts of LA County
• Miami
• Austin
• Atlanta

In every one of them, it’s limited to roads with a speed limit of 45 mph or less, and only roads Zoox has already checked out with its own safety process. So it’s not all of Hayward on day one. It’s whatever roads they’ve cleared.

The fleet numbers

The exemption technically lets Zoox build up to 2,500 of these a year. But the number actually allowed on the road at once is way lower. Right now it’s 600. Zoox can ask to bump that to 1,000. Anything past 1,000 needs a formal change from the NHTSA.

So 1,000 is the real ceiling for now. That’s still a big jump from where Zoox has been. Texas records from a few weeks ago showed Zoox with only 17 registered there.

A small nerdy detail

The new letter also switched which version of the self driving rulebook it uses. There’s an industry standard called SAE J3016. That’s the one with the “Level 2, Level 4” stuff. It got updated in September, and the NHTSA now points to the new version. One term even changed from “minimal risk condition” to “mitigated risk condition.” That just means what the car does when something goes wrong, like pulling over safely. Small thing, but it shows the rules are catching up to the tech.

How it compares

Waymo is still way ahead on size, with well over a thousand cars in Texas alone. Tesla is pushing Cybercab in Austin and Dallas. Zoox is smaller, but it’s the only one of the three running a vehicle built from scratch with no human controls at all and federal approval to do it.

My take

Hayward isn’t flashy. It’s a city in the East Bay most people outside California couldn’t find on a map. But that’s kind of how this works now. These companies aren’t doing big launch parties anymore. They’re just quietly adding a city here, a zone there, and one day you look up and they’re everywhere.

The cap is the thing I’m watching. 1,000 cars with no steering wheel driving around nine areas would’ve sounded crazy two years ago. Now it’s a paperwork step.