I’ve seen the future, and it looks a lot like an old, horse-drawn “wagon.”
That’s not my analogy, but the way the eight-person design team behind Zoox so often describes their self-driving car. First founded in 2014 and acquired by Amazon in 2020 for $1.2 billion, Zoox has spent nearly the last decade building an autonomous vehicle from scratch. Their goal is not to sell the car, but to build the rideshare service of tomorrow to challenge Uber and Lyft.
Zoox, on the other hand, gave itself no such constraints, which has enabled the company to build a unique vehicle like none on the road–something that resembles human-sized toaster. The Zoox car is smaller than a BMW i3, and completely symmetrical front to back, allowing it to take passengers forward or in reverse without even turning around. (The symmetry also means the vehicle is built from fewer unique parts.) Large automatic doors slide open on each side of the vehicle so it’s as easy to enter as a sun room, while two bench seats face each other inside, like in a wagon. And yet, despite all these unconventional decisions, Zoox believes the entire vehicle will still receive a five-star crash rating before it launches on public roads.
“It’s the benefit of designing from the ground up,” says Chris Stoffel, director of studio engineering and industrial design team lead at Zoox, who walked us through some of the finer points of the design.
A wagon designed like a giant gadget
In many ways, Zoox’s form is self-explanatory. It’s a wagon—a room on wheels—and, as such, it’s shaped like that, while the design cleverly channels air through its own wheel wells to stay aerodynamic.
Instead of being inspired by the silhouettes of vehicles, “we’re going for more of a product aesthetic, something well established in consumer electronics,” says Nahuel Battaglia, senior industrial design lead at Zoox. Indeed, despite its soft edges, the entire design reads gadgety, like you could shrink it to the size of your palm and play with it.
“It’s really about developing a language around self-driving cars,” says Stoffel. “We’re so used to, consciously or not, the way we interact with drivers and other objects, with the hand wave, the nod, the light flash.”
The vehicle features a 32-speaker array, which can actually beam sound to individual people within a 7-degree arc. “It was about smart communication and, in another sense, reducing noise pollution in cities,” says Stoffel. Instead of simply honking for the whole block to hear, the vehicle can chirp at someone who is crossing the street while looking at their phone. The quieter ride benefits everyone—including Zoox passengers who might be trying to sleep.
A predictable, but customizable, interior
The experience inside the vehicle is just as intentional. And it really does start with the aforementioned bench seats, which have two pairs of riders facing one another rather than sitting in rows. In theory, the idea makes sense—we’ve seen it used in trains for decades.
“I found that to be a careful balance. In those scenarios where you’re facing someone and they are too close, it’s almost too intimate,” says Stoffel. “[But] the architecture really allows us to shove those seats farther out than people expect. It’s more like sitting in a lounge or at a table than a tight compartment.”
“The experience is the same at 6 a.m. as 6 p.m.,” says Stoffel. “We always call that return-to state. If you have people coming in and out of the vehicle, it should always be the same.”
Whereas the Zoox team believes they’ve figured out how to make this neutral, return-to state safe, they did work expression and customization into the interior through their spectacular “Celestial Headliner,” a ceiling with 600 individual LEDs that shine like stars in any color.
“In the morning, you might want a serene commute. During the day, running errands is a different mood, and at night you want to go out, and that’s a different mood—this can do all that,” says Stoffel. “This is your ride, that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to worry about owning the vehicle, but you get to enjoy this badass thing and make it your own . . . we’ve enabled the vehicle to be able to do that in the future as we roll it out.”