Amazon has bought Zoox, the company has officially announced. In total, more than 1.2 billion dollars, as described by The Information and the Financial Times. Is its largest investment in the autonomous car sector and a strategic purchase to try to save on an expense as important as the cost of delivery personnel.
After investing in Rivian and Aurora, Amazon buys this startup founded in 2014 and which was valued at up to 3,200 million dollars in 2018. A figure considerably higher than the amount that the giant Jeff Bezos would have paid.
Why has Amazon made this bet on a company that had not yet launched its autonomous vehicle service? Here’s what we know about the operation, about Zoox, and about Amazon’s plans for autonomous cars.
Who is behind Zoox and what is Amazon looking for?
At the end of May, the first details of Amazon’s interest in acquiring Zoox appeared. According to Morgan Stanley analysts, this purchase was intended to achieve savings of $ 20 billion annually, mainly related to the salary of parcel delivery transport drivers.
“Autonomous technology is a natural extension of Amazon’s efforts to build its own third-party logistics network,” the analysts noted. According to FT one of the sources close to the operation, Amazon plans to work with Zoox to create a fleet of autonomous vehicles and rival Waymo and Google. From the point of view of some analysts, Amazon’s plan would be closer to integrating Zoox’s technology into its delivery service.
The move is close to that made this year by Intel with the purchase of Moovit for $ 900 million, but the development and implementation of autonomous vehicles is not being easy. In addition to the many challenges associated with this technology, the coronavirus crisis has further delayed its arrival. In April of this 2020, Zoox laid off close to 100 employees, out of the more than 1,000 employees it currently has.
Buying Zoox is Amazon’s second largest purchase since 2009, when it bought Zappos and only behind the Whole Foods acquisition in 2017. Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox and Jesse Levinson, CTO of Zoox, will remain with the company after the operation. Zoox will continue to operate independently, similar to what happens with Twitch.
“We have come a long way with our specially designed approach to safe and autonomous mobility, we now have an even greater opportunity to achieve a fully autonomous future,” Aicha Evans explained in the statement.
An ambitious startup pitted against Tesla
Zoox has its own software for its autonomous vehicles. They have been testing it for a long time in real environments and on different prototypes. Zoox expected to manufacture its first own model this 2020 and in October of last year it began its expansion to Las Vegas.
In March 2019, the litigation between Tesla and Zoox. Elon Musk’s company accused four former employees of having “leaked with Tesla-owned documents that they found useful to their new company” in order to “help Zoox do without all the years of work required to develop and run their own. warehousing, logistics and inventory control operations “. In April of this year, Zoox admitted possession of those documents and agreed to pay Tesla a certain amount of money as compensation.
Zoox is one of the autonomous driving startups whose plans are more ambitious. The company does not focus solely on software, but his plans went through the construction of the entire vehicle to later operate their own autonomous taxi service. Similar to what Cruise Origin intends.
In a video published by the company, a Toyota Highlander can be seen driving through the streets of San Francisco. The video shows the vehicle crossing intersections and continuing through tunnels without the use of GPS. Its autonomous driving is based on a 360º vision system composed of 18 cameras, 10 radars and 8 LIDARs.
Amazon has been experimenting to date with the delivery of warehouse drones and robots, this acquisition marking a turning point in Amazon’s bid for autonomous vehicles. We will have to wait and see if they decide to turn it into their own car service and rival Waymo or if they take advantage of all the technology of Zoox to improve the automation of shipments. Because if there is a company interested in saving costs in transport, that is Amazon.
More information | Amazon
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