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Amazon's Zoox unveils electric robotaxi that can travel up to 75 mph
Six years ago, Zoox launched quietly with a mighty mission: build and commercialize just about every aspect of a robotaxi service from the self-driving software stack and on-demand ridesharing app to the management of the fleet and an unconventional vehicle that would transport passengers.
Now, it's finally lifting the veil on its multi-year effort. Zoox, which was acquired earlier this year by Amazon, unveiled the electric, autonomous robotaxi it built from the ground up — a cube-like vehicle loaded with sensors, no steering wheel and a moonroof that is capable of transporting four people at speeds of up to 75 miles per hour. The vehicle can drive bidrectionally and has four-wheel steering, capabilities that Zoox said were included to allow it to maneuver through compact spaces and change directions without the need to reverse. In other words, dense urban environments.
The vehicle has a four-seat, face-to-face symmetrical seating configuration, similar to what a train traveler might encounter. It's also equipped with a 133 kilowatt-hour battery that Zoox said allows it to operate for up to 16 continuous hours on a single charge. Zoox didn't provide a mileage range for the battery.
Also at The Verge, Bloomberg, CNBC, and NYT.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2020, @09:15PM
Very sci-fi, but other road users are going to hate it because the wheels are at the corners and are only about half covered by the "fenders":
+ When it's wet this thing is going to throw up spray like a semi-trailer.
+ Gravel on the road is going to be tossed up and break windshields of following cars.
+ In the event that you come in contact with one of the exposed tires at more than a slow speed, either your car or the Zoox is going to get tossed up in the air. Similar to car-car crashes when tires get interlocked in open wheel racing.
The people in the Zoox aren't going to like it very much at higher speeds either, for the same reason--wheels at the corners. This geometry leads to very high pitching rate on rough roads. Lots of head-toss fore-aft, on all but the smoothest roads. There are some good reasons that nice riding cars are designed around a sweet spot of "mass-moment of inertia in pitch" ratioed to the wheelbase. Packard came up with one work-around in their suspension design, here's the paper from 1956,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44468637?seq=1 [jstor.org]
This is why I call them stylists, although the people involved almost certainly call themselves designers (or industrial designers). Designers do engineering design and the good ones consider the full operating environment, not just the cool factor(s).
sorry for my rant, it's a personal peeve...