Amazon’s (AMZN) autonomous vehicle company, Zoox, announced on Tuesday that it is expanding its testing operations to Los Angeles, making it the sixth city in its U.S. test program. Zoox’s test fleet already operates in places like San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami. The company said it takes a careful, step-by-step approach when launching in new cities and will start in L.A. with a small number of test vehicles driven by safety operators.
Before testing driverless cars, Zoox maps out the area manually in order to understand the local road conditions. The team plans to start autonomous driving in L.A. later this summer. Just like in Austin and Miami, Zoox expects to gather useful information from Los Angeles’ unique road conditions, construction, and city events. This will help improve its robotaxi service before it considers rolling out to more neighborhoods.
Zoox was founded in 2014 and bought by Amazon in 2020 for over $1.2 billion. Interestingly, the company initially gained attention for designing its own bidirectional, all-electric vehicles made specifically for ride-hailing. It has also hit several milestones, such as becoming the first company to meet federal safety standards for autonomous vehicles without requiring any special exemptions. In addition, it competes against Waymo (GOOG), Tesla (TSLA), Aurora Innovation (AUR), and others in the fast-growing robotaxi space.
Is Amazon Stock Expected to Rise?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on AMZN stock based on 45 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average AMZN price target of $268.05 per share implies 53.8% upside potential.
