Zoox’s Aicha Evans Is Reimagining Urban Mobility

Aicha Evans recalls the first time she saw the Zoox robotaxi, a driverless vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no front or back. “I fell in love,” she says.She went home and told her husband she was taking the job as CEO of the startup. Amazon acquired Zoox the following year for $1.3 billion, keeping her in the top slot. That was in 2020. This August, six years later, Zoox began charging for rides in Las Vegas, and has since announced plans to expand into Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, and Austin. Earlier this year, Zoox taxis also became available in the Uber app. All that might seem like a blip compared to the success of Zoox’s main competitor, Waymo, which now provides roughly 500,000 paid rides a week across 10 U.S. cities. But while Waymo adapts existing cars to be driverless, Zoox builds its driverless vehicles entirely from scratch, and in doing so is reimagining urban mobility."We are in the people-moving space, and we happen to use self-driving technology to realize the vision," Evans says. She believes the experience of driving should be a bit more like that of flying: You don’t spend a plane journey monitoring the pilot. You’re simply along for the ride, and can use that travel time however you wish. "We want you to be you and do you," Evans says.Without a steering column or driver's seat to design around, Zoox's engineers built what Evans calls a horseshoe airbag, one that envelops a passenger rather than deploying at them from a dashboard. It's the kind of safety innovation possible only because the vehicle wasn't inherited from a century of cars built for a driver. In fact, the entire vehicle is built around the rider rather than a driver. The bench seats face each other, so friends ride face to face. Evans sees the Zoox robotaxi’s sliding doors as an entry into a journey that goes beyond merely getting from point A to B. "I'm not opening doors," she says. "I'm being welcomed into this space that's going to be mine while I'm being transported." She envisions Zoox riders looking up at skyscrapers, trees, and stars from an angle they can’t access from behind a wheel. "You can dream," she says. Evans herself has been dreaming big since childhood. Born in Senegal and raised in Paris, she recalls feeling like a bit of an outsider in school. “Most of the time nobody looked like me,” she says. She took inspiration from Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist who became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for her research on radioactivity. Curie has been a lasting companion for Evans, not just as a scientist but as “a wife, as an immigrant,” someone who crossed languages and cultures as Evans has. She often returns to one of Curie’s mottos: “Nothing needs to be feared. Everything needs to be understood.”