Zoox opened a 220,000-square-foot factory in Hayward, California in June 2025. At full scale, it can produce more than 10,000 robotaxis per year—roughly three vehicles per hour.

Right now? They're making about one per day.

That gap between capacity and current production tells you everything about where autonomous vehicles are in 2025: the infrastructure's ready, the technology works, but scaling to mass production is the hard part.

What Zoox Built

This is the first purpose-built robotaxi serial production facility in the United States. Not a retrofitted automotive plant—a factory designed from scratch to build autonomous vehicles that have no steering wheel, no pedals, and bidirectional driving.

The facility employs about 100 technicians, using a mix of human workers and robots to assemble Zoox's custom vehicles. Beyond production, the Hayward plant handles robotaxi engineering, software and hardware integration, component storage, and end-of-line testing.

Zoox isn't just building vehicles here—they're building the entire vertical integration stack Amazon's known for.

The Tesla Playbook

This is Amazon copying Tesla's manufacturing strategy. Own the factory, own the supply chain, own the production process. Don't rely on third-party manufacturers like Magna Steyr to build your vehicles.

Compare this to Waymo's approach. Waymo partners with Jaguar for their I-PACE platform, retrofitting existing vehicles with autonomous systems. That's faster to deploy—Waymo's already operating at 100,000+ rides per week. But it's less optimized. You're constrained by the base vehicle's design decisions.

Zoox and Tesla both chose the hard path: design a purpose-built vehicle from scratch. No compromises, no legacy automotive baggage. Just pure autonomous vehicle optimization.

The payoff is better unit economics at scale. A vehicle designed entirely for autonomous operation should be cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, and cheaper to operate than a retrofitted consumer vehicle.

But you have to get to scale first.

The Production Ramp Challenge

Going from one vehicle per day to three per hour is the execution test. Zoox didn't provide a timeline for hitting full production capacity, which tells me they don't know yet how long it'll take.

This is where manufacturing experience matters. Tesla's been ramping production for 15+ years. They know how to scale from prototype to volume manufacturing—they've done it with Model S, Model 3, Model Y, and now Cybertruck (painfully slow, but they're doing it).

Amazon has incredible logistics and operational expertise, but they don't have automotive manufacturing experience. Zoox is learning this for the first time.

For context, Tesla's targeting April 2026 for Cybercab production, and even Elon Musk admits that's aggressive. Zoox has the factory capacity, but ramping to full production could easily take 18-24 months.

The Vegas Launch Context

Zoox launched public robotaxi service in Las Vegas in September 2025, offering free rides on the Strip. They're also testing in Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, Atlanta, and Seattle. San Francisco service is expected to launch publicly sometime in 2026.

Here's the production constraint: at one vehicle per day, Zoox is making roughly 365 vehicles per year. That's enough to support small pilot programs in multiple cities, but nowhere near enough to scale to Waymo's 100,000+ weekly rides.

To hit that volume, Zoox needs to be producing hundreds of vehicles per month, not one per day. The Hayward facility can support that scale—10,000 vehicles per year is 833 per month. But getting there is the hard part.

Vertical Integration vs. Speed to Market

I'm pro-vertical integration long-term, but it's the slower path to market. Waymo's already operating at meaningful scale because they partnered with Jaguar and didn't wait for custom manufacturing. Amazon's Zoox launched in Vegas, but they're constrained by production capacity.

Tesla's in the same position. They're running robotaxi service in the Bay Area with existing Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, but the Cybercab—their purpose-built robotaxi—won't start production until April 2026 at the earliest.

Vertical integration pays off when you're producing thousands of vehicles per month and capturing the cost savings. Until then, it's a capital-intensive bet that you can out-execute competitors who took the faster partnership route.

What Amazon's Betting

Amazon's treating this like AWS in the early days: build massive infrastructure capacity before you need it, then scale into it as demand grows.

The Hayward factory can produce 10,000 robotaxis per year. At Waymo's current utilization rates (100,000+ rides per week with an estimated fleet of 1,000-1,500 vehicles), Zoox could support 600,000-900,000 rides per week with 10,000 vehicles.

That's the scale Amazon's targeting. Not 2025. Probably not 2026. But by 2027-2028, if autonomous vehicles hit mass adoption, Zoox has the manufacturing capacity to compete.

The question is whether Waymo and Uber's AV partnerships capture the market before Zoox ramps production. First-mover advantage matters in network-effect businesses like ride-hailing.

Here's What I Think Happens

Zoox hits 100 vehicles per month by mid-2026, which lets them expand beyond Las Vegas and San Francisco into their other test markets. By late 2026, they're producing 200-300 per month, enough to start competing with Waymo in select cities.

But Waymo maintains their lead because they're already at scale. By the time Zoox is producing 3,000 vehicles per year, Waymo's operating 5,000+ vehicles across a dozen cities with years of operational data.

Amazon's bet is that vertical integration wins long-term—lower costs, better margins, proprietary technology. I think they're right. But getting there takes time, and ride-hailing is a race to dominate local markets before competitors lock them down.

Tesla faces the same challenge with Cybercab. Building the factory is the easy part. Ramping production to thousands per month while maintaining quality and hitting cost targets? That's where execution separates winners from everyone else.

Source: Amazon's Zoox opens its first major robotaxi production facility