March 9 (Reuters) - Amazon's robotaxi unit Zoox is expanding testing to Dallas and Phoenix and launching a command hub for fleet operations in Arizona, as it looks to widen its footprint in the U.S.'s increasingly competitive autonomous taxi market.
The move willexpand testing operations to 10 markets across the country, Zoox said on Monday, adding the two Sun Belt cities to existing sites including Las Vegas, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
While Alphabet's Waymo has been leading commercial deployments in the sector and Tesla is betting on its production capacity and AI technology to give it an edge, Zoox has been gradually scaling operations, launching limited services in Las Vegas and a pilot rider program in San Francisco late last year.
The company now plans to deploy a small number of retrofitted sport utility vehicles in Dallas and Phoenix, initially focused on manual mapping before progressing to autonomous testing with a safety driver behind the wheel.
Zoox will also open new depots in both cities and launch a "Fusion Center" facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, to serve as a command hub for fleet operations, remote guidance and rider support. The expansion is expected to create hundreds of jobs, the company said.
Phoenix and Dallas offer different testing conditions compared to dense urban areas like San Francisco, featuring sprawling road networks and extreme weather conditions such as desert heat and dust, which the company said will help validate its sensors, batteries and artificial intelligence systems.
Zoox has logged more than 1 million autonomous miles and served more than 300,000 riders so far, the company said.
Meanwhile, U.S. regulators are set to hold a national autonomous vehicle safety forum on Tuesday, which will be attended by the CEOs of Waymo, Zoox and self-driving company Aurora.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Abhirup Roy in San Francisco; Editing by Jonathan Ananda)
