Amazon's robotaxi service Jukes, the world's largest e-commerce company, will set up a factory in the United States and compete with Google and Tesla in earnest.

According to major U.S. media on the 18th (local time), Amazon Jukes opened a robotaxi production facility in California. "We have opened a robotaxi production facility in Hayward, Bay Area, where we can produce up to 10,000 customized robotaxi per year," Juks said in a statement. The robotaxi production plant announced on the same day is about 20,000 square meters and is the size of three and a half football fields. Jukes is currently testing limited robo-taxi in San Francisco and Las Vegas. CEO Aisha Evans said she will start commercial service in Las Vegas later this year.

Unlike Waymo and Tesla, which have a similar structure to ordinary passenger cars, the robot taxi made by Juks has a structure where four passengers face each other. Another feature is that there is no steering wheel or pedal inside. Because it is a gondola-type structure, it can move back and forth. Amazon entered the robo-taxi market five years ago when it acquired self-driving startup Jukes for $1.2 billion. Through this robotaxi production, it is expected to compete with Google Waymo and Tesla Cybercap in earnest.

Currently, Google Waymo is the most advanced in robo-taxi services in the United States. Waymo currently operates commercial operations in San Francisco, LA, Silicon Valley, and Phoenix. Waymo said on the same day that New York City was also conducting a test run to secure a map. Waymo has already accumulated more than 10 million paid rides and 250,000 paid operations per week.

Tesla is also scheduled to start service in Austin, Texas, on the 22nd. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an interview with CNBC last month, "After (Austin), we will expand our service to San Francisco, LA, and San Antonio," and predicted, "By the end of next year, hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles or more than 1 million Tesla vehicles in the United States will operate autonomously."

Tesla's robo-taxi business is fundamentally different from its competitors. Waymona Jukes is very expensive in the form of an expensive LiDAR and a camera. Tesla, on the other hand, operates Tesla vehicles that are sold as passenger cars by robo-taxi, and self-driving only with cameras, not LiDAR.

Tesla is also different from the other two companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) learning method, which is the core of autonomous driving. Waymo and Juks are learning AI with data obtained while driving a robotaxi based on high-precision maps. In the new city, data is secured and AI is learned through new pilot operations. Tesla, on the other hand, is currently learning AI from data obtained from Tesla vehicles on roads around the world. This is why the more the number of Tesla supplies, the better the self-driving performance, and autonomous driving is normally carried out outside the city.

As self-driving services become more common in the United States, overseas expansion is expected to accelerate. Waymo has decided to start test operations in Japan in partnership with Japanese taxi companies. In April, Toyota also announced that it would strengthen cooperation with autonomous vehicles. In Korea, there are also observations that Tesla will soon receive permission for fully autonomous driving (FSD) for its vehicles.

[Silicon Valley Correspondent Lee Deok-ju / Seoul Reporter Ahn Seon-je]