Amazon’s Zoox is making a major power move in San Francisco, quadrupling its service area to include some of the city’s most coveted neighborhoods. Starting now, the aloe-green autonomous vehicles will operate in the Marina, North Beach, Chinatown, Pacific Heights, and along the Embarcadero. But here’s the catch: you probably can’t ride one yet.

The robotaxi company is keeping access extremely limited during this expansion phase. Right now, only Zoox employees, their friends and family, and a select group of people from the waitlist can actually book rides. The company is being strategic about where it’s expanding, focusing on areas where ride-hailing is already popular before eventually moving into more residential neighborhoods.

This expansion is a big deal for the Foster City-based company, which launched publicly in San Francisco back in late 2025. Until now, rides have been restricted to SoMa, the Mission, and the Design District. CEO Aicha Evans framed the expansion as part of Zoox’s growth strategy for 2026, saying “This expansion marks a significant step forward for Zoox and is driven by the insights from our early deployments”.

So what’s the actual track record here? Since going live in Las Vegas last September, Zoox has accumulated nearly 2 million autonomous miles and given rides to more than 350,000 people across its limited service areas. That sounds impressive until you compare it to competitor Waymo, which completes over 1 million autonomous rides every single month. Yeah, the gap is real.

The expansion isn’t just happening in San Francisco, though. Zoox is scaling up in Las Vegas and will start testing its purpose-built vehicles in Austin and Miami. The company is clearly betting big on autonomous ride-sharing as the future of urban transportation.

If you’re dying to try Zoox but aren’t in their inner circle, your best bet is signing up for the waitlist through their app. The company says it’ll eventually open service to more people from the waitlist, but there’s no timeline on when that’ll actually happen. For now, it’s still very much a limited beta experience, which is pretty typical for this stage of robotaxi development, but definitely frustrating if you’re stuck waiting.