Zoox plans for scalability with robotaxi serial production facility

An automated transport system moves vehicles from station to station in Zoox’s serial production facility. | Source: Zoox

Since it was founded in 2014, Zoox Inc. has worked to deploy custom-built robotaxis on public roads. The autonomous vehicles of Amazon’s self-driving venture don’t look like an average car; they have no steering wheels, brake pedals, or driver’s seats. Instead, they are built around cultivating a comfortable riding experience.

A custom vehicle, however, requires custom manufacturing processes. This has led Zoox to open its own robotaxi serial production facility in Hayward, Calif., earlier this year. While the company doesn’t have the advantage of having a large OEM backing it, Zoox does maintain complete control over every step of the manufacturing process.

Michael Lemperle, the senior director of manufacturing engineering and general assembly at Zoox, has spent his entire career in the automotive industry. After helping fortify Porsche’s manufacturing supply chain for almost a decade in Germany, Lemperle moved to the U.S. in 2016.

Around this time, Tesla was becoming more mainstream, and it was clear to Lemperle that the industry was shifting towards electrification. There was also a lot of growing hype around autonomous vehicles (AVs). Lemperle was drawn to Zoox because of its unique vehicle design.

“If you want to deliver an outstanding or superior service to your customer, you basically need to really decide to integrate the whole ride journey,” Lemperle told The Robot Report. At the end of the day, Zoox sells rides, so it’s important to build around the riding experience, he said.

Now, Lemperle has spent over seven years at Zoox, helping the company create its autonomous vehicles with scalability in mind.

How is Zoox’s production line different from an average OEM?

Zoox uses its production facility for a variety of operations, including robotaxi engineering and software/hardware integration, robotaxi assembly, storage of robotaxi components, shipping and receiving, and end-of-line testing.

When it comes to the assembly line, Lemperle said Zoox uses effective aspects of traditional OEM assembly lines. For example, the company partners with suppliers as much as possible to deliver high-quality components.

Where Zoox differs is in testing diagnostics and in building software-defined vehicles. This means the company puts a much greater focus on integration.

“In a traditional OEM, you typically power up the vehicle very late in the process, and the diagnostics that need to happen on the electrical system are fairly limited,” Lemperle said. “For us, it’s exactly the opposite way around. We try to power up very early so that we can start testing and find issues as they happen.”

Zoox runs diagnostics every time it installs a new component on the vehicle. This means the company is constantly checking to make sure a part is connected correctly, if it has the right firmware version, or if there are any other faults.

Zoox relies on automation in its facility

At the final quality inspection point, Zoox uses a light tunnel to check for scratches, fit issues, or uneven gaps. | Source: Zoox

Because Zoox is running diagnostics with every component it adds, it takes longer to assemble a Zoox robotaxi than a regular vehicle. On an average large-scale automotive assembly run, a line runs at about 30 to 60 vehicles per hour, which equates to one to two minutes of assembly time, Lemperle said.

Zoox, on the other hand, takes 20 minutes to assemble a vehicle, much of which requires a flexible, human operator who can jump between different tasks quickly. There are, however, parts of the process that require repeated, laborious tasks. For these, Zoox employs robotics.

“A great example for this is, we use [automation] for all of the urethane dispensing that we do to glue in glass or other panels,” Lemperle explained. “The repetition and continuity that a robot can produce, you can’t train a human to get to that point.”

Zoox also uses automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in its facility, a technology that Lemperle noted has matured. Now, AGVs don’t require many infrastructure changes, and are easy to scale when needed, he said.

“It’s extremely flexible and un-invasive from an infrastructure perspective,” Lemperle said.

Quick servicing is key to scalability, Lemperle says

For Lemperle, scalability was an important concern from the very first Zoox prototype. He has worked to build the vehicle manufacturing team from scratch.

“Now, we are in this very interesting phase, from a vehicle manufacturing standpoint, where our focus is now shifting,” Lemperle said. “The product has reached the maturity that we now, and we’re transitioning into really ramping up production and being able to, at the same high quality level, deliver thousands of [vehicles] into the fleets.”

But scalability isn’t just about how to easily build a vehicle. “For us, as we operate the fleet, it’s not only about how can you build them easily, but also, you do you service them? And, how do you keep service costs down and basically also optimize around the uptime of the vehicle?” Lemperle said.

He wanted to ensure that a Zoox vehicle would spend as little time as possible getting serviced at a depot. This was especially important considering a robotaxi will drive many more miles than an average vehicle.

“For example, there are a couple of larger modules. One of them is our drive module that has quite a bit of complex technology in it; the battery is in there, the GPU is in there,” Lemperle said. “If you have a problem with that unit, we can fairly easily pull that unit off, put a new unit on, and the vehicle can go out into the field again and drive.”

The benefits of staying in-house while scaling to 10k vehicles

For Lemperle, one of the biggest benefits of keeping all of Zoox’s manufacturing in-house is the ability to collaborate across departments.

“Keeping that general assembly of the vehicle in-house means we can really have close collaboration between the different engineering teams, like vehicle and software engineering,” Lemperle said. “Our facility is now just 50 minutes away from our headquarters. So whenever we find issues, we can very quickly iterate and really work through them.”

“It allows us to keep very tight control of the configuration of the vehicle and the variation evolution of the vehicle, while continuing to ensure its performance,” he continued. “So these quick feedback loops are really a key piece of the puzzle. I think the other piece is this proprietary diagnostic system that we developed to be able to fully integrate that into the assembly line of the testing.”

The company plans to continue to weigh which pieces it wants to keep making in-house and which components it can outsource.

“We can produce more than 10,000 vehicles out of this facility in a year,” said Lemperle. “So we are obviously already putting thought into what comes after this.”

“There are certain pieces right now, looking at the vehicle that we build ourselves, where we might say, okay, probably a supplier could have done this better,” he concluded. Looking to outside sources will help Zoox focus on what it does best: integrating complex systems into one, user-focused robotaxi.

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