Amazon's Zoox unveiled its self-driving robotaxi on Monday.

It's a "carriage-style" car, which means that passengers face each other.

The car can travel up to 75 miles per hour and can run up to 16 hours on a single charge

Amazon's self-driving vehicle company, Zoox, is taking the wraps off of its first robotaxi.

Zoox on Monday debuted an electric, fully driverless vehicle that's built for ride hailing. It's a "carriage-style" car, which means that passengers face each other and there's no space for a driver or passenger seat, since there's no steering wheel. It has space for up to four passengers.

The robotaxi has a few features that set it apart from rivals like Alphabet's Waymo, GM's Cruise, Uber and Tesla. It has bidirectional driving capabilities and four-wheel steering, which allows it to change directions without the need to reverse and navigate in compact spaces.

An array of cameras, radar and lidar sensors are mounted on all four corners of the car, eliminating "typical blind spots" and giving it a 270-degree field of view on the road. The car can travel up to 75 miles per hour and can run up to 16 hours on a single charge. It's also equipped with an airbag system on all four seats.

 autonomous carriage has space for up to four passengers.

Zoox

The vehicle is designed for ride-hailing in urban environments. Zoox said it's currently testing in three cities — Las Vegas, Nevada; Foster City, California; and San Francisco, California.

The company plans to launch an app-based ridesharing service. Its first target markets will be San Francisco and Las Vegas, Zoox said.

"Zoox is the first in the industry to showcase a driving, purpose-built robotaxi capable of operating up to 75 miles per hour," the company told CNBC in a statement. "While our vehicle is not ready for commercial use yet, this marks a key milestone towards our vision of building an autonomous robotaxi fleet and ride-hailing service."

It comes after GM's Cruise subsidiary unveiled its own driverless shuttle, called Origin, in January. Like Zoox's vehicle, it doesn't have manual controls like pedals or a steering wheel.

Zoox was founded in 2014 by Australian artist-designer Tim Kentley-Klay,[6][7] and Jesse Levinson, son of Apple Inc. chairman Arthur D. Levinson, who was developing self-driving technology at Stanford University.

The company's name Zoox comes from the creature Zooxanthellae due to the creature's dependence on renewable energy like Zoox's production vehicle and its symbiotic relationship with coral reefs relating to the company's goal to have a symbiotic relationship with people.

In December 2018, Zoox became the first company to gain approval for providing self-driving transport services to the public in California.

By July 2018, according to Bloomberg, Zoox had raised $800 million in venture capital, at a valuation of $3.2 billion. Draper Fisher Jurvetson is an investor in the company.

In January 2019, Zoox appointed a new CEO, Aicha Evans, who was previously the Chief Strategy Officer at Intel

On March 20, 2019, Tesla, Inc. filed a lawsuit against Zoox and several now-former Tesla employees (who left Tesla for employment at Zoox) alleging theft of Tesla's proprietary information and trade secrets related to warehousing, shipping, and logistics in late 2018 and early 2019.The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum in April 2020 where Zoox "acknowledged that certain of its new hires from Tesla were in possession of Tesla documents pertaining to shipping, receiving, and warehouse procedures when they joined Zoox’s logistics team.”

On June 26, 2020, Amazon and Zoox signed a "definitive merger agreement" under which Amazon will acquire Zoox for over $1.2 billion.

In September 2020, Zoox became the fourth company in the State of California to receive permit to test driverless automobiles on public roads.

On December 14, 2020, Zoox became the world’s first company to showcase a fully autonomous, all-electric, purpose-built vehicle that is capable of driving up to 75 mph.