Amazon may have just taken a big step toward self-driving delivery vehicles
Zoox has self-driving vehicles out on the streets in Arizona and Nevada. (Amazon /)You’ve probably seen many stories about how Amazon plans to deliver packages via drones at some point in the future. You may have even seen the outlandish plan for Amazon drone “hives” that could sit in city centers disbursing package-carrying crafts to every corner of a city. We haven’t heard as much about self-driving vehicles taking up Amazon delivery duties. Today, however, the company spent $1.2 billion to purchase a self-driving vehicle startup called Zoox.According to the deal, Zoox will still operate as an independent company under the Amazon umbrella in much the same way the self-driving car company Waymo maintains independence under the Alphabet hierarchy. Zoox has been around for six years, but 2020 has been rough. In April, it cut roughly 100 jobs and laid off a number of its contract workers.Amazon hasn’t said what...