After a year of testing and tooling around San Francisco city streets, Zoox announced it is making its robotaxis available to the public, starting with free rides for those who join a waitlist.
Zoox’s green vehicles are eye-catching. They aren’t built like cars. They have no steering wheel or pedals, all four seats face inward and some people refer to them as toasters on wheels.
They’re notable in another way, too. They’re manufactured in Hayward.
As factory jobs continue their decades-long decline across the country, the East Bay is doubling down on precision manufacturing, betting its proximity to Silicon Valley’s labs and talent pools will help lift a slumping industrial base into a new era. Alameda County’s manufacturing sector expanded by 10% over the same period, reaching nearly 94,000 jobs.
Old timers will recall that the East Bay has a storied history of building cars, most famously the NUMMI plant in Fremont, taken over by Tesla in 2010, now operating the biggest auto plant in the United States.
But ask anyone at Zoox and they’ll tell you, they’re not building cars. They’re designing robots that happen to carry people.
“We do not classify ourselves as in the automotive sector. We are in the robotic sector,” said Corrado Lanzone, vice president of manufacturing operations at Zoox, acquired by Amazon in 2020.
Lanzone told KQED that one of Hayward’s biggest benefits is its proximity to Silicon Valley and its culture of innovation.
That means the mechanical engineers in Hayward have an easier time collaborating with the software engineers at Zoox’s headquarters in Foster City.
Zoox launched its manufacturing operation in a 220,000-square-foot, repurposed Gillig bus manufacturing facility last June, and ultimately hopes to produce up to 10,000 vehicles a year. While about 100 people work for Zoox in Hayward today, the company anticipates hiring more.
It’s not just Hayward driving the advanced manufacturing bus in Alameda County. Fremont and Newark are doing it, too, according to the East Bay Economic Development Alliance, a public-private partnership covering Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
Together, the three cities have positioned themselves as an emerging regional hub for high‑value sectors like advanced transportation, biomedical, food and beverage, climate tech, and, yes, robotics. Fremont hosts Tesla, Applied Materials, and dozens of precision-hardware suppliers. Newark hosts Lucid Motors’ engineering and prototype plant.
By protecting industrial land, expediting permits, and modernizing infrastructure, the three cities have drawn a concentration of robotics, electric vehicle, biotech-hardware and clean-tech manufacturers that did not exist at this scale 15 years ago.
The Bay Area is too expensive to lure most manufacturing work, but because of its established base of technological talent, companies like Zoox find an attractive value proposition in building things close to headquarters, “especially in the early stages of trying to fine tune and commercialize a product that’s going to be made at scale,” said Stephen Baiter, executive director of the East Bay Economic Development Alliance.
Baiter calls what’s happening in the region a “convergence effect.” That is to say, companies like Tesla, Applied Materials and Zoox are capitalizing on the regional talent pool, its strong research and development ecosystem, availability of production space, and supportive local economic development policies as reasons why the region is an attractive place to scale operations.
While the East Bay’s biggest employers are education, health services, and professional/technical services, manufacturing is a major player, and one that’s growing.
“It’s anywhere between 20 to 30% of our gross regional product. Employment-wise, it’s closer to 10%. But still a substantial sector, however you want to slice it,” Baiter said.
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