Zoox will start charging Las Vegas robotaxi passengers next week

Zoox will start charging Las Vegas robotaxi passengers next week

2 min read•Aug 7, 2026•
Anna Kowalski
Anna Kowalski

Zoox will start collecting fares from robotaxi passengers in Las Vegas next week, first reported by Cleantechnica. The move follows last week's approval to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next two years and charge for rides, while Waymo remains the market leader by far in the US robotaxi market.

Before last week's approval, Zoox could conduct self-driving vehicle and robotaxi testing but could not charge passengers. NHTSA's authorization covers both paid rides and deployment of up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next two years.

Zoox has carried more than 1 million passengers for more than 3 million miles in robotaxis across Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin and Miami. The fare launch adds paid service to an operation that has already carried passengers in four cities.

Zoox gains share as Waymo still leads

Mobile app tracker Apptopia apparently put Zoox's share of the robotaxi market at 25% of active monthly users in June 2026, up from 15% in January. Waymo's share fell from 79% to 69% over that period, although its user base continued growing.

Waymo's monthly active-user growth also fell from 79% year over year to 15%. Zoox is entering paid service as its share rises, but Waymo still holds the larger position by far.

The next question is how many more robotaxis Zoox will deploy now that it can deploy thousands and charge for rides.

Meta agrees to teen limits in settlement costing up to $17B

Meta has reached a settlement with attorneys general from 47 states over allegations that it illegally manipulated children’s attention, first reported by Newyorker. The agreement could cost the company up to $17 billion and would change how Facebook and Instagram handle teen access through age verification, daily limits and nighttime restrictions.

Meta did not acknowledge wrongdoing. The Oakland trial turned on whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects providers from liability for user-posted content, should also shield the algorithms that shape what users see; the plaintiffs argued that it should not.

The states presented evidence that senior executives, intent on maximizing the company’s growth, repeatedly set aside concerns about what Meta’s products were doing to its youngest users. A former Meta engineer testified that the chance of a teen encountering violent or graphic content was between a hundred and four hundred times higher than what the company acknowledged publicly.

Meta also spent more than two billion dollars on legal defense in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Under the agreement, Facebook and Instagram will remove the like count on posts, do more to verify that users are at least thirteen years old, limit service to two hours a day for teenagers and restrict service entirely for those users during nighttime hours.

The settlement was quickly compared with the tobacco lawsuits of the nineties. But Meta is a trillion-dollar company increasingly invested in artificial intelligence, and the agreement applies to only a single facet of its sprawling operations. The deal places a striking financial cost alongside product changes focused on teen users.

New technologies are being disseminated ever more quickly, while the machinery of politics and law delivers accountability intermittently and at a painstaking crawl. It took more than a decade of worrying about how teenagers used Facebook and Instagram for a legal settlement to enforce a change in Meta’s behavior.

Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, stayed away from the lawsuit, arguing that it did not go far enough. After the settlement was announced, he said, “We’ll see them at trial.”

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