LAS VEGAS - Before nearly 20 county firefighters and city police officers got to inspect the toaster-like autonomous car set to ferry passengers on the busy Las Vegas strip, a local official reminded them of the high stakes of setting it loose in public.
State regulators in Nevada, not local officials, get to decide when a company can launch a robotaxi service, said Andrew Bennett, director of Clark County's Office of Traffic Safety. The training session held by Zoox for first responders was one of the few opportunities those responsible for keeping Las Vegas streets safe would have to influence the rollout.
"It's our opportunity to ask questions and to make sure that you're comfortable with the technology," Bennett said to the first responders last fall.
Questions that came up included: What can first responders do if the nearly 6,000-pound vehicle is blocking a roadway? (Better to pull, not push.) What happens if the vehicle loses its connectivity? (It's designed to pull over.) And can first responders manually shut off the vehicle? (Not yet, but Zoox is working on it.)
Training sessions like the one Zoox held in Las Vegas last fall are becoming a new ritual for emergency workers across the country as autonomous vehicles begin to spread beyond the handful of cities that served as initial testing grounds.
The vehicles' operators generally claim they drive more safely than humans, but anything can happen on public roads and first responders need to know how to intervene if a robotaxi is caught in a collision that traps passengers, catches fire, or gets caught doing something that demands a traffic stop.
Nearly a year after that first-responder training session, and after two years of testing its vehicles in Vegas, Zoox started allowing the public to ride up and down the Strip in its vehicles on Wednesday. The four-person cars lack steering wheels and are symmetrical, driving in either direction without turning around.
Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon that has also tested its vehicles in San Francisco and Foster City, California, is the first company to provide robotaxi service in Las Vegas. Once the company receives approval from the Nevada Transportation Authority, it can charge for paid rides. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
Alphabet's Waymo, which has over 2,000 vehicles completing hundreds of thousands of paid trips each week across San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta, has trained over 20,000 first responders in how to interact with its vehicles, the company said.
Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment on how many first responders the company has trained, but a representative from the Austin police department confirmed that fire, police and transit workers were trained on the company's Robotaxi before the company launched commercial service in June.
Tesla, Waymo and Zoox say their vehicles can detect the lights and sirens of emergency vehicles and automatically attempt to pull over. Waymo says its vehicles can interpret first responders' hand signals.
So far, Waymo and Tesla robotaxis that carry passengers are modified conventional cars, although Waymo has begun testing a custom-built design similar to that of Zoox.
Zoox has been slower to launch service to the public than rivals, and its vehicles currently operate in much smaller areas than Waymo's. Passengers can hail a ride through a smartphone app, similar to how they might call an Uber or Lyft, but the company's vehicles currently travel to only a handful of destinations along and near the Las Vegas Strip.
At the Las Vegas training session, firefighters and police officers walked around and stepped inside the autonomous vehicle while it sat idle in an air-conditioned company depot.
The first responders appeared excited about the potential of the company's artificial intelligence technology to ferry visitors up and down the Vegas Strip without concern that a driver might be inebriated.
They were also wary of problems that might unfold: Autonomous vehicles are electric, and when electric vehicles catch fire, they're difficult to extinguish, the firefighters said. The first responders also worried that a secondary air bag deployment could injure an emergency responder, a common concern with conventional vehicles. And if a police officer wanted to view the footage a Zoox vehicle captured on the road, would the company be willing to share it?
Turning over footage would require a subpoena, a Zoox official responded.
The interaction highlighted how there can be tension between robotaxi companies and first responders. Robotaxi operators often say they want to work with local officials, but emergency departments and city leaders have sometimes clashed over how to minimize disruptions to transit routes and emergency response. The data collected by the cameras and other sensors the vehicles use to see the road can be tempting to investigators.
In San Francisco, where Waymo has trained first responders and operated for years, autonomous vehicles have obstructed public transit service and firefighters responding to emergency scenes, leading city officials to ask for tougher oversight from state regulators.
Consumers have broadly shown a willingness to embrace robotaxis. In California they have also led to close calls with cyclists and pedestrians, incidents of riders being harassed by drivers or pedestrians, autonomous cars being targeted with vandalism, and hundreds of parking violations in San Francisco alone.
Federal regulators have opened safety investigations into Zoox's and Waymo's operations. Cruise, owned by General Motors, suspended its operations after a grisly collision with a pedestrian in San Francisco. GM decided in 2024 to shut down its autonomous taxi operations.
While the first-responder training sessions anticipate some of the major safety issues involved with encountering a driverless vehicle on the road, those who've been through the trainings and have seen large-scale commercial rollouts say it's difficult to anticipate all the potential issues in a specific market.
Darius Luttropp, at the time deputy chief of operations for the San Francisco Fire Department, said in an interview last year that Waymo vehicles in the city have blocked firefighters from leaving and entering firehouses, and have crashed into their equipment.
According to SFFD reports obtained through public records requests, autonomous vehicles in 2023 and 2024 occasionally delayed fire fighters' emergency response time, usually for just one or two minutes but in one 2024 incident by five minutes. A 2023 report describes a Waymo positioning itself between a fire engine and another car on fire, with emergency responders needing to enter the Waymo and move it out of the way. City fire and transit officials said in interviews that incidents of service disruption were vastly undercounted.
"Waymo strives to partner with city officials, first responders, and local organizations to provide a valuable service for the communities we operate in," company spokesman Chris Bonelli said in an email. "We take all observations and concerns seriously and use that feedback to improve the performance of our technology."
Lt. William White of the Austin Police Department said that Waymo vehicles have sometimes had trouble identifying and obeying police officers. "We have had multiple instances of them failing to recognize an officer on a motorcycle with lights activated," he said, adding that he's been concerned about the safety of officers directing traffic on foot during disruptions like concerts or sporting events. Austin court records show that Waymo vehicles have received 21 parking tickets in 2025.
The Austin Police Department has filed three criminal complaints against vehicles that impeded traffic, White said. Waymo said two have been dismissed. Local media has reported the fire department has also lodged complaints.
Waymo is working to do better, White said. The company has given the department some ideas about how officers could motion with their arms more emphatically to signal to robotaxis, he added.