On Thursday, the Department of Transportation allowed Amazon’s autonomous vehicle company, Zoox, to roll out several thousand of its cars over the next few years. The Trump administration said it is developing safety standards for self-driving cars like Zoox, which do not have steering wheels, brakes, or controls for humans. Zoox is already test driving in Las Vegas and San Francisco, with four passenger seats and a robot voice. The feds allowed Zoox to roll out up to 2,500 of its vehicles annually in the next two years and begin charging for rides. Jeff Farrah, CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, noted most robotaxis currently look like typical vehicles. Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at Telemetry, said new federal safety standards should set minimum requirements for self-driving cars, similar to human driver licensing tests. Missy Cummings, professor and director of Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University, said all such vehicles require extensive human supervision, with remote teams, sometimes overseas, monitoring cars and stepping in when trouble occurs, raising cost scalability questions. Abuelsamid also cited bad weather as a hurdle, noting autonomous vehicles have mostly been deployed in warm weather environments like California, Texas, and Nevada, and must improve in snow, rain, and fog to grow.