SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Santa Monica is negotiating a deal that would let Zoox, the robotaxi company owned by Amazon, park as many as 150 of its driverless vehicles in city-owned parking facilities, including the Main Library parking structure, after the City Council voted 6-0 to let staff keep talking with the company, The Santa Monica Daily Press reported.
The vote, taken at the council's Oct. 13 meeting, authorizes city staff to continue negotiations and, if the two sides reach terms, to sign a license agreement. City Manager Oliver Chi described the arrangement as a pilot that could run for up to a year. The city's parking operator, Metropolis, is helping to put the deal together.
Staff are looking first at the first underground level of the library garage and parts of the library's surface lot, according to the Daily Press. The Kiss-and-Ride lot south of the downtown Expo station is also being assessed, and Mr. Chi said it could serve as an interim site in the short term. Staff are still working out Zoox's technical requirements and whether the facilities meet them.
Under the staff report, the agreement would follow the Parking Division's standard license terms and would indemnify the city for incidents involving Zoox vehicles. The city expects about $500,000 or more a year in new recurring revenue, which Mr. Chi said Zoox would pay on a per-space basis. He said Zoox is setting up a charging site elsewhere and would use the city locations only for parking.
Mr. Chi told the council the library structure has three levels but only one is regularly used, and that one level has been closed entirely because of operational problems. He said there was "unused parking capacity that's sitting vacant at the library." The city had previously talked with another autonomous vehicle company about staging vehicles there, he said, but those efforts did not succeed.
Councilmember Natalya Zernitskaya noted that the library garage closes at night and asked how that would be handled. Mr. Chi said the structure would stay open while Zoox was using it and that the city would need staff on site to manage the vehicles. He also said Zoox is running a pilot in San Francisco and coordinating a wider rollout of robotaxi service, with Santa Monica included in a Los Angeles regional deployment.
Councilmember Dan Hall recused himself from the Zoox vote, saying he might hold Amazon stock. "So out of an abundance of caution, I will recuse from this action," he said, according to the Daily Press.
The proposal gives robotaxis a city-sanctioned place to wait away from homes, which Mr. Chi said has been a city priority in recent months. In July, the council voted 7-0 to adopt an emergency interim zoning ordinance that created a land-use category for autonomous vehicle fleet facilities, limited them to commercial corridors and barred maintenance, cleaning and servicing between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. at sites within 100 feet of residential zoning, Santa Monica Next reported.
The city is still fighting Waymo, the Alphabet-owned robotaxi leader, over two charging lots on Broadway that Waymo has used since November 2024. After residents complained about beeping, humming, lights and late-night activity, the council declared the lots a public nuisance in November 2025. Waymo sued the city that December and the city countersued. A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge barred overnight operations at the lots in July, but that injunction was stayed in August while Waymo appeals, allowing it to keep operating there, the Daily Press reported.
Zoox builds a purpose-made robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals. In July, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration granted the company a temporary exemption from parts of the federal vehicle safety standards covering up to 2,500 vehicles in each 12-month period through July 2028, according to the Federal Register. Zoox began charging fares on the Las Vegas Strip in August.
City officials did not say when Zoox vehicles might begin using the Santa Monica sites.
