Amazon's Zoox Updates Software After San Francisco Crash
Hey everyone, so check this out. Amazon's self-driving car company, Zoox, just put out another software fix. They did this because one of their cars had a little bump-up with someone on an electric scooter in San Francisco a few weeks back.
Basically, the update is all about making sure their cars are better at seeing people walking or scooting nearby. They want to make sure the car doesn't move if someone's too close, you know? Zoox said this fix is for 270 of their cars that have the self-driving stuff.
So, what happened in San Francisco? Well, on May 8th, this person on a scooter was turning slowly at an intersection and hit an empty Zoox robotaxi. The scooter rider got some minor injuries and fell near the car. Then, the car started to move a tiny bit and stopped again without hitting the person anymore. Because of this, Zoox paused their on-road testing for a bit to figure things out.
Zoox mentioned that this software update is to fix a problem where, in some weird cases, the car might start moving again even if it knows someone is still right there. After the incident, they stopped all their driverless car stuff, put in the software update, and did a bunch of testing and practice runs. They said they started testing again last week.
Just so you know, these cars are all owned by Zoox right now. You can't buy one yet. They've been testing these self-driving cars on public roads since 2023 in places like California and Nevada. Then last year, they started testing in Florida and Texas too. Now, they're trying them out in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, plus Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami. They actually had another software update for these same cars earlier this month after an empty robotaxi crashed with a regular car in Las Vegas in April. And back in April, the government closed an investigation into some of Zoox's cars because of a braking issue after Zoox did a recall to update their software then too. Lots going on with self-driving cars, huh?
