Amazon's Zoox Updates Software After San Francisco Crash
Hey, so Amazon's self-driving car crew, Zoox, just put out another software update for their vehicles. This is the second one, tbh. They're trying to make sure the cars are better at seeing folks walking nearby and don't move if someone's super close. This all happened after a little fender-bender in San Francisco earlier this month. It wasn't a big deal, but still good they're on top of it.
Apparently, this update is for 270 of their cars that use this self-driving software. Zoox told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about it. What happened was on May 8th, some person on an electric scooter was turning slow at an intersection in San Francisco and bumped into one of those empty Zoox robotaxis. The scooter rider got a small boo-boo and fell down next to the car. Then, the car started to move just a tiny bit, like, it literally just started going and then stopped real fast without touching the person again. Wild, right?
Because of that, Zoox actually pressed pause on driving on real roads for a bit to look into things. They said this new software update fixes a problem where sometimes, in weird situations, their self-driving cars might start moving again even if they didn't see the person who was right there. So they stopped all the cars that didn't have a driver, put in the update, and did a bunch of tests and simulations. They told everyone they started driving again last week.
Just so you know, these cars are all owned by Zoox. You can't buy one just yet, unfortunately. They've been testing these self-driving rides on public streets since 2023 in California and Nevada. And last year, they started trying them out in Florida and Texas too. Now, you can spot their test cars in places like the Bay Area (that includes San Francisco), Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami. Pretty cool, huh?
Oh, and earlier this month, Zoox actually did *another* software recall for those 270 driverless cars. That was because of a crash that happened in Las Vegas on April 8th. An empty robotaxi hit a regular car that time. And back in April, the NHTSA finished looking into 258 of Zoox's cars about a braking issue. Zoox fixed that by doing a software recall too. Seems like software updates are a regular thing for them, idk. It makes sense though, gotta be safe!
