Amazon's Zoox Updates Software Again After San Francisco Bump
Hey, so Amazon's self-driving car company, Zoox, just put out another software update. This is the second one they've done recently, which is interesting, right? They're trying to make their cars better at seeing people walking nearby and also to stop the car from moving if someone is too close.
Why are they doing this, you ask? Well, it's linked to a little bump that happened in San Francisco earlier this month. So, they decided to update the software on 270 of their vehicles. They even told the government about it, like they're supposed to.
What actually happened? Okay, so on May 8th, someone on an electric scooter was making a turn slowly at an intersection. They ended up hitting an empty Zoox car. The scooter rider got some small injuries and fell down next to the car. Then, and this is where the software part comes in, the car started to move a tiny bit before stopping, but it didn't actually hit the person again. Still, it was enough for Zoox to stop testing cars on the road for a bit to figure things out.
Zoox said this new software update is supposed to fix a problem where, sometimes, in really rare situations, the car might start moving again even if there's still someone standing nearby. They stopped all the driverless cars right after that incident, updated the software, and did a bunch of testing. They're back to testing now though.
Just so you know, these cars aren't for sale to regular people yet. Zoox owns all of them. They've actually been testing these self-driving cars on public roads since 2023 in California and Nevada and then started testing in Florida and Texas last year too. You can see their test cars driving around the Bay Area, including San Francisco, plus Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami.
Oh, and remember how I said this was the second update? Earlier this month, they also recalled 270 cars for a software issue after an empty car crashed into another car in Las Vegas on April 8th. And back in April, the government actually finished looking into 258 of their cars because of a braking issue after Zoox updated the software for that too. So yeah, lots of updates happening with these self-driving cars!
