Zoox Software Update After San Francisco Incident

Hey, so Amazon's self-driving car company, Zoox, just put out another software update for their vehicles. This was after a little fender bender type thing happened in San Francisco earlier this month. They want the cars to be better at seeing people walking nearby and, you know, not moving if someone is close.

Apparently, this update is for about 270 of their cars that have the self-driving stuff in them, according to a report Zoox sent to the folks in charge of highway safety. What happened was on May 8th, a person on an electric scooter was turning real slow at an intersection in San Francisco and bumped into an empty Zoox robotaxi. The scooter rider got some minor ouchies and fell down next to the car.

Get this, the car started to move a little bit after that but then stopped without hitting the person again. Phew! After that, Zoox actually stopped driving the cars on the road for a bit to figure things out. They said this new software update is supposed to fix a problem where, in some rare cases, the car might start moving again even if it still sees someone nearby when it's stopped or going super slow.

So, Zoox paused all their driverless car stuff after the incident, then they did the software update, and did a bunch of testing. They started driving the cars around again last week. Just to be clear, these cars are all owned by the company right now, you can't just go buy one yet.

Zoox has been trying out their self-driving cars on regular roads since 2023 in places like California and Nevada. Last year, they even started testing in Florida and Texas. Their test cars are now driving around in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, and also in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami. Pretty cool, huh?

Oh, and actually, earlier this month, Zoox did another software recall for those same 270 cars. That was because of a different crash in Las Vegas back in April where an empty robotaxi hit a normal car. And get this, way back in April, the safety people looked into 258 Zoox cars because of a braking issue, but they closed that investigation after Zoox did another software update. Seems like they're doing a lot of updates!