Zoox Software Update After San Francisco Robotaxi Incident
Hey, so get this, Amazon's self-driving car company, Zoox, just put out another software fix for their cars. They had to do this after one of their robotaxis had a little bump-in in San Francisco earlier this month. Apparently, the update helps the cars do a better job of knowing when people are super close, so the car doesn't move when it shouldn't.
Zoox told the folks at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that this recall covers about 270 of their cars that use this self-driving software. So, what happened in San Francisco? Well, on May 8th, someone on an electric scooter was turning at an intersection and hit an empty Zoox robotaxi. The scooter rider got some minor boo-boos and fell next to the car. The car then started to move a little and stopped without hitting the person again. After that, Zoox actually stopped their on-road testing for a bit to figure things out.
Zoox said this new software update is all about fixing a thing where sometimes, in some weird situations, the car might start moving again even if there's still someone standing really close. It sounds like they paused all their driverless stuff after that incident, did the software update, and did a bunch of testing and simulations before they started driving around again last week.
Just so you know, all these cars are owned by Zoox right now. You can't go out and buy one yet. They've actually been testing these self-driving cars on public roads since 2023 in places like California and Nevada. Last year, they started testing in Florida and Texas too. Their test cars are now cruising around the Bay Area, including San Francisco, plus Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami. It's kinda wild how many places they're testing in!
This isn't the first time Zoox has had a little software issue. Just earlier this month, they recalled 270 driverless cars because an empty robotaxi got into a crash with another car in Las Vegas back in April. And get this, back in April, the NHTSA actually closed a look into 258 Zoox cars over a braking thing after Zoox did another recall to update their software. Seems like they're constantly tweaking things, which I guess makes sense since this is all still pretty new, right? Maybe it just shows how complicated making these cars safe really is. What do you think?
