Zoox Updates Self-Driving Software After San Francisco Incident
So, like, Amazon's robot car company, Zoox, just put out another software fix. This is to make sure their cars are way better at spotting people nearby and stopping if someone's too close. This came after a little boo-boo happened in San Francisco earlier this month.
They said this fix goes out to 270 of their cars that use this special self-driving tech. Zoox told the folks at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration all about it on Thursday.
Okay, so get this: on May 8th, someone zipping by on an electric scooter was turning kinda slow at an intersection in San Francisco. They bumped into an empty Zoox robotaxi. The scooter rider got some minor bumps and fell down right next to the car. Then, weirdly, the car started to move a tiny bit and then stopped without touching the rider again. Because of this, Zoox actually stopped all their cars driving around for a bit to figure out what went wrong.
Zoox mentioned that this new software update is gonna help with this specific problem where a person is near their self-driving car when it's stopped or just barely moving, or getting ready to go again. They said sometimes, although it's super rare, the Zoox car might start moving even if it doesn't see the person still there.
After that incident, Zoox totally hit pause on all their cars driving without anyone inside. Then they did this software update, ran tests with computer models, and did some other checks. They said they started driving again last week.
Just so you know, all these cars belong to Zoox. You can't just go out and buy one right now. Zoox has been testing these self-driving cars on regular roads since 2023 in places like California and Nevada. Last year, they started testing in Florida and Texas too.
Right now, their test cars are driving around in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, plus Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami. Funny enough, earlier this month, Zoox had another software recall for 270 of these same cars after one of their empty robotaxis got into a crash with another car in Las Vegas back in April. And even before that, in April, those NHTSA folks closed an investigation into 258 Zoox cars about a braking issue after the company did another recall to update their software. So yeah, lots of updates going on with the self-driving stuff. What do you think about all these updates?
