Zoox Updates Software After San Francisco Crash
So get this, Amazon's self-driving car company, Zoox, just did another software update. They're trying to make sure their cars are better at seeing people walking nearby and won't move if someone's really close. This happened after a little crash in San Francisco a bit ago.
Apparently, this recall thing is for 270 cars that have their special self-driving software. Zoox told the folks at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about it. What happened? Well, back on May 8th, someone on an electric scooter was turning slowly at an intersection in San Francisco and bumped into an empty Zoox robotaxi. The scooter rider got a couple of minor scrapes and fell down next to the car. Then the car started to move a tiny bit and then stopped, but didn't hit the person again. Because of this, Zoox actually stopped driving their cars on the road for a little while to figure things out.
Zoox said this new software update is supposed to fix a problem with how their self-driving cars handle pedestrians when the cars are stopped, moving super slow, or about to start moving again. They mentioned that in some rare cases, the car might just start driving without realizing someone is still close by.
After that incident, Zoox paused all their cars that didn't have a driver. Then they put in that software update, did a bunch of testing and practice runs, and they said they started driving again last week. All these cars belong to Zoox right now, you can't buy them yet.
Zoox has been testing 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. Now, their test cars are driving around in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, plus Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, and Miami.
Oh, and not that long ago, Zoox had another software recall for 270 driverless cars. That was after an empty robotaxi was in a crash with a regular car in Las Vegas back on April 8th. And in April, the NHTSA closed an investigation into 258 Zoox cars about a braking issue. That also happened after Zoox did a recall to update their software. It seems like they're doing a lot of updates, right?
