While driverless taxis seem to be the way of the future, they’re still not close to the finished product. This has been made evident by the announcement from Amazon that it’s recalling 270 driverless robotaxis after one of them was involved in a car crash last month.
a crash is possible when the driverless car is going over 40 miles per hour
Amazon’s Zoox business division said on Tuesday that while there were no injuries stemming from the incident involving a passenger vehicle, there was a fault when “another vehicle slowly approaches perpendicularly and stops.” In this scenario, a crash is possible when the driverless car is going over 40 miles per hour.
In this specific case, the unoccupied Zoox vehicle anticipated the other car just slowing down instead of coming to a complete stop, which led to the robotaxi moving to the right and colliding with the other vehicle.
At the time of the incident, Zoox paused all operations until it completed a full investigation and updated the software issue.
This isn’t the first time Zoox vehicles have had a problem. Last May, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had to probe a braking issue following two rear-ending incidents. The company has mainly been testing its robotaxis in Foster City, California, and Las Vegas.
