Zoox Robotaxi Moves After Collision with e-Scooter Rider
Zoox barely avoids recreating the Cruise pedestrian dragging sequence
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi started moving on its own after being in an e-scooter collision, with the collision scooter rider (minor injuries) on the ground next to the vehicle. This is a huge deal for safety, and hard questions should be asked:
Did the robotaxi not detect or keep track of the fact it had been hit after it stopped in an apparent attempt to avoid a collision?
Did the robotaxi not detect or keep track of a scooter rider on the ground next to it?
Why were remote assistants not brought into the loop before the robotaxi started moving after a collision with a light mobility user? Assuming it knew there was a collision. Assuming it knew the collision involved an e-scooter.
This is eerily similar to the factors that contributed a Cruise robotaxi dragging a pedestrian -- except Zoox got lucky and no dragging occurred.
Full Zoox crash description: "On May 8, 2025, in San Francisco, CA, while making a low-speed turn, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was struck by an e-scooterist after braking at the intersection to give right-of-way. The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact. The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist. Zoox operations personnel met the individual quickly on the scene to exchange information and offer medical attention for minor injuries, which was declined."
The important bit: The robotaxi moved despite there being a potentially injured person on the ground right next to it. They got SO LUCKY they did not drag that person down the street or run the person over.
What would we think if a human driver had an e-scooter rider hit them while they were stopped; the rider spilled onto the pavement next to the car; and the driver decided it was a great idea to proceed with making their turn? Without getting out of the car to see where the rider was and if the rider was OK. Regardless of blame or fault assignment.
I don't see any mention that Zoox did an operational stand-down after this mishap as they did for the Las Vegas mishap a few weeks earlier. They almost redid the Cruise mishap. And they don’t have the excuse of a flying pedestrian being unexpected. They absolutely should have done a stand-down.
Their fix description amounts to they care about safety so very much; software update; fixed; nothing to see here; move along. A better way of restoring trust would be to explain what part of the safety case is being changed to prevent this from happening again. And why that part of the safety case wasn’t fixed before deployment in light of lessons they should have learned from the Cruise mishap. But what we got from them was transparency is only for regulators, not the public. No public answers as to why this problem wasn’t fixed before deployment given the enormous publicity for a similar post-crash mistake by Cruise.
Post-crash motion should simply not have happened, and the fact that a system with this problem made it onto public roads raises a lot of questions about their safety processes.
Too many lessons from the Cruise mishap that don't seem to have been learned. Hope Zoox takes the time to review them here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05281
Zoox blog posting here: https://zoox.com/journal/2025-may-safety-recall-report/
(Recall report not yet available on the NHTSA web site, so I'm going by their blog post for now.)
Yikes, this does have Cruise written all over it. Hard to say what happened without the video and I still do not understand why Zoox won't share footage with the public from incidents like this. But if Zoox then issued a voluntary software recall, that would imply that Zoox did somehting wrong - ie not stopping after they hit the e-scooter rider.
Sharing video would build real trust and transparency - otherwise I think it's fair to assume the worst.
A large coalition of us are organizing to oppose the operation of Waymos on several long blocks of Market Street in San Francisco. That stretch was made mostly car free a few years ago.