Instead of turning a traditional car into an autonomous one, the Amazon-owned self-driving car service Zoox has created its own type of autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or front seat. Redesigning a car from the ground up also means redesigning car safety features.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco-based company released its first (voluntary) safety report since revealing its electric robotaxi in December. The report highlights what the company considers more than 100 safety features not found in regular (human-driven, conventional) vehicles.
Dr. Mark Rosekind, Zoox’s chief safety innovation officer, broke down the key features into three categories in a recent call: driving control, redundancy (or back up in case of failure), and rider protection. Zoox is focused on preventing crashes and incidents, but it’s also preparing for when things do go wrong once its ride-hailing service is on the road. (The vehicles have not started picking up riders and are still in testing.) Read more…
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