The San Francisco Police Department is investigating Zoox after one of its robotaxis collided with a suddenly opened car door on January 17, raising fresh questions about the Amazon-owned company's ability to navigate urban edge cases. The crash injured a street ambassador and comes as Zoox pushes to scale its fledgling public robotaxi service in San Francisco, already plagued by recalls and operational hiccups since launching rider programs just months ago.
Zoox just hit another roadblock in its quest to prove autonomous vehicles can handle real-world chaos. The Amazon-owned robotaxi company is under investigation by San Francisco police after one of its self-driving vehicles struck the driver's side door of a parked 1977 Cadillac Coupe DeVille near 15th and Mission Streets on January 17, TechCrunch reports.
The crash happened around 2 p.m. when street ambassador Jamel Durden opened his car door into the path of the approaching robotaxi. Durden's hand was smashed in the collision, and the Zoox vehicle's glass doors were damaged. A Zoox employee riding as a passenger inside the autonomous vehicle was unharmed, according to the San Francisco Police Department - a detail the company hadn't previously disclosed.
Zoox claims its system "identified the opening door and tried to avoid it but contact was unavoidable," framing the incident as an edge case where human unpredictability outpaced machine reaction time. The company insists it offered medical attention to Durden, who allegedly declined until his vintage Cadillac was towed, according to MissionLocal.
But the timing couldn't be worse for Zoox's public rollout. The company only started offering free rides through its "Zoox Explorer" early-rider program in San Francisco last November, mirroring a similar Vegas deployment. Since then, it's been a rocky ride. Just weeks before this crash, in December to fix software that caused vehicles to cross center lanes and block crosswalks - exactly the kind of unpredictable behavior that spooks regulators and the public.
