Amazon's Robotaxi Company Recalls Its Fleet After One of its Cars Got…

Zoox recalled its entire fleet of 105 robotaxis after one vehicle became confused by heavy smoke at an active emergency scene in Las Vegas, unable to detect and avoid the hazard without human intervention. The incident is part of a pattern of autonomous vehicles interfering with emergency responders, prompting NHTSA to declare such failures a 'functional insufficiency' and a public safety danger. If you're building sensors, decision logic or safety systems for autonomous vehicles, NHTSA just signalled that 'edge cases' like smoke and emergency scenes are now baseline regulatory requirements, not nice-to-haves. This is your market: every robotaxi company now needs to buy or integrate better perception and emergency-scene handling, and the bar just got higher for everyone else trying to deploy.