Zoox, the autonomous vehicle arm of Amazon, has been crash testing its robotaxis as part of its strategy to ramp up the vehicles toward commercialization.
The crash testing comes just a few weeks after the robotaxi company started testing its autonomous vehicles on public roads in California. It was the first time vehicles were tested in public after several months of testing the robotaxis on private roads.
Zoox said the robotaxis were built from the ground up and as part of its plans to pass its internal testing, crash tests were needed. This comes after Zoox ran several pre-crash simulations to component-level tests and post-crash testing.
In the video, Zoox engineers put its autonomous shuttles through several crash test simulations including head on collisions, rear-end collisions, side swipe collisions and much more.
The company focuses on how it must comply with normal vehicle safety regulations even if it does not have the same equipment as traditional cars — such as no steering wheel, pedals or driver cockpit. Additionally, during testing certain problems emerged that due to the shuttle configuration presented difficulty in solving safety issues. This was especially challenging with side crashes as the sides of the robotaxi are larger than traditional vehicles.
