Sign up to see the future, today<\/p>\n
Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech<\/p>\n
Robotaxi companies are learning the hard way that operating driverless cars also means that there\u2019s no one supervising what happens inside them.<\/p>\n
Take Zoox<\/a>, the Amazon-owned self-driving startup that\u2019s been offering rides, free of charge, in Las Vegas and San Francisco since September. It claims that it\u2019s served more than 500,000 passengers \u2014 while acknowledging that some of them haven\u2019t exactly been sticklers for the rules.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not supposed to smoke in the vehicle. They smoke in the vehicle. And they\u2019re smoking everything in the vehicle,\u201d an exasperated Chris Stoffel, Zoox\u2019s director of robot industrial design and studio engineering, told Fast Company<\/a> in a new interview. \u201cLike, how do we interact with that?\u201d <\/p>\n Unlike its competitors, Zoox uses its own unique car that it designs and builds in-house. There\u2019s no driver seat or steering wheel, let alone traditional car doors. Instead, it has two rows of face-to-face seats fitting four people, and sliding doors that part in the middle. It\u2019s like a train car on wheels, if the train car was way smaller and looked like a minimalist toaster.<\/p>\n The fundamentals of this unique design has stayed the same through the years, but Zoox recently\u00a0unveiled a new \u201cevolution\u201d of the car, as it prepares to start giving rides to the public in Austin and Miami.<\/p>\n Many of these changes were passenger focused, according to Stoffel, now that it\u2019s had plenty of rides to learn from. And one particularly informative recurring passenger behavior? Vomiting.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough we thought about that in the initial product and initial materials, we can make it better, right?\u201d Stoffel told Fast Company. \u201cBecause now we have real-world experience saying like, hey, this is how long it took us [to clean], this is where the vomit got into the nooks and crannies. Can we adjust that? Can we fix that?\u201d<\/p>\n Combined with the plague of passengers hot-boxing in their cars, Zoox engineers pivoted to using more moisture and odor-resistant materials. Sayonara, weed smoke and throw-up stench!<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cWe wanted to be able to wipe clean any issue very quickly rather than replace parts,\u201d Stoffel said.<\/p>\n Zoox isn\u2019t the only robotaxi company dealing with rowdy riders. Some passengers have reportedly had sex in their self-driving cabs<\/a>, and most recently, a group of teens made headlines after they were spotted hanging out the windows of a Waymo robotaxi<\/a>. How these services will keep riders on their best \u2014 or at least acceptable \u2014 behavior is something we expect to be a major challenge as they grow in popularity.<\/p>\n