The robotaxi from Zoox - the autonomous-vehicle firm owned by Amazon - was baffled by thick smoke at the site of a fire and stopped in the middle of an active operation. The result: a software recall of the entire fleet of 105 robotaxis. The self-driving car clearly did not know what to do when visibility vanished and everything around it was burning.

The incident happened on 20 June. According to the report filed with the US traffic-safety agency (NHTSA), the vehicle „encountered thick smoke concealing an active firefighting operation that was not cordoned off with cones\". The robotaxi braked sharply as it tried to turn aside, then came to a complete stop. Only after a human operator remotely reversed the vehicle could firefighting crews place cones around the site. There were no passengers in the vehicle, and Zoox reported no injuries.

The regulator's response was sharp. Jonathan Morrison, the head of NHTSA, was direct: „Let me be clear - the inability to detect and respond appropriately to situations like this represents a functional deficiency. Emergency-response scenes are not rare or extreme edge cases.\" In other words - this is not some strange exception no engineer could have foreseen, but precisely the scenario a driverless car must be prepared for.

Zoox claims this is the „only event of its kind\" the firm has experienced and that it has carried out an investigation into the causes. The recall decision was made on 7 July, and the software update now adds the ability for the vehicle to recognise thick smoke in certain situations. The real question is different: how many such „only events\" do we need before autonomous vehicles learn to recognise what every human driver sees instinctively - that when there is fire and smoke ahead of you, you do not drive straight into it.