A Zoox robotaxi drove into an active fire. Amazon just recalled 105 of them.

Here’s the kind of scenario autonomous vehicle engineers dread: thick smoke rolling across a road, hiding an active fire scene just beyond it. On June 20, that’s exactly what happened to an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi in Las Vegas — and the vehicle drove straight into the emergency site.

Amazon’s autonomous driving subsidiary, Zoox, announced it is recalling 105 robotaxis after the incident exposed a dangerous blind spot in the vehicle’s perception system. The software couldn’t recognize dense smoke as an obstacle.

According to details of the June 20 incident, the unoccupied robotaxi encountered a large cloud of smoke on a Las Vegas street. The smoke was coming from a fire that emergency responders were actively working, but they had not yet set up traffic cones to block the road. The Zoox vehicle entered the scene, attempted to steer away, then suddenly emergency-braked and stopped. Zoox remote operators guided the vehicle to reverse out, while responders placed cones to secure the area.

Zoox told regulators this was an isolated incident. No one was injured, and the company said it found no other similar cases in its testing history.

The recall — voluntarily initiated by Zoox — comes at a politically sensitive moment for autonomous vehicle safety. Just last week, NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison sent a letter to autonomous vehicle developers demanding that their vehicles reliably detect and yield to police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles after a broader industry pattern of near-misses.

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for $1.3 billion. The company builds purpose-built autonomous taxis with no steering wheel or pedals — four seats face each other like a small shuttle bus. That design makes the robotaxi fundamentally different from retrofitted consumer vehicles, but it also means the perception software carries the full burden of navigating unpredictable real-world hazards.

This isn’t Zoox’s first software recall. The company has previously pulled vehicles back for issues related to crossing lanes unsafely and failing to accurately predict the movement of other vehicles and pedestrians. Each recall adds to a growing record that regulators and the public are watching closely as autonomous ride-hailing services inch toward commercial deployment.