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OSHA closed its Zoox inquiry after the company promised CO2 monitors in Atlanta test cars
A contractor's complaint about gas exposure grounded Zoox's Atlanta test fleet in August. The remedy on the federal record is one sensor and a battery swap, in cars where an emergency room named carbon monoxide.
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What happened
- Zoox grounded its Atlanta autonomous vehicle test fleet after safety drivers were potentially exposed to carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide or hydrogen sulfide inside the cars in August, TechCrunch reported.
- One worker's complaint prompted OSHA to open an inquiry and instruct Zoox to investigate the repeated exposures.
- An OSHA letter to Zoox that TechCrunch viewed put as many as 40 workers as possibly exposed in the vehicles, a figure the Amazon-owned company says is too high.
- Two employees said the northwest Atlanta facility has run at limited capacity since late August, with the test vehicles quarantined during the investigation.
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Why it matters
- constraint The sensor Zoox agreed to fit alarms on CO2 only, so a carbon monoxide or hydrogen sulfide recurrence still depends on someone in the cabin smelling something or feeling ill.
- decision Any operator running monitored test cars now has to settle who may end a shift on a symptom report alone, because Zoox's own account includes a group going back out after a worker threw up.
- exposure The health risk lands on contract safety monitors, and three of the four workers TechCrunch spoke to would talk only anonymously for fear of retaliation, so a regulator hears from the few willing to be named.
- precedent A letter promising one class of monitor and a parts swap was enough to close the federal file here. The next AV operator in this position has a template for what counts as remediation.
Employees told TechCrunch they noticed a rotten-egg smell in the test cars [12]. One group was put back on the road in a different car after one worker vomited and the others reported exposure symptoms, a contractor told TechCrunch. They had a second bout of symptoms later the same day [6]. "They made us go right back in the field after we said we were throwing up," said Jay Davis, a contractor who got sick in mid-August and filed the OSHA complaint [7]. "I emailed HR, told her what's going on, and I told her I feel like it's messed up that y'all made us go [back out]," he said [8].
Zoox is owned by Amazon [21] and is expanding its operations in places like Las Vegas and San Francisco in a bid to catch Waymo [23]. The people in the driver's seats of the retrofit test cars are safety monitors, many of them contractors. TechCrunch has previously reported contractors injured by sudden braking and swerving in Zoox test vehicles, and Waymo has reported similar test driver injuries to OSHA [22].
Three gases are named in the record [1]. Davis said he and two other workers who became sick were told at the emergency room that their symptoms were consistent with carbon monoxide exposure [13]. Zoox told TechCrunch it has not identified carbon monoxide, which is odorless, in its vehicles, that it consulted an outside medical expert, and that the only gas it detected was CO2 [14]. In a September 10 letter to OSHA the company said it examined the cars for CO2 and replaced their 12-volt batteries, the part that can give off hydrogen sulfide when damaged, and that it will add CO2 monitors; OSHA has since closed the inquiry [11][15]. Those monitors alarm on one of the three gases [26].
Zoox's own count in that letter was 28 employees who rode in six test vehicles with an "unexplained odor" [4], twelve fewer than OSHA's upper figure [24]. Ten of the 28 voluntarily underwent medical evaluation, about a third of them [25], and the company told OSHA it received "one medical report identifying CO2 exposure" [5].
The hazard is old news in cars. Combustion engines produce carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, which reach the cabin through an exhaust leak or build up when a vehicle runs in an enclosed space for a long time [18]. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigated Ford for six years over reports of carbon monoxide buildup in Explorer SUVs [19]. Zoox's purpose-built robotaxis are all electric and were not affected [17].
For anyone running a fleet with staff sitting inside it, two questions decide this: does the fitted instrumentation alarm on a given hazard, and can the person in the seat end the shift without approval? In Atlanta in August the answer to both was no, and what finally stopped the fleet was a 911 call for a sick worker on August 22 [9]. Adding the CO2 monitor settles the first question for one hazard. Giving safety monitors unilateral stop authority on cabin symptoms covers the rest, and it will cost shifts to reports that turn out to be nothing. Here, Davis and two other workers who got sick went to the emergency room [13].
Zoox told TechCrunch: "While we investigate these reports thoroughly, we have ceased operations of our test vehicles in this market" [16].
What to watch
- Whether Zoox resumes Atlanta operations, and whether it publishes the alarm threshold it sets on the new CO2 monitors.
- Whether OSHA receives complaints out of Zoox's Las Vegas or San Francisco operations as headcount there grows.
- Whether Zoox's count of 28 or OSHA's 40 becomes the accepted figure in any later filing or inspection record.