--- title: "Self-Driving Taxi Company Annoyed by the Naughty Thing Passengers Keep Doing in Its Cabs" description: "Rowdy riders have informed some of the designed changes that Amazon-owned Zoox made in its refreshed robotaxi." date: "2026-07-04" modified: "2026-07-04" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/self-driving-taxi-company-annoyed-naughty-passengers" categories: - "Advanced Transport" - "Self-Driving Vehicles" --- # Self-Driving Taxi Company Annoyed by the Naughty Thing Passengers Keep Doing in Its Cabs ![A Zoox robotaxi with mysterious green smoke drifting out of it.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: ZOOX / Shutterstock* Robotaxi companies are learning the hard way that operating driverless cars also means that there's no one supervising what happens inside them. Take [Zoox](), the Amazon-owned self-driving startup that's been offering rides, free of charge, in Las Vegas and San Francisco since September. It claims that it's served more than 500,000 passengers — while acknowledging that some of them haven't exactly been sticklers for the rules. "You're not supposed to smoke in the vehicle. They smoke in the vehicle. And they're smoking everything in the vehicle," an exasperated Chris Stoffel, Zoox's director of robot industrial design and studio engineering, [told *Fast Company*]() in a new interview. "Like, how do we interact with that?" Unlike its competitors, Zoox uses its own unique car that it designs and builds in-house. There's 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's like a train car on wheels, if the train car was way smaller and looked like a minimalist toaster. The fundamentals of this unique design has stayed the same through the years, but Zoox recently unveiled a new "evolution" of the car, as it prepares to start giving rides to the public in Austin and Miami. Many of these changes were passenger focused, according to Stoffel, now that it's had plenty of rides to learn from. And one particularly informative recurring passenger behavior? Vomiting. "Although we thought about that in the initial product and initial materials, we can make it better, right?" Stoffel told *Fast Company*. "Because 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?" 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! "We wanted to be able to wipe clean any issue very quickly rather than replace parts," Stoffel said. Zoox isn't the only robotaxi company dealing with rowdy riders. Some passengers [have reportedly had sex in their self-driving cabs](), and most recently, a group of teens made headlines after they were spotted [hanging out the windows of a Waymo robotaxi](). How these services will keep riders on their best — or at least acceptable — behavior is something we expect to be a major challenge as they grow in popularity. **More on self-driving:** [*Waymo Caught Driving Straight Into Oncoming Traffic*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()