TL;DRWaymo paused service in five US cities after a software recall failed to stop robotaxis driving into floods. Freeway rides are also suspended.
Waymo suspended robotaxi service across five US cities on 21 May after a software patch it pushed to its entire 3,791-vehicle fleet less than two weeks earlier failed to prevent another autonomous vehicle from driving into standing water. An unoccupied Waymo robotaxi got stuck on a flooded street in Midtown Atlanta on Wednesday evening during severe storms, roughly the same failure mode that triggered a recall on 8 May and a service shutdown in San Antonio a month before that.
The company has now paused operations in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, the last of which has been offline since late April. It has also suspended all freeway rides across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami while it works to improve its vehicles’ performance in construction zones. Waymo says it expects to resume those routes soon, but has not provided a timeline.
The underlying problem is architectural, not cosmetic. According to a letter posted on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website, the software flaw could allow vehicles “to slow and then drive into standing water on higher speed roadways.” In the San Antonio incident on 20 April, an empty Waymo robotaxi encountered a flooded section of a road with a 40 mph speed limit, detected the water, reduced speed, and then drove into it anyway, because its decision system had no hard-stop condition for water in its path. The vehicle was swept into a creek. Waymo issued a voluntary recall of 3,791 robotaxis using its fifth and sixth-generation automated driving systems and shipped an interim software update that placed restrictions on operations during elevated flood risk. That update was not enough to prevent the Atlanta incident.
