Waymo Robotaxis Kept Blowing Past School Buses in Austin
Internal emails reveal Waymo spent months trying to teach its self-driving cars to actually stop for school buses.
Waymo's robotaxis repeatedly failed to stop for school buses in Austin — a basic legal requirement — and it took months of back-and-forth between the company and a local school district to fix the problem.
Emails, text messages, and NTSB reports obtained by Wired paint a messy picture. The autonomous vehicles apparently struggled to recognize and respond to stopped school buses, raising serious questions about how self-driving systems learn and adapt to real-world road scenarios.
The incidents highlight a fundamental challenge in autonomous driving: edge cases that human drivers handle instinctively can stump even the most advanced AI systems. Stopping for a school bus with flashing red lights isn't optional. It's the law everywhere in the US.
The situation also puts a spotlight on how robotaxi operators handle safety gaps once they're identified — and how long fixes actually take to deploy.