Waymo told regulators a year ago that it had fixed its school bus problem. The federal safety agency now says most of the violations happened after the fix was in.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a recall query on November 6 covering 2,895 Waymo vehicles, according to TechCrunch. The filing says a majority of the reported incidents — robotaxis driving past stopped school buses with flashing red lights and extended stop arms — occurred after Waymo said its software remedy was fully deployed on November 17, 2025. The query exists to judge whether that remedy was adequate.

The original problem was caught on camera. In September 2025, footage from Atlanta showed a Waymo crossing in front of a stopped school bus and swinging left around its front while children were unloading. NHTSA opened its first investigation that October, and Waymo filed a formal recall in December covering 3,067 vehicles. Waymo said the car could decide it was blocking traffic and pull away before the lights went off; the fix told it staying put outranks moving out of the way.

It apparently did not take. Austin's school district documented 19 distinct violations, including one where a car proceeded while a student was crossing, according to Reuters. And in one January incident, the failure wasn't even in the code: the car asked a remote human whether the bus had active signals, the agent said no, and the SUV drove past with the stop arms still out, according to the NTSB's preliminary findings.

Waymo says the story has moved on. "We have made significant improvements to vehicle behavior around school buses and have received no citations since March 2026," a spokesperson told TechCrunch. That may be true — the citation-free streak is real evidence. But a query is the step before a recall: the regulator saying last year's paperwork doesn't match the incident log. If NHTSA finds the remedy inadequate, a second recall follows, and the fix must cover not just the software but the remote humans the cars call when unsure.

That matters beyond one edge case. Waymo is the company the whole robotaxi industry is measured against, and it is expanding while rivals stall. A fix that didn't fix the thing it was named for is the kind of detail that follows a company into every permit hearing it walks into next.

— via TechCrunch