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Waymo expands pause to four cities as robotaxis keep driving into floods

Posted on by faz_business


Waymo has now paused service in four cities because its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads, a problem that already prompted the company to issue a recall last week.

One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.

“Safety is Waymo’s top priority, both for our riders and everyone we share the road with. During a period of intense rain yesterday in Atlanta, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle encountered a flooded road and stopped,” the company said in a statement.

Waymo also halted service in Dallas and Houston because of severe weather across Texas this week, the company confirmed to TechCrunch late Thursday. The expansion was first reported by Bloomberg News.

A Waymo spokesperson said the company also paused service in Dallas and Houston out of an abundance of caution for the forecasted severe weather.

Waymo admitted that it hadn’t finished developing a “final remedy” for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,” according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering a flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory. The company said those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather.

“NHTSA is aware of this incident, is in communication with Waymo, and will take appropriate action if necessary,” a spokesperson for the safety regulator told TechCrunch regarding the robotaxi that got stuck in Atlanta.

This is not the first time Waymo has struggled to quickly stamp out problematic behavior with its robotaxis. When people started to notice Waymo robotaxis illegally passing stopped school buses last year, the company shipped a fix that was supposed to address the issue — only for its fleet to continue making illegal maneuvers around school buses.

Waymo’s behavior around school buses is at the center of one of two sets of active investigations into the company.

Both the NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are looking into this problem. Waymo has already produced a batch of documents for the NHTSA, all of which were redacted to the public. On May 15, the NHTSA sent a second document request to Waymo because the company’s initial response “necessitates that [NHTSA] receive further data and information.”

The other set of investigations from the NHTSA and NTSB involve a January 23 incident where a Waymo robotaxi crashed into a child in Santa Monica, California. Waymo has said that its robotaxi braked to around six miles per hour before it struck that child and that she suffered minor injuries.

This story has been updated with more information about how Waymo uses National Weather Service alerts, and to include new service pauses in Houston and Dallas.

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Waymo’s co-CEO on the challenge of scaling robotaxis safely

Posted on by faz_business


Waymo’s co-CEO, Tekedra Mawakana, had a clear message during her interview on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 stage Monday: “It is imperative that we scale.”

Mawakana was speaking in the context of how Waymo balances fundraising (and burning through that money) with eventually achieving profitability. But she was also clear in the interview that she believes Waymo can increase road safety by reaching that scale.

All this helps explain why the company has been on an expansion tear this year, and expects to launch in many more U.S. cities — D.C., Miami, Denver, Dallas, Seattle, and Nashville — as well as in London in 2026. It’s a furious pace that has seen the autonomous vehicle company leverage multiple partnerships with the likes of companies like Uber, Lyft, and Avis.

“By the end of 2026, you should expect us to be offering 1 million trips per week,” she said.

Mawakana spent a lot of time during the interview with TechCrunch Transportation Editor Kirsten Korosec talking about the challenges of safely reaching that kind of scale.

The Waymo co-CEO maintained that the company is operating at a level that is safer than the typical human driver. And while she didn’t name names, she took a shot at competitors, saying they aren’t doing enough to prove that their autonomous vehicle technology is truly safe.

“It is incumbent upon [them] to be transparent about what’s happening,” she said. “And if you are not being transparent, then it is my view that you are not doing what is necessary in order to actually earn the right to make the road safer.”

Her comments come as the company continues to iron out edge cases during its expansion — with one of the most recent incidents coming in Atlanta, Georgia, where a Waymo vehicle pulled out in front of a stopped school bus, leading to an investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Waymo itself recently released a report claiming its vehicles are already five times safer than most human drivers, and 12 times safer with respect to pedestrians.

Still, Waymo vehicles have been caught making a number of head-scratching decisions.

“It’s important to recognize, it’s not going to be perfection, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be accountable for transparency,” Mawakana said on stage. “I think…we really worry as a company about those days. You know, we don’t say whether, we say when, and we plan for them.”

Mawkana also said Waymo doesn’t think in terms of “how many [incidents] are allowable.”

“We know they’re going to happen because our cars are on the road with humans, and unfortunately, right now, the state of the roads and the state of human driving is there is a lot of deaths, and there are a lot of injuries being caused on the roadways,” she said.

And when asked whether the public would accept a death caused by a robotaxi in the face of the promise of greater safety, Mawakana said: “I think that society will.”