Among the alleged benefits of autonomous vehicle technology is the capacity for every car to acquire knowledge from the errors of a solitary vehicle. As Waymo states on its website: “The Waymo Driver assimilates lessons from the shared experiences accumulated throughout our entire collection of vehicles, encompassing earlier hardware versions.”
Nevertheless, in Austin, Waymo’s automobiles grappled for months to assimilate the protocol for halting for school buses while children were being transported. An official with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) asserted that the vehicles had, in no less than 19 instances, “unlawfully and perilously” bypassed the district’s school buses while their red signals were flashing and their stop arms were extended, instead of making full stops as mandated by law.
In early December, Waymo even initiated a federal recall pertaining to these incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of them to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the body responsible for road safety oversight. According to federal documentation, engineers from the self-driving vehicle enterprise had “developed software modifications to address the behavior” several weeks prior.
However, even following the recall, the school-bus-passing occurrences persisted, as reported by school personnel and an account from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an autonomous federal safety oversight body also probing the matter.
Now, correspondence via email and text messages between school administrators and Waymo representatives, obtained by WIRED through a public records request, illustrates the extensive measures the Austin public school district and Waymo undertook to try and resolve the issue. AISD even hosted a half-day “data gathering” event in a school parking area in mid-December, the documents reveal, with several staff members assembling school buses and stop-arm indicators from across the fleet to enable the self-driving car company to compile information concerning vehicles and their illuminated signals.
Still, by mid-January, more than a month later, the school district reported at least four additional school-bus-passing incidents had occurred in Austin. “The information we gathered from the commencement of the academic year until the conclusion of the semester indicates that approximately 98 percent of individuals who receive one infraction do not receive another,” an official with the school’s police department informed the local NBC affiliate that month. “That signifies that the person is learning, but it does not appear that the Waymo automated driver system is acquiring knowledge through its software updates, its recall, or whatever else, because we are still experiencing infractions.”
The situation prompts inquiries regarding the peculiar blind spots of self-driving technologies and the industry’s capability to rectify them even after their identification.
Autonomous driving software has long encountered difficulties recognizing flashing emergency lights and road safety apparatus featuring elongated, slender arms, including gates and stop-arms, observes Missy Cummings, who conducts research on autonomous vehicles at George Mason University and served as a safety consultant to the NHTSA during the Biden administration. “If [the company] failed to rectify this years ago, the more they operate, the more problematic it will become,” she states. “That is precisely what is unfolding here.”
Waymo did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District directed WIRED to the NTSB while the incidents remain under investigation. A spokesperson for the NTSB declined to answer WIRED’s questions as its inquiry proceeds.
Unlawful Overtaking
By midwinter of 2025, AISD officials were exasperated. In one of the 19 occurrences alleged by an attorney for the district in a letter subsequently released by federal road safety regulators, a Waymo vehicle passed a school bus discharging children “only instants after a student traversed in front of the vehicle, and while the student remained in the roadway.”
“Alarmingly,” the attorney penned, five of the purported incidents had transpired after Waymo had guaranteed the district that it had updated its software to rectify the issue. Federal regulators with the NHTSA had already initiated an inquiry into the conduct. “Austin ISD is assessing all potential legal remedies at its disposal and intends to undertake whatever measures are essential to safeguard the well-being of its students, should it be required,” the attorney cautioned.
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