Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
One of The purported advantages of self-driving car technology are that each car can learn from a single vehicle’s mistakes. Here’s how Waymo He puts it down Its website: “The Waymo driver learns from collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including previous device generations.”
But in Austin, Waymo vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses while drivers picked up and dropped off children. Administrator at Austin Independent School District (AISD) The alleged one That the vehicles, in at least 19 cases, passed district school buses “illegally and dangerously” while their red lights were flashing and their stop levers extended instead of coming to a complete stop, as required by law.
In early December, Waymo issued a federal recall related to the incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of them To federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. According to federal filings, engineers at the self-driving vehicle company “developed software changes to address the behavior” weeks ago.
But even after the recall, school bus accidents continued, according to school officials and a report From the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal safety watchdog that is also investigating the situation.
Now, emails and text messages between school officials and Waymo representatives, obtained by WIRED through a public records request, show the lengths to which the Austin Public School District and Waymo have gone to try to resolve the issue. AISD even hosted a half-day “data collection” event in the school’s parking lot in mid-December, documents show, where several employees collected school buses and stop signs from across the fleet so the self-driving car company could collect information about the vehicles and their flashing lights.
However, by mid-January, more than a month later, the school district reported at least four more school bus crashes in Austin. An official in the school police department: “The data we collected from the beginning of the school year until the end of the semester shows that about 98 percent of people who receive one violation do not receive another violation.” he told the local NBC affiliate That month. “That tells us that the person is learning, but it doesn’t seem like the Waymo automation system is learning through its software updates, recalls, or what have you, because we’re still having violations.”
This situation raises questions about interesting blind spots in autonomous driving technologies and the industry’s ability to compensate for them even after they are discovered.
Self-driving software has long struggled to recognize objects Flashing emergency lights And road safety devices have long, thin arms, including gates and stop levers, says Missy Cummings, who researches autonomous vehicles at George Mason University and served as a safety adviser to NHTSA during the Biden administration. “If (the company) didn’t fix this a few years ago, the more drivers there are, the bigger the problem will be,” she says. “And that’s exactly what’s happening here.”
Waymo did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District referred WIRED to the NTSB while the incidents are under investigation. An NTSB spokesperson declined to answer WIRED’s questions while the investigation is ongoing.
Illegal pass
By midwinter of 2025, AISD officials were frustrated. In one of 19 incidents claimed by the district attorney In a message Waymo was later charged by federal road safety regulators for passing a school bus to allow children “just moments after a student crossed in front of the vehicle, while the student was still on the road.”
“Alarmingly, five of the alleged incidents occurred after Waymo assured the district that it had updated its software to fix the issue,” the attorney wrote. Federal regulators with NHTSA had Already launched an investigation In behavior. “Austin ISD is evaluating all potential legal remedies available to it and intends to take any necessary action to protect the safety of its students, if necessary,” the attorney warned.