But in Austin, Waymo’s vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children. An Austin Independent School District (AISD) official alleged that in at least 19 cases, vehicles “illegally and dangerously” passed the district’s school buses while their red lights were flashing and their stop arms extended instead of coming to a complete stop, as required by law.
In early December, Waymo also issued a federal recall related to the incidents, at least 12 of which it acknowledged to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. According to the federal filing, engineers at the self-driving vehicle company “developed software changes to address the behavior” weeks earlier.
But even after the recall, school-bus-passing incidents continued, according to school officials and a report by 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 went to try to resolve the problem. Documents show AISD also conducted a half-day “data collection” event in a school parking lot in mid-December, in which multiple employees simultaneously pulled stop-arm signals from school buses and entire fleets so that the self-driving car company could collect information related to the vehicles and their flashing lights.
Yet, by mid-January, more than a month later, the school district reported that at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had occurred in Austin. A school police department official told the local NBC affiliate that month, “The data we’ve collected from the beginning of the school year to the end of the semester shows that about 98 percent of people who get one violation don’t get another violation.” “This tells us that the person is learning, but it doesn’t appear that the Waymo automated driver system is learning through its software updates, mind you, what have you, because we’re still in violation.”
This situation raises questions about the unique blind-spots of self-driving technologies and the industry’s ability to compensate for them even after they are noticed.
Missy Cummings, who researches autonomous vehicles at George Mason University and served as a safety adviser to NHTSA during the Biden administration, says self-driving software has long struggled to recognize road safety devices with long, thin arms, including flashing emergency lights and gates and stop-arms. “If [the company] Had it not been fixed a few years ago, the more they drive, the bigger the problem,” she says. “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 remain under investigation. An NTSB spokesperson declined to answer WIRED’s questions while its investigation continues.
illegal passing
By mid-winter 2025, AISD officials were frustrated. In one of 19 incidents alleged by an attorney for the district in a letter later released by federal road safety regulators, a Waymo passed a school bus dropping off children “only moments after a student passed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still on the road.”
“Disturbingly,” the lawyer wrote, “the five alleged incidents occurred after Waymo assured the district that it had updated its software to fix the problem.” Federal regulators, along with NHTSA, had already begun investigating the behavior. “Austin ISD is evaluating all possible legal remedies at its disposal and intends to take whatever actions are necessary to protect the safety of its students, if necessary,” the attorney warned.
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