A dramatic incident in San Antonio — where an empty Waymo robotaxi was carried off by floodwaters — has forced the self-driving giant to confront one of the messier realities of autonomous vehicle technology: nature doesn’t follow a script. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced Tuesday that Waymo has issued a software update to its fleet of nearly 4,000 vehicles to help them avoid flooded roads, though federal regulators note the company is still “developing the final remedy for this recall.”
The Alphabet-owned company, which launched its first commercial driverless ride-hailing service in Phoenix back in 2020, has since expanded to around a dozen U.S. cities and logged over 10 million paid rides. But growth has come with growing pains. Since February 2024, the company has issued a series of recalls — for crashing into a towed vehicle, hitting a telephone pole, colliding with parking gates and chains, and illegally passing stopped school buses more than 20 times in Austin alone.
The flooding issue surfaced in late April when Waymo’s robotaxis struggled to navigate inundated roads in central Texas. The core problem, according to NHTSA, was that vehicles were slowing — but not fully stopping — when encountering flooded roads they could not safely cross. Both fifth- and sixth-generation autonomous driving systems are affected across 3,791 vehicles.
The interim update now places “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,” per NHTSA. Waymo has also paused San Antonio operations entirely.
“We have identified an area of improvement regarding untraversable flooded lanes specific to higher-speed roadways, and have made the decision to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA related to this scenario,” Waymo said. “We are working to implement additional software safeguards and have put mitigations in place, including refining our extreme weather operations during periods of intense rain, limiting access to areas where flash flooding might occur.”
A permanent fix has not yet been deployed.
