The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a recall query into Waymo on Friday, Nov. 6, TechCrunch and Engadget reported on Monday. The agency said most reported incidents of the company’s robotaxis passing stopped school buses occurred after Waymo’s software fix.
Related: Tesla Expands Robotaxi Service to San Antonio, Another City Where Waymo Already Operates.
What we know
NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation opened the query to “assess the adequacy of the remedy,” TechCrunch reported. The review will also seek to “identify the causes of the conditions leading to the post-remedy reports,” Engadget reported.
The filing said “a majority of incidents occurred after the … remedy date,” according to Engadget. Reuters was first to report the filing, TechCrunch said.
Waymo recalled 3,067 vehicles in December 2025, CBS News reported at the time. NHTSA said the software could cause vehicles to pass a stopped school bus even when its red lights were flashing or its stop arm was extended. The agency said that raised the risk of a crash with a pedestrian, according to CBS News.
Waymo said last year that the software update was complete for all affected vehicles on Nov. 17, 2025, TechCrunch reported. The remedy did not end the reports, according to the new filing.
What Waymo said
“We have made significant improvements to vehicle behavior around school buses and have received no citations since March 2026,” a Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The spokesperson said the company would respond to NHTSA’s query once it was received. “Safety is central to Waymo’s mission, and operating safely around school buses is a responsibility we take seriously,” the spokesperson told Engadget.
How the case developed
The Office of Defects Investigation opened its first inquiry in October 2025 after seeing footage from Atlanta, TechCrunch reported. In that incident, a Waymo robotaxi crossed in front of a stopped school bus from its right side. The vehicle then turned left around the front of the bus, according to TechCrunch.
More reports followed from Austin, Texas. The Austin Independent School District said that as of Dec. 5, 2025, it knew of 20 incidents that school year in which a Waymo vehicle illegally passed a school bus, CBS News reported. A district spokesperson told CBS News that the 20th citation came after Waymo said it had fixed the software issue.
The public school district in Atlanta said it knew of six such cases as of the same date, according to CBS News. All 50 states require vehicles to stop for a school bus with flashing red lights and a deployed stop arm, NHTSA has said.
The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency, opened its own investigation into Waymo’s behavior around stopped school buses earlier this year, Engadget reported.
What happens next
The query will determine whether the November 2025 update fixed the problem, according to Engadget. Waymo, owned by Alphabet, said it looked forward to “continuing our engagement on recall processes for AV software that continues to learn and improve.”
More on autonomous vehicles and regulators is on our technology news page and in our AI news and research center.
Sources
- TechCrunch: Waymo robotaxis kept illegally passing school buses after software fix, feds say
- Engadget: NHTSA investigates if Waymo robotaxis are still running school bus stop signs
- CBS News: Waymo recalls more than 3,000 vehicles over faulty software following school bus violations
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