Waymo Recalls Nearly 3,800 Vehicles After Robotaxi Enters Flooded Roadway

Autonomous driving company Waymo announced it is voluntarily recalling 3,791 robotaxis due to a software issue that could cause the vehicles to continue traveling on flooded roadways.

The recall was prompted by an incident in San Antonio, Texas, on April 20, when a Waymo robotaxi entered a flooded lane during inclement weather, a recall report filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stated. The roadway had a posted 40-miles-per-hour speed limit, and while the autonomous vehicle detected that the roadway might be impassable, it proceeded ahead at reduced speed.

The vehicle was unoccupied, and no injuries were reported. The incident sparked the Alphabet subsidiary to recall its entire fleet of autonomous vehicles to implement operational changes amongst its fifth- and sixth-generation Automated Driving Systems.

“On higher speed roadways, the Waymo AV may slow but not stop in response to detecting a potentially untraversable flooded lane,” the NHTSA report stated.

On the day of the incident, Waymo said it implemented operational restrictions in markets that could experience higher risk of its vehicles entering flooded roadways at higher speeds. Waymo also increased the vehicles’ weather-related constraints and updated the maps the robotaxis use for autonomous driving.

Four days later, on April 24, Waymo’s safety board decided to conduct the voluntary recall.

“Waymo provides over half a million trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments across the U.S., and safety is our primary priority,” a Waymo spokesperson said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times.

“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. 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.”

Waymo said it’s working to develop a final remedy for the problem. The NHTSA recall number for Waymo is 26E026.

Waymo’s autonomous driving technology drew additional scrutiny in late January after a child was struck by a Waymo robotaxi near an elementary school zone in Santa Monica, California. According to the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI), the child darted out from behind a double-parked sport utility vehicle and received minor injuries after being hit by the driverless vehicle. The ODI is investigating the driving behavior of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles near school zones and surrounding areas, as well as their adherence to posted speed limits.

The Waymo spokesperson noted that across more than 170 million fully autonomous driving miles, Waymo demonstrated a 13 times lower rate of serious injury incidents versus human drivers, reflecting a 92 percent reduction in crashes involving serious injuries. Waymo robotaxis have logged more than 68 million miles in the Phoenix metropolitan region, 53.5 million miles in the San Francisco Bay Area, and 37.8 million miles in Los Angeles, through December 2025.