Robotaxis Are Learning in Public: Waymo Recalls 4,000 Cars, Tesla Faces Court

The recall covers the entire fleet. Waymo counted at least 13 cases of robotaxis driving into highway sections closed for construction: six in Phoenix in April, seven in San Francisco in May, according to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cited by TechCrunch. Waymo pulled its cars off all freeways on 19 May and says a fix is "currently under development." It has not grounded the vehicles, which still run on surface streets.

That is the shape of the robotaxi business in 2026: not a launch, but a maintenance schedule.

Look at the sequence. In December, Waymo recalled its robotaxis over illegal behaviour around school buses. In May, it recalled them again after cars drove into flooded roads, and paused service in San Antonio, then Atlanta, Dallas and Houston as storms moved across Texas. In June came the freeway construction recall. Five months, three safety campaigns, four cities offline at the peak. The company frames each one as voluntary and proactive, and the filings bear that out. But the pattern is the story.

Waymo's own numbers show why the edge cases keep arriving. The Alphabet-owned company says its vehicles have driven more than 170 million miles autonomously and claims a 13x reduction in serious-injury-or-worse crashes compared with human drivers. It also plans to launch in more than 20 cities this year, including London and Tokyo. Scaling a fleet multiplies the number of rare situations the software meets, and each new city brings its own road rules, weather and construction habits. A system that works in Phoenix may meet its first flash flood in Atlanta.

Regulators are running two investigations

Two sets of investigations are open. The NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board are both examining Waymo's behaviour around school buses. On 15 May, the NHTSA sent a second document request to Waymo, saying the company's initial response "necessitates that [NHTSA] receive further data and information"; the first batch of documents was fully redacted for the public. The other investigation concerns a 23 January incident in Santa Monica, California, where a Waymo robotaxi struck a child. Waymo has said the car braked to around six miles per hour before impact and that the child suffered minor injuries.

The flood episode is instructive because Waymo had already shipped a fix. When it issued the software recall in May, the company admitted it had not finished a "final remedy" for flooded roads. Instead it pushed an update that placed "restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway," according to NHTSA documents. Then a robotaxi drove into a flooded intersection in Atlanta anyway and got stuck for about an hour. Waymo told TechCrunch the Atlanta storm produced rainfall so intense that flooding began before the National Weather Service had issued any flash flood warning, watch or advisory, and that those alerts are among the signals it relies on.

"NHTSA is aware of this incident, is in communication with Waymo, and will take appropriate action if necessary," a spokesperson for the safety regulator told TechCrunch.

Tesla's record is being tested in a different room. Reporting by the Swiss broadcaster RTS, based on a leak of internal Tesla documents, says the company kept quiet about thousands of serious incidents involving its driver-assistance systems up to 2022, some of them fatal. The files reportedly contain more than 2,400 complaints about spontaneous acceleration and more than 1,000 accidents, many marked "unresolved."

A jury ordered Tesla to pay more than 243 million dollars in damages over a crash involving Autopilot; a federal judge confirmed the award in late February after Tesla tried to have it thrown out, and the company can still appeal. RTS describes a case in which crash data should have been in the vehicle's black box, but Tesla said the data was corrupted, and experts hired by the victims' lawyers recovered it. The report says the car detected obstacles and did nothing to avoid the collision, sounding only an alert before impact. Tesla has consistently blamed drivers for such crashes, arguing they were distracted and had taken their hands off the wheel against instructions. Tesla and Elon Musk did not respond to interview requests from the RTS investigation, according to the broadcaster.

The data question underneath

Both companies are chasing the same fix: more real-world driving data, faster. Uber said in January that it is opening a division called Uber AV Labs to collect that data for its more than 20 autonomous vehicle partners, including Waymo, Waabi and Lucid Motors. No contracts are signed yet, and the operation started with a single Hyundai Ioniq 5 whose sensor kit engineers were still bolting on, Uber's VP of engineering Danny Guo told TechCrunch.

Uber's CTO, Praveen Neppalli Naga, framed the effort as a public good in an interview with TechCrunch: "Our goal, primarily, is to democratize this data, right? I mean, the value of this data and having partners' AV tech advancing is far bigger than the money we can make from this."

It is a quiet admission of an industry problem. Waymo has run autonomous vehicles in testing or service for a decade, and it still missed stopped school buses and closed freeway ramps. Tesla's answer to the same problem has been scale: millions of customer cars feeding its training pipeline, an approach Uber cannot match and does not try to. Guo said Uber expects to pick cities on partner demand from the 600 it operates in.

What the recalls and the court ruling have in common is that the public is now part of the test. A robotaxi that enters a construction zone in San Francisco, or a car whose black box data turns out to be recoverable, both end up in front of a regulator. The technical work continues. The evidence is no longer private.