Waymo and Tesla both stumble as robotaxis meet rain, cones and cameras

Waymo paused service in four cities after its robotaxis struggled with heavy rain and flooded roads, according to TechCrunch. The company confirmed the stops in Atlanta, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. In Atlanta, an unoccupied Waymo drove through a flooded street on a Wednesday and sat stuck for about an hour before crews recovered it, local news reports said.

The pause followed a software recall the week before. Waymo told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration it had not finished a "final remedy" for avoiding flooded areas. Instead it shipped restrictions "at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway," per NHTSA documents cited by TechCrunch. Waymo said the Atlanta storm dropped rain fast enough that flooding began before the National Weather Service had issued any flash flood warning, watch or advisory.

Regulators are watching. "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.

Water is not Waymo's only problem. The company has two active investigations open. One concerns how its cars behave around stopped school buses. The other concerns a January 23 crash in Santa Monica, California, where a robotaxi struck a child. Waymo has said the vehicle braked to around six miles per hour before impact and that the child suffered minor injuries. The school-bus case escalated when NHTSA sent a second document request on May 15, saying Waymo's first response "necessitates that [NHTSA] receive further data and information."

Then came the construction zones. Waymo recalled nearly 4,000 robotaxis in June after at least 13 instances of vehicles driving into highway sections closed for construction: six in Phoenix in April, seven in San Francisco in May. The company pulled robotaxis from all highways on May 19 and said a fix was "currently under development." It is the sixth recall Waymo has issued. The earlier ones covered flooding, school-bus behaviour, low-speed collisions with chains, gates and telephone poles, and a towed-truck problem.

Tesla's launch drew a different kind of scrutiny

Tesla's robotaxi service opened on June 22 in a limited area of Austin, with early access limited to influencers and investors. Business Insider asked three autonomous driving experts to review rider videos. The reported issues: speeding more than 10 miles above the limit, driving into the wrong lane, random braking, pullover button problems, and at least two safety-monitor interventions over parking.

Raj Rajkumar, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, told Business Insider that phantom braking may expose a design flaw. "Hallucinations are an integral part of how AI operates, and once you hallucinate, phantom braking ends up happening, so a camera-only solution will not be sufficient for a very long time," he said. Tesla's robotaxi uses an advanced version of Full Self-Driving with eight cameras and no radar or lidar, unlike Waymo.

Steven Shladover, lead researcher at UC Berkeley's Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology program, told BI that automated driving needs cameras, radars and lidars plus precise localisation against high-accuracy maps. Tesla did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Separately, RTS reported on an internal Tesla data leak covering thousands of serious incidents up to 2022, including more than 2,400 complaints about spontaneous acceleration and more than 1,000 accidents. A jury awarded more than $243 million to victims in a first Autopilot verdict, which a federal judge upheld in late February. Tesla can still appeal.