Waymo pauses service in four cities as robotaxis keep entering floods

The company confirmed the pauses in Atlanta, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston to TechCrunch, which reported the expansion on 21 May. Bloomberg News first reported the Dallas and Houston suspensions.

Atlanta set it off. Local news reports cited by TechCrunch show a Waymo robotaxi driving through a flooded street on Wednesday, then sitting stuck for about an hour. Waymo told the outlet it recovered the vehicle and removed it from the scene.

"Safety is Waymo's top priority, both for our riders and everyone we share the road with. During a period of intense rain yesterday in Atlanta, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle encountered a flooded road and stopped," the company said in a statement.

A recall without a fix

The timing is the awkward part. Waymo issued a software recall over the flooding problem only a week earlier, and admitted then that it had not finished developing a "final remedy" for avoiding flooded areas. Instead it shipped 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 documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

That was not enough to keep a car out of a flooded Atlanta intersection. Waymo told TechCrunch the storm dropped so much rain that flooding was already under way before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch or advisory. Those alerts are among the signals the company uses to prepare vehicles for bad weather.

"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.

The regulator already has two active investigations open into Waymo. One covers the company's behaviour around school buses, which both NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board are examining. Waymo produced a batch of documents for NHTSA that were fully redacted to the public, and on 15 May the agency sent a second request because the initial response "necessitates that [NHTSA] receive further data and information."

The second set concerns a 23 January incident in Santa Monica, California, where a Waymo 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. Both NHTSA and the NTSB are looking into it.

Not the first slow fix

Waymo has struggled before to stamp out a problem quickly. When people began noticing its robotaxis illegally passing stopped school buses last year, the company shipped a fix that was supposed to address the issue. The fleet kept making illegal manoeuvres around school buses anyway.

The weather pauses point at a broader difficulty for the industry. Edge cases that look rare in isolation, deep water, closed highway lanes, a stopped school bus, are exactly the situations where a driverless car has no human to fall back on. Data collection has become the industry's answer. In January, Uber launched a division called AV Labs to gather driving data for robotaxi partners including Waymo, Waabi and Lucid Motors, telling TechCrunch it would put sensor-laden cars on public roads and feed processed data back to partners.

Regulators are moving too, though mostly after the fact. China's Supreme People's Court ruled in February that drivers remain responsible for road safety even when driving assistance is active, citing a September 2025 Zhejiang case in which a driver surnamed Wang set his car to drive itself while intoxicated and fell asleep in the passenger seat. The court said assistance systems "cannot replace the driver as the primary operator."

Waymo has not said when service will resume in the four paused cities, or what additional changes it plans to make to its weather handling.