Waymo's Flood Recall Falls Short as Robotaxis Stall in Four Cities

Waymo has paused service in four cities because its robotaxis are struggling with heavy rain and flooded roads, TechCrunch reported on 21 May 2026. The halt covers Atlanta, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. The company confirmed the Dallas and Houston suspensions to TechCrunch late on Thursday. Bloomberg News reported that expansion first.

Local news reports spotted one of Waymo's robotaxis driving through a flooded street in Atlanta on Wednesday. It got stuck for about an hour. Waymo told TechCrunch it recovered the vehicle and removed it from the scene. The company said it paused service in the city while it works out a solution.

The pause follows a software recall the company issued the previous week. When Waymo filed that recall, it admitted 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.

Atlanta rain arrived before the alerts

Those restrictions did not stop a robotaxi from entering a flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm produced so much rainfall that flooding was already happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch or advisory. Those alerts are part of a larger set of signals the company relies on to prepare its vehicles for poor weather.

Waymo's public statement to TechCrunch was brief: "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."

"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.

Waymo did not tell TechCrunch how many vehicles the pause affected, how long it expects the stoppage to last, or when a final fix for flooded roads will ship. The dossier gives no timeline for restoring service in any of the four cities.

A pattern the company has seen before

This is not the first time Waymo has struggled to quickly stamp out problematic behavior. Last year, people started to notice Waymo robotaxis illegally passing stopped school buses. The company shipped a fix that was supposed to address the issue. The fleet kept making illegal maneuvers around school buses anyway.

Waymo's behavior around school buses sits at the center of one of two sets of active investigations into the company. Both NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board are looking into the problem. Waymo has already produced a batch of documents for NHTSA, all redacted to the public. On 15 May, the agency sent a second document request because the company's initial response "necessitates that [NHTSA] receive further data and information."

The other set of investigations from both agencies involves a 23 January incident in which a Waymo robotaxi crashed into a child in Santa Monica, California. Waymo has said its robotaxi braked to around six miles per hour before it struck the child, and that she suffered minor injuries.

Floods, cones and a widening recall record

The weather problem is not Waymo's only software defect this year. On 18 June 2026, TechCrunch reported that the company recalled nearly 4,000 robotaxis to restrict them from driving on highways while it works out how to make the vehicles behave around construction zones. The recall followed at least 13 instances of robotaxis driving into highway sections closed for construction.

Six of those happened in Phoenix in April, and seven in San Francisco in May. Waymo pulled its robotaxis from all highways on 19 May, and a fix was "currently under development," according to filings with NHTSA. The company did not pull vehicles off the road and kept operating on surface streets, though it has periodically paused service during severe weather. That recall was Waymo's sixth, following the May flood recall and a December recall to address illegal behavior around school buses. Earlier recalls covered low-speed collisions with chains, gates and telephone poles, and a problem involving towed trucks.

Waymo 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 is planning to launch in more than 20 cities this year, including London and Tokyo.

Meanwhile, the data race

Waymo's stumbles come as rivals try to turn driving data into an advantage. In January 2026, Uber launched a division called Uber AV Labs to collect driving data for its autonomous vehicle partners. Uber has more than 20 AV partners, including Waymo, Waabi and Lucid Motors, though no contracts for the data were signed at launch.

Uber's chief technology officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, told TechCrunch the goal was to spread that data around: "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."

Uber's vice president of engineering, Danny Guo, said the division started with one Hyundai Ioniq 5 and a sensor kit his team was still screwing on. "We don't know if the sensor kit will fall off, but that's the scrappiness we have," he told TechCrunch. Naga said Uber expects to grow the division to a few hundred people within a year.

For Waymo, the immediate question is narrower. Four cities are offline for now, a fix for flooded roads is unfinished, and federal investigators are still waiting on documents.