Waymo, Uber and Tesla: the robotaxi edge cases that keep turning into recalls

Waymo paused service in Atlanta, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston within a single week in May 2026, according to TechCrunch.

In Atlanta, a robotaxi drove through a flooded street on a Wednesday and sat there for roughly an hour before crews recovered it. The company had already filed a software recall over the flooding problem. It had not finished the fix. That gap between filing a recall and shipping a remedy is what put four cities on pause, and the same gap has turned up in Waymo's other safety episodes this year.

What Waymo actually shipped

Waymo told TechCrunch it had not developed a "final remedy" for avoiding flooded areas when it filed the recall. Instead, according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 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." That was not enough. Waymo said the Atlanta storm dumped so much rain that flooding was already underway before the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning, watch or advisory. Those alerts are among the signals the company uses to prepare vehicles for bad weather. In a statement, Waymo said: "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 told TechCrunch it knew about the incident and was in contact with Waymo.

The pattern is not new. Waymo shipped a fix for robotaxis illegally passing stopped school buses, and the fleet kept doing it, TechCrunch reported.

That behaviour sits at the centre of one of two active investigation sets, run by NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board.

Construction zones, and a sixth recall

A month later, on 18 June 2026, Waymo recalled nearly 4,000 robotaxis to keep them off highways while it worked out how they should behave around construction zones. TechCrunch reported at least 13 instances of robotaxis entering highway sections closed for construction: six in Phoenix in April, seven in San Francisco in May. Waymo pulled its vehicles off all highways on 19 May. Its Field Safety Committee restricted freeway operations in Phoenix after the April cases, and its safety board decided to file the recall on 8 June, NHTSA filings show. It was the company's sixth recall. Waymo said in a statement that it "voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month while making improvements, proactively notified state and federal regulators, and decided to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA."

One rider's account, given to CBS News and reported by TechCrunch, described a robotaxi that "blasted through cones" and was chased by police. Waymo offered him three free rides of up to $40 each, according to CBS.

Waymo says its vehicles have driven more than 170 million autonomous miles and shown a 13x reduction in serious-injury-or-worse crashes versus human drivers.

Why the data hunt matters

Uber launched a division called AV Labs in January 2026 to collect driving data for its more than 20 autonomous vehicle partners, including Waymo, Waabi and Lucid Motors, TechCrunch reported. It is not building its own robotaxis. It started with one Hyundai Ioniq 5, with engineers still screwing on lidars, radars and cameras.

"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 chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told TechCrunch.

Uber expects to grow the division to a few hundred people within a year.

The legal backdrop

Regulators and courts are moving at the same time. China's Supreme Court said on 13 February 2026 that drivers stay responsible for road safety even after switching on driving assistance, citing a September 2025 Zhejiang case in which a driver surnamed Wang was jailed and fined for relying on the system while drunk and asleep. "Driving assistance systems cannot replace the driver as the primary operator," the court stated.

In the US, an RTS investigation published on 17 April 2026, based on leaked internal Tesla data, reported that Tesla concealed thousands of serious incidents up to 2022, with more than 1,000 accidents recorded.

A jury ordered Tesla to pay more than $243 million to victims of a fatal Autopilot crash; a federal judge confirmed the award in late February. Tesla has said it may still appeal.

The common thread is not one bad algorithm. It is that real roads keep producing situations, floods, cones, a stopped school bus, that a fleet only learns about by meeting them.