NHTSA asks whether Waymo school bus software recall actually worked

NHTSA asks whether Waymo school bus software recall actually worked

10 November 2026: The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened Recall Query RQ26006 to test whether a Waymo software recall stopped its robotaxis passing stopped school buses, after finding that most of the incidents it had collected happened once the fix was in place. The query covers 2,895 vehicles running the fifth-generation automated driving system.

Not yet independently verified. The regulator's record gives no total count of incidents. Waymo's statement comes from TechCrunch, since the NHTSA press pages refused our request and we have no statement from Waymo's own site. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

A remedy dated before most of the reports

The Office of Defects Investigation sets out the sequence in its own record. Waymo filed recall 25E084 on 10 December 2025 for a software issue that could let a vehicle drive past a school bus with its red lights flashing or stop arm extended. The recall report said a software update had been completed for all affected vehicles on 17 November 2025.

"Of the total reported incidents identified during PE25013, a majority of the incidents occurred after the November 17, 2025 remedy date," the record says. The agency is opening the query to assess the adequacy of the remedy and to identify the causes of the reports made after it. Traffic citations supplied by the Austin Independent School District are listed as a source of incident data.

PE25013 was the preliminary evaluation that preceded this step. According to TechCrunch, that first investigation began in October 2025 after footage from Atlanta, and Austin school officials had reported at least five incidents at the time.

Waymo's answer

"We have made significant improvements to vehicle behavior around school buses and have received no citations since March 2026," the company told TechCrunch, adding that it will respond to the agency's query. If that holds, the period under question runs from late 2025 into the spring, and a further update may already have changed the behaviour NHTSA is examining.

What a recall means for software that keeps changing

A recall query is the tool the agency uses when it doubts a fix, and it can end in a further recall. For this industry the case tests something a conventional car rarely faces: when a defect sits in a driving model that is retrained and redeployed, a remedy "completed" on one date is not a fixed state of the product.

Cities and transport authorities negotiating operating terms with a robotaxi provider can use the case in two specific ways. Ask for the provider's post-remedy incident data on each recalled behaviour, not only for the date the update shipped. And ask school districts along proposed service areas what citations they hold, since it was a district's records that fed this query.

The record leaves the incident total blank or marked confidential in most fields. We list Waymo among 15 autonomous vehicle operators.

Sources

• NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation: resume of Recall Query RQ26006, 6 November 2026
• TechCrunch: Waymo robotaxis kept illegally passing school buses after software fix, feds say, 9 November 2026