Nearly 2,900 Waymo robotaxis are under federal scrutiny because they keep blowing past stopped school buses — and most of the incidents happened after the company claimed it already fixed the problem with a software update. American children are being used as test dummies on their own streets while a Google subsidiary works out the kinks in real time.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a recall query on Nov. 6 to determine whether Waymo's December 2025 software recall actually did anything useful. The agency found that a majority of reported incidents of robotaxis passing stopped school buses — red lights flashing, stop arms extended — occurred after Waymo said its remedy was complete. That is not a closed case. That is a company that told regulators and the public it solved a problem it had not solved.
The original probe was triggered in October 2025 after a Waymo vehicle in Atlanta stopped for a school bus unloading children, then drove around the front of the bus and continued down the road while kids were getting off. Austin Independent School District documented 19 incidents during the 2025 school year and asked Waymo to suspend operations during school pickup and drop-off hours. The district was ignored.
Waymo filed recall 25E084 on Dec. 10, 2025, covering 3,067 vehicles, and claimed the software fix had already been installed between Nov. 5 and Nov. 17. The company disclosed 12 related traffic citations between Sept. 25 and Nov. 14. No collisions were reported.
But the fix didn't take. On Jan. 12, a Waymo Jaguar I-Pace stopped behind another vehicle near a school bus loading students in Austin. The robotaxi called for remote assistance — reaching a human operator sitting in Novi, Michigan, who responded to a prompt before the vehicle resumed moving and passed the bus with its stop arms still extended. A person in Michigan made a split-second decision about an Austin school zone. Five other vehicles then followed the Waymo past the stopped bus.
The National Transportation Safety Board also identified a separate Jan. 14 incident involving a special-needs school bus route in Austin.
Waymo's response amounts to: we're learning. A spokesperson told TechCrunch the company has "made significant improvements to vehicle behavior around school buses" and received no citations since March 2026, pointing to autonomous software that "continues to learn and improve."
School buses with stop arms out are not a classroom. Children exiting a bus are not training data. The question of whether a robotaxi can recognize and respect a stopped school bus should have been settled before these vehicles were ever allowed on public roads — not after, and certainly not through a recall that didn't recall anything meaningful.
The open question is how Alphabet's self-driving unit got permission to operate at this scale with this level of unfinished business. Waymo is a subsidiary of Google's parent company, which spent years building relationships with regulators before deploying thousands of vehicles in American cities. The lobbying apparatus that greased those approvals deserves the same scrutiny as the software that keeps failing. NHTSA's query will test whether any of it amounts to accountability — or just another process that lets Big Tech keep experimenting while the public absorbs the risk.
