One of the The claimed benefit of self-driving car technology is that each car can learn from the mistakes of one car. Here’s how They are there puts it its website: “Waymo drivers learn from the collective experience accumulated in our fleet, including previous generations of hardware.”
But in Austin, Waymo’s vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children. Austin Independent School District (AISD) Official it is owed that the vehicles had, in at least 19 instances, “unlawfully and dangerously” passed school district buses with their red lights flashing and their stop arms extended instead of coming to a complete stop, as required by law.
In early December, Waymo even released a federal memo related to the incidents, at least acknowledging it 12 of them to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. According to federal filings, engineers at the self-driving car company had “software changes to accommodate the behavior” weeks ago.
But even after the reminder, incidents of passing the school bus continued, according to school officials and report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal watchdog that is also investigating the situation.
Now, emails and text messages between school officials and Waymo representatives, obtained by WIRED through a public records request, show the lengths to which the Austin public school district and Waymo went to try to resolve the problem. AISD even hosted a half-day “data collection” event in the school’s parking lot in mid-December, documents show, with several employees pulling together school buses and stop signs from all fleets so the autonomous vehicle company could collect information related to the vehicles and their flashing lights.
Still, by mid-January, more than a month later, the school district reported at least four more school bus passing incidents had occurred in Austin. “The statistics we collected from the beginning of the school year to the end of the semester show that about 98 percent of people who receive one violation do not receive another,” said an official of the school’s police department. he told the local NBC affiliate that month. “That tells us that the person is learning, but it doesn’t appear that Waymo’s self-driving system is learning through its software updates, its memory, what have you, because we’re still in violation.”
The situation raises questions about the curiosity areas of autonomous technology and the ability of the industry to cover them even after they appear.
Self-driving software has long struggled to identify turn on the emergency lights and road safety devices with long, narrow arms, including doors and parking arms, says Missy Cummings, who researches self-driving cars at George Mason University and served as NHTSA’s safety adviser during the Biden administration. “If (the company) didn’t fix this a few years ago, the more they drive, the more it’s going to be a problem,” he says. “That’s exactly what’s happening here.”
Waymo did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District referred WIRED to the NTSB while the incidents are under investigation. An NTSB spokesman declined to answer WIRED’s questions while its investigation is ongoing.
Illegal passing
By mid-winter 2025, AISD officials were confused. In one of the 19 incidents claimed by the district attorney in a letter released later by federal traffic safety regulators, Waymo passed the school bus leaving the children “shortly after the student crossed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still in the roadway.”
“Ironically,” the lawyer wrote, five of the alleged incidents occurred after Waymo assured the district it had updated its software to fix the problem. Federal regulators and NHTSA had has already launched an investigation on behavior. “Austin ISD is evaluating all available legal remedies and intends to take whatever steps are necessary to protect the safety of its students, if necessary,” the attorney warned.
