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The autonomous ride company Waymo voluntarily recalled its entire fleet’s software last month after one of the vehicles drove into a flooded lane in San Antonio, Texas.
A Waymo spokesperson said there was no disruption to the company’s operations in the Bay Area. The company is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., and is based in Mountain View.
The recall differs from most automotive recalls because Waymo is its own customer, so there was nothing to direct consumers to fix, according to a company spokesperson.
The company voluntarily filed a recall notice with federal regulators to let them know the company had identified a problem with its software related to high-speed roadways with standing water that could not be traversed.
A software update made unspecified alterations to the vehicles’ system while a more comprehensive fix is worked out.
The incident happened on April 20. The company filed a voluntary recall notice with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 10 days later. There were no injuries, according to the company.
“We have identified an area of improvement regarding untraversable flooded lanes specific to higher-speed roadways and have made the decision to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA related to this scenario,” the Waymo spokesperson said in a statement.
“We are working to implement additional software safeguards and have put mitigations in place, including refining our extreme weather operations during periods of intense rain, limiting access to areas where flash flooding might occur,” the spokesperson said.
The company said it provided over 500,000 trips per week in challenging environments and that across 170 million miles driven, the self-driving cars were shown to be 13 times safer than human drivers related to serious injury collisions.
San Francisco was the first city the cars began operating in for the public in 2024. A major blackout this past December froze hundreds of Waymos on city streets as the technology was confused by darkened intersections.
The disruption led to a hearing in March before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors seeking more information about how the company’s cars would respond to closed roads in a sudden emergency and how law enforcement could manage the vehicles without physically moving them in such an event.
“Our first responders should not be AAA roadside assistance,” District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong told company representatives during the hearing, after it was revealed that San Francisco firefighters had to push stalled vehicles off the roadway. In at least one instance, a vehicle had to be moved to access a fire at a PG&E substation that had caused the blackout.
One of the issues the company said it was working on at the time was how to make the cars understand where roads were closed more efficiently by using geofencing, which uses data to map restricted zones like construction or any roads closed by emergency responders.
The company’s representatives at the hearing said the company would be ready to comply with a California state law that goes into effect in July requiring the company to respond to 911 dispatchers within 30 seconds of being notified of an emergency.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood expressed doubts the company’s technology would be ready to comply by then, given its performance during the blackout.
This story was written by Thomas Hughes for Bay City News Service.
