Cases › physical harm › LR-2026-0531
Waymo robotaxis drive into flooded roads, prompting recall and service pauses in five US cities
Preliminary Why: 1 report: Tech Times · subject to change · 1 independent report
Status: no action reported
No source states: loss or records, agent tool, could do, deployer.
Severity moderate: tier: service and riders touched in a bounded scope of five stated cities, with a recall of 3,791 vehicles; no count of affected third parties or regulator-involved compromise is stated
Waymo operates driverless robotaxis in US cities, and in April one of its unoccupied vehicles in San Antonio drove into a flooded road and was swept into a creek; no one was injured. Waymo recalled the 3,791 vehicles in its fleet and shipped an over-the-air update restricting operation where flooding risk is elevated. Another unoccupied robotaxi was later reported trapped in flood water in Atlanta. Waymo then suspended service in five cities, and the company said it still had no permanent fix and was working on additional software safeguards. No timeline for a permanent fix or for resuming service was given.
What happened
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What was done
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Risks
Primary43 incidents
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Controls
Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:
Harness ApplicationPhysical safety interlocks · Human approval for high-impact actions · Live behaviour monitoring · Adversarial testing before deployment
Similar incidents
Evidence
No source states: a step-by-step account, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off, what was done.
Show the full account: 4 items from the primary sources
What happened, in order
- 2026-05-21 Waymo suspends robotaxi service in five cities
Not dated in the sources:
- Waymo issues voluntary recall of nearly 3,800 robotaxis and says it is working on additional software safeguards
- Unoccupied Waymo robotaxi reported trapped in flood water on a road in Atlanta
- Company gives no timeline for a permanent fix or for resuming service in suspended cities
Show every field, with its source and grade
The AI system
What happened
Impact
Context
Notes on gaps
Waymo's reliance on NWS alerts is reported but not mapped to a listed control.
LR-2026-0531 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON