NHTSA opens recall query into Waymo robotaxis still passing stopped school buses

Federal regulators have opened a new investigation into Waymo after reports that its robotaxis continued to illegally pass school buses that had stopped with their red lights flashing — behavior the company had already tried to eliminate through a software recall.

According to TechCrunch, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration disclosed the probe in a November 6 filing, first reported by Reuters. The agency's central finding is that most of the incidents on record took place after Waymo deployed the software update meant to stop them.

A recall that did not hold

The story dates back to October 2025, when NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation opened its first inquiry after footage emerged of a Waymo vehicle in Atlanta maneuvering around a school bus with its stop sign extended and lights flashing while children were being unloaded. As TechCrunch describes the encounter, the robotaxi crossed in front of the bus from the right, then looped left around the front of the bus before continuing down the street.

Similar incidents followed in Austin, another city where Waymo operates a driverless ride-hailing service. Officials at Austin Independent School District documented at least five such episodes, according to a letter filed with the safety agency.

Waymo's response was a software update issued alongside a recall, and the company said the fix had reached every affected vehicle by November 17, 2025. NHTSA now says the majority of reported violations happened after that date — the discrepancy that prompted the new review.

What a recall query does

The Office of Defects Investigation has classified its new effort as a recall query, the mechanism the agency uses when it needs to judge whether the remedy for an earlier recall actually worked. In Waymo's case, that means explaining why vehicles running the patched software kept committing a traffic violation the update was designed to prevent.

TechCrunch says it contacted both Waymo and Austin Independent School District for comment and had received no response by publication time.

Why it matters

The case is a direct test of whether over-the-air software updates, the industry's standard fix for autonomous-vehicle defects, can genuinely correct unsafe driving behavior rather than simply being assumed to do so. Passing a stopped school bus is illegal precisely because children are often crossing the road around it, which makes repeated violations by a driverless fleet among the most serious categories of safety failure.

The findings could also shape how regulators handle software-based recalls across the autonomous-vehicle sector, determining whether Waymo must take further corrective action and how closely remedies of this kind are examined going forward. For a company operating commercial robotaxi services in cities including Atlanta and Austin, the investigation puts its safety record under renewed federal scrutiny.