Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

Summary

Waymo has now paused service in two cities because its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads, a problem that already prompted the company to issue a recall last week. One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution. “Safety is Waymo’s top priority, both for our riders and everyone we share the road with. During a period of intense rain yesterday in Atlanta, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle encountered a flooded road and stopped,” the company said in a statement. Waymo admitted that it hadn’t finished developing a “final remedy” for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,” according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory. The company said its fleet those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather. This is not the first time Waymo has struggled to quickly stamp out problematic behavior with its robotaxis. When people started to notice Waymo robotaxis illegally passing stopped school buses last year, the company shipped a fix that was supposed to address the issue — only fo...