NHTSA opens recall query into Waymo after robotaxis still pass stopped school buses

Federal regulators opened a fresh probe into Waymo on November 6, asking why its robotaxis kept illegally passing stopped school buses even after a software fix and recall. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says a majority of the reported incidents occurred after the remedy shipped. The short verdict: the patch did not hold.

Waymo, an Alphabet unit, completed a software update for all affected vehicles on November 17, 2025, the company said last year. That update followed numerous reports of its autonomous vehicles driving past school buses that had stopped and deployed flashing red lights. NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation has now opened a formal "recall query" to, in the agency's words, "assess the adequacy of the remedy."

Reuters first reported the November 6 filing.

How did the original investigation start?

The ODI opened its initial investigation in October 2025 after reviewing footage of a Waymo autonomous vehicle maneuvering around a stopped school bus in Atlanta. The bus had its stop sign extended, its lights flashing, and was unloading children at the time.

The maneuver was not subtle. The robotaxi crossed perpendicularly in front of the school bus from its right side, then turned left around the front of the bus and continued down the street. Children were unloading. The vehicle proceeded anyway.

What happened in Austin?

Similar incidents piled up in the weeks and months after, in Austin, where Waymo also runs a robotaxi service. Officials at Austin Independent School District reported at least five such incidents, according to a letter filed with NHTSA.

The pattern matters more than any single event. A one-off failure suggests an edge case; repeated failures after a deployed fix suggest the defect model itself was incomplete. That is precisely the question the recall query will examine.

What does this change for fleet operators?

For transit and mobility managers watching autonomous deployments, the lesson is procedural rather than technical. A recall in software-defined vehicles is only as good as its post-deployment verification. Waymo pushed the update, closed the ticket, and the behavior reportedly continued.

The NHTSA query will test whether the November 17, 2025 remedy addressed the root cause or merely the observed symptom. Regulatory scrutiny of autonomous vehicle remedies now looks set to follow the same recall-query playbook used for conventional hardware defects.

TechCrunch has reached out to Waymo and Austin Independent School District officials for comment and will update its reporting if they respond. CIO Monitor will track the ODI's findings as the query proceeds.