"In Austin, Texas, Waymo's robotaxis passed school buses with flashing red lights and extended stop arms at least 19 times between September 2024 and January 2025—including moments when children were crossing in front of the vehicles."

"One of the purported advantages of self-driving car tech is that every car can learn from one vehicle's mistakes. Here's how Waymo puts it on its website: 「The Waymo Driver learns from the collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including previous hardware generations.」 But in Austin, Waymo's vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children."

"In early December, Waymo even issued a federal recall related to the incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of them to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety."

"Stop signs mean different things in different contexts—intersection stops, construction-worker stops, school-bus stops. Teaching software to distinguish between these contexts is trying to teach something very subtle."

"Self-driving software has long struggled with recognizing flashing emergency lights and thin, articulated safety devices like stop arms."