Feds Probe Waymo's School Bus Fix, Saying the Problem Never Stopped

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a formal investigation into whether Waymo's software recall over school bus passing last fall actually solved anything. The agency's key evidence: most of the school bus incidents happened after Waymo shipped the fix, according to a filing. Passing a stopped school bus with its red lights on and stop arm out is illegal in all 50 states.

The timeline is rough for Waymo. The company pushed the software remedy in mid-November, then issued an official voluntary recall a month later, per the filing. Weeks after that fix, in mid-January, another school bus passing incident occurred, according to a report this year from the National Transportation Safety Board, which is running its own investigation into the issue. WIRED reported last year that a series of Waymo cars had driven around stopped school buses.

Waymo spokesperson Dana Gallagher pushed back in a written statement, saying the company has "made significant improvements to vehicle behavior around school buses." She said Waymo hasn't been cited for passing a school bus since last March, months after the mid-December recall, and that it looks "forward to continuing our engagement on recall processes for AV software that continues to learn and improve."

The Austin school district tried to help. Late last year it set up a half-day data collection event for Waymo, bringing school buses and stop-arm signals to an empty parking lot so the company could train its vehicles to avoid the maneuver, WIRED reported. That event came after both the software fix and the recall—and the incidents kept coming.

There's real money on the line. Past recall queries like this one have ended in civil penalties, some costing automakers and software developers tens of millions of dollars.