Waymo Just Recalled 3,791 Robotaxis - 6 U.S. Cities Paused

What happens when the self-driving car you just called drives straight into a flooded street? It already happened.

On May 12, Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous-driving arm and the U.S. market leader, issued a software recall on all 3,791 of its 5th- and 6th-generation robotaxis. It is the largest single-company recall in the history of commercial autonomous driving.

The trigger came in late April in San Antonio, Texas. An empty Waymo entered a flooded road and was swept into a creek. No one was hurt, but the message was loud: the robot couldn't tell that the road was no longer a road.

Then, even after the recall, it happened again. On May 21, an Atlanta Waymo drove into floodwater and sat stuck for about an hour. The company immediately paused service in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and Nashville - six cities at once.

In the same week, a separate issue surfaced. Waymo halted freeway rides in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami after its vehicles struggled in construction zones. That brings the count to 10 metro markets disrupted in a single week.

TechCrunch summed it up bluntly: "Robotaxis are here - and yet they're not." Even the category leader is still finding new edge cases every time it enters a new city or unlocks a new road type.

What does this mean for you? If you live in or visit those six cities, double-check the Waymo app before relying on it - especially in bad weather. Alphabet (GOOGL) holders should expect short-term volatility tied to autonomous-driving headlines. And the nationwide robotaxi rollout timeline most analysts had penciled in just got a little more cautious.

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📌 Sources: TechCrunch, Bloomberg, CNBC

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