Waymo Said Its Robotaxis Would Stop for School Buses. The Feds Say Most Incidents Came After

Every kid who rides a school bus learns the rule before they learn to tie their shoes. When the red lights flash and the stop arm swings out, every car stops. It’s the law in all 50 states.

Waymo’s robotaxis have had a hard time with that one. And the federal government now says the fix Waymo rolled out almost a year ago didn’t solve it.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened what it calls a recall query on Nov. 6. It’s a formal look at whether Waymo’s 2025 software recall did its job. The agency says it has identified “a large number of reported incidents” of Waymo vehicles passing stopped school buses with red lights flashing or stop arms out, and that most of them happened after Waymo said its fix was installed on every affected car, according to the NHTSA filing.

The query covers 2,895 Waymo robotaxis running the company’s fifth-generation self-driving system. Reuters was first to report it.

How a fix turned into a second probe

This started in October 2025. A video out of Atlanta showed a Waymo going around a school bus that had stopped with its stop sign out and lights flashing while children got off. The robotaxi crossed in front of the bus from its right side, turned left around its front and kept going down the street, TechCrunch reported. NHTSA opened an investigation.

Austin, where Waymo also runs a robotaxi service, had its own run of trouble. School district officials reported at least five similar incidents at the time, according to a letter filed with NHTSA. The new investigation file lists traffic citations from the Austin Independent School District among the reports.

Waymo said its software update was finished on every affected vehicle on Nov. 17, 2025. It filed a formal recall about a month later, on Dec. 10, 2025.

It didn’t end there. A report from the National Transportation Safety Board found another bus-passing incident in mid-January, several weeks after the fix, according to WIRED. The NTSB, which is separate from NHTSA, is running its own investigation into the school bus problem.

Here’s the part that stings. Late last year, WIRED reported, the Austin school district even helped Waymo set up a half-day data collection event. The district brought school buses and stop-arm signs to an empty parking lot so Waymo could gather information to train its cars to stop. That happened after the fix and the recall. The incidents kept coming anyway.

Waymo’s side of it

Waymo says the problem is behind it. “We have made significant improvements to vehicle behavior around school buses and have received no citations since March 2026,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The company also argues its cars make the roads safer overall. “The Waymo Driver has a clearly demonstrated positive impact on roadway safety,” the spokesperson said. “Once received, we’ll work to respond to NHTSA’s query and look forward to continuing our engagement on recall processes for AV software that continues to learn and improve.”

That last phrase matters. A regular car recall is simple. You take your truck to the dealer, they swap a part, and the problem’s gone. A self-driving system isn’t like that. It’s software that keeps changing as the company trains it on more driving. So when Waymo says the fix is done, the question regulators now have to answer is whether “done” means anything for a system that gets updated all the time.

NHTSA is trying to get at exactly that. It says it wants to “assess the adequacy of the remedy” and figure out what caused the incidents after the update. The agency aims to wrap up a recall query within eight months. A query isn’t a new recall. It’s an investigation that could lead to one.

Not the only headache this year

Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has had a rough year with regulators. In June it recalled 3,871 robotaxis over a software flaw that sent cars into closed freeway construction zones, Quartz reported. NHTSA is also looking at a January crash between a Waymo and a child outside an elementary school in Santa Monica, California.

None of that means robotaxis are a bust. Waymo runs a paid robotaxi service in several cities, and plenty of riders use it every day. But school buses are the one place where nobody gives a machine the benefit of the doubt. A human driver who blows past a stop arm gets a ticket, and in a lot of states a big fine. Parents expect a robot to be better than that, not worse.

For families in Austin, Atlanta, Phoenix and the other cities where these cars run, the practical takeaway is simple. Teach kids to look both ways at the bus, every time, no matter what kind of car is coming. And for Waymo, the job is just as simple to say and harder to do. Stop for the bus. Every single time.