NHTSA asks whether Waymo's school-bus fix worked, after most violations came after the update

Federal safety regulators want to know why Waymo's robotaxis kept passing stopped school buses after the company said it had fixed them. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a recall query into 2,895 Waymo vehicles on Nov. 6, according to the agency's filing, which Reuters reported on Nov. 9. Waymo finished installing the software remedy on all affected vehicles on Nov. 17, 2025, the filing says, yet a majority of the incidents found in NHTSA's earlier investigation happened after that date.

That makes the case a test of how a software recall gets closed. A hardware recall ends when the part is swapped. A recall of driving behavior, sent over the air, only ends when the behavior stops, and NHTSA says the query will "identify the cause(s) of the conditions leading to the post-remedy reports."

A rule for staying out of buses' way caused the passes

Waymo's December 2025 recall report, which covered 3,067 vehicles, explains where the bug came from. Its driverless system is designed not to impede priority vehicles such as public buses and school buses. While yielding to a stopped school bus, it could decide it was in the bus's way and pull off before the red lights went dark or the stop arm folded. The feature was not new. The behavior only appeared with the Aug. 20, 2025 software release, deployed broadly in mid-September, which changed how the system predicts what other road users intend to do.

Waymo's Field Safety Committee decided on Oct. 30, 2025 to ship a hotfix outside its normal release cycle, and rolled it out between Nov. 5 and Nov. 17, the report says. The defect lived where two features met, each of which worked on its own. Patching that junction once does not show that the next prediction update will leave it alone.

Austin's school district supplied the evidence

The query's failure summary lists 8 traffic citations provided by the Austin Independent School District. Reuters reported that the district documented 19 violations, including one in which a driverless car stopped briefly and then went on while a student was crossing, and that Atlanta's public schools recorded 6 more. NHTSA opened its preliminary investigation in October 2025.

Waymo's answer is the best case that the problem is already solved. "We have made significant improvements to vehicle behavior around school buses and have received no citations since March 2026," the company said, according to Reuters. If so, the passes stopped about four months after the date the recall lists as complete, and nothing in the recall paperwork records what changed in between.

What NHTSA asks Waymo for next will show which problem it thinks it has: a better patch for 2,895 cars, or proof of how each new release is checked against school buses before it ships.