By Natalie Lung, Kara Carlson and Amy Stillman, Bloomberg
Waymo has temporarily halted service in five cities over concerns that its robotaxis may attempt to drive on flooded roads, the latest setback over an issue that recently led the company to recall thousands of vehicles.
The autonomous vehicle unit of Alphabet Inc. said on Thursday it has halted service in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas and Houston amid severe weather. Storms swept through Atlanta on Wednesday, during which an unoccupied Waymo vehicle drove and got stuck in a flooded road. The car has since been recovered and removed from the scene, a Waymo spokesperson said.
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The company’s San Antonio service has similarly been on pause since late April, after one of its unoccupied vehicles entered a flooded lane and was swept into a creek. Last week, the company recalled 3,791 vehicles to fix an issue with its software that could cause robotaxis to continue driving and not stop even upon detecting a potentially untraversable flooded lane.
The company separately said on Thursday that it has temporarily paused freeway access in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Miami to “integrate recent technical learnings” into its software around construction zones. Street operations remain unaffected, and it expects to resume freeway routes “soon.”
The incidents highlight the challenges for driverless vehicles to adapt to unpredictable weather and other unexpected roadway conditions without a human driver’s judgment. Prior to the suspensions, Waymo had been operating its paid robotaxi service in 11 US cities and has been testing in over a dozen more in a growing competition with the likes of Tesla Inc. It was the first and only robotaxi company in the US to offer paid driverless rides on highways.
“Short term, a pause is the responsible and right thing to do,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor and an expert on automated driving. “Long term, you can’t have a robotaxi service that can’t function in inclement weather because the world also needs to function in inclement weather.”
Waymo said it has refined its extreme weather operations after the San Antonio episode. The vehicle in Atlanta encountered the flooded roadway before any National Weather Service alerts about potential flash flooding, which the company monitors to guide its plans.
Smith said the company will likely have to do more training, conduct more simulations and collect more data to fully resolve how to navigate these complex scenarios.
“Waymo does need to get data on these situations. That probably means a lot of driving, or supervised manual driving,” Smith said.
Waymo said safety is a top priority and is still working on additional software updates to improve its performance around flooded roadways. It will monitor weather and road conditions to determine whether it’s safe to resume its robotaxi service in Austin and Atlanta, which is offered via the Uber app through a partnership with the ridehailing company. It will similarly do so for the service via its own app in Dallas and Houston.
The weather agency expects scattered thunderstorms through Saturday in the Atlanta area, including the risk of heavy rainfall.
Waymo is under two separate investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which didn’t respond to a request for comment after business hours on the latest service pause. One is probing an incident in which a robotaxi struck a child near a school in Santa Monica, California, in January, while the other was opened after the company’s cars repeatedly failed to fully slow or stop for school buses last year.
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–With assistance from Romy Varghese.
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