Waymo recalls nearly 4,000 robotaxis due to freeway issue

Waymo is recalling almost 4,000 self-driving taxis after a software issue caused at least 13 of them to enter closed highway construction areas. The company filed a voluntary recall notice with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and is working on a software update to address the problem. There have been no reported injuries.

These are all instances where our vehicles did not interpret ramp closure signs and construction warning signs on freeways correctly. Either they were placing undue emphasis on avoiding other freeway hazards or not seeing the construction zone altogether. Six of these incidents occurred in Phoenix in April, and seven of them took place near San Francisco in May. Following a series of vehicles entering active construction areas on May 18th, we removed all of our robotaxis from freeways the following day, and our safety board determined that a recall was appropriate on June 8th.

1Why a software 'recall' is different

Typically, when a car company issues a recall, there’s some mechanical component that needs to be fixed. In this case, the “defect” is a pattern of behavior programmed into the vehicle’s autonomous driving model, which caused it to repeatedly misinterpret a particular type of scenario. We “found an opportunity for improvement related to performance in freeway construction zones,” and we’re pushing out a software update over the air to correct it, rather than sending the cars back to the dealership. This is the future of automotive safety: defects and fixes exist in software.

2What it means for you

For those who might be riding in one of these vehicles, it’s comforting to know that Waymo got ahead of this problem by reporting it to local and federal authorities and pulling the cars from the road before the recall went into effect. It’s also a little disconcerting to see that this is Waymo’s sixth recall since launch, and the reason was a commonplace occurrence: construction. Autonomous vehicles excel at the banal 99 percent but sometimes struggle with the strange 1 percent that humans take for granted.

My thoughts: This is a pretty good example of how responsible autonomous vehicle deployment should go — find a trend, report it, shut down the fleet, update the model. The question isn’t if AVs will make errors, because they will, but if the companies behind them will continue to publicly report those errors. A voluntary recall with details of the incidents is the good news.