Waymo is now under investigation by two federal agencies after its self-driving vehicles repeatedly broke the law around school buses. The National Transportation Safety Board opened a probe Friday focusing on more than 20 incidents in Austin, Texas, where Waymo robotaxis illegally passed stopped school buses while children were boarding or exiting. It's an escalation that comes just months after NHTSA launched its own investigation and Waymo issued a software recall that clearly hasn't solved the problem.
Waymo just hit a regulatory wall. The National Transportation Safety Board announced Friday it's opening an investigation into Alphabet's autonomous vehicle subsidiary after its robotaxis were caught on camera illegally passing stopped school buses more than 20 times in Austin, Texas. The move marks the first time the NTSB has ever investigated Waymo and signals mounting federal concern over the company's struggle to teach its AI systems basic traffic laws designed to protect children.
"Investigators will travel to Austin to gather information on a series of incidents in which the automated vehicles failed to stop for loading or unloading students," the NTSB told TechCrunch. The agency expects to publish a preliminary report within 30 days, with a detailed final report coming in 12 to 24 months.
But here's the kicker - this is actually the second federal investigation Waymo's facing over the same problem. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation opened a similar probe back in October, after incidents first surfaced in Atlanta last September. That's when a Waymo vehicle pulled out of a driveway and drove perpendicularly across a stopped school bus from the right side, then turned left down the street while kids were getting off.
Waymo acknowledged at the time that its vehicle couldn't see the stop sign or flashing lights. The company pushed out a software update to fix what it called a specific scenario. Problem solved, right? Not even close.
Even after Waymo issued a software recall in December to address the issue, the violations kept happening. Local Austin news station KXAN published videos from school bus-mounted cameras showing Waymo vehicles making illegal maneuvers on multiple occasions. The footage was damning enough that Austin Independent School District asked the company to suspend operations during pickup and drop-off times.
Waymo's chief safety officer Mauricio Peña struck a defiant tone in response to the investigation. "We safely navigate thousands of school bus encounters weekly across the United States, and the Waymo Driver is continuously improving," Peña told TechCrunch. "There have been no collisions in the events in question, and we are confident that our safety performance around school buses is superior to human drivers."
That "no collisions" defense might not carry much weight with investigators or parents. The laws requiring vehicles to stop for school buses exist precisely to prevent worst-case scenarios involving children. The fact that nothing tragic has happened yet doesn't mean the violations are acceptable.
Peña also tried to shift focus, noting that Austin ISD has "reported success in reducing human-driven violations around school buses from 10,000+ a year." It's a classic deflection - yes, human drivers break this law too, but they're not supposed to be inferior to autonomous systems that companies like Waymo insist are safer than humans.
The timing of this investigation is particularly awkward for Waymo. The company is in the middle of aggressive expansion across the United States. Just this week, it launched robotaxi service in Miami, adding to existing operations in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The company is racing to establish market dominance in the autonomous vehicle space, but these safety incidents threaten to undermine the entire value proposition.
The NTSB probe carries different weight than NHTSA's investigation. Unlike NHTSA, the NTSB isn't a regulatory agency and can't issue fines or force recalls. But what it lacks in enforcement power, it makes up for in investigative depth. The safety board conducts root-cause analyses that often result in public hearings and detailed recommendations that shape industry practices and future regulations.
For Waymo, this means months of scrutiny into how its computer vision systems, machine learning models, and decision-making algorithms handle school bus scenarios. The investigation will likely examine everything from sensor capabilities to training data to the update process that apparently failed to solve the Atlanta problem before it spread to Texas.
The company's repeated software patches suggest this isn't a simple bug fix. If Waymo's AI can't reliably recognize and respond to one of the most distinctive and legally protected scenarios in American traffic - a big yellow bus with flashing red lights and an extended stop sign - it raises questions about edge case handling across its entire autonomous driving stack.
Peña positioned the investigation as "an opportunity to provide the NTSB with transparent insights into our safety-first approach," but transparency is exactly what's been missing. The company hasn't disclosed how many total school bus encounters result in violations, what percentage of its fleet has the updated software, or why patches that supposedly fixed the Atlanta scenario didn't prevent the Austin incidents.
"We see this as an opportunity" is corporate speak for "we're in damage control mode." And with two federal agencies now circling, Waymo's got a lot of explaining to do about why its vaunted autonomous technology keeps breaking one of the first traffic laws American teenagers learn in driver's ed.
Two federal investigations into the same safety problem isn't just bad optics for Waymo - it's a fundamental challenge to the autonomous vehicle industry's core promise. If self-driving systems can't consistently handle scenarios as straightforward as stopped school buses, the path to widespread deployment just got a lot longer. The next 30 days will reveal whether this is a fixable software issue or a deeper problem with how AI perceives and prioritizes child safety in dynamic traffic situations. For parents in Austin, Miami, and the four other cities where Waymo operates, that answer can't come soon enough.
