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Waymo under investigation for unsafe school bus incidents

Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google, is being investigated by U.S. safety officials after its robotaxis were caught driving past stopped school buses. And not just once. This happened more than 20 times in Austin, Texas.

In the U.S., cars must always stop when a school bus is picking up or dropping off kids. It is one of the strictest traffic rules because children may be crossing the road. In some of these cases, kids were actually crossing when the Waymo cars kept going.

Now, the National Transportation Safety Board is stepping in. Investigators are heading to Austin to collect data and review videos. A first report should come out in about a month, but the full investigation could take much longer.

What makes this more worrying is that this is not the first time. Back in October, another U.S. safety agency looked into similar problems in Georgia. Waymo said it fixed the issue with a software update and even recalled over 3,000 vehicles. But now, the same problem is showing up again in Texas.

Waymo says there have been no crashes and that its cars are still safer than human drivers. They also say their system handles thousands of school bus situations every week and keeps improving. Still, school officials in Austin have asked Waymo to stop running robotaxis near schools during pickup and drop-off times. Waymo has not agreed to that.

This whole situation shows how tricky self-driving cars still are. Most of the time, they work fine. But when it comes to kids, school zones, and unpredictable moments, even small mistakes can be very serious.

As robotaxis roll out in more cities, moments like this will play a big role in how much people trust the technology and how strict the rules around it become.