A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses. It didn’t work

One of The purported advantages of self-driving car technology are that each car can learn from a single vehicle’s mistakes. Here’s how Waymo puts it on its website: “Waymo Driver learns from collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including previous device generations.”

But in Austin, Waymo vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses while drivers picked up and dropped off children. An Austin Independent School District (AISD) official alleged that vehicles, in at least 19 instances, “illegally and dangerously” overtook school buses in the district while their red lights were flashing and their stop arms were extended instead of coming to a complete stop, as required by law.

In early December, Waymo issued a federal recall related to the crashes, and reported at least 12 of them to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. According to federal filings, engineers at the self-driving vehicle company “developed software changes to address the behavior” weeks ago.

But even after the recall, school bus crashes continued, according to school officials and a report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal safety watchdog that is also investigating the situation.

Now, emails and text messages between school officials and Waymo representatives, obtained by WIRED through a public records request, show the lengths to which the Austin Public School District and Waymo have gone to try to resolve the issue. AISD even hosted a half-day “data collection” event in the school’s parking lot in mid-December, documents show, where several employees collected school buses and stop signs from across the fleet so the self-driving car company could collect information about the vehicles and their flashing lights.

However, by mid-January, more than a month later, the school district reported at least four more school bus crashes in Austin. “The data we collected from the beginning of the school year through the end of the semester shows that about 98 percent of people who receive one violation do not receive another,” a school police department official told local NBC affiliate that month. “That tells us that the person is learning, but it doesn’t seem like the Waymo automation system is learning through its software updates, recalls, or what have you, because we’re still having violations.”

This situation raises questions about interesting blind spots in autonomous driving technologies and the industry’s ability to compensate for them even after they are discovered.

Self-driving software has long struggled to recognize flashing emergency lights and road safety devices with long, thin arms, including gates and stop levers, says Missy Cummings, who researches self-driving vehicles at George Mason University and served as a safety adviser to NHTSA during the Biden administration. “if [the company] “This problem wasn’t solved a few years ago,” she says. “The more cars they have, the bigger the problem. And that’s exactly what’s happening here.”

Waymo did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District referred WIRED to the NTSB while the incidents are under investigation. An NTSB spokesperson declined to answer WIRED’s questions while the investigation is ongoing.

Illegal pass

By midwinter of 2025, AISD officials were frustrated. In one of the 19 incidents alleged by the district attorney in a letter later released by federal road safety regulators, a Waymo vehicle passed a school bus to drop off children “just moments after the student crossed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still on the road.”

“Alarmingly, five of the alleged incidents occurred after Waymo assured the district that it had updated its software to fix the issue. Federal regulators with NHTSA have already launched an investigation into this conduct. Austin ISD is evaluating all potential legal remedies available to it and intends to take any necessary action to protect the safety of its students, if necessary,” the attorney wrote.