NHTSA opened a new probe after Waymo robotaxis kept passing stopped school buses

Federal regulators are asking whether Waymo’s fix for robotaxis that passed stopped school buses ever worked. Recall query RQ26006 covers 2,895 vehicles running the company’s fifth-generation automated driving system, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened it on Nov. 6, 2026. Reporting on the query began circulating on Nov. 9.

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The question is narrow and uncomfortable for Waymo. The company reported a software remedy as complete in November 2025, yet the agency says a majority of the school-bus incidents it has catalogued happened after that date. A recall query exists to test the gap between a remedy on paper and what the vehicles do on a street where a bus has its red lights flashing.

Recall 25E084 and the November 2025 software update

NHTSA’s investigation record for RQ26006 lays out the history. Waymo filed Recall 25E084 on Dec. 10, 2025, describing a software condition that could let one of its vehicles pass a stopped school bus with red lights flashing or the stop arm extended. The remedy was a software update, and the filing reports it as completed for every affected vehicle on Nov. 17, 2025. Autoblog’s account of the new query adds that the earlier recall covered 3,067 vehicles, a larger population than the 2,895 now under review. Neither source explains the difference.

The query grew out of preliminary evaluation PE25013, the school-bus probe first reported in January 2026 after incidents involving Austin buses. Investigators working through that file noticed that most of the incidents it identified came after the remedy date. That observation is what turned a closed-looking recall into an open question about whether the update addressed the real cause.

Austin and Atlanta school-bus reports

The incident counts come from school districts rather than from Waymo. Autoblog, citing Reuters, reports that Austin Independent School District documented 19 distinct violations and issued numerous $300 tickets, while public schools in Atlanta recorded six more. NHTSA’s own page says the Austin district supplied traffic citations but does not state a count, and the incident table on the page is hard to read, so the 19 and six figures rest on press accounts of district records. Local coverage from Austin of the original December 2025 recall described the same pattern of buses and robotaxis meeting at flashing red lights.

A $300 ticket is small money for a company of Waymo’s size, and the fines are not what regulators are weighing. The concern is the behavior: a stopped school bus with flashing lights is among the clearest signals in traffic law, and children are crossing in front of it. Every pass recorded after the November 2025 update leaves investigators with two possibilities, either the remedy missed a scenario or the vehicles met conditions it never covered.

Reporting from NPR in December 2025 tied the original recall to the same Austin episodes. Atlanta schools, not only Austin’s, have now reported violations, which widens the geography beyond the single Texas district where the first complaints surfaced.

Fifth-generation vehicles in scope and Ojai left out

Scope is limited to vehicles with Waymo’s fifth-generation driving system. The newer Ojai robotaxi, which uses the sixth-generation system, sits outside RQ26006, according to Autoblog, so the outcome will not directly test Waymo’s newest hardware. Readers tracking the company’s expansion plans should treat the query as a verdict on the software lineage that carries most of its present service.

The listing names Paul Parker as the investigator and Tanya Topka as the approver. It shows no information requests and no response deadlines, so the next visible step is unknown. Autoblog’s account says the query could lead to further corrective action, which might mean a revised remedy or an expanded recall. In the sources reviewed, Waymo had not published a response, and the earlier recall page remains the company’s last public word on the subject.

The dates in the record carry a detail worth reading closely. The remedy was reported complete on Nov. 17, 2025, and the recall filing is dated Dec. 10, 2025, 23 days later, so the update was already in the vehicles before the formal paperwork reached the agency. NHTSA uses a recall query to judge whether a manufacturer’s remedy fixed the defect it was meant to fix, which is a different job from the preliminary evaluation that came before it. Under RQ26006 the agency is auditing a fix, not hunting for a new defect.

For parents and bus drivers, the practical stakes are plain. State traffic laws require drivers to stop when a school bus has its red lights flashing, and a robotaxi that treats the signal as optional puts children at the curb in the path of a moving vehicle. The records so far, as Autoblog describes them, document violations and tickets rather than crashes or injuries; the crash, injury and fatality fields on NHTSA’s page are blank. That distinction matters, and it is also why investigators are acting on a pattern of repeated passes instead of a single harmful event.

What remains open is the cause. NHTSA wrote that it opened RQ26006 to assess the adequacy of the remedy and to identify the reasons for the reports that followed it, and until Waymo supplies answers the school-bus pattern in Austin and Atlanta stays unexplained.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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