NHTSA investigates Waymo vehicle recall remediation effectiveness

On November 9, 2026, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced an investigation into whether a recall fix by Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, actually worked, covering 2,895 vehicles. The probe focuses on Waymo cars repeatedly violating traffic rules when passing school buses.

Waymo launched a recall in December 2025 to fix how its vehicles behave around school buses with flashing red lights or extended stop signs. After the fix, cars still slowed or stopped, but then kept going and overtook the bus. Waymo said at the time that it had completed software updates on all affected vehicles, yet most of the violations occurred after November 2025, when those updates were supposedly in place. NHTSA will assess whether the software fix was effective and determine why the cars kept breaking the rules after the update. Waymo is also facing a separate ongoing matter: in January 2026, one of its robotaxis struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, and in October 2025 NHTSA had already opened a preliminary investigation into Waymo after reports about problems with its driverless taxis.

The investigation now stands at the stage of evaluating whether the software repair from the December 2025 recall is effective, and NHTSA has not yet issued any conclusion.