Waymo Still Has A Problem Stopping For School Buses

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Waymo has clearly gotten off to a great start in 2026, and the company has made a strong case already that its robotaxis are significantly safer than human drivers. However, they aren’t perfect. A Waymo robotaxi briefly blocked an ambulance responding to a shooting in Austin this week. (Though, I think that’s a little overblown, as the robotaxi did get moving after a few moments, it was an odd situation, and there was another ambulance stopped just a tiny bit up the road as well — conveniently left out of the video frame for most of the video.)

One issue that has been plaguing Waymo robotaxis for a while, apparently, is they have not been stopping for stopped school buses. This became a big issue with Texas officials last year, getting logged for this 19 times. In December, Waymo rolled out an update to try to solve this problem. But it apparently hasn’t gone away completely.

There was reportedly another such incident in January, and the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating it. Additionally, there was an odd case that involved a Waymo passing an international school bus without safety indicators that other cars were passing (but shouldn’t have been). Clearly, this is an area that still needs improvement.

This also makes me think of one of my biggest issues with Tesla “Full Self Driving” (FSD) over the years. I don’t know about school buses, as I don’t encounter them enough with their stop signs extended, but it has never responded to school zones. When the yellow lights are flashing indicating that you have to slow down to 15 or 20 mph, Tesla FSD has never recognize that for me and slowed down. Given that a drive through three such school zones every day — multiple times a day — this is a major problem. Perhaps it has been fixed in the latest versions, but I haven’t seen any indication of that.

One would think that both of these issues would be fairly easy for Waymo and Tesla to train for and have working smoothly. And one has to assume that they consider the safety of children important, right? So, why has this taken so long?