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Self-driving car company Waymo is now under federal investigation Following reports that one of his vehicles did not stop for a school bus as students were alighting.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration then began an investigation. Event in Atlanta, Georgia on September 22, Which is being done by its defect investigation office.
Despite the school bus being parked, with its red lights flashing and the stop arm deployed, waymo fail to stop, to ODI The report said.
The self-driving vehicle reportedly approached the bus from a straight road side and stopped briefly, but then turned right and passed in front of the vehicle and drove down its entire left side. report State.
“During this maneuver, the Waymo AV passed the bus’s extended crossing control arm past the disembarking students (on the right side of the bus) and crossed the extended stop arm on the left side of the bus,” ODI said,
At the time of the incident, Waymo was being operated by the company’s 5th generation Automated Driving System (ADS) and there was no safety operator in the vehicle.
Waymo’s ADS surpasses 100 million miles driven in July 2025.
According to ODI, Waymo’s ADS-related operations currently accumulate approximately two million miles per week.
The department said that, based on the incident and the accumulation of operational miles, the likelihood of other similar incidents in the past is high.
“ODI has opened an initial evaluation to examine the performance of Waymo ADS around stopped school buses, how the system is designed to comply with school bus traffic safety laws, and the system’s ability to comply with those traffic safety laws,” the ODI report said.
“During this investigation, NHTSA will seek to identify the scope of the issue presented by this incident and identify other similar incidents.”
In a statement shared with Independent, A Waymo spokesperson said: “Safety is our top priority, as we provide hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous paid trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments in America.”
“The data shows that we are improving road safety in the communities in which we operate, with five times fewer injury-related crashes compared to human drivers, and twelve times fewer crashes involving pedestrians.
“NHTSA plays a vital role in road safety, and we will continue to work closely with the agency as part of our mission to be the world’s most trusted drivers.”
This comes on the heels of a separate incident in San Bruno, California, in which traffic police mistakenly stopped a driverless Waymo for a suspected DUI, after making an illegal U-turn.
“Since there was no human driver, a ticket could not be issued (there is no box for “robot” in our citation books),” the department wrote in an online post.