During mid-April’s local downpours, self-driving taxi company Waymo temporarily suspended services in San Antonio after floodwaters swept away one of its vehicles.
Days earlier, local TV stations aired footage of another Waymo gliding the wrong way through a pickup lane in front of an Alamo Heights elementary school.
And up the road in Austin, a driverless car stopped in the middle of a roadway last month, briefly blocking an ambulance responding to a mass shooting.
All three incidents occurred mere weeks after Silicon Valley-based Waymo’s February launch in the Alamo City.
Welcome to the driverless future, Texas.
For a company that sells the future as frictionless, Waymo’s present keeps colliding — sometimes literally — with the messy unpredictability of real-world streets.
“If Waymo or any other company is going to operate autonomous vehicles on public roads, they should be able to demonstrate that those vehicles can follow the law,” said Cooper Lohr, senior policy analyst for transportation safety at Consumer Reports. “We need to have some kind of accountability in place if companies are going to roll out this technology.”
To Lohr’s point, the National Transportation Safety Board early this year revealed it opened an investigation into Waymo cars passing and failing to yield to school buses after a series of incidents in Austin. And in February, one of the firm’s vehicles struck a child near her elementary school in Santa Monica, California.
None of the incidents have resulted in catastrophic injury. The schoolgirl, who reportedly darted from behind another car, only suffered minor injuries.
Even so, the incidents have shaken public confidence in a technology that transportation experts maintain will bring us safer roads. They also raise questions about whether Texas and the rest of the nation are providing adequate oversight to the nascent technology.
Waymo officials declined to be interviewed for this article, but issued a statement saying the service pause in San Antonio will help the company evaluate the flooding incident and tune up its local operations. They said they hope to resume service soon.
“Our hearts go out to everyone in San Antonio dealing with the aftermath of these floods,” company spokesman Chris Bonelli said. “Like many of our neighbors, we were affected by this severe weather when one of our unoccupied vehicles was caught in the rising waters. In coordination with local emergency teams, we have recovered it safely and are incredibly grateful for the hard work of the city’s first responders during this time.”
Texas’ hands-off approach
Despite the growing list of eyebrow-raising incidents, cities like San Antonio are largely powerless to respond.
The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passed a 2017 law banning cities from regulating autonomous vehicles. At the time, proponents of the measure said they wanted to make it easier for the industry to grow in Texas — a common refrain from lawmakers in a state that regularly trumpets its pro-business environment.
Last year, the Lege asked the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles to create new regulations for autonomous vehicles, but those changes don’t take effect until next month.
An official from the City of San Antonio declined comment for this article.
However, citing a city spokesman, the Texas Tribune last month reported that SA’s police and fire departments “received training and quick-reference guidance for safely managing autonomous vehicles, including steps to take if a vehicle becomes unresponsive, how to contact the vendor for immediate support, and how to redirect vehicles away from active incident scenes.”
Critics of Texas’ hands-off regulatory approach argue that state lawmakers flagged the industry into the fast lane without making sure its systems are fully roadworthy.
“In states that don’t have strong regulations in place, it’s problematic when they’re tying the hands of municipalities,” Lohr of Consumer Reports said. “Who’s dealing with these vehicles the most? It’s the local police. The work really starts at the community level — these are the people on the front line as the technology is getting rolled out.
The majority of U.S. residents agree that electric vehicle operators should face penalties for glitches on public streets, according to a January poll by Consumer Reports.
When asked what consequences robotaxi operators should face for repeatedly violating traffic laws, 52% said the company shouldn’t be allowed to operate until they can prove the issue has been resolved. An additional 26% support rules restricting where the vehicles can operate, such as keeping them out of school zones. A mere 1% think the firms should face no consequence when their vehicles malfunction on public streets.
Studies and federal reporting suggest that, mile for mile, driverless systems like Waymo’s tend to have fewer serious crashes than human drivers. However, it’s not the only autonomous vehicle company with its sights on the massive Texas market.
At least five other self-driving car companies are now operating in Austin, according to media reports. Tesla’s robotaxis are now in operation, but not yet picking up everyday customers. Meanwhile, ADMT, Avride and Zoox are reportedly in the testing phase and Motional is mapping the city.
An analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data by electric-vehicle news site Electrek found that, as of January, Tesla robotaxis have crash rates nine times higher than the average human driver.
Beyond that, the report accused Tesla of being far less transparent about the data it shared about its crashes than other such companies — every single collision report to the feds was redacted with the same phrase: “[REDACTED, MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION].”
Tesla officials were unavailable for comment at press time.
Federal action coming?
Despite Texas’ lax oversight, around half of U.S. states currently have some kind of regulatory programs overseeing self-driving cars, according to experts. That patchwork approach to regulating the nascent technology has raised eyebrows in Washington.
For one, the NHTSA has ramped up investigations into autonomous driving systems and is pushing for more standardized reporting of crashes and malfunctions.
Meanwhile, in a rare flicker of bipartisanship, congressional lawmakers have begun floating proposals that would set nationwide safety standards, improve data transparency and demand clearer lines of accountability for driverless car companies.
In February, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation asked execs at Waymo and Tesla to testify that someone is at the wheel. During the hearing, senators on both sides of the aisle appeared eager to see the industry take distracted drivers off the street while also improving its safety record.
“Fully autonomous vehicles offer the potential to reduce crashes on roads, but we have seen the risk of letting companies beta test on our roads with no guardrails,” ranking committee member U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, said during the hearing, according to a CBS News report.
Indeed, there’s already federal legislation aimed at increasing the transparency of the automated vehicle industry. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, this year introduced a measure that would require better data reporting from the industry, and he also co-filed a bill with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, that would require companies to share more safety data before they’re allowed to operate on city streets.
“Autonomous vehicle companies have long boasted they can eliminate road fatalities caused by human error,” Markey said in a statement. “Now it is time they are honest about their technology’s reliance on human help.”
If those efforts gain traction, they could provide a much-needed backstop for states like Texas, where political leaders seem more interested in courting tech investment than scrutinizing it. Federal rules wouldn’t just level the playing field — they’d ensure that cities aren’t left hosting an uncontrolled experiment with no emergency brake.
But as the Texas rollouts barrel ahead — and the possibility of more driverless-technology glitches on San Antonio streets — the question becomes just how quickly a deeply divided Congress is capable of acting.
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