America’s road safety regulator has opened a fresh investigation into Alphabet’s driverless cars, after reports that they kept passing stopped school buses even after a software fix meant to stop them doing so.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Monday it had opened a recall query into 2,895 vehicles operated by Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving unit, over continued traffic safety violations around school buses.
The regulator is examining whether a software update issued under a December 2025 recall adequately addressed the defect. The fault could cause a Waymo vehicle to pass a school bus displaying flashing red lights or an extended stop arm after first slowing or stopping. NHTSA said most of the incidents it is reviewing happened after November 2025, when Waymo said it had completed the software remedy across the affected fleet.
The trouble began in autumn 2025, when footage circulated of a Waymo car driving around a stopped school bus in Atlanta. NHTSA opened a preliminary evaluation on 17 October 2025, and in December Waymo filed safety recall 25E084, covering 3,067 vehicles running fifth-generation driving software. The company said every affected car had been updated by 17 November 2025, before the recall paperwork was even filed.
But school buses in Austin kept recording passes. The Austin Independent School District documented about two dozen incidents over the school year, including passes on 11, 12 and 19 December and again on 12 January, all after the fix. The US National Transportation Safety Board, which opened its own investigation in January, found in preliminary findings that the 12 January pass came after the car asked a remote human assistant for help and received the wrong answer. Six vehicles passed that stopped bus in all, the safety board said.
The new query will assess whether the remedy was adequate and determine what caused the post-remedy incidents. It is separate from a probe NHTSA opened in January after a Waymo vehicle struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California.
Waymo has said it has seen material improvement in performance since the update, and disputes the characterisation that nothing changed. The company operates driverless ride-hailing services in several American cities, and the outcome of the query will be watched closely across the self-driving industry as the technology expands.
A recall query is not a finding of a defect. NHTSA can close it or escalate it to an engineering analysis, the next stage of a defect investigation, from which it can formally seek a recall. The details of the new query rest on the NHTSA statement as reported by Reuters; the regulator has not published a count of the post-remedy incidents.
Sources: Reuters, “US opens probe into 2,895 Waymo vehicles over school bus safety violations”, 9 November 2026 — https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-opens-probe-into-2895-waymo-vehicles-over-school-bus-safety-violations-2026-11-09/ ; The Autowire, “Waymo School Bus Pass Traced to a Remote Agent’s Wrong Answer”, 16 October 2026 — https://theautowire.com/2026/10/16/waymo-school-bus-remote-assistance-austin-ntsb/ ; NHTSA recall acknowledgement letter, campaign 25E084 — https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2025/RCAK-25E084-3001.pdf
