On 6 November 2026 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) opened a recall query, RQ26006, into Waymo. The query will assess whether the remedy in Waymo's December 2025 school-bus recall was adequate.
The background
ODI opened a preliminary evaluation (PE25013) in October 2025. This followed footage of a Waymo robotaxi in Atlanta driving around a stopped school bus that had its stop arm out and lights flashing while children got off. More incidents were later reported in Austin.
Waymo filed recall 25E084 on 10 December 2025, covering 3,067 units of its driverless software. According to SDV Sector's reading of the filing, the problem was that a vehicle stopped, or stopping, for a school bus could move off before the bus had switched off its red lights or retracted its stop arm. Waymo pushed a software fix to its whole fleet, all of which it owns, and said the update was complete on 17 November 2025.
Why NHTSA has reopened the issue
When it closed the preliminary evaluation on 6 November, NHTSA found that most of the incidents it had identified occurred after the date the remedy was reported complete. Its failure summary lists 27 incidents from other sources, including citations supplied by the Austin Independent School District. NHTSA wrote that this "calls into question the effectiveness of the recall remedy". The recall query covers Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving system and a population of 2,895 vehicles.
Waymo told TechCrunch it had made "significant improvements" to how its vehicles behave around school buses and had received no citations since March 2026. It said it would respond to NHTSA's query.
Wider significance
The case tests how recall law applies to software that keeps changing. When an operator updates every vehicle itself, a recall's completion date says little about whether the fix works on the road. NHTSA is now checking the remedy against what the vehicles did afterwards.
Why it matters financially
No penalty has been proposed. A recall query can, however, lead to a new or expanded recall, and it adds regulatory scrutiny as Waymo expands its services. For the wider robotaxi industry, the outcome will help decide how much evidence regulators expect before a software recall can be closed, which affects deployment timelines and compliance costs.