NHTSA opened a recall query into whether Waymo's school-bus software fix worked

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation opened recall query RQ26006 into Waymo on 6 November, according to its opening resume. The query covers Waymo’s fifth-generation automated driving system, lists a population of 2,895 and concerns the effectiveness of the recall remedy for Waymo vehicles passing stopped school buses. The same day, NHTSA closed preliminary evaluation PE25013, opened on 17 October 2025, according to the closing resume.

Waymo filed recall 25E084 on 10 December 2025, according to its Part 573 report. It covered 3,067 units of driverless software from the 20 August 2025 release until the 5 November 2025 release, under which 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 shipped the fix as an out-of-cycle hotfix, reaching all affected vehicles between 5 and 17 November 2025. The report listed 12 citations Waymo linked to the behaviour, all dated 25 September to 14 November 2025, and said that because Waymo had already updated every vehicle, all of which it owns, no owner or dealer notices were needed.

The closing resume says most of the incidents the evaluation identified occurred after 17 November 2025, the date the remedy was reportedly completed. Its failure summary lists 27 incidents from other sources, described as a media report from Atlanta on 22 September 2025 and traffic citations supplied by the Austin Independent School District, and marks Waymo’s own count as confidential. NHTSA wrote that this “calls into question the effectiveness of the recall remedy”. The query will assess whether the remedy was adequate and what caused the later reports. Waymo told TechCrunch it had received no citations since March 2026.