Swansenreport

Waymo has issued its sixth recall in under a year, pulling nearly 4,000 robotaxis from highway service after the vehicles drove into closed freeway construction zones at least 13 times across two cities.

The recall, filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on June 8, covers 3,871 vehicles running Waymo’s 5th Generation Automated Driving System — the entire fleet capable of freeway operation. A software fix is “currently under development.” The vehicles are still operating on surface streets.

The incidents happened in two waves. Six robotaxis drove past ramp-closure signs and into active construction zones in Phoenix in April. Seven more did the same in the San Francisco Bay Area on a single day in May, this time driving between cones marking closed lanes. In the Phoenix cases, the software simply failed to recognize the closure signs. In San Francisco, Waymo told NHTSA the vehicles were “prioritizing the avoidance of other freeway hazards” — in other words, the cars saw something else to dodge and stopped paying attention to the construction zone.

One rider posted footage on social media showing a Waymo that blew through cones and was chased by police. Another passenger, Elliot Slade, told CBS San Francisco he and his fiancée were certain they were going to die. “The Waymo started freaking out as we got closer to the merge,” Slade said, describing lanes disappearing and the car speeding up. “That’s when I looked at my fiancée — we’re done. This is it. We’re dead.” The company offered affected riders three free rides, each worth up to $40.

Waymo suspended all freeway driving on May 19, the day after the San Francisco incidents. The company only added highway service in November 2025. Seven months later, it pulled the feature entirely.

This is the second recall in just over a month. In May, Waymo recalled nearly 3,800 robotaxis after vehicles drove into flooded roads. Previous recalls have addressed collisions with telephone poles, gates and chains, a crash involving a towed truck, and illegal behavior around school buses. NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board are separately investigating a January incident in which a Waymo vehicle struck a child near a school in Santa Monica.

The company says its vehicles have logged more than 170 million autonomous miles and claims a 13-to-1 reduction in serious-injury crashes compared to human drivers. Waymo is in the middle of an aggressive expansion, planning to launch in more than 20 cities this year, including London and Tokyo.

Highway construction zones are not exotic edge cases. They are a routine feature of American roads. That a service operating at highway speeds couldn’t reliably detect cones, closure signs, and flashing lights — on roads it had already mapped — raises questions about how ready the technology was for freeway use in the first place.

Sources: TechCrunch, June 18, 2026; CBS News, June 18, 2026; The Next Web, June 18, 2026; InsideEVs, June 18, 2026