Waymo’s autonomous vehicle software is under investigation after federal regulators received 22 reports of the robotaxis crashing or potentially violating traffic safety laws by driving in the wrong lane or in construction zones.
Office of Injury Investigation (ODI) of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the survey intended to evaluate the software and its ability to avoid collisions with stationary objects and how well it detects and responds to “traffic safety control devices” such as cones. The inquiry is billed as a “preliminary assessment”, which the ODI is trying to resolve within eight months.
“NHTSA plays a very important role in road safety, and we will continue to work with them as part of our mission to be the world’s most trusted driver,” Waymo said in a statement to TechCrunch.
It’s the second autonomous vehicle research ODI has publicly announced in the past two days. On Monday, ODI opened a detector to Amazon-backed Zoox AVs after receiving two reports of the company’s autonomously equipped Toyota Highlanders falling behind motorcycles after the SUVs unexpectedly applied the brakes.
The investigation into Waymo’s software also comes just three months after Waymo first recalled its self-driving software after two of its vehicles crashed into the same tow truck in Phoenix, Arizona.
The company’s robot taxis have encountered enough problems on construction sites that videos of these mishaps regularly go viral. Some of them are mentioned in the ODI report, such as when one of Waymo’s robotaxis drove off a paved road into a construction zone in Phoenix last October and suffered underbody damage.
More typical feathers are also mentioned. In San Francisco, California last year, one of Waymo’s AVs was waiting to merge into traffic when it decided to change course. As a result, one of its external sensors cut off an SUV. In a May incident in San Francisco, a Waymo AV crashed into the bumper of a parked car while trying to perform a “sweater maneuver.”
Many of the accidents reported in the ODI report, however, tend to report more mundane encounters.
There are many examples where Waymo’s robotaxis has had trouble navigating automated gates in parking complexes. Time after time, Waymo’s AVs have fallen through the cracks. In one incident in February in Arizona, the Waymo AV encountered a closed gate and, as it turned to leave the area, ran into parking spikes and blew a tire. In another from November, a Waymo AV crashed into a chain dividing part of a parking lot.
While these aren’t life-and-death scenarios, they help illustrate the difficult — and hard-to-predict — corner cases that stand in the way of truly autonomous vehicles.
