Waymo has halted its autonomous taxi operations in Atlanta after an empty vehicle drove into a flooded roadway on Wednesday, a company spokesperson said. The company recovered the vehicle and removed it from the scene, and operations remain suspended while Waymo evaluates conditions.
This interruption in Atlanta is the second known pause of Waymo's services triggered by severe-weather encounters. The autonomous-unit of Alphabet Inc. previously suspended its San Antonio service in late April after an unoccupied vehicle entered a flooded lane and was carried into a creek.
In response to that earlier incident, Waymo recalled 3,791 vehicles last week to address a software defect that could cause robotaxis to continue driving instead of stopping when they detect a flooded lane that may be untraversable. The recall and the Atlanta suspension are directly connected to the company's ongoing work to refine its flood-related operational safeguards.
Waymo noted that the vehicle in Atlanta encountered the flooded roadway before the National Weather Service had issued any flash-flooding alerts in that area. The company uses those weather service alerts as part of the criteria that guide its decisions about operating in flood conditions, and it continues to monitor such alerts to shape operational plans.
Following the San Antonio event, Waymo said it tightened its extreme-weather procedures and is developing further software updates intended to improve autonomous performance around flooded roadways. The company did not provide a timeline for when the Atlanta service will resume but said it will monitor weather and road conditions and make a determination when it is safe to restart service.
Waymo's Atlanta robotaxi rides are offered through the Uber app under the companies' partnership. The suspension means those on-demand autonomous trips through that channel will remain unavailable until Waymo deems conditions and software mitigations sufficient to resume safe operations.
Context and operational notes:
- Waymo recovered the unoccupied vehicle from the flooded site and removed it from the scene.
- The company has initiated software-level work and has previously refined extreme-weather operations after the San Antonio incident.
- Service resumption in Atlanta will depend on continuous monitoring of weather and road conditions and completion of additional software updates.