Waymo Recalls 3,791 Robotaxis After Driverless Car Gets Swept Into Texas Creek

A Car With No Driver. In a Creek.

On April 20, an unoccupied Waymo robotaxi encountered a flooded section of road in San Antonio, Texas. Instead of stopping or rerouting, it slowed down and kept going. The vehicle was swept into Salado Creek and had to be pulled out days later, according to documents posted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's website.

No passengers. No injuries. But a $150,000-plus vehicle sitting in a creek is not a good look for the future of self-driving cars.

A second flood-related incident had occurred roughly two weeks earlier near McCullough Avenue and Contour Drive in San Antonio. Two incidents in one city. In one month.

What NHTSA Actually Said

Waymo filed a voluntary recall with the NHTSA on April 30 — ten days after the creek incident. The recall covers 3,791 vehicles equipped with Waymo's fifth- and sixth-generation automated driving systems. That covers every city Waymo currently operates in: Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, San Antonio, and Atlanta, according to Electrek.

The NHTSA's own documentation is careful with its language. The agency says Waymo is still developing the final remedy. What's been pushed out so far is an interim fix — tighter operational boundaries during heavy rain, updated maps flagging flood-prone areas, and restrictions on high-speed roads during storms. Per TechCrunch, the core problem was that Waymo's robotaxis were slowing down near flooded roads but NOT stopping. That's a significant distinction.

OTA Update: The Good News

This is NOT a traditional recall. No Waymo rides a flatbed to a dealership. The fix goes out over the air — like a software update on your phone — to the entire fleet simultaneously, according to Electrek. That's a genuine advantage of software-defined vehicles.

Waymo paused all San Antonio operations after the April 20 incident. Per Electrek, it was the company's longest service stoppage in that city. The company was expected to resume San Antonio service this week.

What Waymo Said

"We have identified an area of improvement regarding untraversable flooded lanes specific to higher-speed roadways, and have made the decision to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA related to this scenario," Waymo said in a statement quoted by CNBC.

The company also said it provides "over half a million trips every week" and that "safety is our primary priority." Standard corporate language. But the recall itself is the honest part — they caught a problem and reported it.

This Is NOT Waymo's First Rodeo

This is a pattern, not a one-off.

Waymo's first recall came in February 2024 after two robotaxis in Phoenix separately crashed into the same towed vehicle, according to TechCrunch. Then came recalls for low-speed crashes with parking gates and telephone poles. Then a recall for illegally passing stopped school buses in Austin and Atlanta.

Now flooding. Each incident gets a voluntary recall and an OTA fix. That process is actually how responsible engineering is supposed to work — identify, report, fix. But the accumulation matters.

On top of the flooding recall, Autoweek reports that NHTSA is already investigating a separate incident in which a Waymo vehicle struck a child near a school in California earlier this year. The National Transportation Safety Board is also probing the Texas school bus incidents from January. These are significant concerns.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

CNBC and TechCrunch frame this mostly as a routine software update story — almost reassuring in tone. "Voluntary recall, OTA fix, safety is our priority." Done.

Waymo doesn't have a complete fix yet. NHTSA's own documents say the final remedy is still in development. The interim update tightens where and when the cars operate — it doesn't actually teach the vehicles to handle flooding better. That's the difference between avoiding a problem and solving it.

The creek incident also isn't the only data point. Flooding, school buses, power outages causing gridlock in San Francisco in December — these are different failure modes, but they share a theme: Waymo's systems struggle with conditions that fall outside the norm. Real-world roads are nothing but conditions that fall outside the norm.

What This Means for Regular People

If you're in a Waymo city and it starts pouring, the company is now restricting where its cars go. That's reasonable. But it also means the service you paid for disappears exactly when driving is most dangerous and most people would want a car to show up.

Longer term, this is a stress test the whole AV industry is watching. Waymo is the furthest along of anyone in this space. If Waymo's sixth-generation system can still get fooled into driving into a flooded road, every competitor has the same problem — they just haven't hit it yet.

The technology is genuinely impressive. It's also genuinely unfinished. Both things are true. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.