The commercial driverless taxi service Waymo is recalling software in thousands of its vehicles due to a malfunction that could cause the cars to drive into flooded roads, a letter from the U.S. Department of Transportation says.
The correspondence, shared Monday, said a safety recall will be conducted for all 3,791 cars in the company’s fleet.
“The software may allow the vehicle to slow and then drive into standing water on higher speed roadways,” the letter reads.
“Entering a flooded roadway can cause a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash or injury,” it continued.
The recall follows an incident report filed by the Department of Transportation in April, in which a passengerless Waymo drove into a flooded roadway during a heavy rainstorm in San Antonio, despite the road being “untraversable.”
Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli told the New York Times that the company “provides over half a million trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments across the U.S., and safety is our primary priority.”
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Bonelli added that Waymo had “identified an area of improvement” in relation to flooding on major roadways.
“We are working to implement additional software safeguards and have put mitigations in place, including refining our extreme weather operations during periods of intense rain, limiting access to areas where flash flooding might occur,” he told the U.S. outlet.
Global News contacted Waymo for comment but did not receive a response.
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The software will be updated without disruption to the taxi service, as it can be updated when vehicles return to a warehouse for regular maintenance, it added. The service is currently available in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.
Waymo has temporarily halted public rides in San Antonio, Bonelli added.
The software malfunction is just one of a series of product errors that have raised concerns over the safety of driverless cars as their prominence grows across major U.S. cities.
The tech business, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, is currently facing a federal investigation into a January traffic violation after one of its vehicles struck a 9-year-old girl at a pedestrian crossing near an elementary school in Santa Monica.
The company also opened a voluntary investigation last October after its taxis were recorded illegally passing stopped school buses.
Waymo vehicles have been involved in a number of more serious incidents, including blocking an ambulance from getting to the scene of a shooting in Austin, Texas, according to local media reports, and hitting and killing a cat in San Francisco.
In September, one of the company’s self-driving cars made an illegal U-turn close to a police vehicle surveying for drunk drivers in San Bruno, Calif. The vehicle was pulled over, but officers were unable to issue a ticket to the driverless car.
Waymo maintains that its technology makes roads safer and that data suggests its driverless cars consistently outperform humans in avoiding crashes and major incidents.
Would you get into one of these death traps? The concept is good, but the computer still is not capable of common sense. AI is just an algorithm for searching for the best answer out of a selection. It cannot see a new/different situation and come up with a solution.
As to San Bruno, if there is no driver and driver’s licence to attach to a ticket. It should be issued to the company that owns the car. If they rack up sufficient points, then their licence to operate driverless vehicles should be suspended (like any other driver). – that would be incentive to back up their wild claims.