Waymo is back under the microscope. A month after one of its autonomous cars killed a neighborhood cat, Alphabet’s $GOOGL ( ▲ 0.48% ) self-driving arm is once again defending its safety protocols as regulators turn up the heat.
The company said Friday that it will issue a software recall to address a problem where its robotaxis failed to fully stop for school buses. The announcement comes after the NHTSA opened an investigation tied to several incidents in Atlanta and Austin, where Waymo vehicles illegally passed stopped buses. Waymo said it updated the software on November 17 and pointed to its “strong safety record.”
That record is actually impressive. According to Waymo’s latest Safety Impact Report, which covers nearly 100 million driverless miles across four cities, its vehicles were involved in 91 percent fewer serious-injury crashes and 80 percent fewer crashes involving any injury compared with human drivers. The New York Times noted that the dataset is remarkable in part because most autonomous-vehicle competitors don’t publish anything close to this level of detail.
Still, context matters. The miles logged are concentrated in specific, tightly mapped areas, and the analysis is conducted by Waymo itself. And even with strong statistics, every high-profile mistake hits differently for the public. A robotaxi passing a school bus or killing a pet tends to overshadow thousands of uneventful trips.
That’s the real challenge in the driverless race. Waymo, Tesla $TSLA ( ▼ 0.2% ), and others are pushing the technology rapidly forward, but the psychological hurdle remains taller than the technical one. One bad moment can outweigh a mountain of safety data when the court of public opinion is watching.