An autonomous self-driving Waymo was caught on tape Monday in the Atlanta, Georgia, area, blowing past a school bus that had stopped with its red lights flashing, a move that would have landed a human driver a $1,000 ticket.
Altanta police have not issued a citation in the case and told CBS News they currently have no reports on the incident.
Waymo said it is investigating the incident, which appeared to involve a school bus for Atlanta Public Schools. CBS News reached out to the school district for comment.
It’s the latest in a series of Waymo driving mistakes that have gone viral. Last weekend, police in the San Francisco Bay Area pulled a Waymo over after it made an illegal U-turn. San Bruno police said that since there was no human driver, a ticket could not be issued, saying their citation books “don’t have a box for ‘robot.'”
Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, offers driverless rides in five cities — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix and Atlanta — with plans to expand. Waymo hopes to be in Washington, D.C, Miami and Dallas as soon as next year. It is also currently testing its service in New York City.
Waymo first started offering its fully autonomous driverless robotaxi service to the public in October 2020 in Phoenix.
CBS News got an exclusive look last year as Waymo was being tested on Arizona freeways.
“It’s really about never making a mistake, driving defensively, and predicting things that could go wrong” Pierre Kreitmann, principal software engineer for Waymo, told CBS News at the time. “…So the bar is to make as few mistakes as possible, and be safer than a human driver would be.”
The company argues that its own safety data shows 91% fewer serious injury crashes, and 92% fewer crashes injuring a pedestrian, compared to a human driver.
But it acknowledges the vehicles are still learning, telling CBS News in a statement that “the trust and safety of the communities we serve is our top priority. We continuously refine our system’s performance to navigate complex scenarios.”
“I think they need to be held to a higher standard,” said former National Transportation Safety Board chair Robert Sumwalt, a CBS News transportation safety expert and analyst, of self-driving vehicles. “…Before we have widespread use of self-driving vehicles, we’ve got to make sure that they are implemented properly.”
