Emergency officials from San Francisco and Austin told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in a private meeting last month that Waymo's driverless vehicles are getting worse on city streets, blocking fire stations, freezing at intersections, and pulling first responders away from active emergencies. Wired obtained an audio recording of the session. The complaints land as Waymo runs 500,000 paid rides weekly across 10 US cities and prepares to launch in 10 more before year-end, including London.
Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, told NHTSA the city is seeing "backsliding of some things that had improved upon" and that Waymo vehicles are "committing more traffic violations." San Francisco Fire Department Chief Patrick Rabbitt said Waymos are "frequently now blocking our fire stations from access" and that the vehicles' default behavior is to freeze. In Austin, Lieutenant William White of the Austin Police Department's Highway Enforcement Command said the cars often fail to recognize officer hand signals.
"I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn't really ready," White told federal regulators. He said the failure mode is consistent: "The human element is what's killing them. The moment you introduce the human element, [the vehicles] lack that social awareness of what to do, and they freeze."
Key facts
- 01San Francisco and Austin officials told NHTSA in a private meeting last month that Waymo performance is backsliding.
- 02More than 1,000 Waymos stranded in San Francisco's December power outage; 60 had to be retrieved manually over three hours.
- 03A 911 operator waited 53 minutes on Waymo's hotline; an Austin Waymo blocked an ambulance for 2 minutes during a shooting that killed 3 and injured 14.
- 04Waymo now runs 500,000 paid rides weekly across 10 US cities, with 10 more planned by year-end including London.
- 05California DMV rules taking effect in July require AV operators to answer first responders within 30 seconds and clear emergency areas within 2 minutes.
The numbers behind the complaints are specific. During a December power outage in San Francisco, more than 1,000 Waymos were stranded for at least a few minutes as they struggled to navigate intersections without working traffic signals; 60 had to be retrieved manually over the three-hour blackout. In one instance, a 911 operator waited 53 minutes on Waymo's hotline. Carroll warned that volume of that kind "can delay response, delay our call time for people that have true life-and-death situations."
“More than a thousand Waymos stranded during a December San Francisco power outage, with 60 retrieved manually over three hours and a 911 operator left on hold for 53 minutes.”— Jaeden Schafer
Austin first responders appeared before the City Council on Wednesday to discuss an incident last month in which a Waymo blocked an ambulance for two minutes as it responded to a downtown shooting that killed three people and injured at least 14. Officers said connecting with Waymo's remote operators has previously taken up to three minutes. Two front-row chairs labeled "RESERVED FOR: WAYMO" sat empty through the two-hour session.
Waymo's ride volume has grown tenfold since last year, though Uber still provides roughly 400 times as many weekly rides. The company says it has conducted in-person training for more than 35,000 emergency responders nationwide. Spokesperson Julia Ilina said in a statement that Waymo "deeply value[s] our partnership with first responders" and that their feedback "has been instrumental in driving impactful improvements to the Waymo service."
Other frictions are piling up. Austin's Independent School District has complained about Waymos passing school buses with stop arms extended. Assistant Chief Nicole Jones of the San Francisco Police Department told NHTSA officers are frustrated that they have to stick their heads inside robotaxis to talk with remote operators, and the department has asked Waymo to add exterior microphones.
Regulators are starting to draw lines. On Tuesday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles published new autonomous vehicle rules taking effect in July that require AV companies to answer first-responder calls within 30 seconds, give emergency officials authority to issue temporary "do not enter" directives, and require vehicles to exit a designated area within two minutes. Because AVs are regulated at the state level in California and Texas, city departments have until now had limited formal leverage.
There is a counterweight worth naming. Waymo's own data shows its vehicles cause fewer serious crashes than human-driven cars on a per-mile basis, and first responders themselves are not asking the company to leave. "We want them to succeed, and we understand that the technology is here," White said. San Francisco's emergency department says conversations with Waymo since the December outage have been productive, and the company has changed some internal policies and increased training.
The harder question for Waymo is whether scale is outrunning the operational layer. Five hundred thousand rides a week is a real business, but doubling the city footprint by year-end means dropping a fleet that freezes on hand signals into Boston, New York, Seattle, Washington, and London — markets where organized labor and city politicians are already hostile. Every minute an ambulance sits behind a stuck robotaxi becomes evidence in that fight, and California's 30-second response rule is the template other states will copy.
Driverless ride-hail has spent the last two years selling regulators on a safety story built on aggregate crash data. The first-responder complaints reframe the conversation around a different metric — how the system behaves at the edge, when a human in a uniform is waving at it — and that is the metric cities will increasingly use to decide whether the next 10 launches happen on schedule.
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