Waymo has recalled software for almost 4,000 cars after some of its robotaxis drove into freeway construction zones, a safety failure that pushed the company to restrict freeway access while it works on fixes. The recall follows Bay Area road incidents in which the vehicles did not stay out of active work areas.
The issue became impossible to dismiss after Elliot Slade’s ride back to San Francisco last month on Highway 101 turned into what he described as a construction zone ordeal. He said the car first tried merging into other lanes before driving into the work zone itself, where it went through cones and then sped up straight away. “There were signs. There were lights. There were cones. And it went through the cones and then sped up straight away,” Slade said. He and his fiancé feared for their lives during the about five-minute ride.
Waymo said it identified improvement areas for its cars in construction zones and has voluntarily restricted freeway access while it implements those changes. That makes the recall bigger than one alarming ride: records showed seven cases on Bay Area roads in one day last month, suggesting the problem was not isolated to a single vehicle or a single stretch of highway. A nearby highway patrol car chased the Waymo after seeing what was happening, and the robotaxi eventually left the construction zone and took an exit into a residential neighborhood.
The friction is plain. Waymo says it is fixing the software, but it has not said exactly how it will keep cars from entering construction zones again. Scott Moura said transportation agencies doing construction on highways are actively feeding data into exchanges that connect to vehicles, a sign that the industry is trying to build guardrails around a problem that is still very much live. For now, Waymo’s next step is not expansion but restraint: the company is keeping freeway access limited while it works through the recall, and passengers will be waiting to see whether the changes are enough to keep a robotaxi from doing what Slade saw on Highway 101.
That is the test now. If Waymo cannot keep its cars out of cones, lane shifts and active work zones, the promise of hands-off freeway driving will stay under a recall notice instead of on the road.
