(Rob Pegoraro)
Many Waymo riders have been encountering major issues with the robotaxi service this month—and they haven’t gotten much in the way of explanation from the Alphabet-owned firm.
First, Waymo abruptly halted freeway driving in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Miami, and Phoenix, barely six months after adding highway routing. Many riders reported that they only learned of this when Waymo’s app offered much longer routes than usual.
In San Francisco, for example, PCMag’s Michael Kan saw the Waymo app quoting times from the middle of the city to San Francisco International Airport—a route for which we didn’t find Waymo that great even when freeways were enabled—as long as 1 hour and 33 minutes.
Then Waymo suspended service in six southern cities—Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio in Texas, plus Atlanta and Nashville—following incidents in which Waymo vehicles drove into flooding. Those incidents had already led the company to recall almost 3,800 vehicles. (In late 2024, Waymo, which began its on-road testing in Phoenix’s reliably sunny climate, called its software ready for conditions as unfriendly as “fallen trees and downed power lines, flooding, and power outages.”)
Customers in those six southern cities knew service was unavailable, but not why: App notices stating “Our service is currently paused” left users on Reddit’s r/waymo forum guessing what had happened.
That subreddit also featured reports of a service shutdown in Miami, itself unexplained in Waymo’s app. Reddit users have since posted to say that the service has resumed there and in other cities.
In Austin, however, the requirement to use Uber’s app to book a Waymo apparently left would-be riders confused about the sudden absence of self-driving rides.
Waymo customers have to turn to third-party forums for help in part because Waymo’s site and app have no equivalent to a web service’s status page.
The company’s blog did not mention these problems between an April 15 post about service opening to everybody in Miami and Orlando and one Thursday about its debut of Ojai robotaxi minivans made by the Chinese firm Zeekr. Waymo’s X and Instagram accounts have been equally uninformative about recent interruptions.
“I’m surprised Waymo is having this many issues around freeway closures and city-wide outages at this stage, especially given how aggressively they’ve expanded,” Harry Campbell, founder of the Driverless Digest newsletter, tells me. “Many users, including myself, learned about it only by trying the app and seeing that routes didn’t take freeways. Definitely not ideal.”
Waymo has prided itself on being transparent about the safety of its operations. That’s helped set Waymo apart from its much smaller autonomous-vehicle rival, Tesla’s Robotaxi service, which redacts the most informative parts of its safety data and ignores press queries.
But Waymo looks distinctly opaque in communicating everyday operational issues. Asked about them, the company did not clarify where it has ended service suspensions or suggest when freeway driving might resume.
“We are committed to being good neighbors for our riders and our communities,” spokeswoman Katherine Barna says in an email. “As part of that commitment, we make proactive decisions, including temporarily pausing aspects of our service. We know riders count on us to get around, and we appreciate their patience as we work to get them where they’re going safely and reliably.”
Campbell’s take: Patience is easier to grant after an explanation.
“Waymo needs to do a better job communicating, as a lot of people have come to rely on the service,” Campbell says. “We knew something was up for a few days before the official announcement, which makes caution understandable, but incidents like this could hurt trust if riders suddenly lose freeway access or see service limited by construction, weather, or other operational issues.”