Waymo hits sixth recall as fleet swells from 700 to 4,000

Waymo scaled from roughly 700 robotaxis in 2025 to nearly 4,000 now, and the tail of the distribution is getting louder. A New York Times report by Emmy Martin frames the growth against a run of edge-case failures the company keeps having to walk back through NHTSA filings.

The most vivid one: on April 20 an unoccupied Waymo drove into a flooded road in San Antonio and was swept into Salado Creek, only recovered four days later along the Greenway Trail near Pletz County Park. The recall notice said the car detected the flooded road but continued at reduced speed. That triggered a voluntary recall of 3,791 vehicles equipped with Waymo's fifth- and sixth-generation automated-driving system, with an over-the-air software fix pushed fleet-wide.

Then in June, Waymo filed what NHTSA counts as its sixth recall, this one covering 3,871 vehicles after at least 13 confirmed cases of robotaxis driving into closed freeway construction zones, six near Phoenix in April and seven in the San Francisco Bay in May. The company's own filing quoted in the reporting says the car 'may enter and drive at speed in freeway construction zones due to inappropriately prioritizing the avoidance of other freeway hazards.' Layered on top is a December Pacific Gas and Electric substation fire in San Francisco that took down power for roughly a third of the city and left Waymos stranded at dark intersections while remote confirmation requests backed up.

A fair frame here is that recall count is not the same as a safety trend. The fleet more than tripled in a year and NHTSA filings tripled with it; the number that would actually decide the question, incidents per mile against a human baseline in the same rare conditions, is not in the NYT piece. What the reporting does establish is that Waymo is now filing recalls at the cadence of a mainstream automaker, which is itself a signal that regulators are treating it as one.

This lands into an already busy Autonomous Vehicles tracker, after Zoox started charging in Las Vegas and Wayve won its TfL license for London inside the last week. On the buildout side, Moove raised $250M at a $2.1B valuation for Waymo depot 'Nests' in the same stretch. Waymo's advantage in this window is that OTA fixes on a fleet still measured in thousands let it retire failure modes faster than any competitor could ship them; the exposure is that every new city it opens introduces long-tail conditions it has no data on yet.