Waymo Resumes San Antonio Robotaxis After Flood Pause
Waymo has restarted its driverless taxi service in San Antonio, five months after flash flooding swept away an empty vehicle and forced its longest pause there to date. TechCrunch
The service covers 60 miles including downtown and San Antonio International Airport. Dozens of vehicles are operating, open to some riders at first. Waymo now offers paid rides in 15 U.S. cities.
The pause goes back to heavy rain on April 20. Several Waymo vehicles got stuck in flooded streets. One unoccupied vehicle was washed into Salado Creek. Houston Public Media The vehicles slowed near waterlogged streets but did not stop.
Waymo briefly paused in other Texas cities around the same time and has since resumed there. In late April it said it was reviewing San Antonio operations to improve flood monitoring and related safeguards. GovTech
In May came the engineering response. Waymo recalled almost 3,800 robotaxis after the incident. Houston Public Media It updated software to better spot and avoid standing water and kept vehicles out of areas with higher flood risk.
The restart comes with updated safety figures. The analysis covers more than 220 million miles with no human driver through the end of March 2026 across five service areas, adding Atlanta for the first time. The company now drives more than 4 million miles each week. Waymo
Compared with human drivers in the same areas over the same period, Waymo reports 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries, 82% fewer crashes with airbag deployment, and 82% fewer crashes with any reported injury.
For vulnerable road users, meaning cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians, it reports 84% fewer injury crashes involving cyclists, 84% fewer involving motorcyclists, and 93% fewer involving pedestrians.
In Atlanta, the analysis covers more than 5.4 million driverless miles. Waymo reports 86% fewer injury crashes and 94% fewer airbag-deployment crashes than the human benchmark.
Expansion continues alongside that record. In August 2026, Waymo said it would start testing vehicles with no human driver in Munich in the coming weeks. Reuters It aims to pass 1 million paid trips per week by the end of 2026. CBS Austin Driverless passenger service for employees in Austin began in March 2024.
The broader context here is familiar from earlier automation. Avoiding other road users is a different task from handling standing water. Depth is hard to judge from cameras and lidar, laser sensors that map surroundings, because a flat reflective surface gives little depth information, and the safe choice is often to avoid the route rather than brake at the last meter.
In my view, the San Antonio sequence is instructive because no one was hurt and the failure was clear to diagnose. Geofencing flood-prone streets out of service, feeding weather and water-level data more tightly into dispatch, and using more cautious water-depth limits are step-by-step fixes. They narrow where cars operate in the short term to keep service sound over the long term. What other operators should note is the pattern: the fleet slowed as designed but lacked a stop-and-reroute rule with enough margin. That kind of edge case only appears at scale, and Waymo's mileage now surfaces it faster than test driving alone could.
