The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recalled more than 1,200 self-driving Waymo vehicles after a series of small collisions.
The recall affects vehicles that used the fifth generation of Waymo’s automated driving system software, Reuters reported.
The company has more than 1,500 vehicles on the road in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin. The recall applies to a majority of them — 1,212.
There have been around 16 collisions with chains, gates and other barriers from 2022 to late 2024, but there were no injuries.
The NHTSA said last year that an investigation determined that the cars hit “clearly visible objects that a competent driver would be expected to avoid.” The agency opened the investigation on May 13, 2014.
The sixth-generation software corrected the problem Waymo said, with the update of the ADS software sent to all vehicles in the fleet at the end of last year, Reuters reported.
NHTSA documents confirmed that all of the vehicles have been repaired.
The company released a statement which read, “Waymo provides more than 250,000 paid trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments in the U.S.,” adding, “Our record of reducing injuries over tens of millions of fully autonomous miles driven shows our technology is making roads safer.”
This is not the first recall for Waymo vehicles. More than 400 self-driving cars were recalled in February 2024 after two minor collisions that were attributed to a software error not allowing the vehicle to predict a towed vehicle’s movement.
Waymo owns all of the vehicles, so no additional notifications are being sent to “owners, dealers or distributors,” the NHTSA said.
A company spokesperson told Channel 2 Action News that the recall will not impact the Atlanta area, nor its program with Uber for self-driving cars in the city.
According to Waymo, the recall is voluntary and applies to cars with software released before November 2024.
Waymo said the recall does not impact any vehicles currently on the road.
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