Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Look Up Mashable Selects Trending Now Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Safety Net Mashable @Home In My Bag Versus Creator Playbook Getting Technical with Mashable All Series The service covers a massive area, dwarfing competitors. Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car.

Waymo Said It Fixed Its School Bus Problem. The US Government Says It Didn't Work Last year, Waymo recalled its software after several of its autonomous cars drove around stopped buses. Now the feds want to know more. The US government is examining whether Waymo's recall of software involved with a series of school bus passing incidents last fall actually fixed the safety issue. The formal investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will determine whether the company's supposed software fix succeeded in preventing its robotaxis from improperly passing stopped school buses with red lights on and their stop arms extended--indicators that the buses were picking up and dropping off students.

Waymo's 2025 software recall may be less effective than initially thought. Several months after Waymo issued a voluntary software recall on its robotaxis for running red lights and stop signs from stopped school buses, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into the recall's effectiveness. The recall query began on Friday to determine whether Waymo's update worked, since a majority of incidents occurred after the ... remedy date. The latest investigation from the NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation referenced Waymo's software recall in late 2025, which itself followed an investigation from the agency into the root issue. NHTSA's first probe revealed that Waymo's robotaxis were documented driving past stopped school buses with flashing red lights and stop sign arms deployed in Atlanta, Georgia and Austin, Texas.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Your morning catch-up: Betting on the elections, Becerra widens the lead in governor's race and more big stories'They come in droves': How robotaxis hog EV chargers in one corner of Southern California Self-driving vehicles charge at the Waymo station in Santa Monica in 2025. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.

The companies plan to deploy their autonomous bZ4X vehicles to other right-hand drive markets like the UK. In April 2025, Toyota and Waymo entered a preliminary agreement to work together on robotaxis. Now, the companies have announced that they will start testing an autonomous fleet of Toyota bZ4X electric vehicles in Japan sometime in 2027. After Japan, they're planning to deploy the vehicles to the UK and other right-hand drive markets in the years that follow. The bZ4X is Toyota's first modern mass-market electric vehicle based on the e-TNGA platform it developed with Subaru.

Removing human drivers isn't only a cost-cutting strategy; Waymo riders prefer the solitude, the staff writer Molly Fischer says. A Waymo offers a unique experience: you ride as a passenger behind or next to an empty driver's seat, the steering wheel turning as though handled by a ghost. The staff writer Molly Fischer has been reporting on Waymo, and she tells David Remnick that though the statistics are hard to parse, Waymos appear to be safer than cars driven by humans. Fans of Waymo prefer not putting themselves in the temporary custody of a stranger, but, Fischer says, this appeal is precisely what makes Waymos' glitches scariest. Now that her reporting is done, Remnick wants to know: Would she take one of the robot taxis by choice?

Waymos are safer than human drivers. Why are people heckling them, egging them, and smashing in their windshields? The wheel turns: when one of Waymo's autonomous vehicles is in motion, its steering wheel moves, too--twitching out the car's maneuvers from the usual position, facing the front-left seat. Generally, on American roads, this is known as the driver's seat. In a Waymo, such a designation is arbitrary. The Waymo Driver, as the company calls its autonomous-driving system--a force guided by sensors, cameras, custom maps, and machine learning--is all around. No one is allowed to sit in that front-left seat. Before I'd ridden in a Waymo, I had wondered about the wheel. What was it doing up there? One answer, a boring one, is as follows: it is fulfilling a legal mandate. Existing safety standards assume that cars have steering wheels, and, because Waymo's vehicles are regulated as cars, so do they. Besides, the company has spent much of its decade-long existence retrofitting normal cars with self-driving technology; the wheel is largely a vestigial inheritance. "We were very curious about whether people would react positively or negatively to the fact that the wheel turned," Megan Neese, Waymo's "Head of Insights," told me recently. We were sitting in her employer's San Francisco offices. Neese has been at the company since 2019, when it began offering fully driverless rides to the public; she was tasked with gauging passenger reactions. It was not hard to see how a wheel steering on its own might look spooky--the suggestion of a ghost in the machine. Yet, to Neese's surprise, riders reported that it reassured them. It seemed to convey that the car's actions were "recognizable; they're relatable; they're continuing to happen." The Driver doesn't need them.)

Self-driving cars from Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla are studded with cameras and sensors. Some of them are pointing at riders. One afternoon this past summer, a self-driving Waymo pulled into a parking lot in San Mateo County, California, and stayed there until the police arrived. Local cops had gotten a 911 call from Waymo staffers--humans, it should be said --who were viewing the car's passengers through cameras installed inside the vehicle. It looked like two teens were shooting a black handgun out the window of the vehicle, playing with it and drinking between shots, a police report said.

Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Versus Creator Playbook In My Bag Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off All Series Neal joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2024, editing and writing stories about digital culture and its effects on the environment and marginalized communities. He is the former editorial director of The Advocate and Out magazines, has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, Curbed, and Los Angeles magazine, and is a recipient of the Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for LGBTQ Journalist of the Year Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association (NLGJA). He lives in Los Angeles with his family. Waymo just announced a new transit rewards program that incentivizes pairing robotaxi rides with public transit. The transit rewards program is now available to Waymo employees in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it will open to the Bay Area public in a few weeks, according to the Google-owned autonomous rideshare company.

Autonomous car manufacturers have long claimed that self-driving vehicles would reduce traffic accidents. Thus far, the stats are largely in their favor. According to a report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), Google's Waymo robotaxis were involved in roughly 65 percent fewer car crashes than human drivers last year. Waymo's own internal statistics, meanwhile, claim that the autonomous vehicles (AVs) reduce accidents with serious injuries by 94 percent. Some critics are understandably dubious, however, noting that more testing needs to be done before anyone can meaningfully certify these safety gains.