Emergency First Responders Say Waymos Are Getting Worse

Emergency first-responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets—that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them “a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims.” WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting.

Officials from San Francisco and Austin, where Waymo has been ferrying passengers without drivers for more than a year, said the vehicles’ performance is getting worse. “We are actually seeing something interesting: backsliding of some things that had improved upon,” Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, told officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees self-driving vehicle safety in the US. “They are committing more traffic violations.”

“We’ve seen some behavior we haven’t seen in a few years … Waymo is frequently now blocking our fire stations from access,” added Chief Patrick Rabbitt, the head of the San Francisco Fire Department. “Their default is to freeze.” The situation can prevent firetrucks from responding to emergencies in a “timely and appropriate” way, he said.

In Austin, first responders have been frequently stymied by Waymos “freezing up,” said Lieutenant William White, head of Highway Enforcement Command at the Austin Police Department. White said that, contrary to what Waymo had told first responders, the vehicles often fail to recognize or respond to officers’ hand signals, which can lead to cascading delays during emergencies or unusual road incidents.

“I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn’t really ready,” White said. NHTSA did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The complaints come as Waymo embarks on an ambitious expansion across the US and the world. Today, the company offers driverless rides in parts of 10 US cities, with plans to launch service in 10 more before the end of the year, including London. Waymo said last month that it’s now providing 500,000 paid rides weekly—a figure that’s still dwarfed by human-powered ride-hail services (Uber provides some 400 times that number weekly) but has grown tenfold since last year.

But these comments from cities where the service is already operating threaten to slow the rollout of driverless technology, which, according to Waymo’s data, reduces serious crashes compared to human-driven cars. Waymo is already facing political opposition, especially from organized labor, in several dense, blue, and potentially lucrative cities, including Boston, New York City, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

In a statement, Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina wrote: “We deeply value our partnership with first responders and our shared commitment to safety. Their ongoing feedback has been instrumental in driving impactful improvements to the Waymo service.” The company says it has conducted in-person training for more than 35,000 emergency responders across the country.

Public Comment Periods

The comments made in the private meeting are blunter than what government officials have generally said in public. But they reflect long-simmering and sometimes vocal frustrations expressed by city leaders since at least late last year. Since autonomous vehicle operations are regulated in California and Texas by state rather than city officials, local first-responder departments and those who represent them can generally only request that developers like Waymo make specific changes to their operations.

On Wednesday, Austin first responders appeared before the City Council to discuss Waymo’s response to an incident last month in which a driverless vehicle blocked an ambulance for two minutes that was responding to a shooting in the city’s downtown, which killed three people and injured at least 14. Though officers were able to connect quickly with Waymo operators to move the vehicle, they reported that it had taken up to three minutes to connect with a remote agent in the past. They reiterated that Waymos don’t always respond well to hand signals, especially ones from police mounted on motorcycles.

Waymo declined to attend the meeting, and two front-row chairs labeled “RESERVED FOR: WAYMO” remained empty throughout the two-hour session.

Ilina, the Waymo spokesperson, said the company has "already had the substantive conversations this moment calls for,” and said the company has answered questions from city officials. “We will keep working with Austin's leadership and first-responder community, because ongoing collaboration is how we build the trust this city deserves and make Austin’s streets safer,” she wrote.

Austin’s Independent School District has also complained in the last few months about Waymo operations, after several incidents where driverless vehicles passed school buses picking up or dropping off schoolchildren with their stop arms extended and alert lights on. In San Francisco, Carroll, the emergency management head, testified before the City Council last month about a widespread December power outage that left more than a thousand Waymos stranded for at least a few minutes as they struggled to navigate intersections without traffic signals. More than 60 Waymos had to be retrieved manually during the three-hour blackout, Waymo later reported.

“I definitely stay awake at night thinking about things that could happen and how we integrate this new technology,” Carroll told city leaders. In at least one instance, she reported, a 911 operator waited on Waymo’s hotline for 53 minutes. “Anything that brings a high volume of calls to 911 around these kinds of things can delay response, delay our call time for people that have true life-and-death situations,” she said.

Waymo says it has changed some internal policies and increased engagement and training with first responders following the power outage.

Jackie Thornhill, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management (DEM), wrote in a statement to WIRED: “Since the [December] outage, DEM and Waymo have engaged in productive conversations to improve our communication and establish clear paths for issue escalation.” She said the agency would “continue to coordinate clear lines of communication” between safety agencies and the private sector.

Sadot Azzua, a spokesperson for the Austin Police Department, said in a written statement that the department is “actively engaging with city partners to assess various situations involving autonomous vehicles.”

The Human Element

First responders’ comments to federal regulators in last month’s private meeting zeroed in on what they called Waymo’s “human element”—the remote support teams meant to quickly respond to safety-related requests from first responders and riders alike. Assistant chief Nicole Jones of the San Francisco Police Department said officers were frustrated that they had to stick their heads into robotaxis to speak with Waymo’s remote operators, who sometimes can help the vehicles navigate out of tricky situations from afar. Jones said her department has advocated for exterior microphones that allow officers to speak to Waymo workers from outside the cars.

White, the Austin police official, said Waymos can get stuck when they’re forced to interact with people. “The human element is what’s killing them,” he says. “The moment you introduce the human element, [the vehicles] lack that social awareness of what to do, and they freeze.” Freezing creates “a significant danger to public safety,” he told federal regulators.

On Tuesday, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles published new autonomous vehicle regulations that could solve some of the first responders’ issues. The rules, which will be implemented in July, require autonomous vehicle companies to respond to first-responder calls within 30 seconds. They also give emergency officials new powers to issue temporary “do not enter” directives to these companies, to clear driverless vehicles from areas experiencing emergencies. Vehicles will be required to exit the area within two minutes.

First responders said in the meeting that they wanted to keep working with autonomous vehicle companies, including Waymo. “We want them to succeed, and we understand that the technology is here,” White said.