By Sean McLain
This was supposed to be the year that robotaxis hit Main Street across the U.S., as companies like Alphabet's Waymo, Tesla and Amazon.com's Zoox launch AI-powered autonomous rides in dozens of cities.
But as hundreds of robot cars collide with humans, both literally and figuratively, tensions are rising. The problems cropping up in police reports and viral social-media posts range from the concerning to the comical.
Over Mother's Day weekend, Andy Milheizler's quiet Atlanta cul-de-sac was overrun with empty Waymo vehicles.
Her neighbors put up a barricade to block the vehicles. The next day, the robotaxis stopped at the barrier one after another, boxing each other in for around two hours.
"We started realizing that there might be a problem here," said Milheizler, a 48-year-old civil engineer and mother.
The passengers in two Waymo vehicles in Atlanta last week were in a less-humorous predicament. Their taxis drove into flooded streets during a storm and became stranded.
Now, criticism is mounting from drivers, law enforcement and local governments from California to New York -- and as the companies attempt to scale, robotaxis face more scrutiny than ever before.
Waymo and other robotaxi operators point to the safety records of autonomous vehicles, saying they are involved in far fewer accidents than a human-driven car.
"Reducing serious car crashes is core to our mission, and we're incredibly proud of our record that shows we can make roads safer," a Waymo spokesperson said. "At the same time, we know trust is earned."
Waymo said peer-reviewed research showed its vehicles had over 80% fewer injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers operating on the same streets. The company said it would soon begin offering rides in a new vehicle dubbed the Ojai, which it says offers superior safety.
Tesla's robotaxis use a version of its Full Self Driving software, which is also available to consumers. The company maintains that FSD is safer than a human, able to travel 1.6 million miles before a minor collision, compared with the national average of 220,000 miles.
"Robotaxi companies want safety to be the number of crashes per mile," said Phil Koopman, an autonomous-driving safety expert and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University. "As long as they get lucky and no one gets hurt, they don't think that's a safety problem, but humans see that as a safety problem."
Recent advancements in AI allow robotaxi companies to train their vehicles better and more quickly, leading to bold expansion goals. Waymo, the current market leader operating in 11 cities, including San Francisco and Orlando, said it aims to add 19 more cities.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said earlier this year that he hoped to expand its robotaxi service to a dozen states this year as the company puts artificial intelligence at the core of its business. New players like Zoox, Hyundai-backed Motional and Nuro are seeking a piece of the pie as well.
The autonomous vehicle space is expected to account for around 30% of the U.S. rideshare industry by 2032, according to Morgan Stanley.
But delivering safer-than-human transit depends on solving what the industry calls edge cases: rare, unusual incidents beyond everyday driving. Those edge cases cause the biggest headaches.
Waymo vehicles in December froze up during a San Francisco blackout, blocking traffic when they were unable to navigate traffic signals; in March, a Waymo vehicle in Austin, Texas, briefly blocked an ambulance responding to a mass shooting. The vehicles also faced a backlash in Austin for passing stopped school buses.
In April, an unoccupied Waymo became stuck after it drove into a flooded street in San Antonio, Texas, leading the company to recall all 3,800 vehicles with a software update. In its recall report, Waymo said vehicles traveling at higher speeds might slow but not stop when confronted with "a potentially untraversable flooded lane."
A month later, after the software update, two Waymo vehicles in Atlanta got stuck in flooded streets. Last week, the company also halted rides on freeways in some cities for a few days to tweak how the vehicles responded to construction zones.
Many of the robotaxi issues being reported involve Waymo, in part because the company accounts for the overwhelming majority of self-driving taxis on the road today. But it isn't alone.
In August, a Zoox vehicle pulled partially into oncoming traffic while making a right turn, leading the company to issue a software update to correct the issue.
Musk has said Tesla is exercising caution in its robotaxi rollout after finding issues with how the vehicles behave on the roads.
He said during the company's earnings call in April that Tesla robotaxis still get confused when faced with atypical traffic situations, stopping in traffic -- or endlessly driving in circles.
"We have also had literal infinite loops where the car might want to make a turn into a road, but there's construction and then it goes around the block," Musk said.
The National Transportation Safety Board opened an ongoing investigation into Waymo after a robotaxi struck a child in Santa Monica, Calif., near an elementary school. The company said the vehicle had hit the brakes, reducing the car's speed from 17 mph to 6 mph at the time of impact.
Waymo said in a blog post that the accident demonstrated the relative safety of a computer-driven vehicle, adding that a human in the same situation would have made contact at 14 mph.
A separate investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is examining whether Waymo's software behaves with the appropriate caution around schools during drop-off hours.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had been pushing to allow robotaxi companies to operate a commercial service this year. But in February, she reversed course, and Waymo's testing permit wasn't renewed.
The Boston City Council has debated putting restrictions on robotaxis, supported by labor unions fearful of losing driver jobs. In Seattle, home of some of the biggest technology companies, robotaxi operators have been hit by protests.
Musk last year promised Tesla's robotaxis would soon be available to half the U.S. population. He is now striking a more cautious tone as the service rolls out more slowly than projected.
Tesla registered 42 robotaxis that operate in portions of Austin, Dallas, and Houston, according to state filings. By comparison, Waymo has 577 vehicles registered in Texas.
"We haven't had any injuries and certainly no fatalities to date with the unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion," Musk told analysts on a call in April. "We want to keep it that way."
During a hearing in March about San Francisco's blackouts, city Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said autonomous cars are "a technological miracle" that he likened to one of "Cinderella's magical carriages."
"But just like in the fairy tale," Mahmood said, "We can now see that those carriages can turn into pumpkins at the drop of a hat."
Write to Sean McLain at sean.mclain@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 29, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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