Minutes apart from one another, two Waymo cars came across the same tow truck that was pulling a pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona. The pickup was being towed backwards and at an angle rather than being lined up straight behind the tow truck, according to a Waymo blog post published Tuesday. The pickup’s front end was partly in a turn lane next to the lane the tow truck was driving in.
Both Waymo cars incorrectly interpreted what their cameras were seeing and, because of that, wrongly predicted the how the truck was going to move, Waymo said.
After a first Waymo vehicle hit the pickup, the tow truck kept driving. A few minutes later, a second Waymo vehicle came across the truck and also hit the pickup. There were no riders in either of the Waymo vehicles, although the company operates a driverless ride-hailing service in that city.
Following the incidents, Waymo informed local police, a state safety agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the incidents, the company wrote. After researching what happened, Waymo changed its vehicle software and installed the updated software on all its vehicles between late December 2023 and early January 2024, according to the blog post.
After discussions with NHTSA, Waymo determined that it should file a recall report, which is done when a company makes a safety-related change to vehicles on the road. Since Waymo does not sell vehicles to individuals or other companies, the software update was confined to its own fleet of self-driving Jaguar I-Paces.
“This voluntary recall reflects how seriously we take our responsibility to safely deploy our technology and to transparently communicate with the public,” Waymo wrote in its blog post.
While self-driving cars were have been pushed by the tech industry as potentially safer than human drivers, autonomous vehicles have had repeated incidents involving so-called “edge cases,” or unusual situations. While edge cases are, by definition, uncommon, with both human and robot drivers logging millions of miles on American roads every day, they occur with some frequency.
Waymo’s actions follow an incident last year involving Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary. In that incident, which occurred in San Francisco a Cruise vehicle struck a pedestrian that had first been hit by another car and then, following the impact, dragged the person across along the road.
Various state and federal agencies found that Cruise had not been forthcoming with information in that incident, including not being clear that the person had been dragged after being hit.
Cruise lost its permits to test vehicles in California then voluntarily stopped testing throughout the country. Numerous Cruise executives left the company. Cruise also issued a recall for its software in that case.
Cruise has not yet returned to operating its vehicles.
