As Waymo expands its fleet from 700 in 2025 to nearly 4,000 now, recalls and edge-case failures like flooded roadways and a San Francisco power outage mount
Waymo driverless cars are in San Francisco and 14 other metropolitan areas, including Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego and Tampa.Jason Henry for The New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
Waymo’s operating record has moved from an early San Francisco driverless rollout to more than 50,000 weekly paid rides across three cities in 2024. Along the way, the company has had to address concrete operating disruptions, including a fleet-navigation update after San Francisco blackouts and earlier incidents in which Waymo vehicles jammed an intersection.
The current failures arrive as Waymo’s service footprint spans 15 metropolitan areas and its vehicle count has risen sharply. That makes operational resilience—not simply access to new markets—the central constraint on scaling the service.
First-order effects
- Waymo must manage recalls and fleet software or operational changes across nearly 4,000 vehicles, rather than within the much smaller fleet it operated in 2025.
- Flooded-road and power-outage failures put pressure on Waymo’s reliability in the cities where its driverless cars are already operating.
Second-order effects
- Waymo’s earlier outage-navigation update becomes a recurring fleet-maintenance requirement as more vehicles and cities expose the system to local infrastructure failures.
- The company’s safety case will increasingly be judged against real-world operations, even as it has reported lower serious-injury crash involvement than human drivers over its accumulated miles.
Third-order effects
- Robotaxi expansion is likely to be governed as much by handling infrastructure and weather edge cases as by the core driving system, making fleetwide update capability a durable competitive requirement.
The trend: Autonomous ride-hailing is shifting from proving baseline driving performance to operating reliably through the messy, city-specific failures that emerge at fleet scale.