Report: Waymo's autonomous vans struggle to smoothly perform rather mundane driving tasks, often slowing or stopping at odd times, risking fender benders
If the autonomous revolution ever arrives, it's almost certain that self-driving cars will drive with an over-abundance of caution …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 report lands mid-arc for Waymo's autonomy push. Months earlier the company had published its first safety report arguing its vehicles were 'safer by design,' and that spring it claimed roughly 5,600 miles between driver interventions against Uber's struggle to hit 13 — see the intervention-mileage comparison. Over-caution was the price of those numbers.
What makes the piece worth revisiting is where the arc goes next: by late 2025 Waymo was deliberately retraining its cars to be 'confidently assertive,' with vehicles bending traffic laws and showing impatience with pedestrians — trading the fender-bender-prone timidity described here for a new set of street-level frictions.
First-order effects
- Waymo's vans, optimized for intervention-free miles rather than predictable flow, brake and stall in mundane traffic situations, putting human drivers behind them at risk of rear-end collisions right now.
- The same caution that produced Waymo's ~5,600-mile intervention average versus Uber's 13-mile target is exposed as a metric artifact — smoothness and statistical safety pull in opposite directions.
Second-order effects
- The reputational cost of erratic braking pressures Waymo to retune its driving personality, which is exactly what the later 'confidently assertive' pivot reflects — swapping one failure mode (over-caution) for another (law-bending assertiveness).
- Rivals reading this coverage get a competitive frame: Tesla's Austin robotaxi effort trails Waymo on fleet size and still relies on safety drivers, so Waymo's behavioral rough edges are the main opening left to attack.
Third-order effects
- As the fleet scales from 700 vehicles in 2025 toward nearly 4,000, the kind of edge-case friction described here compounds — the recalls and failures accompanying Waymo's expansion suggest each behavior fix surfaces new ones at scale.
- If the pattern holds, robotaxi acceptance will hinge less on raw disengagement statistics and more on whether autonomous driving styles can be tuned to human traffic norms without regulators or the public treating every adjustment as a safety walk-back.
The trend: Autonomous vehicle development is learning that statistically safe driving is not socially drivable, forcing a continuing oscillation between over-caution and assertiveness as fleets scale.