Driving Car Saw the Flood and Drove In Anyway. Here’s The Problem Plaguing Every Robotaxi.

Key Points:

• Waymo issued a voluntary recall of 3,791 robotaxis after a software flaw caused vehicles to drive into standing water despite detecting the hazard, highlighting a decision-making error rather than a sensor failure.
• The incident in San Antonio involved a Waymo robotaxi floating off the road into Salado Creek, revealing that the software lacked a hard-stop condition for water on higher-speed roads, only slowing down without preventing entry.
• Tesla’s Cybercab uses a vision-only sensor approach without LiDAR, which can struggle in adverse conditions like heavy rain, as demonstrated by a manual takeover during a submerged camera incident in April 2026.
• Uber’s Avride platform is under NHTSA investigation for multiple crashes involving lane changes and failure to stop, despite having safety monitors onboard, while Amazon’s Zoox employs the most sensor redundancy but remains in limited testing.
• These events collectively expose a critical gap across autonomous vehicle platforms: they can perceive hazards but sometimes generate unsafe responses, underscoring the ongoing challenge of refining decision-making algorithms for edge-case scenarios.