Waymo suspended its driverless taxi service in Atlanta after several of its autonomous vehicles became stranded in flash floodwaters during a Wednesday rush-hour storm that dropped more than two inches of rain in a short span. The company confirmed that one vehicle required a tow while a handful of others were temporarily stuck, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
An AJC videographer riding in one of the vehicles described a 20-minute commute that stretched to two and a half hours after her Waymo got stuck three times in southwest Atlanta. The car first pulled into a flooded church parking lot and had to be manually reversed with guidance from a remote support agent. About 15 minutes later it drove into standing water near Morehouse College at normal speed, jerking and stalling for several minutes before freeing itself. On a third stop near Mechanicsville, the vehicle chose a lane with deeper water under a bridge even though a drier lane was available, and it became stuck again, requiring another remote-assisted reversal.
The incident came weeks after Waymo recalled nearly 4,000 vehicles nationwide following a separate episode in which an unoccupied vehicle was swept into a creek in San Antonio. In a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the company attributed that earlier incident to a software issue that could let a vehicle slow and then continue into standing water on higher-speed roads.
Waymo told the AJC that flood-related software mitigations from the recall were already in place, but that the storm's rapid onset outpaced the National Weather Service alert the system relies on as an input. The company said it is using the Atlanta incident to refine how its vehicles detect and respond to flash flooding.
Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- https://www.ajc.com/business/2026/05/waymo-atlanta-operations-paused-after-robotaxis-got-stuck-in-flash-floods/