On the night of March 1, 2026, a driverless Waymo robotaxi blocked an ambulance trying to reach a mass shooting in downtown Austin, Texas. Two people were dead. Fourteen others were wounded. A couple leaving a nightclub around 2 a.m. caught it on video: the Waymo sat perpendicular across West 6th and Nueces Streets, stuck in the middle of the intersection while emergency vehicles waited. The witnesses had been trying to catch a ride home. They found a robotaxi that couldn't move.
That moment — the autonomous vehicle meeting the emergency — is the story of Waymo's scale. The company is now providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides per week, up from 400,000 rides weekly in February. That growth is a deployment milestone, and milestones surface problems that demos don't. Waymo operates a fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles across six U.S. cities, and at any given time, about 70 remote assistance workers are monitoring them globally — half based in the U.S. and half in the Philippines. That ratio matters when something goes wrong.
The Austin shooting isn't an outlier. In at least six documented incidents over the past several months, first responders have had to manually navigate Waymo vehicles — including at two active crime scenes, according to TechCrunch. In Atlanta, a Waymo drove into an active crime scene where officers were responding to a barricade situation; two officers were injured, one grazed in the head, another cut by falling debris. The vehicle bypassed multiple police squad cars and came to a stop in the middle of the scene. In Nashville, a police officer had to manually drive a Waymo away from a Broadway intersection after it stalled. In Redwood City, California, a California Highway Patrol officer drove a stuck Waymo to a park-and-ride lot roughly 30 minutes after the company called 911 — because Waymo's own roadside team couldn't reach it in time.
"What has started to happen is that our public safety officers and responders are having to be the ones to physically move Waymos," said Mary Ellen Carroll, San Francisco's Director of Emergency Management, at a March hearing of the California State Assembly transportation committee. "In a sense they are becoming a default roadside assistance for these vehicles, which we do not think is tenable." Carroll said she lies awake at night thinking about integrating this technology into emergency response. San Francisco District 4 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood put it more bluntly: "Our first responders should not be AAA."
The December 20 San Francisco blackout is the starkest illustration of what "not tenable" looks like in practice. More than 1,500 Waymo vehicles lost contact with their navigation references when traffic signals went dark across the city. A 911 dispatcher sat on hold with Waymo's first responder hotline for 53 minutes, unable to reach anyone who could explain what the vehicles would do. Waymo ultimately manually retrieved 62 stalled vehicles — all done by the company's own roadside assistance crews or tow trucks, not its remote operators, according to KQED's coverage of the hearing. In two instances, first responders moved a Waymo themselves. The company says its vehicles navigated 7,000 darkened intersections without incident on their own; the problem was the spike in remote assistance requests overwhelming the system.
The mass shooting scene in Austin raises a harder question: not just whether the technology works, but who is actually in charge when it doesn't. Waymo's remote assistance system is not a remote control. The company is explicit that its onboard system remains "the primary, real-time authority for safe operation," and that remote operators provide advice, not instructions — the vehicle can reject their suggestions if it deems them inappropriate. Waymo's median one-way latency is roughly 150 milliseconds for U.S.-based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for agents based abroad. The average time between a remote assistance request and advice delivery, the company says, is seconds. But in the January 12 incident in Austin that is now under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, a remote assistance operator located in Novi, Michigan — 1,700 miles from the scene — was asked whether the vehicle nearby was a school bus. The operator replied No. The vehicle then resumed travel and passed the stopped school bus while its stop arms were still extended. There were students aboard. The NTSB documented the exchange in detail. Waymo issued a safety recall covering 3,067 vehicles with its fifth-generation autonomous driving system following that incident and a similar one on January 14 involving a special-needs school bus route.
Waymo operates four remote assistance centers — in Arizona, Michigan, and two cities in the Philippines. That detail has attracted scrutiny beyond safety. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts sent a letter to the company in early February asking for detailed information about its remote personnel policies. Representative Buddy Carter of Georgia, a Republican, separately asked the U.S. Department of Transportation to investigate whether Waymo's use of operators in the Philippines raises national security concerns. San Francisco District 4 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood put the question directly to Waymo at the March hearing: "If we are reliant, in an emergency situation, on operators in the Philippines to have to assess the condition here, how can you explain or justify that?" Waymo did not provide a satisfactory answer to Mahmood's office, which says it has not received the promised follow-up.
The company says it has trained more than 30,000 first responders globally on how to interact with its vehicles. Waymo's position is that its safety record justifies the risk: the company claims an 88 percent reduction in serious injury-or-worse crashes compared to human drivers in San Francisco. That claim comes from Waymo, not an independent audit. The company's own blog acknowledges the comparison is imperfect — different routes, different conditions, different time periods. What the statistic doesn't measure is what happens when the car can't figure out what to do and nobody can reach anyone who can help.
California is trying to mandate an answer. AB 1777, a state law that takes effect July 1, 2026, requires autonomous vehicle operators to maintain a phone line that a human answers within 30 seconds, and to equip vehicles with a two-way communication device that first responders can use. The gulf between the 30 seconds the law requires and the 53 minutes that actually happened during the December blackout is not a rounding error. It is a regulatory gap with a deadline. Waymo's incident response manager, Sam Cooper, told the March hearing that the company has improved its surge-staffing capabilities but did not provide specifics.
There is also the question of what Waymo's roadside assistance team actually does. Some of those workers are employed through Transdev, a third-party contractor, and a few are former safety drivers or monitors for the company itself — not software engineers or emergency professionals. Waymo has said its Event Response Team has never moved a vehicle outside of training. In rare circumstances, some U.S.-based personnel could prompt a stopped vehicle to move forward at 2 mph for a short distance, but that has not occurred in the real world.
Waymo is planning to expand to approximately 20 more cities this year, adding to its current markets in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio, and the San Francisco Bay Area. That means emergency management departments in 20 more cities will face what San Francisco is grappling with right now — and most of them don't have Mary Ellen Carroll, who has spent months trying to get straight answers out of a company whose vehicles keep ending up in places they shouldn't be.
The robotaxi industry has spent years arguing that autonomous vehicles will be safer than human drivers. On the evidence so far, that argument may be correct. The harder question — what happens when the machine can't solve the problem and nobody can find the person who can — is now a first responder problem documented in at least six incidents. The 30-second clock on a California law is ticking. Waymo's 70 remote operators, half of them in the Philippines, are watching 3,000 vehicles that are currently navigating roads that don't come with an instruction manual for what to do when everything goes wrong at once.
