Collection
Evergreen list of Verified and Reported cases.
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This page covers AI in transportation, mostly robotaxis: launches in new cities, safety recalls, outages, regulators' decisions and companies that shut down.
Waymo is the largest U.S. example. It said it passed 450,000 weekly paid rides in December 2025, CNBC reported. [1] In November 2025 it began freeway rides for "a growing number of public riders" in the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix and Los Angeles, Waymo said. [4] California regulators later approved its expansion to 18 counties, the Los Angeles Times reported. [5]
Scale brings recalls. Waymo recalled software on 3,067 vehicles over how they handled stopped school buses, according to its recall report to NHTSA. [2] Amazon's Zoox recalled software on 105 robotaxis, its own filing shows. [6]
Rivals are at different stages. Tesla began robotaxi rides in Austin in June 2025 with a safety monitor in the front passenger seat, TechCrunch reported. [7] GM's Cruise agreed to pay a $500,000 criminal fine after admitting it submitted a false report to influence a federal investigation, the Justice Department said. [3] GM then stopped funding Cruise's robotaxi work, after investing about $10 billion in it, The Verge reported. [8]
Each case below covers what was deployed, what it cost where disclosed, and what went wrong.
© 2026 Real World Wire. Written October 28, 2026.
Service came back in September after what Waymo calls a flood-zone audit. The software recall it filed in May still lists only an interim fix, and we found no final remedy on file.
A year after Waymo promised driverless rides in 2026, no operator has applied for London's consent, TfL says. The only bookable robotaxis carry a safety driver.
The two-seater lacks permanently attached manual controls such as a steering wheel and pedals, NHTSA says. The agency wants Tesla to explain, under oath, how it certified the car as meeting federal safety standards.
After more than a year of supervised testing in seven central wards, Waymo, GO and Nihon Kotsu say paid rides with no one at the wheel could start next year. Permits come first.
State staff approved Waymo's bigger map and its Ojai vehicle, built by a unit of China's Geely group, and set aside protests from San Diego's transit agency. Waymo says the rollout will be gradual.
NHTSA's two-year exemption caps Zoox at 2,500 vehicles a year. Fares began Aug. 10, and a local taxi driver says he earns about half what he once did.
Employees ride first and the public "soon," Waymo says. Denver will be among the first cities to get the Ojai, a robotaxi built by a unit of China's Geely group.
Tesla announced Dallas and Houston days before its first-quarter results, and Orlando and Tampa around its second-quarter call. Crowdsourced counts show a handful of unsupervised cars in each.
The unoccupied robotaxi braked hard and stopped, then was reversed under remote guidance. Months earlier, a Zoox stalled in a busy Strip intersection.
Norse Atlantic Airways sends passengers to an AI agent and lists no phone line. FTC records show customers who went looking for one and found scammers.
An empty Waymo in San Antonio slowed but didn't stop at floodwater on a 40-mph road. A month later, flooding in Atlanta led Waymo to pause service in five cities.
Waymo's 11th robotaxi city launched with "dozens of vehicles," and a Lyft subsidiary is slated to take on charging, cleaning and repairs. Lyft says half of its depot hires so far have been current or former Lyft drivers.
Federal investigators say a Waymo was the first car to stop for an Austin school bus in January, then drove past after a remote assistance agent in Michigan said it wasn't a school bus with active signals. Austin's school district counts at least four violations after Waymo's November software fix, The Verge reported.
At a March 2 hearing, city officials said stalled robotaxis delayed an ambulance and left first responders moving cars. Waymo apologized but declined to share key staffing numbers.
Seven months after launch, Tesla began offering paid rides with no employee in the car. Videos show another Tesla trailing behind, and Tesla says only "a few" cars are unsupervised.
Moove, the outside company hired in 2024, runs the depots. Rides start with a waitlist of about 10,000 people, inside a 60-square-mile area that skips South Beach and the airport.
Waymo's filing says a software change led its cars to decide they were "impeding" the bus and pull away. Austin's school district documented 19 incidents, NHTSA says, and has asked Waymo to stop operating at pick-up and drop-off times.
When a substation fire cut power to much of the city, Waymo's robotaxis stopped at dead traffic lights and waited for remote confirmation. The company paused service and says a software update is coming.
Some public riders in the Bay Area, Phoenix and Los Angeles can now be matched with freeway trips, and service stretches down the Peninsula to San Jose and its airport. Waymo says freeways cut ride times by up to half.
Any adult with the app can ride along the Strip, but only between five stops and without paying. Zoox says it needs regulatory approval before it can charge.
California regulators say Tesla hasn't applied for the permits needed to carry passengers in an autonomous vehicle. So the Bay Area service uses human drivers running Tesla's software.
At least five Waymos were destroyed during protests against immigration raids. Waymo left downtown, then paused service across the city ahead of the "No Kings" marches.
After a decade of promises, Tesla began offering invited riders trips in self-driving Model Ys in a small part of South Austin. Within a day, videos of erratic driving drew questions from federal regulators.
Waymo's recall filing lists 16 collisions with chains, gates and similar barriers, none with injuries. It says a software update reached the whole fleet by Dec. 26, 2024, months before the recall was filed.
Selected riders in Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto and parts of Sunnyvale can now hail robotaxis around the clock, adding 27 square miles to Waymo's Bay Area service.
CEO Mary Barra said the cost of running a robotaxi fleet "[is] not our core business." About 1,000 Cruise staff are gone, and the rest will work on driver-assist features for cars people own.
The ride count rose roughly sevenfold from the late-2023 total, CNBC reported, in the same month GM shut its Cruise robotaxi unit. Waymo's next vehicle is being built with China's Geely.
A fleet-services startup with roots in Africa will clean, charge and maintain Waymo's robotaxis in Phoenix, then build depots for a planned 2026 launch in Miami. Neither side disclosed terms.
A study run with the reinsurer compared liability claims over 25.3 million driverless miles with Swiss Re's human-driver baselines. Waymo published the results; the paper had been submitted to a journal but not yet published.
A $500,000 criminal fine follows a $1.5 million civil penalty from the national road-safety regulator. Both turn on what Cruise left out of its report: the car dragged the woman more than 20 feet.
About 100 driverless cars now serve roughly 80 square miles of LA County. They stay off freeways, and city officials want more safety oversight.