Waymo Under Federal Investigation After Robotaxi Strikes Child Outside Elementary School

Silicon Valley-based Waymo is under federal investigation after a driverless robotaxi struck a child outside of a Santa Monica elementary school last week — the second time a Waymo autonomous vehicle made contact with a child, according to federal records.

Waymo reported the Santa Monica crash to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and told the agency the child sustained minor injuries.

The collision happened during morning drop-off on Jan. 23. The child stepped onto the street from behind an SUV, the company said in a blog post describing the incident. The Waymo detected the child and braked, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before impact.

The company, a subsidiary of Google’s parent Alphabet, said the child walked to the sidewalk and Waymo called 911.

Waymo asserted the collision demonstrates the value of its safety systems: “Our peer-reviewed model shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph,” the post stated.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles and California Highway Patrol met with Waymo and reviewed the incident, a spokesperson for the DMV said in an email to KQED, noting the agency is collaborating with NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board in their investigations.

The safety of autonomous vehicles has come under intense scrutiny as Waymo and its rivals mass deploy robotic taxis on U.S. streets. Waymo offers fully autonomous rides without a human safety monitor in half a dozen American cities, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and the Bay Area. On Thursday, Waymo announced it would begin taking passengers to and from San Francisco International Airport.

The company came under fire in the Bay Area in October after one of its robotaxis struck and killed Kitkat, a beloved neighborhood cat, prompting outcry and calls for more intense regulation. A week later, another Waymo struck a small unleashed dog.

And in November, a Waymo vehicle came to a stop on the foot of an exiting teenage passenger in Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an NHTSA incident report. The Waymo “remained stopped on top of the passenger’s foot until emergency services arrived and lifted the right side of the vehicle,” after which the passenger was taken to the hospital “with moderate injuries to the foot.”

A passerby called first responders after hearing a male juvenile “screaming for help,” according to the police report. The officer who responded overheard the passenger saying the Waymo “told him to get out of the vehicle, even though it was in the middle of the street.”

A Waymo spokesperson told the Washington Post the teen opened the door while the vehicle was traveling 35 mph, and attempted to exit before the vehicle had come to a complete stop.

“Waymo — over the past few months — doesn’t have a great track record of being overtly transparent with their data,” said Billy Riggs, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Management and the director of the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative.

Riggs was referring to Dec. 22, when many of Waymo’s self-driving cars blocked streets of San Francisco during a mass power outage and forced the company to temporarily suspend service, raising questions about the autonomous vehicles’ ability to adapt to real-world driving conditions.

The vehicles, Riggs said, “are driving based on the rules of the road that we give them.” Waymos, he said, follow the speed limit, unlike many humans in a school zone.

“That collision would have been a lot more severe at a higher speed,” he added.

The Santa Monica crash happened the same day that the NTSB said it was opening an investigation into Waymo’s behavior around school buses in Austin. Austin Independent School District officials said in November they documented 19 cases of Waymos “illegally and dangerously” passing buses since the beginning of the 2025-26 school year.

Riggs said he’s looked into those cases and found Waymos were not entirely at fault in all the incidents. “Some of these situations are a little more complex,” he said. “Similar situations are being reported as if they were the same, and they’re not precisely the same.”

Additionally, he said, “The fleet learns as it scales, and so they can issue these patches, and it shouldn’t repeat the same error twice.”