Robotaxis Keep Blocking First Responders as NHTSA Demands a Fix

Federal regulators gave the robotaxi industry a deadline this month: stop the vehicles from blocking firefighters, police and ambulances, or face the consequences. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, the U.S. agency that regulates vehicle safety) sent that message on July 8, the same week San Francisco firefighters described a pattern they say has gone unaddressed for months.

The letter from NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison never named a company. But firefighters in San Francisco, police in Austin and regulators in Texas have all been describing the same operator for months: Waymo, the Alphabet-owned robotaxi company that runs the largest driverless fleet in the country.

NHTSA Demands a Fix by the End of July

Morrison’s letter, sent to every autonomous vehicle (AV) developer listed in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Standing General Order, said the agency has identified a clear pattern of driverless vehicles interfering with law enforcement and other first responders. NHTSA’s own press release describes a call to action on first-responder interference covering vehicles that:

• Drove directly into active emergency scenes
• Blocked the paths of ambulances and firefighters
• Failed to recognize flashing lights, flares, smoke, fire and traffic cones

Companies now have until the end of the month to present NHTSA with solutions. The letter does not spell out penalties for missing that deadline.

Let me be clear: the inability to detect and appropriately respond to such situations represents a functional insufficiency. Emergency scenes are not rare or extreme ‘edge cases.’

Morrison wrote that in the letter, adding that NHTSA was issuing what he called a call to action for developers to immediately focus resources on fixing the issue. He also compared AVs to human drivers, who face fines and even jail time for impeding emergency vehicles.

The Firefighters Who Keep Filing the Same Report

Days before Morrison’s letter went out, the San Francisco Standard published internal fire department records showing Waymos and Zoox vehicles routinely block streets and interrupt crews already on a call. In one entry, firefighters are dispatched just to wake a passenger who fell asleep in the back of a stopped robotaxi.

On the morning of Feb. 21, a Waymo attempted a three-point turn on Sanchez Street in San Francisco’s Duboce Triangle neighborhood and got stuck facing the sidewalk, blocking a fire engine responding to a call for someone struggling to breathe. Firefighters spent several minutes verifying their identities with a Waymo representative before police and a tow truck arrived to clear the car. The incident report described the company’s representatives as “very uncooperative.”

Waymo says it runs a 24/7 emergency line and has trained 35,000 first responders across 150 agencies in the cities where it operates. “Our goal is to support first responders, not create additional work for them,” a company spokesperson said. Another company statement argued the fleet improves with every incident: “No technology is perfect, but Waymo’s fleet learns from individual events in a way human drivers cannot.”

San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan is not waiting for that learning curve to catch up. She plans to introduce legislation citing companies whenever their vehicles obstruct first responders. “This is going to impact their bottom line,” Chan said. “This is only the first step.”

Austin’s Mass Shooting Exposed a Geofence Problem

The clearest earlier warning came on March 1, when a gunman opened fire outside Buford’s in downtown Austin, killing three people and injuring more than a dozen others. A video that went viral showed a Waymo sitting in the middle of the street, blocking an ambulance with its lights on, until an Austin police officer walked up and moved it within about two minutes.

City officials later said the visible car was only part of the problem. At a special joint meeting of the Austin City Council’s Public Safety and Mobility committees, officials said as many as five Waymos blocked the response corridor that night. First responders had geofenced the active scene, an instruction telling AV companies to keep vehicles out of a 1,000 foot radius for an hour. The blocked cars sat just outside that line, at 6th and Guadalupe, where firefighters said the lead vehicle became confused and would not continue despite hand signals.

Waymo skipped the council meeting. A spokesperson said the company had already had the substantive conversations with city and state officials. Seats reserved for Waymo representatives sat empty.

The episode split opinion on Austin’s streets. Adie Tomer, a senior fellow studying transportation at the Brookings Institution, noted that autonomous vehicles’ “fatality rate is already much lower” than human drivers. Tray Gober, an Austin injury lawyer who has represented crash victims, was less convinced. “The future isn’t today because these vehicles are not ready,” he said. Researchers cataloguing AV failures elsewhere have documented worse outcomes, including a robotaxi’s collision with a responding fire truck that had its sirens and lights running.

A Pattern That Keeps Repeating

Austin was not an isolated case. Officials in two states have now documented similar breakdowns, each with its own city, its own emergency and its own delay.

A separate TechCrunch review found at least six incidents through March in which first responders had to personally take control of a Waymo and move it during an active emergency, including one mass shooting response.

Why Did a Fireworks Show Strand Dozens of Waymos?

San Francisco’s biggest Fourth of July fireworks show in years turned the Presidio into a parking lot. Unplanned road closures around the Golden Gate Bridge display trapped dozens of Waymos in traffic so dense that some ran out of charge before help arrived, leaving them stalled in the street for hours until tow trucks hauled them away.

Witness Jermaine Ellis estimated he saw roughly 20 Waymos stuck at once. Passenger Rose Peterson said her car drove straight over a lit firework someone had set off at an intersection. “Something really bad could have happened to us,” she said. Nearby, resident Dave Guingona spent close to two hours waiting for the road to clear. “People were getting out of their cars, yelling and screaming at these Waymos because there were no drivers,” he said.

A separate, unoccupied Waymo Ojai van caught fire after driving over fireworks of its own. Nobody was hurt in either incident, the company said. Waymo runs roughly 500,000 paid trips a week across about 10 cities, and San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director of Streets Viktoriya Wise summed up the night two days later: “Our transportation system simply could not handle the volume of people.”

San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said he plans to submit a formal letter of inquiry examining how the vehicles affected transit and emergency crews that night.

The Uber-Waymo Split Adds a Wrinkle

Two weeks before Morrison’s letter, Waymo and Uber confirmed they had quietly ended a nearly three year robotaxi partnership in Phoenix. The vehicles Uber used for that pilot have been folded back into Waymo’s own Phoenix fleet, and Uber says it is lining up a new, unnamed autonomous vehicle partner in the city. Waymo rides booked through Uber continue in Austin and Atlanta.

Uber described the Phoenix deal as limited from the start, calling it an intentionally limited deployment that reached just over a dozen dedicated vehicles. Waymo called it a productive pilot that paved the way for future expansions and partnerships across the globe.

The timing matters because both companies are still scaling. Waymo is rolling its new Zeekr built Ojai van onto the road, and analysts at Goldman Sachs Research have projected the global robotaxi market could reach roughly $415 billion by 2035. Separate federal rulemaking now under review could ease Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) requirements that currently assume a human sits behind a wheel, changes that would help companies like Tesla and Zoox build robotaxis without one.

None of that changes what happens inside the cabin during an emergency. A recent academic study of robotaxi riders documented a passenger’s panic during an unexplained slowdown, with no visible way to signal distress until a phone icon on the screen connected them to a remote operator. Steven Shladover, a research engineer at UC Berkeley, told NewsNation the technology is still in its childhood, still in the process of learning.

What We Know:

• Uber and Waymo ended their Phoenix partnership in May after it reached its contracted end date
• Waymo rides through Uber continue in Austin and Atlanta with no announced end date
• Waymo’s newest robotaxi, the Zeekr built Ojai van, is already on the road in multiple markets

What’s Unconfirmed:

• Which company will become Uber’s new Phoenix robotaxi partner
• Whether the Austin and Atlanta Uber-Waymo partnerships will eventually wind down too
• Whether San Francisco’s proposed citation ordinance for obstructing first responders will pass

Firefighters in San Francisco and police in Austin are not waiting to find out. They keep filing the same reports, moving the same stalled cars, one call at a time, while the clock on Morrison’s deadline runs toward July 31.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Did NHTSA Order Robotaxi Companies To Do?

NHTSA gave every AV developer on its Standing General Order list until the end of July to present solutions for vehicles that fail to detect or respond to emergency scenes, including blocked ambulances, unrecognized sirens and lights, and vehicles that drive into active incidents. The letter does not mandate a specific technical fix, only that companies show up with one.

Is NHTSA Targeting Waymo Specifically?

The letter names no company, but Waymo operates the largest robotaxi fleet in the country and has accumulated the most documented incidents, including at least six cases through March in which first responders had to move the vehicles themselves. Tesla and Zoox also received the letter as developers preparing steering wheel free vehicles.

Has a Robotaxi Blocking First Responders Ever Caused a Death?

No fatality has been directly tied to a robotaxi blocking emergency crews in the incidents reported so far. The closest case is a late May gas explosion in Dallas, where rescuers were delayed more than three minutes after a robotaxi failed to move, though the fatality in that explosion was not attributed to the delay itself.

What Is a Geofence, and Why Does It Matter Here?

A geofence is a virtual boundary first responders can activate around an active emergency, instructing AV companies to route vehicles around it. In Austin’s mass shooting response, the boundary covered a 1,000 foot radius for one hour, but vehicles just outside that line still became confused and blocked traffic.

Why Did Uber and Waymo End Their Phoenix Partnership?

Both companies said the Phoenix pilot, which involved just over a dozen vehicles, reached its contracted end date in May. It is unrelated to NHTSA’s directive. Waymo folded the vehicles into its own Phoenix app, and Uber is preparing a new, unnamed autonomous vehicle partner for the market.