A Waymo robotaxi blocked an ambulance from responding to the scene of a mass shooting in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, EMS and Waymo officials confirmed.
“A driverless vehicle was stopped in the area while our crews were responding to this morning’s shooting, and it did briefly interfere with access for one ambulance,” Austin-Travis County EMS spokesperson Christa Stedman told Axios. “The officer in the video followed established protocol to address the situation and was able to quickly move the vehicle so ATCEMS units could proceed.”
The Google-owned Waymo told outlets that it would not be providing a statement.
In footage of the incident circulating online, a Waymo cab is seen straddling the width of a street, preventing an EMS vehicle with its lights flashing from passing. Instead of clearing a path, the cab fidgets in place, before the ambulance driver decides to reverse out and take a different route. After several minutes of indecisiveness — perhaps as it waited for an overseas safety driver to provide guidance — the robotaxi finally pulls off the street and into a parking garage.
“Come on!” one onlooker is heard urging the driverless car at one point. “Go!”
Waymo has been suffering a bit of a bad streak of PR in recent months, and this latest blunder will only raise additional questions about the ability of robotaxis to respond to unpredictable road scenarios that fall outside their typical training, especially as Waymo is considered a leader in the autonomous vehicle space.
In December, dozens of Waymo vehicles in San Francisco went haywire during a city-wide power outage, blocking roads and piling up intersections without traffic lights to guide them.
Additional controversy continues to mount over reports of Waymo robotaxis blowing past stopped school buses when children were disembarking. Both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board have launched separate investigations into the dozens of reported violations. Less than a week after the NTSB announced its probe, Waymo admitted that one of its cars struck and injured a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California.
This latest incident also isn’t the first time the robotaxis have interfered with law enforcement. Last year, one of them was spotted blazing through an active police standoff. Others have forced police to pull them over for driving erratically.
Wayward Waymos are apparently enough of an issue that first responders are trained how to react to them. (Waymo pays for this training, in fact.)
“This type of scenario is something we prepare for,” Stedman told Axios, adding that it was “resolved quickly without a significant impact to patient care or overall response operations.”
More on self-driving cars: Here’s How Many Remote Operators Waymo Has Per Self-Driving Taxi
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