Waymo blocks the ambulance rushing to the shooting scene, paramedics: the situation is getting worse

Waymo Self-Driving Cars Repeatedly Encounter Problems at Emergency Scenes in Multiple U.S. Locations: Over 1,500 Vehicles Stalled During the December 2025 San Francisco Power Outage, Police and Fire Responded 64 Times; In March 2026, a Waymo Blocked an Ambulance at an Austin Shooting Scene, Also Incidents of Intrusion at Atlanta Crime Scenes.
(Background Recap: Jensen Huang Speech: “AI Era ‘Problems’ Are Worth 10,000 Times More Than Answers,” Don’t Use Excel to Calculate Returns, Physical AI Will Break Limits)
(Additional Context: Tesla + xAI + SpaceX: Understanding Elon Musk’s Ultimate AI Flywheel)

Table of Contents

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• An Ever-Longer List
• The Issue Lies in System Design
• Expansion Continues, Integration Has Yet to Keep Up

On the morning of March 1, 2026, a shooting broke out on Sixth Street in downtown Austin, resulting in 3 deaths and 15 injuries. When an ambulance tried to rush into the scene, it was blocked by a Waymo self-driving car. With no driver to negotiate with and no horn to respond, police ultimately had to get in and manually drive it away.

It took a few minutes, but in the context of emergency response, a few minutes is a heavy unit of time.

An Ever-Longer List

This is not an isolated incident.

According to Wired statistics, ** in August 2025, a hillside fire next to California’s I-280 caused a Waymo vehicle to stop on the shoulder, unable to move. When remote support failed, the system directly dialed 911 for police assistance, and California Highway Patrol (CHP) ultimately manually moved it away from the scene.

In December 2025, a PG&E substation in San Francisco caught fire, causing power outages for over 130k households. That night, Waymo’s fleet management system began to crash: over 1,500 vehicles were immobilized at intersections without traffic lights. The San Francisco 911 dispatch center received numerous reports, and dispatchers called the Waymo support hotline 31 times that evening, one of which was on hold for up to 53 minutes.

Ultimately, 64 incidents required direct intervention by police and emergency personnel.

In February 2026, in Atlanta, a Waymo entered a crime scene still cordoned off, forcing law enforcement to halt their investigation and remove the uninvited vehicle.

Currently, Waymo provides over 400k rides weekly, with a fleet of about 3,000 vehicles. There are approximately 70 remote support staff, half based in the U.S. and the other half in the Philippines. Waymo states that these remote personnel “offer suggestions but do not directly control, steer, or drive” the vehicles.

Translated, this means: when a vehicle stops in the wrong place, remote staff can tell it what to do, but if the vehicle cannot follow commands, they have no means to forcibly intervene.

The Issue Lies in System Design

At a city council hearing after the San Francisco power outage, two specific questions were raised: first, why half of the remote operators are based in the Philippines; second, whether the company is willing to integrate its system with city emergency notifications so that vehicles can automatically avoid areas when notified of a blockade.

San Francisco Fire Department and Emergency Management have proposed integration suggestions, but Waymo representatives could not commit at the hearing.

After the shooting incident, Austin’s city council sent a letter to Waymo requesting a public safety discussion. On April 25, 2026, Waymo did not attend that meeting. Mary Ellen Carroll, head of San Francisco’s Emergency Management, stated:

“What’s happening now is that our public safety and emergency personnel have to physically move these vehicles. In a sense, they are becoming the default roadside rescue for these vehicles. This is not an acceptable state of affairs.”

The city council members’ words were even more direct: “Our frontline rescue workers should not become AAA.”

Note: AAA, the American Automobile Association, is the largest roadside assistance organization in the U.S. This metaphor is not exaggerated.

Expansion Continues, Integration Has Yet to Keep Up

Waymo is currently operating officially in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, with plans to expand to over 20 U.S. cities by 2026. The company also claims to have trained over 30k frontline emergency personnel worldwide on how to interact with autonomous vehicles.

This number sounds large, but it raises a question: are they being trained on how to open doors, manually move vehicles, or how to prevent vehicles from making wrong decisions at shooting scenes?

After the December 2025 blackout, Waymo released fleet updates to enable vehicles to respond more decisively at unsignalized intersections during widespread power outages. This is a patch for a known scenario. The problem is, emergency response lacks standardized protocols.

Shootings, fires, blockades, power outages—each scenario presents different challenges for autonomous vehicles, and currently, U.S. regulations do not require autonomous vehicle operators to halt expansion until they are integrated with city emergency notification systems.

For cities currently holding hearings on autonomous vehicle regulations, these incidents serve as concrete counterexamples: the pace of technological expansion is outstripping the speed of public safety integration. Waymo’s responses to each specific incident are roughly the same: the event “did not significantly impact emergency response.”