An American ride-hailing company has recalled more than 1,200 of its driverless cars after more than two dozen minor crashes.
Waymo, which is owned by Google-parent Alphabet, on Monday recalled some of its 5th Generation Automated Driving Systems with software released before November 7.
‘The software may cause the vehicles to collide with certain roadway barriers, such as chains and gates,’ states the recall notice posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which aims to prevent injuries and save lives.
A total of 1,212 units are subject to the recall.
It comes after the company learned of 16 collisions its self-driving vehicles had with barriers including chains and gates from 2022 to the end of last year.
There were no injuries reported that were related to the faulty software.
The NHTSA began investigating the Waymo vehicles a year ago after learning of instances of them possibly breaking traffic safety laws.
Some of the incidents ‘involved collisions with clearly visible objects that a competent driver would be expected to avoid’, the NHTSA found.
Waymo said it updated the software to fix the bug and that it was deployed across the fleet in December.
The company based in Mountain View, California, offers rides in cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Phoenix, and is working to expand to a dozen more cities.
Waymo stated on Wednesday that it ‘provides more than 250,000 paid trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments in the US’.
It comes more than a year after Tesla recalled more than 362,000 of its vehicles in America over concerns that the self-driving technology could cause crashes.
The NHTSA determined that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software did not adhere sufficiently to traffic safety laws, by allowing vehicles to ‘exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash’.
