The latest safety scare for Waymo robotaxis comes from all the way in suburban Atlanta, where a Waymo vehicle illegally drove around a school bus that was dropping off kids and flashing its stoplights, and Georgia lawmakers are furious.

Many of us remember the summer and fall of 2023, when SF Fire Department and Police Department officials were raising red flags about self-driving car glitches. Meanwhile, executives for self-driving Cruise robotaxis were admonishing SF that we “should be rolling out the red carpet” for the autonomous vehicles because they were supposedly so much safer than human drivers. Those self-congratulatory claims from Cruise officials came to a complete halt after a self-driving Cruise vehicle dragged a San Francisco pedestrian 20 feet, in an incident that ultimately led to the downfall of a Cruise as a company.

Cruise is gone and now Waymo is the dominant robotaxi company, but they too are now dealing with the blowback of a safety violation some 2,500 miles away in Atlanta, Georgia. As seen in the video above from Atlanta’s WXIA, a Waymo illegally darted around a school bus with its stop light on, according to KGW. And the Chronicle reports that the bus was unloading children at the time, as of course, its flashing red stop lights were activated.

Georgia state lawmakers are up in arms, as they recently passed strict laws and stiff penalties around passing school buses with their stop lights on. But they are finding those stiff penalties just don’t apply when there is no human driver involved.

"I'm a big fan of new technologies and emerging technologies and I think that driverless cars are going to become more prevalent, but we got to think about how they're going to comply with the law,"  Georgia state rep Clint Crowe told WXIA. “These cars don't have a driver, so they don't have a driver's license and so we're really going to have to rethink who's the responsible party, who's going to be responsible for being in control of that vehicle and who's going to be the operator of that vehicle.”

His colleague, Georgia state Senator Rick Williams, was more blunt. "Driverless cars should be stopped until it can be figured out,” he added to WXIA. “ We should not have this on the road. It's too dangerous for our children.”

Waymo did respond in a prepared statement, though one that hardly addressed or even acknowledged the incident.

“The trust and safety of the communities we serve is our top priority,” Waymo said in a statement sent to multiple news organizations. “We continuously refine our system’s performance to navigate complex scenarios.”

This comes on the heels of San Bruno police catching a Waymo making an illegal u-turn in late September, and finding there was no way to cite a driverless vehicle for a moving violation. The Chronicle notes that a new state law is coming in July 2026 allowing police to send the citation to the self-driving cars' operating companies. And one of those Georgia lawmakers just vowed that he’s going to introduce similar legislation in that state.

Related: It’s Not Your Imagination, Your Waymo May Be Driving More Like a Human [SFist]

Image via Waymo