Waymo blocked an ambulance rushing to a shooting scene, first responders: the situation is getting worse

Waymo autonomous taxis have repeatedly caused issues at emergency scenes across the United States: over 1,500 vehicles were stranded during the December 2025 San Francisco blackout, forcing police and fire departments to intervene 64 times; in March 2026, a Waymo blocked an ambulance at the scene of a shooting in Austin, in addition to incidents such as trespassing at crime scenes in Atlanta. (Context: Jensen Huang's speech: In the AI era, "problems" are ten thousand times more valuable than answers; don't use Excel to calculate returns; Physical AI will break limitations) (Background: Tesla + xAI + SpaceX: Understanding Musk's ultimate AI flywheel) There is no driver to negotiate with, and no horn to respond to; police eventually had to sit inside and manually drive them away. In the early morning of March 1, 2026, a shooting broke out on 6th Street in downtown Austin, leaving 3 dead and 15 injured. As an ambulance attempted to rush to the scene, a Waymo autonomous taxi was parked at the intersection. It took only a few minutes, but in the dimension of emergency response, a few minutes is a heavy unit. This is not an isolated incident. According to Wired, in August 2025, a hillside fire broke out along the I-280 highway in California, and a Waymo was left stranded on the shoulder. After remote support failed, the system dialed 911 to request police assistance, and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) eventually manually drove it away from the scene. In December 2025, a PG&E substation in San Francisco caught fire, leaving over 130,000 households without power. That night, Waymo's fleet management system began to collapse: over 1,500 vehicles were paralyzed at intersections without traffic lights. The San Francisco 911 dispatch center began receiving a flood of reports, and dispatchers called the Waymo support hotline 31 times that night, with one call left on hold for 53 minutes. Ultimately, there were 64 incidents that required direct intervention by police and fire personnel to clear. In February 2026, in Atlanta, a Waymo drove into a crime scene that was still cordoned off, forcing law enforcement to interrupt their investigation to remove the uninvited guest. Waymo currently provides over 400,000 rides per week, with a fleet size of approximately 3,000 vehicles. There are about 70 remote support personnel, half of whom are in the United States and the other half in the Philippines. Waymo officially states that these remote personnel "provide suggestions but do not directly control, steer, or drive" the vehicles. Translated, this means: when a vehicle stops in the wrong place, remote personnel can tell it what to do, but if the vehicle cannot execute the command, they have no means of forced intervention. At the San Francisco City Council hearing following the blackout, council members raised two specific questions: first, why half of the remote operators are located in the Philippines; and second, whether the company is willing to integrate its system with city emergency notifications so that vehicles can automatically avoid blocked areas upon receiving alerts. Both the San Francisco Fire Department and the Department of Emergency Management have proposed integration, but Waymo representatives were unable to make any commitments at the hearing. Following the shooting, the Austin City Council wrote to Waymo requesting a public safety discussion. On April 25, 2026, Waymo was absent from that meeting. San Francisco Department of Emergency Management Director Mary Ellen Carroll stated: "What is happening is that our public safety personnel and first responders have to move these vehicles themselves. In a sense, they are becoming the default roadside assistance for these vehicles. This is not an acceptable state." A city council member was more direct: "Our first responders should not be AAA." Note: AAA, the American Automobile Association, is the largest roadside assistance service organization in the United States. This metaphor is not an exaggeration. Waymo currently operates officially in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, with plans to expand to over 20 cities across the U.S. in 2026. The company also claims to have trained over 30,000 first responders globally on how to interact with autonomous vehicles. This number looks impressive, but the question it fails to answer is: does the training teach how to open doors and manually move vehicles, or how to prevent vehicles from making wrong decisions at a shooting scene? After the December 2025 blackout, Waymo released a fleet update allowing vehicles to respond more decisively to intersections without traffic lights when a large-scale power outage is detected. This is a patch for a