San Francisco residents gripe that Waymo’s once-polite self-driving cars are suddenly behaving like “an aggressive, New York taxi driver,” weaving through tunnels in zigzags, rolling through stops and squeezing past other cars, according to a report.
In September, police in nearby San Bruno, Calif. pulled over a Waymo after officers watched it make an illegal U-turn — a sign of how sharply the company says it has reprogrammed the cars to be more “confidently assertive.”
When cops approached the offending self-driving car, a Waymo operator’s voice began speaking to them, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“They said they would look into it,” Police Sgt. Scott Smithmatungol told the Journal. “They were really, really apologetic.”
Chris Ludwick, the senior director of product management at the Alphabet-owned company, told the Journal that the company has wired the vehicles to be more aggressive due to the fact that its overly passive driving was disrupting traffic on San Francisco’s crowded streets.
“That was really necessary for us to actually scale this up in San Francisco, especially because of how busy it gets,” Ludwick told the Journal.
Some riders say they can feel the difference.
Pacific Heights resident Jennifer Jeffries, who has logged nearly 3,000 minutes in Waymos, told the Journal the cars now maneuver as well as an Uber driver, getting closer to other vehicles than she expects and slipping around obstacles that once left them stuck.
“They will go around a car or get closer to a car than a human driver would,” Jeffries told the Journal.
“Sometimes I’ll be in the back seat and I’ll be like, ‘Ooh that was really close.’”
But others say the newfound aggression can be jarring, including pedestrian Marc Schreiber, who told the Journal a Waymo began accelerating through a crosswalk as soon as he cleared the front of the vehicle.
“I was taken off guard,” Schreiber told the Journal. “My next thought was, oh they’ve changed the programming to be more aggressive.”
Waymo’s Ludwick told the Journal that its “driver is designed to respect the rules of the road”. He said its vehicles have logged 100 million driverless miles across cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix and Atlanta — with 91% fewer crashes involving a serious injury or worse compared with human drivers.
Some residents say the bolder driving is a mixed bag. Pacific Heights accountant Cossette Drossler told the Journal she’s heard of Waymos doing “California stops” — when a driver slows down at a stop sign but doesn’t come to a complete stop before proceeding.
Drossler said she doesn’t want to see Waymos coming to a full halt on empty neighborhood streets, but also isn’t sure she trusts the cars to judge when rolling through is actually safe.
“I do California rolling stops. I grew up in San Francisco,” Drossler told the Journal, adding: “I only do it if it’s safe.”
Waymo’s broader safety record shows an autonomous vehicle program under growing federal scrutiny as regulators and local authorities track a rising number of documented violations, software failures and real-world mishaps.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened multiple investigations into the company’s technology, including an active preliminary evaluation into reports that Waymo vehicles drove around stopped school buses with their red lights flashing and stop arms deployed.
School districts in Austin reported 19 similar violations this year. A separate federal probe into unexpected autonomous driving behavior — including collisions with stationary objects, lane departures and stop-signal issues — was closed earlier this year only after Waymo issued two software recalls.
The company has announced several recalls tied to technical failures, including software bugs blamed for crashes involving chains, gates and utility poles, as well as a 2024 incident involving improperly towed vehicles.
Waymos have also been involved in collisions with fixed objects, rear-end crashes, pedestrian incidents and multiple animal strikes.
At least one fatal crash has occurred in a Waymo-involved incident, though investigators found the autonomous vehicle was not at fault.
The Post has sought comment from Waymo.
Waymo is currently picking up paying passengers in several US metro areas, including Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta, and has begun fully autonomous operations in additional cities such as Miami as it prepares broader service launches in 2026.
The company is also testing in more than a dozen other cities — including New York, Minneapolis, Seattle, Las Vegas and Philadelphia — where vehicles operate in mapping or supervised-autonomy modes ahead of potential commercial rollout. Waymo is not picking up passengers in those cities as of yet.
