Waymo’s self-driving cars have been mapping Chicago city streets and traffic patterns, but they’re not giving rides—yet.
While the company gears up to deploy in the Windy City, critics are closely watching how the technology handles real-world conditions.
Waymo vehicles have made headlines in recent months following several incidents. In December 2025, the vehicles shut down in the middle of traffic in San Francisco. One month prior, a Waymo vehicle drove into an active crime scene in Los Angeles. And in December 2024, a Phoenix man was trapped inside of a Waymo that was apparently driving in circles.
After these scenarios, Waymo issued software updates and in some cases, said it used the unusual event to improve road safety.
Waymo is operating 3,000 cars in 10 U.S. cities, but Chicago may present a unique challenge, according to Dr. Missy Cummings, the director of George Mason University’s Autonomy and Robotics Center and a nationally recognized expert in self-driving vehicle technology.
“These cars struggle around pedestrians, struggle around people on bicycles and scooters, for example, they do not do well around potholes,” said Cummings.
There are currently three active Federal Investigations into Waymo over incidents involving failure to stop for school buses and an incident where a child was struck in a school zone. Waymo said it takes these investigations “very seriously” and has taken “significant steps to improve performance.” The company has pledged to cooperate fully with investigators.
Cummings said incidents like those “suggest that the computer vision systems on board the cars are still extremely immature. Immature to the point that they have to call remote operators.”
Help from Waymo’s remote operators isn’t always immediate.
During a power outage in San Francisco last December, dozens of Waymo vehicles were effectively bricked—blocking traffic and even fire trucks.
City emergency staff called Waymo for help 36 times that night with no luck. Help only came after the mayor texted Waymo’s CEO.
In recent hearings, Waymo executives were asked to explain the delay. The company’s director of product driving behavior said they “have overall 70 operators working at any point in time to respond to these remote assistance queries.”
However, Cummings says their response system needs improvement since the remote operation for Waymo is based in the Philippines. “This is unacceptable. We need remote operators that have U.S. driver’s licenses that are located in the United States,” Cummings told NBC Chicago.
Despite these issues, Waymo says compared to an average human driver, Waymo vehicles have 92% fewer crashes that could cause serious injury and 92% fewer pedestrian crashes with injury.
The organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving hopes autonomous vehicles will help make roads safer.
“It holds this promise, this wonderful promise that one day there will no longer be roadway fatalities due to drunk driving or other behavioral related safety issues on our roads,” said Stephanie Manning of MADD.
Waymo has logged more than 170 million driverless miles since 2019, but that’s still a tiny share of the trillions of miles Americans drive each year. Some experts say it’s too early for firm safety comparisons.
Cummings says there are some areas where she wouldn’t recommend using them. “Local surface streets, 25 miles an hour, sure, go crazy. Getting on the highway, I can’t give that my thumbs up yet.”
Right now Waymo isn’t technically allowed to operate in Illinois. A bill that would start a pilot program for self-driving taxis in Cook County and others is progressing through the state legislature.
NBC Chicago contacted Waymo for an interview, but the company did not provide a comment to include in our reporting.
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