Dozens of Waymos Stranded on July 4 as San Francisco Demands Answers

The night after San Francisco’s Fourth of July fireworks ended, more than 30 Waymo robotaxis sat motionless in the only parking area set aside for spectators of the Golden Gate Bridge display, their batteries draining while passengers waited and tow trucks rolled in. Stranded vehicles also clogged intersections elsewhere in the city’s northern reaches, blocking traffic for hours before crews could clear the scene. Waymo told reporters that some cars recovered on their own once congestion eased and others had to be towed.

The episode repeats a failure mode that hit the same streets seven months earlier, when a December 2025 PG&E blackout stranded 64 of the company’s cars at dark intersections, and it lands on a company whose spring brought two multi-thousand-vehicle recalls and a federal review of an incident in which a robotaxi struck a child outside a Santa Monica elementary school. A San Francisco supervisor, Mahmood, has now asked city departments to file answers within two weeks on what protocols failed and how the city and company will coordinate ahead of the next big event. Waymo’s own figures say its vehicles are 13 times less likely to be involved in serious injury crashes than the average human driver in its service cities.

Dozens of Waymos Ground to a Halt in the Presidio

The gridlock took shape after the city’s Golden Gate Bridge fireworks ended Saturday night, when crowds began pushing toward the few streets that feed out of the northern waterfront. Waymo told reporters that “extreme traffic congestion in northern San Francisco disrupted normal operations for several Waymo vehicles,” a statement spokesperson Chris Bonelli gave as the night wore on. The company’s roadside assistance team, Bonelli added, was coordinating with local authorities and emergency services to clear the area.

Many of the stranded cars sat in the parking lots the city had set up for fireworks watchers, where KQED reported more than 30 Waymos became stuck and blocked parking for hours. A witness who filmed the mess told ABC7 that about 20 Waymos had stalled in his line of sight, while other drivers told NBC Bay Area they sat in standstill traffic for roughly two hours until tow crews could reach the vehicles. Several of the idled cars were Jaguar I-PACE models that ran out of charge while waiting for the queue to move and were then loaded onto flatbed trucks.

Drivers Watched Two Hours Disappear Behind Dead Robotaxis

From inside the stalled robotaxis, the night looked stranger than it did from outside. Passenger Rose Peterson was pulling up to a four-way stop in the Mission district when a pedestrian lit a firework in the middle of the intersection and her Waymo kept rolling forward. A few blocks away, an unoccupied Waymo drove over another lit firework and caught fire on Connecticut Street; Waymo told local outlets that no one was hurt and the company had reached out to the rider.

Dave Guingona, who sat in personal car traffic nearby, told NBC Bay Area that within 15 minutes of stopping, he saw drivers leave their vehicles to shout at the immobilized robotaxis blocking the road. He spent close to two hours in traffic until the Waymos were cleared. San Francisco Standard readers reported being stuck behind the cars for about four hours near the Palace of Fine Arts.

• 577 Waymo robotaxis operating in San Francisco, per the San Francisco Standard
• ~500,000 paid rides per week across 10 cities, per the same reporting
• 100,000+ people in the fireworks zone on July 4, per Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office
• 30+ Waymos stuck in the Presidio parking area, per KQED
• About ~4 hours the longest wait some riders and drivers reported

We were pulling up to a four-way stop and this guy was shooting off a firework in the middle of the road, and then our Waymo starts driving, and we’re like, ‘Wait, what’s happening?’

Peterson, the passenger who filmed her ride, told outlets that the experience changed how she thought about the technology. “I definitely think it needs to be more sensitive of anything that can come into the path of the road,” she said.

The December 2025 Blackout Failure, Replayed

The pattern inside the Presidio parking lot tracks the same kind of stranding that hit Waymos during a December 20, 2025 PG&E blackout, when the cars treated intersections with dead traffic lights as four-way stops and required a “confirmation check” from a remote operator before they could move again. Waymo had to send staff or tow trucks to retrieve those cars; in two cases first responders got behind the wheel to move the robotaxis out of the way, the San Francisco Standard reported. Waymo’s own write-up of the blackout lessons, published on its company blog three days later, laid out a renewed emphasis on coordinating with city officials during major grid disruptions (the lessons Waymo published after the December blackout).

A Board of Supervisors hearing in March followed the blackout, where Waymo acknowledged it should have coordinated more closely with the city, and supervisor Alan Wong told the meeting that the test for any driverless system is the day it strains. “The standard is not how systems perform on a normal day, the standard is how they perform when conditions are strained,” Wong said.

Seven months later, the strained conditions arrived again with more than a hundred thousand people stacked into a constrained corner of the city. The Guardian reported at the time of the December outage that Waymo had paused its San Francisco service entirely as the blackout unfolded, a step the company did not take on July 4 even as cars idled for hours. Some residents in the area reported losing cell phone service during the holiday weekend’s gridlock, an additional variable that could keep robotaxis from calling out for help even when remote operators are available. The cluster of stranded cars included vehicles operating fully autonomously, with no safety driver on board.

Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office, asked about the night, said public safety was its top priority and acknowledged that some people had faced long delays returning home. Charles Lutvak, Lurie’s spokesperson, said the city “will have conversations with our public and private partners to ensure the experience is smoother next time.” Local outlets also reported that the trouble wasn’t unique to San Francisco: in Atlanta, drivers filmed themselves stuck behind three Waymos frozen at an intersection that same night.

A Recall-Ridden Run-Up to a Major-Event Summer

The Fourth of July is not the first event of 2026 that has tested Waymo’s software and operations. The company spent the spring working through a series of high-profile incidents, two recalls, and an ongoing federal inquiry into a child-strike outside an elementary school in Santa Monica. The cumulative pressure has arrived as Waymo has also been expanding its fleet and pushing for new city launches.

The January child strike is still under federal investigation, with Waymo saying its car braked hard from about 17 mph before making contact at under 6 mph. In March, Senator Markey’s probe found that a “substantial share” of Waymo’s remote-assist operators do not hold US driver’s licenses, many of them based in the Philippines. Waymo recalled thousands of vehicles in May after one of its cars drove into floodwater in San Antonio, then issued a second, larger recall in June for the 3,871 robotaxis that had entered closed construction lanes in Phoenix and the Bay Area, a software problem the company said it caught in 13 incidents. A CNN review of public records and incident reports had earlier laid out hundreds of additional cases in which Waymos ran red lights, drove on closed roads, or came within inches of pedestrians (hundreds of Waymo incidents from a federal-records review).

The recall filings describe specific behaviors the software had to be patched to handle, including detecting flooded lanes, navigating ramp closures, and not driving between cones marking closed construction lanes. With summer-event volume about to ramp up across the company’s ten-city footprint, Waymo has not said whether a similar operational pause is on the table for major city gatherings.

The 70-Person Remote Desk That Couldn’t Move Them

Waymo’s vehicles do not have drivers, but they do have a small pool of remote humans watching over them. The company told CNN it keeps roughly 70 remote-assistance agents on call at any given time for its fleet of nearly 4,000 vehicles, with about half of those operators based in the Philippines. Those agents can advise a stuck car over a cellular link, but they do not take over driving, and Waymo declined to tell CNN how often such interventions are needed. For a single stalled vehicle the loop can take minutes; for a mass-stranding event in a corner of the city where residents reported losing cell phone service, the math does not scale. Some passengers in stalled Waymos left the vehicles to walk to their next destination, NBC News reported, a choice the cars did not give them.

SFMTA’s director of streets, Viktoriya Wise, told KQED that the special event was held at “the far north-western corner of the city” in a constrained area where transit is “not as robust as places like downtown San Francisco or Pier 39.” She said the city’s transportation system “simply could not handle the volume of people that arrived in San Francisco on Saturday.” She apologized for the delays and said SFMTA would study what could have been done better. One Muni rider’s three-mile bus-and-bikeshare ride home from Aquatic Park to the Mission District took three hours, KQED reported, beating a friend’s drive home only in that she finished at 1:45 a.m. instead of sooner.

Supervisor Mahmood Opens an Inquiry

San Francisco Supervisor Mahmood said the weekend was a transit story as much as a traffic story, and on Tuesday his office opened a formal letter of inquiry into what went wrong. He is asking city departments to respond within two weeks on what protocols were in place, what communications happened between the city and Waymo during the congestion, and what changes will be made before the next large event. The inquiry covers the stranded robotaxis in the Presidio parking area, the post-fireworks gridlock that kept thousands of spectators from reaching public transit, and the failed coordination that left buses sitting still. Mahmood had to walk an hour home from Fisherman’s Wharf because the streets around him were jammed, he said.

“It’s not acceptable that disruption of service, first responders and our public transit system is a side effect of autonomous vehicles on the road,” Mahmood said. Waymo declined to provide KQED with a count of how many of its cars experienced issues on July 4, instead pointing back at the same statement it gave other outlets. Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina professor who advises governments on autonomous vehicles, told CNN earlier in the summer that what is happening at Waymo is “the story of progress” because “we replace one set of problems with a new set of problems.” Similar edge-case failures have surfaced in other Waymo markets (a Phoenix Waymo that mistook train tracks for a lane; a Houston probe into idle Waymos).

Waymo has not addressed the July 4 incident on its own social channels, only through press statements. Two other investigations into the company remain open: the NHTSA probe of the Santa Monica child strike, and Senator Markey’s review of foreign-operator staffing. The June recall of 3,871 robotaxis over construction-zone entries is the company’s largest software action this year, filed just ahead of the holiday weekend. Mahmood’s office plans to publish the city departments’ responses once they come in, and the next Bay Area event won’t leave Waymo the same grace period this one did.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to Waymo on July 4, 2026?

More than 30 Waymo robotaxis became stranded in the Presidio parking area in San Francisco after the Golden Gate Bridge fireworks, blocking traffic and running out of charge while passengers waited. One Waymo drove over a lit firework at a four-way stop in the Mission district, and another caught fire on Connecticut Street after running over the same kind of debris. No injuries were reported.

How many Waymo vehicles were affected?

KQED reported more than 30 Waymos stuck in the only parking area set up for the fireworks show, blocking parking for hours. A witness who filmed the queue told ABC7 he saw about 20 Waymos stalled in his line of sight. Waymo declined to give KQED an exact count of vehicles that experienced issues or needed to be manually moved.

Did anyone get hurt in the July 4 Waymo stranding?

No injuries were reported by Waymo or by city officials, including in the two firework-related incidents. Cars operated fully autonomously throughout, and the company’s roadside assistance team, with local first responders, cleared the stranded vehicles. Some passengers left the cars to walk; NBC Bay Area reported drivers left their personal vehicles to confront the empty robotaxis blocking the road.

What did Waymo say about the incident?

Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli said “extreme traffic congestion in northern San Francisco disrupted normal operations for several Waymo vehicles” and that the company’s roadside assistance team worked with local authorities and emergency services to clear them. The company pointed to major traffic disruptions, a high volume of travelers, and unplanned road closures around the fireworks show, and said it is “evaluating ways to strengthen Waymo’s resilience in major traffic disruptions.”

What happens next with the San Francisco inquiry?

Supervisor Mahmood asked city departments to respond to his letter of inquiry within two weeks, with the aim of identifying which protocols failed and how the city and Waymo will coordinate ahead of future large events. Two other investigations into Waymo remain open: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s probe of a January 2026 child strike in Santa Monica, and Senator Ed Markey’s review of the company’s foreign-operator staffing.