Waymo filed voluntary recall 26E035 with NHTSA on June 13 covering its entire 5th-generation Jaguar fleet after 13 documented incidents in Phoenix and San Francisco. A software fix is "under development" with no timeline; freeway operations remain suspended system-wide.

Waymo filed a voluntary software recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on June 13 covering 3,871 of its robotaxis — virtually its entire fifth-generation operational fleet — after 13 documented incidents in which vehicles drove into active freeway construction zones. NHTSA assigned the filing campaign number 26E035 and announced it publicly on June 18. No injuries were reported in any of the 13 incidents.

The recalled vehicles all run Waymo's 5th Generation Automated Driving System on the Jaguar I-Pace platform, manufactured between May 2022 and May 2026. The company's newer sixth-generation Ojai vehicles — built on the Zeekr platform and introduced earlier this year — are not covered. That distinction is the one piece of good news for Waymo: the Ojai is its growth vehicle, while the recalled 5th-gen fleet is the existing operational backbone across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami.

Per the NHTSA filing, the defect was a priority inversion in the trajectory planner: the ADS weighted avoidance of nearby highway traffic above compliance with ramp-closure signs and construction-zone markings, routing vehicles through closed lanes while optimizing locally around other cars. The system would dodge a merge and drive straight through the construction signs telling it not to be there.

The incidents came in two clusters. Six occurred in Phoenix on April 11 and April 19; Waymo's internal Field Safety Committee convened April 20 to review them. Seven more hit San Francisco on May 18, including at least one passenger-carrying vehicle reported traveling at approximately 70 mph through a construction zone, drawing a police pursuit. Passenger Elliot Slade, aboard one of the May 18 vehicles, told CBS News: "There were construction signs... There were lights going on... and it sped up." Waymo's safety committee met again May 19 and the company suspended all freeway operations system-wide — where they remain as of this writing.

The formal recall decision came June 8, three weeks after the San Francisco cluster and three weeks into the operational ban. Waymo told TechCrunch it "voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month while making improvements, proactively notified state and federal regulators, and decided to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA." As of the June 13 filing, the software fix is "under development" with no deployment timeline; correction will come via over-the-air update.

This is the sixth recall Waymo has issued for its robotaxis. The voluntary-recall path lets companies self-report, self-fix, and set their own timelines — which NHTSA accepted here. The 26-day gap between the May 18 cluster and the June 13 filing isn't unusual by that standard, but the practical result is that Waymo's entire 5th-gen fleet has been off freeways since May 19 with no public return date.

What to watch: the OTA fix timeline, whether NHTSA escalates beyond 26E035 to a formal engineering analysis, and whether state regulators in California — where seven of the 13 incidents occurred — weigh in independently.