AIBRIEF
The Alphabet owned service restarts highway routes in the city where the June recall originated, with the Bay Area, Miami, and Los Angeles to follow.
Phoenix gets Waymo's freeways back first, the same city where the recall traces its first six April construction-zone incidents.
Waymo announced the partial resumption on Wednesday, starting highway robotaxi service in Phoenix after halting it in May to fix a software defect that let its cars miss closed construction zones and drive into them at speed. San Francisco Bay Area, Miami, and Los Angeles will follow, in roughly that order.
Phoenix was the first market where Waymo launched highway routing in November 2025, and it is also where the June NHTSA filing records six April incidents, the cluster that pushed the company to act. San Francisco added seven more in May. No passengers were harmed in either batch.
The June recall is a software fix; Waymo has not published the underlying remediation. PCMag cites an unnamed recent report claiming Waymos crash 68% less often than human drivers, a figure that belongs beside the recall rather than in front of it, because the incidents are what triggered the pause. Gizmodo and the SF Chronicle corroborate the resumption and recall framing.
What to watch: how the rollout holds up in dense-event and edge-case scenes, where the same fleet has previously frozen rather than moved.