On Tuesday 10 November 2026, Arizona's Family reported that drivers who crash into Waymo robotaxis in metro Phoenix often leave the scene. The station spent 10 months gathering police crash reports and body camera footage from Phoenix, Scottsdale, Chandler, Mesa and Tempe.
What the reports record
The reports run from 1 September 2020 to 31 December 2024 and contain 88 police-reported crashes involving Waymo vehicles. In 43 of them, 49 per cent, the Waymo stayed and the other driver left, so the crash was classed as a hit-and-run. Damage was minor in most of those cases. The 88 and the 43 are Arizona's Family's count of the reports it collected, not a total published by police.
Set against miles driven, the newsroom and a traffic safety researcher put Waymo's rate of police-reported hit-and-runs at 2.4 times the rate for drivers in Maricopa County. That multiple is their calculation, not an official count.
At the roadside
Waymo roadside crews have been describing the pattern to officers. One specialist told a Phoenix officer, "It's quite shocking how many people just take off."
Body camera footage from March 2024 shows Chandler Police Officer Seth Chavez at a crash near Ray and Price roads, after someone hit the back of a driverless Waymo and drove away. Chavez told the specialist he had never handled a call quite like it. The specialist answered, "People rear-end these things all the time. Most of the time, they just leave."
In October 2024 a truck damaged a Waymo near 2nd Street and Buckeye Road in Phoenix and drove off. The specialist on that call spoke about how often the reports come in. "I don't know how many of these reports you do, but I'm surprised at how many hit-and-runs we honestly get, and where it's a good amount of damage. Like, do you not realize there's cameras on these?"
What Waymo told the station
Waymo reviewed the method. Its researchers "appreciated the rigor and thought" behind the work. The company argues it is impossible to tell whether its vehicles are involved in more hit-and-runs than other cars, or whether Waymo reports incidents to police more consistently than other drivers do.
Camille Dredge, Waymo's senior director for ride-hail operations, spoke to the station last year and offered no theory for the departures. "The standard today is not perfection. Collisions will and can occur. We are absolutely prepared to respond to them."
The company declined a new interview and replied in writing. In that reply, the safety of riders and communities is its "absolute priority". Across more than 90 million fully autonomous miles in Phoenix, Waymo reported a 90 per cent cut in crashes involving serious injuries or worse, compared with human drivers. On the same account, hit-and-runs are uncommon beside the more than four million autonomous miles the fleet drives each week in more than 15 US cities. The reply does not say whether Waymo counts hit-and-runs itself, or how many it has logged.
In a 2020 crash in Mesa, one of the earliest on file, officers suspected that the driver who hit a Waymo was impaired. On the body camera an officer told him, "You're real loopy. Your speech is slurred." Most of the reports give no reason for leaving.
Leaving details
Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University, and Phil Koopman, professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, offered two explanations.
Cummings called for more work from researchers and from government on what is happening and how to limit it. "If there's no one there to trade insurance cards with, then what do you do?"
Koopman has watched police and emergency crews struggle with the vehicles. "I've noticed that police have trouble interacting with these vehicles. Emergency responders have trouble interacting with these vehicles. They're not sure what to do. Ordinary drivers don't go through how-to-talk-to-a-robotaxi training."
A 2022 Chandler report shows the same gap. After a minor crash in a 7-Eleven car park near Warner and Dobson roads, the driver at fault walked up to the Waymo with her "driver's license and vehicle registration in hand". There was no driver to take the papers, and she left.
A driver who collides with an unattended vehicle must stop and give notice under section 28-664 of the Arizona Revised Statutes. The section requires an immediate stop, then either locating the operator or owner and giving the name and address of the driver and of the owner of the striking vehicle, or leaving a written notice with those details in a conspicuous place on the vehicle that was hit. A person who breaks that duty is guilty of a class 1 misdemeanour.
Waymo's written reply adds that a driver does not have to wait for a representative. Someone in a crash with a Waymo can scan the QR code on the driver's side door, use the app, complete a form at Waymo.com/notify, email insurance@waymo.com, or speak to a roadside specialist who is already there.
On the operators
Koopman put the job of making that exchange work on the companies. "If robotaxi companies are putting vehicles on public roads that interact with other people, it should be on the robotaxi companies to figure out how to make that interaction happen."
Rear impacts
The second explanation is a type of crash that can tempt a driver to leave. Cummings has analysed publicly available data and reports that Waymos are hit from behind twice as often as the average human driver. That multiple is her reading of the public data, not an official count. The behaviour she points to is phantom braking, a sudden stop for something that is not there. "Everyone hears about hallucinations with generative AI. These are real hallucinations. The cars see something that isn't there. And the car's response is to do an emergency braking because, to them, it appears that something is there."
Koopman described what that stop means for the driver behind. "If they're not sure, the safe thing, tactically, is to stop. But what you have to take into account is that following drivers, if there's no reason to brake, they're not expecting it."
Waymo disputes that sudden braking is a significant factor. Rear-end crashes are the most common type for human drivers and for autonomous vehicles. Over 270 million autonomous miles, its vehicles were involved in 41 per cent fewer rear-end crashes causing airbag deployment than human drivers in its cities. A peer-reviewed analysis by the company found the vehicles fully stopped in 72 per cent of rear-end crashes that deployed airbags, and in 20 per cent of those that caused injuries. The same analysis found the vehicles were not braking hard in any of the airbag crashes, or in 75 per cent of the injury crashes. Those figures are Waymo's.