A driverless Waymo car temporarily blocked an ambulance trying to get to the scene of a mass shooting in Austin, bystander video shows.
The incident was confirmed by the company and local officials, raising questions about how autonomous vehicles operate around fast-moving emergency scenes.
Three people were killed during the shooting in the city’s entertainment district early Sunday morning, with 13 others injured. Investigators are examining terrorism as a potential motive for the attack.
The mass shooting happened after the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran. The FBI and Austin police said they were still looking into the motive behind the attack, which sent people in the bar and surrounding streets scrambling for cover.
The suspect was wearing clothes with an Iranian flag design and the words “Property of Allah,” a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.
In footage from the scene, a Waymo car is shown stopped, completely blocking the street as an ambulance approaches.
A police cruiser also arrives, and an officer tries to communicate with the company via the car’s speaker system. It takes another minute before the driverless vehicle finally pulls away and into a parking garage.
At a Monday press conference, Austin-Travis County EMS chief Robert Luckritz said first responders were trained for such situations and worked “very closely” with autonomous vehicle operators.
“We had more than 20 assets, resources that responded to this event,” Luckritz said.
“As stated at an earlier press conference, we were on scene within 57 seconds. So in the grand scheme of the impact on the overall incident, we don’t believe it had any impact on patient outcomes.”
A Waymo official confirmed in a statement that the vehicle in question had been en route to pick up a rider from near where the shooting happened on West Sixth Street.
As the car approached the designated pick-up spot, it “identified a road blockage and began executing a U-turn,” the spokesperson told Fox 7 Austin.
Another ambulance appeared while it was mid-maneuver, and the car “briefly yielded and was assisted by a nearby officer.”
“While the Waymo Driver operates in dense U.S. cities, smoothly navigating interactions with emergency vehicles (EVs) at all hours, we are dedicated to learning from this situation and how we show up for our community as we continue improving road safety in the cities we serve,” the Waymo representative said.
At the press conference, Luckritz said that officials had already been in touch with Waymo to express their concerns and prevent similar incidents in the future.
Austin is a prominent testing ground for autonomous vehicles and has faced a number of challenges amid the rollout of the new technology.
In recent months, Axios reported, “Waymo’s cars have come under scrutiny for illegally passing Austin school district buses,” and the company subsequently issued a voluntary software recall in December in response to a federal safety probe.
Waymo expanded its robotaxi fleet last week to also cover Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando.
