Waymo Gets Paralyzed By Venice Canal Parade

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In what seems to be a weekly edition of “Weird Things Happening with Robotaxis,” a friend of mine sent me the following funny clip of a Waymo robotaxi being stalled for 45 minutes trying to cross a tiny bridge due to a Christmas canal boat parade going under the bridge.

In case you can’t see that, here’s the text of what the poster wrote: “Venice, CA (DEC. 14. 2025) The entire Venice community became landlocked behind a frozen Waymo that suffered a long period of sensor dysphoria. Literally hundreds of townsfolk rallied together; trying everything in their power to convince the Waymo to cross over the bridge. Reports from the scene indicate that the Waymo blocked the bridge for 45 minutes or longer.”

Later on, he/she wrote, “It would move forward and then give up and move back and then make another attempt forward and then give up and move back.”

It appears to me that the bridge is so low that the Waymo considered each of those little boats going under the bridge to be potential cars or other obstacles/risks. There were some other theories in the comments, but I don’t think they were correct. There were also a lot of Tesla fans slamming Waymo for this, sometimes aggressively, showing how tribal this topic has gotten.

Does this matter? Is it a big problem? I would say no and no — better safe than sorry, as they say, and Waymo will probably come up with a solution for edge cases like this. However, it is clearly a weird scenario where robotaxis have been shown to be worse than humans. It won’t be the last or the worst such case either. Still, in net, Waymo robotaxis are looking very good and helpful.