As Waymo expands its fleet from 700 in 2025 to nearly 4,000 now, recalls and edge-case failures like flooded roadways and a San Francisco power outage mount (Emmy Martin/New York Times)

Waymo's rapid fleet expansion from 700 to nearly 4,000 autonomous vehicles has exposed critical reliability and safety challenges, with increasing recalls and failures in edge cases like environmental hazards and infrastructure disruptions. This demonstrates that scaling autonomous systems introduces unforeseen operational risks that require robust contingency planning, real-time monitoring infrastructure, and cross-organizational coordination with city systems. For IT leaders, this underscores the importance of building resilient, observability-rich systems and establishing strong incident response frameworks when deploying AI-driven autonomous technologies at scale.