California police pull over a self-driving Waymo for an illegal U-turn (apnews.com)

A Waymo robotaxi in San Bruno, California was pulled over by police after making an illegal U-turn—only officers discovered there was no human driver to cite. The San Bruno Police contacted Waymo and called the maneuver a “glitch,” but declined to issue a ticket because current rules only allow citations to human drivers; California law coming into effect next year will let police report moving violations by autonomous vehicles to the DMV, which is still defining penalties and procedures. Waymo said its autonomous system is closely monitored and that it’s investigating the incident; its fleets operate in Phoenix, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, including San Bruno. For the AI/ML community the episode underlines nontechnical and technical fault lines: legal and regulatory frameworks lag fleet capabilities, and autonomous stacks must not only make safe decisions but also produce auditable telemetry, explainable logs, and remote-control or over‑the‑air remediation paths for misbehavior. Practically, this points to needs for improved rule-compliance modules, richer incident logging for post-hoc debugging, targeted retraining or simulation of rare maneuvers, and clearer interfaces between operators, regulators and enforcement. The viral reaction also highlights public trust and perception challenges that influence deployment and policy for production autonomous systems.