Waymo, Zoox test drivers report more injuries as robotaxis scale

Test drivers for Waymo and Zoox sustained more than two dozen injuries in 2024 and 2025 from hard braking or other sudden movements made by the companies’ autonomous vehicles, according to a TechCrunch review of data submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

These test drivers, who put self-driving cars through their paces on public roads, have suffered sprains, strains, whiplash, and more, per OSHA data and interviews with current and former workers; some have been sidelined for weeks or months. Transdev, which employs and manages Waymo’s test drivers, reported 16 injuries tied to Waymo depot locations in three cities caused by the software braking hard or swerving suddenly; Zoox reported as many as eight worker injuries linked to hard braking. Other autonomous vehicle companies don’t appear in the dataset, partly because OSHA’s public-disclosure rules apply only to “higher-hazard” industries like taxi and transit services with 100 or more employees — meaning injuries at smaller or newer operations may go unreported.

The injury count rose alongside Waymo’s expansion: the company grew its commercial fleet to more than 1,500 vehicles by May 2025, and that fleet is more than 3,500 vehicles today. Transdev reported five Waymo test-driver injuries in 2024 across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix; that number rose to 11 in the same three markets in 2025, with hard braking behind nearly all of them. One Phoenix driver spent 157 days away from work after the vehicle “made an exaggerated breaking [sic] event without any obstruction,” and a Los Angeles driver was sidelined 175 days after the car braked hard when children were playing in its path.

Current and former Zoox contractors told TechCrunch that “brake jabs” can happen repeatedly on a single drive and that workers are still getting hurt as recently as July, sometimes triggered by a full system shutdown — a “nogo” — that can whip a driver forward without warning. Zoox’s OSHA filings show a shoulder and upper-arm injury after a January 2025 hard stop in San Francisco, a neck injury from an “unexpected” stop later that month, and a June injury to a training instructor after the vehicle’s “software braked harshly.”

Zoox said hard-braking incidents are “sometimes unavoidable” and represent a small share of the miles its test fleet has driven, and said a recall addressing “an extremely narrow braking behavior” is unrelated to later incidents; both Zoox and Waymo declined to answer specific questions about the reported injuries. “The safety of our riders, road users, and team is of paramount importance,” Waymo told TechCrunch, calling human-operator testing part of its “ongoing validation process.”

Why it matters

As Zoox’s purpose-built robotaxis carry passengers rather than occupational drivers, any injuries there stop showing up in OSHA data altogether — the company has separately reported two robotaxi crashes to NHTSA in the past eight months tied to hard braking for debris. That makes worker-safety filings a shrinking window into how often these systems still brake unpredictably as robotaxi fleets scale.