Waymo Is New. So Are the Personal Injury Lawsuits.
As of 2026, Waymo operates a fleet of roughly 2,500 robotaxis across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, completing more than half a million rides every week and accumulating millions of autonomous miles every month. The company, owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, has announced plans to expand into Chicago and other major markets, moving the technology from a regional experiment toward something approaching national infrastructure. And as that fleet grows, so does the record of what happens when it fails. NHTSA has logged more than 1,400 incidents involving Waymo vehicles since 2021. There have been over 100 injuries and two fatalities. There have been multiple software recalls. There have been federal investigations. The technology is genuinely impressive, and it is genuinely imperfect, and people are getting hurt.
Waymo does not currently serve Castle Rock or Colorado. But Colorado law already authorizes fully autonomous vehicles to operate on its roads, the state’s legal framework already assigns liability when they crash, and Colorado residents who travel to Phoenix, Los Angeles, or any other Waymo market are riding in and driving near these vehicles right now. Understanding how personal injury claims work when an autonomous vehicle is involved is no longer a hypothetical exercise. It is a current legal reality, and the rules are substantially different from everything that came before.
What Waymo Actually Is
A Waymo robotaxi has no human driver. There is no one in the front seat, no safety operator monitoring from a remote location in real time, and no mechanism for a passenger to take control in an emergency. The vehicle runs entirely on a suite of sensors including LiDAR, radar, and cameras combined with proprietary software that interprets the sensor data and makes every driving decision in real time. Waymo calls this its Automated Driving System, or ADS. The vehicle’s software decides when to brake, when to accelerate, how to respond to pedestrians, and how to handle unexpected road conditions. When it makes a mistake, there is no human reaction to compensate for it.
That architecture is what makes Waymo crashes legally different from every other vehicle crash. In a standard car accident, a human driver made a decision that injured someone. In a rideshare crash, a human contractor made a decision that injured someone, and the company behind them carries commercial insurance. With Waymo, there is no individual driver to hold accountable. The company and its technology are the driver. That distinction reshapes who you sue, what you have to prove, and which legal theories are available to you.
The Recall Record Says Something Important
Waymo has issued multiple software recalls that document, in federal regulatory filings, specific conditions under which its autonomous system behaves dangerously. A 2024 recall covered collisions with gates, chains, and barriers, affecting over 1,200 vehicles. A separate recall in 2025 involved roughly 3,067 vehicles whose software illegally passed stopped school buses, triggering an NHTSA investigation and action by the Austin Independent School District, which had documented 19 separate violations. In May 2026, a recall covering nearly 3,800 vehicles addressed a defect that could cause the system to slow but not fully stop when encountering standing water on high-speed roadways. NHTSA estimated a 100 percent defect rate across all affected vehicles.
In January 2026, a Waymo vehicle struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school, triggering investigations by both NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board. In a separate 2025 incident, two passengers were trapped in a Waymo that accelerated through a freeway construction zone, ignored police lights, and eventually veered into a residential neighborhood before stopping. The company’s own published data shows a strong overall safety record relative to human drivers, and those comparisons are worth acknowledging. But the recall history demonstrates something that Waymo’s aggregate statistics can obscure, which is that specific failure modes exist, have injured people, and recur across thousands of vehicles before being corrected. When one of those failures injures you, the fact that the overall system is safer than average does not resolve your personal injury claim.
Colorado Has Already Built the Legal Framework
Colorado passed Senate Bill 17-213 in 2017, establishing one of the most permissive autonomous vehicle frameworks in the country. The law, codified at C.R.S. § 42-4-242, authorizes fully autonomous vehicles to operate on Colorado roads as long as the automated driving system is capable of complying with all applicable state and federal traffic laws. The statute also addresses liability directly: it states that crashes involving an automated driving system operating without human control are governed by applicable state law, federal law, or common law. In practical terms, that means Colorado courts will apply the same negligence and product liability frameworks that govern every other personal injury claim, adapted to the specific circumstances of autonomous vehicle operation.
The Colorado Department of Transportation maintains an active Autonomous Vehicles program and works with the Colorado State Patrol and the Department of Revenue to oversee the deployment of ADS technology in the state. Colorado has positioned itself explicitly as a forward-leaning state for autonomous vehicle testing and deployment. That posture means the infrastructure for handling Waymo-type operations legally and practically is already in place, and the arrival of robotaxi services in Colorado markets is a question of when, not whether.
Two Legal Theories, Both Available to You
When a Waymo vehicle injures someone, Colorado law provides two distinct legal paths for pursuing compensation, and a serious case will typically pursue both simultaneously.
Negligence
Every vehicle operator owes a duty of reasonable care to other people on the road. In a Waymo crash, Waymo is the operator. The company designed the system, deployed it on public roads, maintains it through software updates, and is responsible for every driving decision it makes. When that system fails to stop for a school bus, misreads a construction zone, or drives into standing water on a highway, it has breached the duty of care that any reasonable driver would owe to people in and around the vehicle. Saying the software made the decision is not a defense. The software is Waymo’s product, running on Waymo’s vehicle, under Waymo’s operational control. The company cannot outsource its liability to an algorithm.
Product Liability
This is the more powerful theory in many Waymo cases, and it is the one that most clearly distinguishes autonomous vehicle claims from standard car accidents. Waymo’s ADS is a product. If that product is defective and the defect causes injury, the manufacturer can be held liable under product liability law without requiring the injured person to prove specific negligence. Product defects take three forms: a design defect, meaning the system was inherently unsafe as designed; a manufacturing defect, meaning a specific sensor or software component failed during production; and a failure to warn, meaning Waymo knew of a dangerous condition and did not adequately disclose it to passengers or the public. The recall record is significant here because NHTSA recall filings are public documents that establish, in the company’s own words, that specific defects existed, when they were identified, and how many vehicles were affected. A recall for a defect that caused the type of crash that injured you is documentary evidence of exactly the product defect your case requires.
The Evidence Problem
Waymo vehicles generate enormous amounts of data. Every fraction of a second, the sensor array produces a detailed picture of the vehicle’s environment, what it detected, how it classified what it detected, what decision the software made, and why. That data exists for every crash. It would answer most of the factual questions that arise in litigation. The problem is that Waymo controls all of it. Unlike a car accident where the evidence is scattered across both parties, bystander phones, and traffic cameras, the most important evidence in a Waymo crash sits on servers owned and maintained by the company you are suing.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires autonomous vehicle operators to report crashes that meet certain thresholds, and those reports become part of the federal database. That reporting requirement creates a baseline public record and creates obligations that make it harder for a company to claim it simply has no data about an incident. But the full sensor logs, the AI decision logs, and the internal communications about known software issues are not automatically public. Getting them requires legal action, formal discovery, and in some cases, experts who can interpret what the data actually shows once it is produced. Moving quickly after a crash to serve formal preservation demands on Waymo before its standard data retention cycles delete relevant material is one of the most time-sensitive steps in these cases.
Other Parties Who May Carry Liability
Waymo operates Jaguar vehicles equipped with its own sensor and software package. That supply chain creates multiple potential defendants beyond Waymo itself. If a sensor manufactured by a third-party supplier failed, the sensor manufacturer may share liability. If a software component developed by a subcontractor produced the defect, that vendor is a potential defendant. If a maintenance contractor improperly calibrated a sensor during a scheduled service, the contractor may bear responsibility for the crash that followed. Identifying which link in the chain failed requires technical investigation that goes well beyond the police report, and it is the kind of investigation that has to happen before evidence in the physical possession of those companies is altered or lost.
Other drivers on the road can also bear liability in Waymo crashes. A significant share of the incidents in the federal database were caused by human drivers who struck or cut off Waymo vehicles rather than by autonomous system failures. In those cases, the claim runs against the human driver and their insurance carrier, not against Waymo. The involvement of a Waymo vehicle does not automatically mean Waymo is at fault. It means the factual investigation has to determine which failure, human or algorithmic, actually caused the crash.
What to Do If You Are in a Waymo Crash
Screenshot the app before you close it. The same principle that applies to rideshare crashes applies here with even more urgency. The app screen shows the trip in progress, the vehicle identification, and the timestamp. That information links you to the specific vehicle and the specific trip, which is the starting point for any preservation demand you send to Waymo’s legal team. Send the screenshot to yourself immediately so it exists in multiple places.
Photograph everything at the scene. The vehicle’s exterior and visible sensor hardware, including the LiDAR dome on the roof, the cameras at each corner of the vehicle, and any visible damage, should all be photographed. Note the specific vehicle identification number visible on the car. Record a voice memo describing exactly what the vehicle did in the moments before and during the crash while the sequence is fresh. Get witness contact information. Call 911 and obtain a police report. Seek medical attention the same day.
Do not give a recorded statement to Waymo’s claims team or sign any document the company or its insurer sends you before you have spoken with an attorney. Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, one of the largest corporations on earth, with substantial legal resources. The company has experience handling crash claims. You almost certainly do not. The asymmetry in experience and resources is exactly why early legal representation matters in these cases.
The Statute of Limitations Has a Complication
Colorado personal injury claims arising from motor vehicle accidents are generally subject to a three-year statute of limitations under C.R.S. § 13-80-101. Product liability claims carry a shorter window of two years under C.R.S. § 13-80-106. A Waymo crash may give rise to both theories. If you pursue only the negligence claim and miss the product liability deadline, you may lose the stronger theory of recovery. Identifying all potentially applicable statutes of limitations and filing within the correct windows requires knowing which theories apply to your specific facts, which is another reason to get legal counsel involved before those windows close rather than after.
Claims against the Colorado State Patrol or any other government entity that may have contributed to a crash remain subject to the shorter 182-day notice requirement under the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act. Road design or signage issues that contributed to an autonomous vehicle’s failure to read a situation correctly could implicate a government entity as a party, and that notice deadline runs from the date of discovery, not the date a lawsuit is filed.
This Is Genuinely New Legal Territory
There are no established jury verdicts in Colorado for autonomous vehicle personal injury claims. There are no published appellate decisions construing how Colorado’s comparative fault framework applies when the at-fault party is software rather than a human being. The cases being filed now in California and Arizona are building the precedent that will eventually govern Colorado litigation, and the lawyers handling those cases are developing the factual and expert frameworks that these claims require. Being injured by a vehicle with no human driver is a situation that the law is catching up to in real time, and navigating it without experienced legal counsel means facing a corporation with fully developed defense strategies while operating without the framework needed to counter them effectively.
Talk to a Colorado Injury Lawyer
The emergence of autonomous vehicles on public roads is not a distant development. It is happening now in cities where Colorado residents travel, and it is authorized under Colorado law whenever companies like Waymo choose to expand here. Rampart Injury Lawyers represents seriously injured people in Castle Rock and throughout Douglas County, and Todd Travis and Jordan Travis handle complex personal injury cases involving emerging technology, corporate defendants, and
