One of the purported advantages of self-driving car tech is that every car can learn from one vehicle’s mistakes. Here’s how Waymo puts it on its website: “The Waymo Driver learns from the collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including previous hardware generations.”

But in Austin, Waymo’s vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children. An official with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) alleged that the vehicles had, in at least 19 instances, “illegally and dangerously” passed the district’s school buses while their red lights were flashing and their stop arms were extended rather than coming to complete stops, as the law requires.

In early December, Waymo even issued a federal recall related to the incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of them to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. According to federal filings, engineers with the self-driving vehicle company had “developed software changes to address the behavior” weeks before.

But even after the recall, the school-bus-passing incidents continued, according to school officials and a report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal safety watchdog that’s also investigating the situation.

Now, email and text messages between school officials and Waymo representatives, obtained by WIRED through a public records request, show the lengths that the Austin public school district and Waymo went to try to solve the problem. AISD even hosted a half-day “data collection” event in a school parking lot in mid-December, the documents show, with several employees pulling together school buses and stop-arm signals from across the fleet so the self-driving car company could collect information related to vehicles and their flashing lights.

Still, by mid-January, over a month later, the school district reported at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had taken place in Austin. “The data we collected from the beginning of the school year to the end of the semester shows that about 98 percent of people that receive one violation do not receive another,” an official with the school’s police department told the local NBC affiliate that month. “That tells us that the person is learning, but it does not appear the Waymo automated driver system is learning through its software updates, its recall, what have you, because we are still having violations.”

The situation raises questions about the self-driving technologies’ curious blind spots and the industry’s ability to compensate for them even after they’ve been spotted.

Self-driving software has long struggled with recognizing flashing emergency lights and road safety devices with long, thin arms, including gates and stop-arms, says Missy Cummings, who researches autonomous vehicles at George Mason University and served as a safety adviser to the NHTSA during the Biden administration. “If [the company] didn’t fix this a few years ago, the more they drive, the more it’s going to be a problem,” she says. “That’s exactly what’s happening here.”

Waymo did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District referred WIRED to the NTSB while the incidents are under investigation. A spokesperson for the NTSB declined to answer WIRED’s questions while its investigation continues.

Illegal Passing

By midwinter of 2025, AISD officials were frustrated. In one of the 19 incidents alleged by a lawyer for the district in a letter later released by federal road safety regulators, a Waymo passed a school bus letting off children “only moments after a student crossed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still in the road.”

“Alarmingly,” the lawyer wrote, five of the alleged incidents had occurred after Waymo had assured the district that it had updated its software to fix the problem. Federal regulators with the NHTSA had already launched a probe into the behavior. “Austin ISD is evaluating all potential legal remedies at its disposal and intends to take whatever action is necessary to protect the safety of its students, if required,” the lawyer warned.

After a relatively quiet few months, Amazon is bringing back another of its famously invented shopping holidays. The Amazon Spring Sale is in its third year, running now through March 31. Like during last year’s event, Amazon is promising customers thousands of deals across various daily, themed categories.

Of course, as we’ve seen in the past with Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, the true discounts on good products will likely be buried among junk deals on shoddy wares. The WIRED Reviews team tests gear all year long, and we fact-checked discounts on the products we actively recommend to our friends, family, and readers. We’ve highlighted the best deals from the Amazon Spring Sale below.

Be sure to check out our other deals coverage for vacuum discounts, smart bird feeders, and more.

Updated March 27, 2026: We’ve added additional deals, removed expired discounts, and checked for accuracy throughout.

WIRED Featured Deals:

Our audiophile reviewers test more headphones than anyone would deem sane or necessary. The Sony WH-1000XM6 are the pair they’ve declared the best wireless headphones of all, with “the best noise reduction on Earth.” You’ll also get 30 hours of battery life, multipoint Bluetooth pairing, folding ear cups and a travel case, sparkling and clear sound, and fabulous controls. They’re nearly perfect. When they’re not on sale for this price, they’re selling for the full MSRP. If you’re in the market, now is the time—or, if you’re not ready right now, wait until the next time they’re on sale for this price.

Last year, Garmin introduced a Pro version that incorporates the inReach’s satellite communications savvy. Not only does it cost at least $400 more than the Apple Watch Ultra and $200 more than the regular Fenix 8, but you also have to pay for the inReach subscription plan, which has several tiers and ranges from $8/month to $50/month depending on whether you want features like unlimited texting or sending photo messages.

What you get for this mind-boggling price is a sports watch that can do anything and everything. It has best-in-class battery life (every Fenix can last for weeks on a single charge, and up to a month with solar charging) and features like the depth sensor from Garmin’s Descent line, which means this watch works as a full-on dive computer for scuba and free diving. It has a microphone and speaker for basic voice commands (although no onboard cellular connectivity), the surprisingly useful built-in LED flashlight, and Garmin’s signature built-in topographic maps, 24/7 health monitoring, and tracking for over a hundred different activities.

I’ve taken the 51-mm version on pretty much every outdoor sport—snowboarding, trail running, mountain biking, and rock climbing. Every time I use it, its capabilities far outclass my own. I have irritated many a fellow climber by attempting to track route difficulty, duration, and falls while integrating my Body Battery metrics and so on. The danger is always that you’ll spend more time fiddling with your Garmin Fenix 8 than you do with your actual sport. I have the version with the sapphire glass face and the titanium bezel, and have smashed it into rock faces with nary a scratch. If you’re up for paying the price and want a good-looking watch that will last forever (I have friends who are still wearing their Fenix 5s and 6s, and honestly, they’re fine), this is the one to get.

Best Running Watch

The Garmin Forerunner series launched in the early 2000s and has become the quintessential runner’s watch. Like all Garmins, the Forerunner comes in a range of price points, each offering different features. Last year, Garmin released the Forerunner 570 ($550), a midrange model with no LED flashlight or onboard maps, and the Forerunner 970 ($750), which is the premium version. Before I go into detail about why the Forerunner 970 is the best option, I should also say that I have tested many previous Garmin Forerunners at various price points. If you’re not a triathlete, the older Forerunners are still worth considering, and the entry-level $200 Forerunner 165 is aimed explicitly at runners, instead of including triathletes as the more expensive models do.