When KitKat, a well-known Mission District corner-store cat, ran under the wheel of a Waymo robotaxi and met his demise last fall, it made national headlines. His death also became a rallying point against the driverless cars and their ever-growing presence on San Francisco streets.
But if bystanders hadn’t witnessed the scene, the world might have never known. Waymo reports some of its traffic incidents to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, but a gap in the rules — wide enough to drive a fleet of Waymos through — makes the information haphazard, at best.
The outcry comes as Waymo, in San Francisco and beyond, has built an image and reputation for caution and safety — not to mention the novelty of a driverless ride that’s made the chunky white Jaguars a big tourist draw.
In a recent UC Berkeley survey, 60 percent of respondents felt safe around driverless cars. Parents now trust Waymo to ferry their kids, and it recently got permission for limited passenger service to San Francisco International Airport.
On Market Street, Mayor Daniel Lurie says they’re needed to boost moribund business along parts of the thoroughfare. Waymo itself announced last fall it was close to turning a profit in SF.
The company, a subsidiary of Google’s parent Alphabet, offers rosy safety data about its service. But having a fuller picture of Waymo’s record is important.
Waymo hasn’t filed a DMV report about KitKat, and there are even more serious incidents that it hasn’t reported. On Jan. 19, 2025, Waymo was involved in a six-car pileup in South of Market that left one man and his dog dead. The deadly crash made the news, but it’s not in Waymo’s DMV reports.
On Feb. 16, 2025, a bicyclist was injured in a SoMa collision allegedly involving two Waymos, one of which had pulled over in the bike lane, according to the bicyclist’s lawsuit. Press reports came out only after the lawsuit was filed in June.
And last Nov. 30, a Waymo hit a dog in the Western Addition. Again, if not for social media and news reports, it would have gone unnoticed.
It’s not clear if Waymo robotaxis were at fault in any of these incidents. But it’s even more unclear what exactly Waymo has to report to the DMV.
The absence of Waymo’s reporting is all the more notable — and downright odd — because the company has self-reported incidents like, say, striking a raccoon on Highway 280 or running over a vacuum cleaner.
The rules are so tangled, it’s hard to know if Waymo is following them or not. With state lawmakers threatening legislation, DMV began last year to rewrite the rules, due in the first half of 2026.
There is a layer of accountability at the federal level. The National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA) requires more thorough self-reporting. KitKat, the Western Addition dog, and the doored cyclist are all in its database. NHTSA is also investigating Waymo hitting a child in a school zone in Santa Monica last month.
But as the epicenter of robotaxi growth, California believes it needs its own system of accountability. When pressing for changes last year, state lawmakers noted that the Trump administration has already wiped out data in other areas such as climate science. There’s no guarantee the NHTSA database will remain reliable — or remain in existence.
When to report… or not
California has regulated autonomous vehicles for more than a decade. The DMV is the lead agency, and its rules are meant to govern the safety of all road users: drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and bicyclists.
Current DMV regulations, approved in 2014 and 2018, say robotaxi companies must report incidents in only two cases: during testing and when “disengagements” happen — that is, when a human driver manually takes over the car. Crashes during testing must be reported within 10 days; disengagements must be reported annually.
The DMV gave Waymo the all-clear to drive on SF roads without a human driver in September 2021. Regular commercial service in the city began in 2023. By the rules, Waymo doesn’t seem required to report much, if anything.
Yet it does. The confusion could stem from Waymo driving under three different permits, according to the DMV: one for testing with a driver, one for testing without a driver, and one for operating in full AV mode. It’s possible that Waymo is only filing reports for some, not all, of these scenarios. But the DMV declined to clarify how and when Waymo is operating in San Francisco under each permit, and it referred questions to Waymo.
When The Frisc examined Waymo’s DMV reports from 2024 and 2025 — representing nearly all its commercial service in SF — we found puzzling examples of discrepancies between what Waymo reports and what it doesn’t.
While it didn’t file a report about KitKat or the Western Addition dog (the dog’s owners later put it down), Waymo did report one of its cars hitting a raccoon on Highway 280 in SF during a “disengagement” with a human at the wheel. It’s unclear if the driver’s presence indicates the car was in testing mode.
Waymo also reported that a car in self-driving mode ran over a vacuum cleaner on Bayshore Boulevard. Both incidents happened in the Bayview, and DMV records show Waymo was allowed to operate without a driver in these areas at the time of the collisions.
The inconsistency extends to crashes with human injuries. Waymo has reported involvement in some multi-car collisions in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but not the six-car SoMa crash on Jan. 19, 2025, that killed an occupant of one of the other cars and damaged the Waymo.
Another incident that Waymo didn’t report to the DMV was the dooring of bicyclist Jenifer Hanki on Feb. 16, 2025 in San Francisco. She is suing Waymo in San Francisco Superior Court, claiming she was riding in a 7th Street bike lane when passengers in a Waymo, which had pulled over to the curb in a No Parking-Tow Away zone, opened the left rear door into the bike lane. Hanki ran into the door and was thrown from her bike into a second Waymo that had angled into the bike lane to park. She landed in the street with what the lawsuit called “severe injuries” and went to the hospital in an ambulance.
Separate from the DMV, San Francisco has an injury collision database. The Frisc found a report of the Hanki incident there, but it neither indicates what kind of car was involved nor mentions a second car.
Hanki’s lawyer Michael Stephenson told The Frisc that he’s currently negotiating over what information from Waymo can be released in court — and what’s a trade secret.
Making contact
The Frisc asked the DMV about these incidents. A spokesperson responded via email that the agency “meets regularly” with companies to review incidents, understand the causes, and determine whether they’ve taken steps to prevent future occurrences.
Regarding KitKat and the dog, a DMV spokesperson said that Waymo “was not required to file a crash report under current California regulations” and that the agency took no action in these matters. Regarding Hanki’s crash and the multicar SoMa crash, the DMV referred The Frisc to Waymo.
Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina said that “DMV crash reporting is limited to collisions that occur during testing operations,” and added that most of Waymo’s driving in California falls under “commercial deployment” rather than testing. She also referred to Waymo’s safety reporting hub.
When Waymo does file reports, the actual circumstances can be hard to parse, and certain phrases are conspicuously absent. Vehicles and objects don’t collide or crash. They only “make contact with” each other.
In a report about a July 2024 incident in SF, Waymo reported that a bicyclist passed the front of its stationary vehicle, slowed down, dismounted, “reached out a hand and made contact with the front passenger side, backed the bicycle up slightly, dropped the bicycle, then fell to the ground.”
The company stated it was reporting this incident because “a media report included an allegation of a crash,” and because the rider reported being injured. (The Chronicle wrote about it two months later.)
Waymo boasts that it has driven 127 million miles without a driver in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin. According to its own data, these vehicles have been involved in 90 percent fewer severe injury collisions than human drivers in those cities.
Two leading researchers call these conclusions into question.
George Mason University professor Missy Cummings is a former NHTSA senior advisor and studies interactions between humans and self-driving vehicles. She says Waymo’s self-comparison to human driving is premature and that it’s not enough to compare millions of miles of city driving to scant freeway driving.
Cummings published a paper in November that analyzed California DMV and NHTSA reports from Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox. She told The Frisc her analysis shows that “in California, autonomous vehicles [without drivers] are on par with ride share drivers, who are having crashes six times more than regular human drivers.”
However, Cummings’ research only covered December 2021 to November 2023, ending around the time that Waymo began full commercial service in SF, with major expansion since then.
Carnegie Mellon University professor emerita Phillip Koopman, author of the Autonomous System Safety Substack, says Waymo’s 127 million miles aren’t enough. “It’s 300 million [miles] with zero fatalities that gives you confidence that you’re at least as good as human drivers,” Koopman told The Frisc in response to Waymo’s September report. “We don’t have statistically valid proof that they will reduce fatalities — nobody has that data and Waymo doesn’t have that data.”
Tickets for Waymo?
When Waymo and its erstwhile rival Cruise rolled out service in August 2023, they blundered into dozens of high-profile incidents: interfering with emergency vehicles, causing gridlock with software glitches, late-night honking parties, and getting into sticky situations.
The DMV pulled Cruise’s license after one of its vehicles severely injured a pedestrian who landed in its path after being hit by another car. The General Motors subsidiary was fined $500,000 for filing a false report about the incident and later went defunct. (The pedestrian received a sizable settlement from GM in May 2024.)
California legislators have been trying since 2024 to boost oversight and give cities more control over the vehicles — or even the right to ban them.
But a bill from SF-based Assemblymember Matt Haney that made it to the governor’s desk last year received Newsom’s veto — not his signature. Newsom said he wanted to give the DMV a chance to revise its regulations.
Those revisions, due this spring, are in progress, and according to the DMV will require all AV companies to report incidents no matter their status. Deadlines to file reports will be tighter too; in the case of bodily injury or fatality, within 24 hours.
The new rules will align more closely with NHTSA regulations. They will also go beyond the federal threshold in at least one area. They are supposed to require Waymo and its competitors to report “phantom braking” — when robotaxis perceive an object in the road that doesn’t actually exist, brake quickly, and cause rear-end collisions. These incidents have been common for Tesla vehicles when drivers use enhanced cruise control on highways at certain speeds.
Finally, as Waymo likes to compare its driving record to that of human drivers, it will also receive something humans already deal with — traffic citations. Infractions will need to be reported to the DMV within 72 hours. Presently, autonomous vehicles can’t get tickets for moving violations. A state law that takes effect July 1 will make ticketing easier; it requires driverless cars to let law enforcement officers communicate with remote operators.
A DMV spokesperson said that for each ticket, it would meet with the company “to understand any corrective actions taken to address the incident.” The agency also underscored that it has “the authority to restrict, suspend, or revoke” a company’s operating permit.
(No word yet whether a robotaxi can opt to go to traffic school.)
Consumer Watchdog tech and privacy advocate Justin Kloczko believes the DMV’s proposed revisions are better than what’s in place now. But he is concerned that the state isn’t imposing a metric for what is safe — and what isn’t. “There are no thresholds or standards for performance,” he said.
In last fall’s UC Berkeley survey of San Franciscans, less than a third of the 811 participants wanted more transparency in AV safety data and real-world testing. Then again, the survey happened before KitKat’s death, and before Waymo’s meltdown during SF’s Dec. 20 power outages that stoked more calls for accountability.
It’s hard to say if the question would poll higher if asked today. But with new rules, San Franciscans can at least hope Waymo and other robotaxi companies will explain themselves better when these kinds of incidents occur.