Robotaxis Brake Hard and the Test Drivers Pay With Their Backs: Over 24 Injuries, One Man 175 Days Off Work

While robotaxis spread across American cities as proof the future has arrived, somebody is paying the bill with their own back. Test drivers for Waymo and Zoox sustained more than twenty-four injuries in 2024 and 2025 - strains, pulled muscles, neck injuries - all caused by sudden braking or abrupt swerving by the autonomous software. The data was reported to the American workplace safety agency, OSHA.

Transdev, the company that employs Waymo's test drivers, reported 16 injuries across three cities. Zoox reported eight. In seven of those eight, sudden braking or a complete system shutdown is explicitly mentioned.

The numbers grow along with the fleet

In 2024 Transdev reported five injuries to Waymo drivers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix. In 2025 the figure jumped to 11 in the same three cities, and almost all of them came from sudden braking. It is no coincidence: Waymo's commercial fleet grew from over 1,500 vehicles in May 2025 to over 3,500 today.

The details in the reports are what tell the story. One driver reported that the car "suddenly went backwards" while parking itself and "turned the steering wheel", catching his left arm and bending it "to the point where he heard a crack in the joint". That man was off work for more than two months.

In September 2025, a test driver in Phoenix was off work for 157 days after the vehicle performed "excessive braking with no obstacle whatsoever". The only report from 2025 that offers any reason at all is from August in Los Angeles - "some children were playing in the roadway". The vehicle stopped so hard the worker was absent for 175 days.

"Brake slams"

Two current and three former Zoox associates said the test vehicles - converted Toyota Highlander SUVs - were still braking hard in July. Three of them said workers are still getting injured. Internally they call these events "brake slams" and they can happen several times in a single driving shift, sometimes in the same spot.

The most frightening is what they internally call a "nogo" - a complete shutdown of the system. "You can be driving at 72 kilometres an hour and the car does a nogo, and suddenly it throws you forward in the middle of the street, in traffic, and you have to be able to take control immediately," one of them recounts.

Four of the injuries Zoox reported in 2025 happened after the company carried out a vehicle recall precisely to resolve a year-long federal investigation into their tendency to brake unexpectedly. Zoox maintains the recall covered a very narrowly defined behaviour and that the later cases have nothing to do with that fix.

The companies' responses are worth reading. Zoox says hard braking is sometimes unavoidable and that the injuries are a small percentage of millions of kilometres driven. Waymo declined to answer questions but sent a statement: "The safety of our passengers, of other road users and of our team is of the utmost importance." Transdev declined to comment at all.

There is one more detail that closes the logic. When Zoox runs its purpose-built robotaxis - the ones with no steering wheel and no pedals - there is no employee inside. If hard braking happens there and somebody is injured, it ends up in no OSHA report at all, because a passenger is not a worker. So the figures we are reading today come from the phase where there is still a human in the driver's seat. What gets reported when that human is gone?