During mid-April’s local downpours, self-driving taxi company Waymo temporarily suspended services in San Antonio after floodwaters swept away one of its vehicles. Days earlier, local TV stations aired footage of another Waymo gliding the wrong way through a pickup lane in front of an Alamo Heights elementary school. And up the road in Austin, a driverless car stopped in the middle of a roadway last month, briefly blocking an ambulance responding to a mass shooting. All three incidents occurred mere weeks after Silicon Valley-based Waymo’s February launch in the Alamo City. Welcome to the driverless future, Texas. For a company that sells the future as frictionless, Waymo’s present keeps colliding — sometimes literally — with the messy unpredictability of real-world streets. “If Waymo or any other company is going to operate autonomous vehicles on public roads, they should be able to demonstrate that those vehicles can follow the law,” said Cooper Lohr, senior policy analyst for transportation safety at Consumer Reports. “We need to have some kind of accountability in place if companies are going to roll out this technology.” To Lohr’s point, the National Transportation Safety Board early this year revealed it opened an investigation into Waymo cars passing and failing to yield to school buses after a series of incidents in Austin. And in February, one of the firm’s vehicles struck a child near her elementary school in Santa Monica, California. None of the incidents have resulted in catastrophic injury. The schoolgirl, who reportedly darted from behind another car, only suffered minor injuries. Even so, the incidents have shaken public confidence in a technology that transportation experts maintain will bring us safer roads. They also raise questions about whether Texas and the rest of the nation are providing adequate oversight to the nascent technology. Waymo officials declined to