5 ms·
Advice, not control: the role of Remote Assistance in Waymo's operations
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- socalgal2 9mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Flux159 9mo agoThis seems like it’s in response to the congressional testimony last week to clarify some things about their remote assistance systems. It’s interesting that they only have 70 people for this - I can understand the outside the US ones for nighttime assistance and they need to be able to scale for other countries too in the future. What I’m still wondering is what is limiting the scaling for Waymo - just cars or also the sensor systems? They’ve had their new test vehicles in SF for a while but I still think that most customers only get their Jaguars right now (and still limited on highway driving to specific customers in the Bay Area).
- xnx 9mo ago> What I’m still wondering is what is limiting the scaling for Waymo I'm also very curious about this. Probably a mix of many things: training the driver to handle tricky conditions better (e.g. flooded roads), getting more Ohai vehicles imported and configured, configuring the backlog of Jaguar iPace and trucking them out to new markets, mapping roads and non-customer testing in new markets, getting regulatory approval/cooperation in other market (e.g. DC), finding depot space, hiring maintenance team, etc.
- jefftk 9mo agoThat it's 70 remote assistance people for 3,000 cars is pretty good counter-evidence to the "they're not driverless, they're remote controlled" claims.
- jeffbee 9mo ago70 on-duty, that probably translates to 200-300 people on staff.
- jefftk 9mo agoI wish they included how many active cars they have at any one time so we could make a proper comparison.
- minwcnt5 9mo agoYou can probably infer the average number of active cars from trips and utilization metrics, which are out there (at least for California I believe they report this). E.g. 450,000 trips/week * 15 min/trip / 0.56 loaded:empty miles / (24760) ~= 1200.
- ameliaquining 9mo agoBut presumably most of the 3,000 cars are on the road at any given time? In which case the point stands, namely, that their remote operations people can't be the ones driving the cars because there aren't enough of them on duty at any given time; therefore, the cars really do drive themselves. (Which I would have thought was never in doubt, but I suppose some people are really determined to be skeptics.)
- altairprime 9mo agoThey’re not “no human in the loop” driverless. They’re just on autopilot, same as any airliner. We don’t call planes that takeoff and land themselves “pilotless”, because there’s humans in the loop. Waymo must be rather defensive about being called out for merely having autopilot cars, which is weird because that’s rather miraculous in historical terms — but certainly the generic term “autopilot” is a much less distinctive claim to success than “driverless”.
- skybrian 9mo agoStyle nit: weird that it's in a modal dialog, unlike their other blog posts. Also, it doesn't come up when searching their blog.
- ameliaquining 9mo agoThat doesn't seem to be unique to this blog post, I got the same thing clicking the other ones linked at the bottom of the page. I see the word "short" in the URL, maybe they have a separate category of "shortform" posts and the modal is for those?
- esafak 9mo agoRather inelegant.
- OhMeadhbh 9mo agoWelcome to the savage future.
- xnx 9mo agoIt's also a peeve of mine that their "blog" has no feed.
- dddgghhbbfblk 9mo agoIt's not a nit at all. This is some of the worst web design from a tech company that I've seen in a long time.
- treesknees 9mo agoI instinctively closed it as a cookie popup, and then wondered where the article was.
- OhMeadhbh 9mo agoI would be very interested to see how the Waymo cars fail when RA workers aren't available. (I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail. It should then be a simple matter to track down the cause. We can certainly afford to be out of communication for the short time it will take to replace it.)
- jgauth 9mo agoI believe we already saw something like this happen with the PG&E power outage in San Francisco in December. The waymo post-mortem [1] describes the outage causing a backlog of RA requests, which seems to have resulted in cars blocking roads an intersections. I would imagine they've improved the system after that incident, however. [1] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-real-world https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r...
- mikepurvis 9mo agoI would expect the assistance is typically around environmental hazards, like is it safe to drive in this construction zone. Basically, not the kind of hardware faults that would be resolved by just sending in another car.
- OhMeadhbh 9mo agoThat seems to be the example Waymo gives as something that remote drivers help the cars with, but it doesn't go on to say that's typical or the only thing they help the cars with.
- mikepurvis 9mo agoFair. On typing the comment I stopped for a moment to think about other potential examples but I don't know if it's really helpful to speculate. And honestly I'm also just not sure what you could be uncertain about on the road where it's time insensitive enough that pulling over and putting on the four ways is a valid interim option. I was just in SF last week and there was an intersection where a cop was directing traffic even though the stoplights were still operating overhead. Multiple waymos correctly obeyed the cop, and I assumed that's just something they can do visually, but it might also be a case where they would have a remote supervisor watching the video feed and affirming "yes, that's your signal to make the left turn you want to make" or "no, you can't go that way, turn right instead".
- briandoll 9mo agoThe fact that this took SO LONG to come out after their PR crisis on this topic is more problematic than the claims themselves
- wmf 9mo agoI suspect the haters have constructed a lose-lose situation where if Waymo says nothing "it's a conspiracy" but if they say anything "it's not self driving". Ultimately Waymo just has to wait them out.
- fragmede 9mo agoYou would prefer they rush something out that's half baked to satisfy your impatience?
- spankalee 9mo agoOT, but why in the world would you have your blog posts pop up in a little modal dialog in the middle of the screen and force readers to scroll more than they have to?
- xnx 9mo agoIt's annoying, but they divide their blog posts into big public-relation type articles at the top of the page, and minor/informational ones at the bottom.
- harry8 9mo agoHow does that choice effect archive? "This is different, remember they said... ...but I can't find it."
- halapro 9mo agoAbsolute laziness by everyone involved. If you use modals, you're a bad designer.
- godelski 9mo agoI really hate that all these companies play smoke and mirrors. Honestly, I don't see a major problem with companies using remote assistance in the transition to fully autonomous systems (jumping straight to autonomous seems insanely dangerous!), under the condition that it is disclosed and the users/public are aware. I don't see how anything short of just is anything but fraud. To be clear, I think Waymo meets my bar. They appear to be working mostly autonomously and are clear about having assistance. They seem to have stated that from the very start and has been the response to many public questions. But we waste so much time and money because of that fraud. It breeds distrust in our society and frankly I just don't understand why it's legal or fines are so small. Fraud kills legitimate businesses. It kills those playing fair. It makes people doubt those that do play fair so it just reinforces more fraud.
- halapro 9mo agoI'm a bit confused about what's happening. Why does it matter if it's remote controlled? It can be possessed by spirits for all I care, as long as I get to the destination. The only interested parties are the investors, not the public/users.
- godelski 9mo agoIt matters if you tell everybody it isn't remote controlled but it is. Think Amazon Go
- ewuhic 9mo ago[flagged]
- LorenPechtel 9mo agoWhy is anyone even bothered by this?? Waymo is level 4 self drive. Level 4 is required to autonomously handle all situations it might encounter (they are geofenced, so outside the geofence is not something it's expected to encounter) safely. That does not preclude stopping and calling for help, it just requires that it be able to safely stop itself. Why do I feel like this whole bit is being stirred up by Tesla to distract from the fact that they aren't making it at level 4?