A few days ago, Waymo’s head of safety, Mauricio Peña, was invited to a hearing before the US Congress, where he was questioned about the origin of the vehicle platforms themselves and how exactly Waymo’s remote assistance works.
Peña said that Waymo uses remote assistants who are based both in the US and in other countries such as the Philippines. This statement was interpreted by the public to mean that Waymo’s vehicles are controlled remotely by human drivers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First of all, a distinction must be made between teleoperation and teleassistance. While Waymo robotaxis are fully autonomous, there are always situations that are unclear or completely new and that Waymo has not yet encountered, despite having driven 200 million kilometers without a driver. Here is an example of a broken fire hydrant spraying water into the air, causing the Waymo to hesitate.
In such a situation, a person must provide assistance, but how this is done makes all the difference. There are two concepts here: teleoperation and teleassistance/teleguidance.
TeleOperation
In teleoperation, human operators sit in an operations center in front of a driving console that allows them to take control of a vehicle remotely and steer it out of a situation. On the one hand, there are models such as those targeted by Qibus, Vay, and Phantom Auto, in which the vehicles are controlled remotely throughout the entire journey. At no point does the car drive autonomously.
In another model, a teleoperator only takes control of an autonomous vehicle when it encounters a situation that cannot be handled by the AI software. Like the broken fire hydrant, for example. The startup Voyage had such a solution in its portfolio, but the company no longer exists.
TeleOperators must be familiar with traffic regulations and local conditions. Even though foreigners can drive in the US with a driver’s license from another country—e.g., as a tourist or on a business trip—(some) companies still take the trouble to train their TeleOperators in US traffic regulations and special features.
TeleAssist / TeleGuidance
TeleAssist (also known as TeleGuidance) is, to borrow a comparison from the AI chatbot scene, prompt-to-drive. In such a marginal scenario, where either the robot taxi itself, the passengers, or an emergency responder has notified the operations center, a teleassistant dials into the car, views the current situation through the cameras and sensors and the stored video data, talks to emergency responders and passengers, and then recommends a suitable course of action to the robot taxi through questions and answers. An example could be that construction cones do not clearly indicate the lane to be driven in, or that the vehicle is instructed to drive through the water fountain without any problems when there is a broken fire hydrant. And that is exactly what Waymo (or Zoox with TeleGuidance) uses.
With TeleAssist, the robot taxi is not controlled in any way from an operations center via a steering wheel or similar device, but rather helpful instructions are given to the vehicle to help it cope with an unknown or difficult-to-recognize situation. This means that it is actually irrelevant whether the teleassistance is located in the US or abroad.
Legal Regulations
California and other states where robot taxi fleets are already in operation require operators to have a plan for how driverless vehicles will handle such situations. The law stipulates that the vehicles must be able to receive assistance from humans in an operations center who are capable of maneuvering the vehicle out of such situations. The concepts involved are teleassistance/teleguidance and teleoperation. The possibility that a human driver can take over the vehicle on site within a certain period of time must also be demonstrated. However, a period of 10 or 20 minutes is not sufficient in normal cases; it must be possible to respond as quickly as possible.
In other words, Waymo and other robot taxi companies must comply with legal regulations and be able to demonstrate their concept for teleassistance/teleguidance or teleoperation to the licensing authority. So it is nothing new that Waymo also has such a department. Waymo has addressed this assistance several times in the past. For example, in a 2024 article entitled “Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles.“
Fleet response and the Waymo Driver primarily communicate through questions and answers. For example, suppose a Waymo AV approaches a construction site with an atypical cone configuration indicating a lane shift or close. In that case, the Waymo Driver might contact a fleet response agent to confirm which lane the cones intend to close.
Machine Learning
It should not be forgotten that with every such intervention or assistance by teleoperators/teleassistants, the data from these moments is fed into the machine learning system and the system is trained accordingly. This enables the vehicles in the robot taxi fleet to master more and more of these rarely occurring driving scenarios over time.
Conclusion
No, Waymos are not remote-controlled. They are not controlled by teleoperators, but are assisted by teleassistants should they encounter a rare traffic scenario. The rest of the time, they drive completely autonomously. I can say from my own experience how often interventions occur: in my more than 300 driverless trips with autonomous cars from a dozen manufacturers, including 140+ with Waymos, I have experienced perhaps three brief interventions. And that was some time ago, because they are becoming increasingly rare.
The statement that Waymo vehicles are remote-controlled and therefore not autonomous is therefore incorrect. And Waymo’s head of safety said nothing else at the hearing before the US Congress. He spoke of teleassistants, and I have explained in detail what they do in this article.
This article was also published in German.
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