That 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.
70 active on average at any given time per the article, which then lists total fleet size, as opposed to number of active cars on average, so it's not a fair comparison.
Although then it says they drive about 4m miles per week, which works out to 57,000 miles per active RA agent per week. A person driving ~25 mph on average 24/7 would do ~4000 miles in a week (and we can assume 24/7 here because they reported active agents, so we assume a team of ~3 people swapping out as driver in this hypothetical).
So that gives you a car/operator ratio of at least 14, and probably more since I bet the average speed is less than 25 mph.
I think anyone who goes for a drive in Los Angeles can attest that there are way mo than 70 cars active at any point. It's not unusual to see multiple Waymos at intersections.
Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.
Yeah that sentence struck me as very carefully worded. They also don't mention how often RA is needed or invoked. We'll encounter a lot of these autonomous systems (cars, robots, equipment) that escalate decisions and edge cases to human employees until they are trained enough that reliability goes up.
It's tricky to give a number for "RA required" that isn't wildly misleading, or contextualize one you're given. The common case for most AV RAs is confirmation of what the vehicle already has planned. Does that count as "required"?
An AV company can also tune how proactive vehicles are in reaching out to RA for confirmation, which is a balancing act between incident rate, stoppages, RA availability, and rider metrics. There's other ways to tune RA rate by also adjusting when and where the vehicles operate, which comes down to standard taxi fleet management tools (e.g. price and availability).
Waymo chooses a target that they're comfortable with and probably changes it every so often, but those numbers aren't the only possible targets and they're not necessarily well-correlated to the system's "true" capabilities (which are themselves difficult to understand).
The remote control claim never made sense anyway. "There is no computer driver, it's all fake, they're paying teams of drivers in India" only sounds plausible to anyone who's never encountered lag in a video game.
> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.
That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
>That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go.
Their claim is talking about latency, not bandwidth. What you're talking about is throughput, which can usually be solved by throwing more money at the problem.
You can stream video with milliseconds of latency, provided you have enough bandwidth for the video stream. Videoconferencing and cloud gaming both work on this principle.
That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.
They don’t do human in the loop at highway speeds.
Further the cars need to safely stop in an emergency without human intervention. There’s no way for the car to first notice a problem, then send a message to a call center which then routes to a human, and for that human to understand the situation, all fast enough to avoid a collision. Even 50ms is significant here let alone several seconds.
>That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.
Right, which is why the blog post is titled "Advice, not control ..." and goes to explain that they're not relying on the "remote assistance" people to make split second judgements.
Interestingly, the round-trip latency from the West Coast to continental Asia isn't nearly as long as I'd assumed (60ms to 250ms, depending on who's measuring).
Not nearly fast enough for real-time highway remote operation IMHO, but surprisingly fast. That's what I get for underestimating how fast light and electric fields can go.
I've got people in my social network who firmly believe that every car is, in fact, "driven by Indonesians". Apparently a widespread belief.
I've pointed out that these vehicles are quickly become more prevalent, here and (especially) in China. To which the counter is that there plenty of Indonesians to go around.
But 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.)
They’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”.
They are actually "no human in the loop" driverless most of the time.
If an airplane did not have a human inside the airplane and they only "dialed in" for extraordinary events, then yes I do think we'd call them pilotless.
Anyway Waymo, to my knowledge, doesn't use the terms "driverless" nor "autopilot." They claim that they are creating an artificial driver or that their cars are autonomous. There's something driving the car, it's just not a human driver, ergo it's not "driverless."
Autopilot in planes is much closer to cruise control than it is to a Waymo. This is of course the purported rationale behind Tesla's use of the name for their L2 feature. Both require a human operator available and monitoring at all times.
The aeronautic equivalent of Waymo is a fully autonomous UAV. A human might be needed to set high-level goals, but all of the actual flying/driving is done by the machine.
Autopilot in planes does not handle takeoff. Pilots still do that. Traditional autopilot was mostly just to keep the plane flying straight. Capabilities have improved over time, but it still doesn't fly the plane the way Waymo drives itself.
Pilots in a plane on autopilot are never out of the control authority of the plane (by which I mean: "ready to take over at a moment's notice"). Driverless AVs do drive without perpetual eyes-on oversight. The FAA would never allow that for commercial planes.
That 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?
This 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).
> 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.
I 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.)
I 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.
I 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.
That 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.
Fair. 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".
OT, 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?
It'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.
I 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.
I 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.
That 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.
70 active on average at any given time per the article, which then lists total fleet size, as opposed to number of active cars on average, so it's not a fair comparison.
Although then it says they drive about 4m miles per week, which works out to 57,000 miles per active RA agent per week. A person driving ~25 mph on average 24/7 would do ~4000 miles in a week (and we can assume 24/7 here because they reported active agents, so we assume a team of ~3 people swapping out as driver in this hypothetical).
So that gives you a car/operator ratio of at least 14, and probably more since I bet the average speed is less than 25 mph.
I think anyone who goes for a drive in Los Angeles can attest that there are way mo than 70 cars active at any point. It's not unusual to see multiple Waymos at intersections.
Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.
One point. This isn’t an article, it’s a blog.
Yeah that sentence struck me as very carefully worded. They also don't mention how often RA is needed or invoked. We'll encounter a lot of these autonomous systems (cars, robots, equipment) that escalate decisions and edge cases to human employees until they are trained enough that reliability goes up.
It's tricky to give a number for "RA required" that isn't wildly misleading, or contextualize one you're given. The common case for most AV RAs is confirmation of what the vehicle already has planned. Does that count as "required"?
An AV company can also tune how proactive vehicles are in reaching out to RA for confirmation, which is a balancing act between incident rate, stoppages, RA availability, and rider metrics. There's other ways to tune RA rate by also adjusting when and where the vehicles operate, which comes down to standard taxi fleet management tools (e.g. price and availability).
Waymo chooses a target that they're comfortable with and probably changes it every so often, but those numbers aren't the only possible targets and they're not necessarily well-correlated to the system's "true" capabilities (which are themselves difficult to understand).
The remote control claim never made sense anyway. "There is no computer driver, it's all fake, they're paying teams of drivers in India" only sounds plausible to anyone who's never encountered lag in a video game.
What is their claim about latency here?
> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.
That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
>That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
Their claim is talking about latency, not bandwidth. What you're talking about is throughput, which can usually be solved by throwing more money at the problem.
They had to throw something in about speed even though the gating factor is the RA's ability to interpret the situation and decide a course of action.
I wouldn't be surprised if actions required agreement between decisions by two independent RAs.
You can stream video with milliseconds of latency, provided you have enough bandwidth for the video stream. Videoconferencing and cloud gaming both work on this principle.
That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.
They don’t do human in the loop at highway speeds.
Further the cars need to safely stop in an emergency without human intervention. There’s no way for the car to first notice a problem, then send a message to a call center which then routes to a human, and for that human to understand the situation, all fast enough to avoid a collision. Even 50ms is significant here let alone several seconds.
>That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.
Right, which is why the blog post is titled "Advice, not control ..." and goes to explain that they're not relying on the "remote assistance" people to make split second judgements.
They could get rid of that latency by hiring Americans.
Any American within a good distance of a large city to mitigate latency issues can make about 4-5x driving for Uber or delivering food.
And latency to small towns in the middle of nowhere is not significantly better than latency to Philippines.
You can expect something in the ballpark of 70ms in both cases.
Plenty of people believe since Covid is a virus, just like software viruses it was being transmitted by 5G base stations.
I've mentioned to a friend that humans are monkeys, but which are capable of building an Internet. But maybe plenty of us are closer to monkeys...
Interestingly, the round-trip latency from the West Coast to continental Asia isn't nearly as long as I'd assumed (60ms to 250ms, depending on who's measuring).
Not nearly fast enough for real-time highway remote operation IMHO, but surprisingly fast. That's what I get for underestimating how fast light and electric fields can go.
I've got people in my social network who firmly believe that every car is, in fact, "driven by Indonesians". Apparently a widespread belief.
I've pointed out that these vehicles are quickly become more prevalent, here and (especially) in China. To which the counter is that there plenty of Indonesians to go around.
After stunt Amazon pulled off, with its shop, being skeptical is warranted.
I know Google and Amazon aren't the same company, but their incentives are.
70 on-duty, that probably translates to 200-300 people on staff.
But 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.)
I wish they included how many active cars they have at any one time so we could make a proper comparison.
They’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”.
They are actually "no human in the loop" driverless most of the time.
If an airplane did not have a human inside the airplane and they only "dialed in" for extraordinary events, then yes I do think we'd call them pilotless.
Anyway Waymo, to my knowledge, doesn't use the terms "driverless" nor "autopilot." They claim that they are creating an artificial driver or that their cars are autonomous. There's something driving the car, it's just not a human driver, ergo it's not "driverless."
Autopilot in planes is much closer to cruise control than it is to a Waymo. This is of course the purported rationale behind Tesla's use of the name for their L2 feature. Both require a human operator available and monitoring at all times.
The aeronautic equivalent of Waymo is a fully autonomous UAV. A human might be needed to set high-level goals, but all of the actual flying/driving is done by the machine.
Autopilot in planes does not handle takeoff. Pilots still do that. Traditional autopilot was mostly just to keep the plane flying straight. Capabilities have improved over time, but it still doesn't fly the plane the way Waymo drives itself.
Some planes can land automatically without the pilot's input: https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reporte...
Takeoff is probably easier to automate than an emergency landing.
787s can both takeoff and land on autopilot. They can't handle taxiing to and from the gate, however.
Pilots in a plane on autopilot are never out of the control authority of the plane (by which I mean: "ready to take over at a moment's notice"). Driverless AVs do drive without perpetual eyes-on oversight. The FAA would never allow that for commercial planes.
Style nit: weird that it's in a modal dialog, unlike their other blog posts. Also, it doesn't come up when searching their blog.
It'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.
I instinctively closed it as a cookie popup, and then wondered where the article was.
That 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?
It's also a peeve of mine that their "blog" has no feed.
Rather inelegant.
Welcome to the savage future.
This 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).
> 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.
I 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.)
I 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-r...
I 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.
That 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.
Fair. 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".
OT, 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?
It'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.
The fact that this took SO LONG to come out after their PR crisis on this topic is more problematic than the claims themselves
I 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.
You would prefer they rush something out that's half baked to satisfy your impatience?
I 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.