Advice, not control: the role of Remote Assistance in Waymo's operations

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.)

The amount of corporate bootlicking and mental gymnastics in comments is staggering.

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.

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The fact that this took SO LONG to come out after their PR crisis on this topic is more problematic than the claims themselves