alt Hacker NewsThat 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.
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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.
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.
70 on-duty, that probably translates to 200-300 people on staff.
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”.
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.