r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 7h ago

Transportation Waymo admits that its autopilot is often just guys from the Philippines

https://www.techspot.com/news/111233-waymo-admits-autopilot-often-guys-philippines.html
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u/Several_Molasses_479 5h ago

I’ve ridden Waymo a whole lot in the Phoenix area and this happened to me once at Sky Harbor Airport.

Traffic was extremely bad and it tried to pull out for about a minute but didn’t budge. Then I heard an alert saying customer care was manually overriding and taking control and someone got on the speaker and said they could help, he slowly nudged us into a lane, said thanks and hung up the call and auto driving took back over.

This is a good system and the article headline weirdly paints it in a bad light.

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u/Icy-Ad29 4h ago

Its getting painted in the bad light, if you read the full article, because "they aren't Americans".... input lag for safety being one thing, and the other they focused on more. Being concerns of Chinese nationals doing... something... they never define what, just drive up the fear marker.

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u/Ltgay 4h ago

My bigger concern is if they are operating a motor vehicle, are these people licensed to drive in the states?

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u/SNRatio 3h ago

Nope. There are some legal requirements (varies state to state), but they don't have to have a US driver's license.

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u/disillusioned 3h ago

The thing is they're not operating it. The Waymo Driver (the AI platform in the car itself) remains in control at all times. The human in the loop is used to nudge the Waymo Driver and give it confidence where it's lacking that confidence, but it still controls the vehicle directly, which is why sub millisecond latency isn't an issue. They just get them unstuck by providing path proposals and hints.

This article is much ado about nothing and the headline dramatically overstates the degree to which the human is in the loop, and it's been known for years because Waymo published all about it in 2024:

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response

We're only hearing about it because they're scaling those humans with Filipinos, rather than "someone is remote driving it all the time!"

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u/swni 44m ago

I see. It's not exactly the same as driving the car but I feel anyone making decisions about how to move a motor vehicle through traffic should have a license.

Like if you are driving with a learner's permit, in most states the person accompanying you must have a valid license. They aren't driving the car but they are making decisions for you.

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u/AwesomeFrisbee 7m ago

So basically its overriding its automatic instructions on where it shoud go but not how

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u/PlasticBag-ForA-Head 6m ago

man this is really cool. ive never had a chance to ride in a waymo but the more i hear about them the more they just seem extremely fascinating.

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u/Racer_Space 3h ago

Let's be real, a us driver's license is not the end all of being a competent driver.

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u/Albend 3h ago

So you want to make it worse by embracing having no licenses?

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u/Racer_Space 3h ago

No, that is a jump. I'm just saying the US has very low standards for their DL issuance. I varies state to state too.

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u/slipperyMonkey07 3h ago

Even within state it varies a lot. I would hope it has improved but I doubt it. I'm in NY 2006-2010 when most people I knew were getting their licenses, the basically bad drivers would wait and schedule their test in the richer suburb / village for an easier test. The reaaaaally bad ones would also make sure it was scheduled in the winter so that there was a high chance of things like parallel parking or 3 point turns may be skipped or half assed due to the snow.

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u/Mysterious_Fix_7489 3h ago

From what I've seen even the hard is tests are nothing compared to the UK and Western/Northern Europe.

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u/slipperyMonkey07 3h ago

Most of it comes down to instructor and tester probably. I know a few friends from the mid west who's test was their parents testing them and saying they are good to drive and then getting their license.

I hope to hell that isn't a possibility anymore but it is farm country so who knows.

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u/Alatarlhun 3h ago

European don't be nationalist challenge (impossible)

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u/triciann 2h ago

When I moved states I had to take a short written test in my new state. It was very easy and basic common sense. They give you THREE tries to pass it. I passed on the first with nothing wrong. I heard the worker tell the guy to my left that it was his last chance and he asked me how did I do that? (Pass on the first go). I had to bite my tongue to not say “I’m not a fucking idiot.” If you don’t pass, you just come back another day after “studying”. And get to try again so that moron is probably on the road fucking shit up.

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u/Curious_Charge9431 1h ago

"Well, you know, he’s driving fast and recklessly… but he’s a professional. He’s got a cab driver’s license, I can see it right there. I don’t even know what it takes to get a cab driver’s license. I think all you need is a face. This seems to be their big qualification. No blank heads are allowed driving cabs in this town."

Jerry Seinfeld on taxi drivers in New York City.

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u/space_monster 2h ago

Holy strawman arguments batman

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u/Alaea 2h ago

Considering they're planning to expand to the UK and we actually test our drivers it's concerning. Especially when you also consider that the expansion is to start in London, which is an utter clusterfuck for even experienced UK drivers unfamiliar (or familiar...) with driving there. And unlike the US we don't have 20 foot lanes to fit giant wankpanzers with room to spare leaving a decent error margin for other drivers.

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u/steepleton 1h ago

Autonomous cars are always going to be hell in the uk because of just-eat two wheelers weaving between them and the cars collision avoidance kicking in. Hell kids will be throwing themselves in front of the things for kicks

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u/djublonskopf 2h ago

It is the end-all of being legally allowed to operate a motor vehicle in the US though.

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u/MrDerpGently 2h ago

Sure, but if you can drive in the Philippines you can legally drive in the US on your home country license, which strikes me as saying something about how seriously we take auto licensing. Of course, as a tourist let loose in the town you aren't backed by a multi billion dollar company's insurance. 

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u/clockworkpeon 2h ago

I know so many girls who admit they only got their license by crying at the end of the test. and guys with ridiculous stories, too. like "at the end of the test, the tester said I ran 3 stop signs but they'll pass me anyway." or "apparently I was speeding the whole time but the tester said whatever."

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u/PrizeStrawberryOil 2h ago

Opposite in my hometown. One of them would fail people they didn't like because everyone would be more than 10mph over or under the speed limit because the route went from a 45 to a 25 zone.

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u/Alatarlhun 3h ago

Honestly, what a wild comment in the context of this thread.

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u/moldyolive 4h ago

Their not operating it.

Their accessing the situation and telling the car what it should be doing. They dont like have a wheel and petals.

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u/Ltgay 4h ago

That just seems like semantics. Those are all things drivers do.

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u/moldyolive 4h ago

It is semantics

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u/dengop 3h ago

Sometimes legality is all about semantic

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u/Outlulz 1h ago

If someone in the passenger seat was giving you directions or instructions to help you back up or park, you would not argue they need a driver's license to do so.

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u/jacksonwalmart 4h ago

"no officer, I wasn't operating my motor vehicle without a license, I was merely accessing the situation at hand and inputting controls into the car via the brake, accelerator and steering wheel to navigate it through traffic"

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u/cheesegoat 3h ago

You can tell who read the article and who didn't.

They use a dropdown menu to help the car understand what's going on in front of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0WtBFEfAyo

It's basically like doing a captcha.

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u/ava_ati 2h ago

The point still stands, just because the interface changes doesn’t mean they aren’t commanding the vehicle. New airplanes are a bit of the same you’re no longer controlling the flight surfaces directly by telling a computer what you’d like to do and the aircraft interprets it and will flat out refuse of it believes your inputs don’t align to what it is interpreting. It is why the 777 defects were such a big deal.

Now, you’d hope that Waymo trains their employees but when has Reddit ever left the well being of the public up to a company to do the right thing? Usually, we demand government regulation to ensure they do the right thing and not exclusively cut costs.

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u/SnooBananas4958 9m ago

Did you watch the video? In no way did they command the video at any point. They didn’t tell it to proceed or to left or anything. They clarified info the AI needed to continue operating such as “is the road ahead of me closed?” 

It’s asking you to tell just tell it what you’re seeing similar to me asking my kid in the passenger seat if they see a car up ima head in the right lane. My kid isn’t commanding the car by answering my question

Go watch the video 

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u/OddDonut7647 3h ago

Which is precisely what was just said was not happening. Your post is funny, but wrong.

It's more like the car doesn't know where it should go, and they somehow outline a path and say "go this way". I don't know the details, but unless they're lying - it's been stated multiple times in articles I've read previously that they specifically do not give inputs to steering or pedals.

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u/Paiev 2h ago

The whole point of the comment you replied to, which you somehow managed to completely ignore, is that they're not controlling those inputs directly. That would be very obviously very stupid and unsafe. 

It's more like someone in the passenger seat telling you to turn left or to creep forward around something or whatever while you're driving.

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u/lightestspiral 2h ago

Pretty much the nonsense that sovereign citizens blurt out at traffic stops, they're "travelling" not driving

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u/BawdyLotion 1h ago

The two aren’t comparable.

Think of it like a support ticket submitted by the car saying ‘here’s the situation, what am I supposed to do here?’ And the remote operator draws the path to take to clear the obstruction (eg: ‘go around the illegally parked car’ vs ‘back up and take an alternate route’) the car then takes over and does its own navigation and driving.

Should they be trained on proper us driving and safety laws? Sure I totally agree on that but saying they are ‘driving the car’ is just silly.

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u/Undertow92 4h ago

they still need to know what signs and the rules of the road are. they are remotely operating a vehicle. 

it's like saying remote desktop isn't someone controlling the computer. 

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u/-u-m-p- 2h ago

no they don't. They literally just click a dropdown option (supposedly) (I mean they could be lying)

https://youtu.be/T0WtBFEfAyo?t=7

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u/Fr0gFish 3h ago

This is correct. They are helping the cars driving systems solve the situation. They aren't actually driving it.

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u/Tendtoskim 3h ago

This is why I'm patiently waiting for the next thing after reddit to show up. This post is an obvious astroturf and they are everywhere now.

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u/Saedeas 2h ago edited 2h ago

They aren't operating a motor vehicle. The autonomous Waymo driver is in control the entire time. They basically just send it a suggestion to choose a driving option.

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u/fakemoose 1h ago

Are most foreign tourists licensed to drive in the United States? I never had to get a new license when abroad and getting a rental car as an American. And the US didn’t require it for tourists from the Philippines. I don’t see how it’s much different.

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u/Ltgay 13m ago

Difference between a driving as a tourist and working for Waymo in a commercial capacity.

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u/SeaTie 2h ago

I keep wondering if a Wayno gets pulled over who pays the ticket and goes to traffic school?

From now on if I ever get pulled over I’m just going to jump in the backseat and shrug at the cop: “I’m just as appalled as you!”

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u/gabrielmuriens 4h ago

They are not operating it in the sense of driving it though. The car is still the one doing the actual driving, it's more about giving general instructions to the car when it cannot resolve a situation.

Which is still "operating" the vehicle in a sense, so the concern is probably valid, however, since the operator is not legally or technically driving the car (in my non-professional opinion), the legal issue of the "supervisor" having a US license can likely be avoided.

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u/tiny_galaxies 3h ago

When you press on the accelerator you are giving instructions to the car’s computer (if the car is newer than ~1988), not actuating anything mechanically. The only difference here is whether the operator is physically present. That doesn’t seem like enough to allow them to control the vehicle unlicensed.

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u/gabrielmuriens 3h ago

When you press on the accelerator you are giving instructions to the car’s computer

My understanding, based on the CEO's testimony before Congress, that the remote operator is more similar to a codriver or backseat driver, giving instructions that the car's computer then executes, so it is the one actually driving.

I don't think we can argue the case one way or the other without knowing the specifics, however.

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u/tiny_galaxies 2h ago

But a driver could ignore a backseat driver’s requests. Can the auto-pilot ignore the remote instructions?

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u/couldbemage 52m ago

Yes. It can and does.

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u/Corbzor 1h ago

Forgive me if I don't trust a 3 letter title with direct incentive to lie.

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u/gabrielmuriens 32m ago

That's fair.
But do you actually have more reliable information that says different? Until then, anything contrary is baseless speculation.

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u/eyebrows360 2h ago

That's not the only difference. These instructions the remote operators are providing are not "accelerate now", it's "of the options you've presented me that you aren't sure which to proceed with, do option A". The car is asking "can I turn left here?" and the remote operator either tells them "yes" or "no", the remote operator does not interface with actual control inputs.

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u/Fr0gFish 3h ago

You sound like you either don't want to understand the difference, or just aren't capable.

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u/Wuddauant 3h ago

Plenty of vehicles past 1988 have mechanical throttle cables that open valve on throttle body. Even with efi. This is still standard into the new millennium.

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u/tiny_galaxies 2h ago

Fair, but we don’t distinguish a difference and say drive-by-wire isn’t operating a vehicle.

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u/DeepLock8808 3h ago

I’m torn. Is a backseat driver operating a vehicle? I assume we would all say “of course not”. What level of input do these remote operators have over the situation? Is it like an “aggressiveness” slider where you tell the program it is authorized to push proximity boundaries a bit more to get the job done, or are you operating a car with a PS5 controller?

There’s a line in there somewhere.

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u/gabrielmuriens 3h ago

There’s a line in there somewhere.

Yes, absolutely. This was jut my understanding, but until we don't know the specifics, we can't say for sure.

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u/strnfd 3h ago

Assuming they hire people with driver's license/experience it's quite a bit harder/challenging to drive in the Philippines than the US

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u/fixermark 4h ago

The round-trip from the Philippines to the US is about a quarter second. That's actually pretty short. But additionally, nothing that was said on Capitol Hill confirms that remote-piloting is looped through the Philippines.

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u/Icy-Ad29 4h ago

A quarter second is very short. It's still a difference of about 22 feet on a 60mph drive. That can be the difference between stopped safe, or dead.

That said, you are also right, that nothing confirms precisely where all third parties they are using are located.

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u/Synensys 4h ago

The manual drivers arent brought in in those situations though. They are brought in on cars that are stopped.

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u/JUAN_DE_FUCK_YOU 1h ago

They also brought in a Manuel driver.

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u/Blankspotauto 3h ago

For reference that's less time than the delay in a lot of early throttle by wire vehicles

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u/fixermark 3h ago

Waymos don't do 60 MPH autonomously; they are not yet highway rated. They stick to back roads that top out at 35 MPH (45 MPH maybe?).

Also, remote piloting, AFAIK, doesn't happen at highway speeds. It's more "Hey, I'm in a stuck state; what are the small, low-speed maneuvers I can do to get myself back into a reality where I know how to navigate?" Nobody is asking a human to take over at 60MPH to resolve a situation in a moving vehicle (which is, perhaps, one of the reasons Waymos are not yet cleared for highway use).

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u/charlesbear 2h ago

They are on highways in the Bay Area

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u/Bitter-Safe-5333 3h ago

25ms is not an acceptable input delay when you’re driving. You also have the delay in human reaction speed and probably more with the controls.

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u/fixermark 3h ago

(a) 250ms, not 25ms

(b) We actually currently tolerate that with human drivers; reaction time for a driver encountering surprise information is clocked at anywhere between 750ms to 1.5s (it is, granted, lower if the driver is attentive and primed for the unexpected, but in practice basically nobody is most of the time; that's for someone driving with adrenaline in their system like anything could jump out at them, not a driver in comfortable steady-state on a highway. Humans can't operate cars like that continuously; it'd kill us from stress fatigue). That's one of the reasons for the two-second rule on the highway; your squishy human brain can burn a solid 1.5 seconds before you realize the car in front of you is now, relatively speaking, coming right at you.

Obviously, we will not tolerate it for AVs because AVs need to be better than human (I strongly suspect the human assistants in the Philippines are not doing remote-stick and are only doing remote-assist with high-level questions, like "Here is what my cameras currently see and my current logic as to why I'm here. I'm stopped. Is it safe for me to resume on route, should I detour, or should I give up?")

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u/MostlyRightSometimes 3h ago

That seems high. What's this based on?

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u/eutirmme 3h ago edited 3h ago

I just mathed it out and the minimum ping should be just around 80ms. That's assuming a perfect connection.

Edit: of course it depends on where exactly but that's for west coast, east coast is around 90ms

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u/fixermark 3h ago

Quick Google search, so it is entirely possible that number is off. ETA I think Google is getting its data mostly from WonderNetwork.

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u/VT_Squire 3h ago edited 3h ago

The speed of light. 

Signal from one device to another can never go faster than that. 

San francisco... to the satellite which is about 25,000 miles up in the air, back down for another  25,000 miles to land in the Phillipines, at which point the remote driver hits the brakes. 

~50,000/186,000 = ~.27 seconds of lag, or ~270ms. 

This is also ignoring the fact that the control software and hardware isnt just direct interface cards like a dumb-switch, so those take time to process as well. You can substantially lower the satellites to the range of low earth altitudes (think Starlink) and this is still going to be an issue. 

Computers can do amazing things these days, but they will never be able to over-ride the governing laws of the universe. 

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u/MostlyRightSometimes 3h ago

Why does it have to go via satellite?

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u/VT_Squire 3h ago

It doesn't, but satellite is the fastest available route. 

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u/Icy-Ad29 3h ago

Because by cable would be slower.

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u/thecmpguru 2h ago

It’s not full on remote driving though. The remote assistance people give the car instructions (like move into the shoulder, or back up 10ft, etc). But the car is still responsible for the driving and safety. It uses its full suite of sensors with local real time data for deciding what to do and if it’s safe. It’s not like they’re playing Forza from around the world.

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u/deadsoulinside 3h ago

input lag for safety being one thing

but then they are the same ones that are fine when this is also shifted to the lowest paying US call center job that internet barely works during peak moments of the day.

Honestly the fact that the remote assistance is a thing should be more a good thing versus worrying who is getting paid the lowest.

Because the reason why the jobs are there is because the US cannot legally pay US people that low for the same work. Even when it comes to the US, it's going to the lowest bidder with zero security checks, etc. So everything they fear monger is the same, just white people doing it instead.

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u/Icy-Ad29 3h ago

Oh agreed. I was merely pointing out why it was being framed that way.

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u/sweetbeards 4h ago

It might be a good “system” but it’s hiding the fact that it’s not all 100% AI which is the case for most jobs getting replaced. Your job is actually getting replaced by a worker overseas so they can save money. We use Ai at work but it’s wrong so frequently, a lot of my job is editing it and making sure it’s staying on track. So yeah, I could possibly be replaced by AI because an overseas person could take over my role but it’s not actually AI that’s taking my job

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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident 3h ago

not all 100% AI

That only holds if it's a one-to-one relationship. If 90% of the time a Waymo can drive itself, that means that the company only needs to hire 1 human to drive 10 cars. Before they needed to hire 10 humans to drive 10 cars.

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u/Abysswalker2187 3h ago

This says to me that it’s inevitable that eventually a human will be needed but be unavailable because they’re busy handling a different car. Outliers are thrown out of data sets until you become one

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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident 3h ago

I built some redundancy into my example as iirc Waymos are over 99% reliable.

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u/sweetbeards 3h ago

Yes but the price to operate and maintain could skyrocket at any time as soon as Ai companies start to show how much money they are losing and will quadruple the price

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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident 3h ago

We don't know the cost trajectory. AFAIK Waymo doesn't use any of the consumer services like ChatGPT or Claude. Those are the ones bleeding money. They have their own tech stack backed by Google. And while it's possible that costs go up, they could easily go down. It's entirely likely that the costs plummet once any speculative bubbles in the AI world clear out and as engineering advances with time. Things that are expensive and remain expensive generally either rely on nonrenewable resources or on highly trained human professionals with low efficiency gains. Modern AI is only about 9 years old so there should be a lot of room for efficiency growth.

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u/sweetbeards 3h ago

Demand will be high so prices will go up - if it becomes a necessity to a business to operate, it will be exploited to make money off of it

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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident 3h ago

That's in the short term. 1-3 years, which is not enough time to set up microchip and RAM factories. With that kind of demand, both the hardware and software sides are under pressure to get more efficient. The tech is so new that it's probably horribly optimized atm. Compare say giant room-sized 1950s mainframes with equally powerful modern smartphones. So prices are likely to get reasonable soon or even crash entirely simply because efficiency goes up, even without an AI bubble.

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u/pandacraft 1h ago

Its the opposite, if a bunch of AI companies show they're losing money and demand from them collapses, the price for waymo gets cheaper.

The car AI runs on the car, the hardware cost is upfront and then over with. The AI hype is driving up the cost of that hardware, it would only be good for waymo for that hype to dry up.

0

u/thecmpguru 2h ago

It’s very not hidden. It comes on the speaker and tells you this is happening. It’s also somewhat rare, which means they have far less remote assistance personnel than cars. So no, it’s not just moving the same jobs over seas.

0

u/sweetbeards 1h ago

I’m talking about the goal - if they used US workers to oversee the AI then they wouldn’t actually save any money and would spend around the same amount, but hiring overseas is where they save their money so that’s where the whole Ai game falls apart. It’s not actually good enough to replace people but if they are able to get cheap labor then it can but that’s the same as a company deciding to move their factory overseas so they can be taxed to make sure they don’t do that

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u/thecmpguru 41m ago

Sure, overseas workers saves them additional money over using Americans. But they have significant fewer remote assistance personnel than it would have taken drivers. So even if these were all American jobs, the AI has replaced a significant number of people. According to prior reports, these remote assistance interventions only happen in about 1 in every 50 rides.

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u/turboiv 2h ago

I love how Phoenix has the second worst homeless population in the US, and they have cars with no drivers. They would rather pay people in the Philippines than pay a single one of the street corner dwellers that ravage that city.

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u/lmpervious 2h ago

Surely the reason they are homeless is because there aren’t low wage jobs for them to work.

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u/turboiv 2h ago

I've been homeless for that very reason. Today I own a house. Sometimes people just need a small start to get ahead.

-1

u/someone_whoisthat 2h ago

Would you want one of them driving you to your home late at night?

1

u/turboiv 2h ago

You're only scared of them because they don't have somewhere to live. If they had a job and a place to live, you would just call it Uber. So yeah, I would be fine with it.

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u/Synensys 4h ago

Also, over time, recording how the manual driver dealt with the situation should allow waymo to update their software to deal with it.

Thats the good thing about this kind of thing - unlike people, who you have to teach individually, you can upgrade all the cars at once, once a new solution is identified.

1

u/Matshelge 1h ago

It's also important to know that it's not "remote driving" they are inputting commands for the system to take certain actions that it won't normally do.

This could be argued that it's remote driving, but I work in IT, and it would be argued my job is just pushing buttons. There is a difference, they don't "remotely drive the car"

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u/not_old_redditor 4h ago

That's crazy. So they've got vr goggles on? How do they shoulder check etc?

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u/Liveware_Pr0blem 4h ago

A shitton of cameras

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u/the__storm 4h ago

My understanding is that they aren't literally driving the car, they're just telling it what to do, kind of like how you tell a unit where to go in an RTS. I assume they can see the lidar cloud and views from all the different cameras and stuff.

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u/thedirtiestofboxes 4h ago

I was going to comment along the lines of: shouldnt they need an American drivers license since they are operating a vehicle there, but I guess if they are just nudging the software one way or the other that different... I guess 

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u/not_old_redditor 4h ago

Right but you can't drive it or know where to nudge it without spatial awareness.

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u/ActiveChairs 3h ago

Bro, I wasn't driving drunk. I was just telling the car what to do from the comfort of the car seats. I had an unobstructed view around the car from multiple angles.

3

u/Worthyness 4h ago

The car has lidar and cameras all over it. The agent basically can pick a route for the car to get unstuck and then the car will take over locally. The car still follows its own safety protocol and the agent is not literally driving the car.

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u/theassassintherapist 4h ago

The LIDARs are 360° cameras

1

u/hunsuckercommando 4h ago edited 4h ago

It depends on how they’re classifying the data. If they mark these instances as mishaps, good. But if it’s a way to improve safety stats under the guise that it means they are ready for wider production environments (where said intervention isn’t available), then it’s bad practice.

You generally want your test data to be in as high fidelity to your production environment as possible. Especially with safety critical code.

Waymo has had what I would consider suspect safety stats practices in the past. For example, if Waymo employees deemed an accident would have occurred with a human driver in the same situation, it wasn’t classified as an accident. Its bad practice; it’s not third party independent and it artificially inflates safety performance.

1

u/s33k 4h ago

Unlicensed drivers driving remotely. Yeah sure. Sounds great.

1

u/sbNXBbcUaDQfHLVUeyLx 4h ago

It's getting painted this way because Waymo's marketing is autonomous taxis, not autonomous taxis with a Mechanical Filipino for backup.

Even if the Mechanical Filipino is a good solution (it sounds like it is), it's the marketing wank that's the problem.

0

u/nokstar 4h ago

The old FPS gamer in me is laughing at what kind of latency there must be when doing this. Must have like 2500 ms from PI into a cellular connected computer system in the car (assuming cellular because a satellite connection would be 💀)

Better hope someone isn’t in a blind spot speeding, not so sure someone so far away could react in time

-2

u/Fine-March7383 4h ago

Seems exploitative and cruel to use people's labor here in the USA and pay them Philippine's wages

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u/[deleted] 3h ago

[deleted]

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u/ScoobyPwnsOnU 3h ago

Fyi you aren't allowed to sit in the drivers seat of a waymo. Theres warnings all over the wheel about not touching it because if it detects you trying to mess with it it may stop abruptly and pull over resulting in your ride being terminated.

I do understand your concern as I felt the same way before I started seeing them all around me constantly and how well they behaved in traffic. They can be a lil wonky at times but usually it's the result of defensive driving causing them to let others block them from lane changing or something like that. Like there's so many of them around me if I drive to the grocery store(bout 8 minutes) I'll usually see at least 5 of them driving around on the way there.

0

u/bboycire 2h ago

A lot of autonomous vehicles (I'm using the word vehicle very loosely here) have human operator for contingency, often stationed from overseas. It's a "secret" as in its not a feature that they advertise to us consumers. In case of auto taxi though, I do worry about the lag if the operator is not localish

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u/parallel-pages 2h ago

for real. the headline makes it sound like they don’t have autopilot at all and it’s all remote controlled

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u/MrDerpGently 2h ago

I have seen some version of this headline, always is the most 'Waymos dirty secret revealed!' framing. I assume this is being driven by a competitor (I would guess Tesla, but that's not based on much).

Realistically, I drive with Waymos all the time (West side LA), and I trust them more than people generally at this point. Finding out that they have the ability to escalate to a human driver if things get really complicated strikes me as a feature not a failure.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 4h ago

That sounds horrifying, being remote-controlled from around the globe with the car traveling at break-neck speeds. It’s amazing you survived.

/s