Waymo denies utilizing distant drivers after Senate testimony went viral

Waymo defended its use of remote assistants for its robotaxis after the testimony of one of its top executives during a Senate hearing went viral. In a letter to Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) on Tuesday, Waymo’s head of global operations Ryan McNamara provided a detailed description of the company’s remote assistance operations, including the number of employees based overseas.

Waymo employs approximately 70 “remote assistance agents,” with half based in the US and the other half in the Philippines, McNamara said. These agents “provide advice only when requested by the [automated driving system] on an event-driven basis,” the letter states. “Waymo’s [remote assistance] agents provide advice and support to the Waymo Driver but do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle.”

Waymo has been on the defensive after numerous outlets reported on the Senate testimony as if the company had revealed some terrible secret about its robotaxi operations. During the hearing, Markey pressed Mauricio Peña, Waymo’s chief safety officer, about the use of remote assistants, asking whether any of these workers were based overseas. “The Waymo phones a human friend for help,” Markey said during the hearing, adding that the vehicle communicates with a “remote assistance operator.”

Peña’s response that some agents were stationed in the Philippines then went viral, as numerous news publications and social media accounts mischaracterized his statement as meaning the vehicles were being controlled by remote drivers overseas.

But in his letter, McNamara says these agents do not control the vehicle, nor are they passively watching the live video feeds from the robotaxi cameras in case anything goes wrong. “Rather, the ADS reaches out to Remote Assistance when the vehicle encounters an ambiguous situation in which it may benefit from more context, even if the ADS can confidently proceed — a helpful safety redundancy,” he writes, adding that these interactions “typically last only seconds.”

Waymo’s remote assistants in the Philippines are all licensed drivers, English speakers, and have passed drug screenings, McNamara assures Markey: “These agents are provided extensive training tailored to the specific tasks they will complete and their performance is closely monitored, and despite never remotely driving the vehicles, are trained on local road rules.” He also claimed that latency between the vehicle and the assistant is insignificant, presenting it as “approximately 150 milliseconds for US-based centers and 250 milliseconds for [remote assistance] based abroad.”

Remote assistants are used for tasks such as “simple vehicle occupancy or cleanliness checks to suggesting paths around obstacles,” McNamara stated. These workers are distinct from Waymo’s Event Response Team, who are deployed when a Waymo vehicle is involved in a crash or safety incident. All ERT employees are based in the US and receive special training, he added.

But while Waymo’s remote assistants may not drive the vehicles, there is a “tool” for “a rare set of specific situations” in which the vehicle is stopped on the shoulder of a highway and needs to be moved. In this case, the ERT agent “could prompt the [autonomous vehicle] to move forward at 2 mph for a short distance at fixed steering angles to exit the travel lane,” McNamara writes. To date, Waymo has only employed this tool in training, he added.

McNamara declined to provide Markey the specific number of “invoked sessions” or requests between Waymo’s automated driving system and its remote assistants on a per-mile basis, calling the number “not material” — though he assured the senator that the company keeps detailed records of the frequency of these requests.

McNamara says its “critical” to distinguish Waymo’s operations from autonomous driving companies that do use teleoperators or remote drivers. Tesla, for example, employs remote drivers for its robotaxis as backup when something goes wrong. Later, a steering wheel for remote operations was spotted in the background of a photo of Tesla’s robotaxi control room in Texas. Other companies, like May Mobility, use the Waymo method of having remote assistants who can send suggestions when problems arise.

Waymo’s operations are under increased scrutiny after several safety incidents, including a December power outage in San Francisco that left several of the company’s robotaxis paralyzed in intersections, and an incident in which a child was struck at low speed by a robotaxi in Santa Monica. When a Waymo robotaxi was caught running a red light in 2024, the company said it was because of an incorrect prompt from a remote assistant. It also comes as Waymo and other companies talk a big game about the spread of driverless cars, spurring anxiety among people who are concerned about AI job losses.

“It is not about whether the remote human driver exists, because all robotaxis will need such a person for the foreseeable future,” Phil Koopman, autonomous vehicle expert at Carnegie Mellon University, said in an email. “It is whether the safety concept for that arrangement is acceptable. For Waymo we have seen a mishap caused by a remote driver error (running the red light). And while we have a lot of claims from Waymo about rigorous operational practices, what we do not have is ongoing independent oversight that what is happening on the ground matches those claims.”

Moreover, as robotaxi operations scale, most people remain unaware or confused about the various levels of autonomy, and their human helpers. Waymo’s vehicles are often described as Level 4, meaning the vehicles do all the driving tasks under specific conditions — but does not exclude all human intervention or assistance. Level 5 is when the vehicle can drive anywhere, under any conditions, without any human help. Most experts agree that this level remains out of reach, in the realm of science fiction.