Robotaxi companies refuse to say how often their AVs need remote help

In February, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) sent letters to seven U.S. companies working on autonomous vehicle technology with a list of questions. He especially wanted to know how often these companies’ vehicles — operated by Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox — rely on input from remote staff. They all refused to say, according to the results of Markey’s investigation, which were released Tuesday.

The information published by Markey’s office is the latest example of how hesitant autonomous vehicle companies are to share details about how their operations truly work — despite the fact that they are all experimenting with this technology on public roads.

“This report has revealed a stunning lack of transparency from the AV companies around their use of [remote assistance operators] to help guide their AVs. The investigation exposed a patchwork of safety practices across the industry, with significant variation in operator qualifications, response times, and overseas staffing, all without any federal standards governing these operations,” Markey’s office wrote in its report.

Markey said Tuesday that he is calling on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to investigate these companies’ use of remote assistance workers, and that he is “working on legislation to impose strict guardrails on AV companies’ use of remote operators.”

TechCrunch has reached out to each company named. Waymo declined to comment. The other six did not immediately respond.

Markey launched his investigation in February after a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee was held on the future of self-driving cars. During the hearing, Waymo’s chief safety officer Mauricio Peña spoke about how the company’s vehicles sometimes need guidance from “remote assistance” staff when they get stuck in tricky or unexpected scenarios. Peña also revealed that about half of Waymo’s remote assistance staff is based in the Philippines.

Autonomous vehicle companies have spoken about these kinds of remote assistance operations in fits and starts over the years. But those conversations were often theoretical, as the technology was still speculative or deep in the testing phase.

Now that many of these companies have commercially deployed robotaxis or, in Aurora’s case, self-driving semi-trucks, the attention on their full operations has intensified.

Following the hearing, Markey sent letters to those seven companies asking for more information on their remote operations. His office asked each company 14 questions, including how often the remote staff give guidance to autonomous vehicles, how big these teams are, where they are located, how they are licensed, and what kinds of security protocols are in place.

The companies’ answers — which you can read in full here — vary wildly. None of them directly answered the question about how often their remote staff are tasked with offering guidance to the AVs, with Waymo and May Mobility explicitly claiming that this is “confidential business information.” Tesla didn’t even include the question in its response letter. It’s not clear why, and the company did away with its North American communications team years ago.

Waymo did claim in its letter that improvements to its self-driving system have “materially reduced” the number of help requests per mile that its vehicles send out to remote staff, but it offered no specifics or proof. The company wrote that a “vast majority of requests” that its robotaxis send to remote assistance staff are resolved by the self-driving system “before an agent even provides an answer.”

Waymo was also the only company that admitted to using overseas remote assistance workers. While the company says it makes sure these workers have local drivers’ licenses, Markey’s office wrote Tuesday that a “driver’s license in a foreign location is not a substitute for passing a U.S. driver’s license exam, as the rules of the road will almost certainly vary by location.”

All of the companies except for Tesla claimed that they either don’t allow or don’t have the ability for remote assistance workers to directly control these autonomous vehicles. Tesla, meanwhile, said that its remote assistance workers “are authorized to temporarily assume direct vehicle control as the final escalation maneuver after all other available intervention actions have been exhausted.”

Tesla said that this can only happen if a vehicle in its pilot fleet is moving at 2 miles per hour or less, and that the remote operator cannot drive the car faster than 10 miles per hour.

“This capability enables Tesla to promptly move a vehicle that may be in a compromising position, thereby mitigating the need to wait for a first responder or Tesla field representative to manually recover the vehicle,” the company wrote to Markey’s office.

This has recently become a source of criticism for Waymo, which faced tough questions from San Francisco city officials at a hearing this month about its reliance on first responders to move stuck robotaxis. Waymo does have its own dedicated “roadside assistance” team that is separate from its remote assistance workers, as TechCrunch recently detailed. But this part of Waymo’s operation was not a focus of Markey’s investigation.

Markey’s office did pry some other information from these companies. His report shows the latency involved in these remote assistance interactions (it varies for each company, with May Mobility reporting the longest worst-case figure of 500 milliseconds), how some of these companies try to keep these workers from becoming fatigued, and what precautions they take to protect the data they oversee.

These are questions that autonomous vehicle companies have faced for years, and answers have not been easy to come by. But with many more commercial deployments on the horizon, Markey’s office certainly won’t be the last to be asking — or demanding — more details.