Some of those drivers encountered a new obstacle: a Waymo robotaxi. Footage of the incident shows the Waymo AV tried to pass stopped traffic by traveling on the shoulder, only to wind up reversing away from the oncoming wrong-way cars, before stopping altogether. The robotaxi wouldn’t budge, despite efforts from the company’s remote assistance team.
Roughly 30 minutes after Waymo called 911, a CHP officer got behind the wheel and drove the robotaxi to a park-and-ride lot near the highway, a CHP incident report obtained by TechCrunch shows. From there, it was driven away by one of Waymo’s “roadside assistance” workers, the company told TechCrunch. The Redwood City incident could be viewed as an edge case, an inevitable, yet mildly embarrassing blip in Waymo’s rapidly expanding robotaxi service network.
But this was not an isolated incident. Waymo has relied on taxpayer-funded first responders to navigate its vehicles when they encounter issues, despite the existence of the company’s own roadside assistance team. In at least six instances identified by TechCrunch, first responders have had to take control of Waymo vehicles and move them out of traffic during emergency situations, including one in which an officer was in the middle of responding to a mass shooting.
Waymo has recently come under criticism by lawmakers for its use of remote assistance employees, including a few dozen who work from the Philippines, to help its robotaxis decide the best path through complex situations. Its roadside assistance team has received far less attention. The company’s representatives never mentioned the roadside assistance workers at a testy March 2 hearing in San Francisco about the behavior of Waymo’s robotaxis that became stalled during a major power outage in December.
The company declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about how many roadside assistance workers it uses, or which third-party companies might employ them. Waymo also didn’t say how it plans to scale the team as it races to launch in about 20 more cities this year, expanding beyond its current markets of Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Waymo’s helpers Waymo’s robotaxis provide more than 400,000 paid rides per week, a testament to the company’s many years developing self-driving technology. The robotaxis do rely on humans for help on occasion, though, and it does this in a few ways. The robotaxis need occasional guidance in complex situations, especially because — as Waymo claims — the company is trying to be as cautious as possible as it scales its service.
Waymo’s robotaxis receive this guidance from the “remote assistance” workers. At any given time, there are around 70 of these people monitoring Waymo’s fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles, the company has said. Half of these workers are based in the U.S. and half are based in the Philippines.
Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S.-based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad,” the company recently wrote. Remote assistance workers perform a few tasks. If a Waymo vehicle encounters a real-world situation that is tricky to navigate, it might send a request to these workers to help decide the best way through.
Waymo is clear that these workers “provide advice and support to the [robotaxis] but do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle.” They also respond to lower-priority requests from Waymo robotaxis, like answering questions about whether the interior of a car is clean. But this loop is not perfect.
The National Transportation Safety Board recently revealed that in January, a Waymo in Austin asked a remote assistance worker to confirm whether a nearby school bus was loading or unloading kids. The stop sign and flashing lights were deployed, but the remote assistance worker wrongly told the robotaxi it could proceed. The Waymo then drove past the school bus as it was loading children, though the bus’s “stop arms” were still extended, the NTSB said.
Waymo told TechCrunch that it “regularly audit[s] RA responses, including correctness. If an incident is captured, it will be immediately flagged for next steps, ranging from additional coaching to full decertification.” When a Waymo gets in a crash, or stuck in an emergency, the company leans on its “event response team.”
There are growing pains here, too. Audio recordings from CHP dispatch, along with the incident report obtained by TechCrunch, show that officers were under the impression for about 10 minutes that Waymo wanted the passenger to drive the robotaxi away from the fire. It wasn’t until the remote worker called 911 a second time that CHP realized an officer needed to drive it away from the scene.
(Waymo declined to answer specific questions about this miscommunication. The company said it never asks riders to take control of its vehicles.) Then there is the roadside assistance team. These workers handle “on-scene, direct interaction” work and are often tasked with moving a vehicle.
Waymo declined to answer questions about how many times these workers have moved a robotaxi, how many are on call at a given time, or how many are in each city. Some appear to work for Transdev, a third-party contractor that Waymo has used in the past, and a few even used to be safety drivers or monitors for Waymo, according to profile information on LinkedIn. The company also told TechCrunch that it “require[s] local tow partners to maintain rapid response capability for urgent tow requests and strategically position support across our service areas.”
Relying on first responders While Waymo says it doesn’t expect first responders to interact with its vehicles, it keeps happening — and it’s not clear whether it will become totally avoidable. In at least six cases over the past few months, first responders have had to manually navigate Waymo vehicles, including at two active crime scenes. Earlier this month, an Austin police officer had to move a Waymo out of the way of an ambulance that was responding to a mass shooting event.
In February, a first responder in Atlanta had to disengage a Waymo after it drove into an active crime scene, before one of the company’s roadside assistance workers “retrieved it,” according to the company. And this week, a police officer in Nashville had to manually drive a Waymo robotaxi away after it got stuck in an intersection. During the March 2 hearing in San Francisco, city officials repeatedly asked Waymo what it would do to lessen dependence on first responders.
But he did not detail those improvements, and Mahmood told TechCrunch his office has not received a promised follow-up. Cooper also said Waymo would consider leveraging partnerships like the one it has with DoorDash, which involves gig workers closing robotaxi doors that were left open, to move vehicles. How that would differ from the existing roadside assistance staff Waymo uses is not clear.