Waymo Self-Driving Taxis Use Overseas Workers For Help

Waymo's self-driving taxis aren't as self-driving as advertised. When the cars get stumped, they call workers overseas for help, including in the Philippines.

During a Congressional hearing Wednesday, Waymo's chief safety officer Mauricio Peña got grilled over the company's use of Chinese-made vehicles and reliance on overseas workers. Business Insider reported on the hearing.

The timing is notable. This comes about a week after a Waymo robotaxi struck and injured a child near a Santa Monica elementary school, triggering a federal probe.

After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas operators work, Peña said he didn't have those stats. Some operators live in the U.S., but others live much further awa, including in the Philippines.

"They provide guidance," Peña said. "They do not remotely drive the vehicles. Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets an input, but the Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input."

Senator Markey Wasn't Having It

The admission didn't sit well with Senator Ed Markey, who argued that "having people overseas influencing American vehicles is a safety issue."

"The information the operators receive could be out of date. It could introduce tremendous cybersecurity vulnerabilities," Markey said. "We don't know if these people have U.S. driver's licenses."

"It's one thing when a taxi is replaced by an Uber or a Lyft," Markey added. "It's another thing when the jobs just go completely overseas."

Good point. Waymo is marketing itself as autonomous transportation. It turns out it's more like autonomous transportation with a call center in the Philippines standing by when the car doesn't know what to do.

What Waymo Says About It

A Waymo spokesperson told Futurism that its fleet response teams are "located in the U.S. and abroad" and are "required to have a passenger car or van license, and are reviewed for records of traffic violations, infractions, and driving-related convictions."

"Additionally, they are routinely, randomly screened for drug use, and are put through thorough criminal background checks in addition to evaluations of their driving records," the spokesperson said.

Waymo has been fairly upfront about human operators. In a May 2024 blog post, the company compared it to a "phone-a-friend."

"When the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment," the post reads. "The Waymo Driver [software] does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times."

When the car's software encounters something atypical, it sends a request to a human fleet response agent who can view real-time feeds from the vehicle's exterior cameras. The remote operator doesn't directly control the vehicle's driving responses. But they still make major decisions. Fleet response agents determine what lane a vehicle should pick or propose a "path for the vehicle to consider."

The remote agent may not control the steering wheel, but they're making major decisions on where the vehicle goes next.

Tesla Does It Too

During the same hearing, Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy told lawmakers Tesla's vehicles also rely on similar remote operators.

"We have many layers of security within our system and, similar to what Dr. Peña said, our driving controls, go, stop, steer, are in a core embedded central layer that cannot be accessed from outside the vehicle," he said.

Moravy also said that to stop anyone from taking control of vehicles, Tesla "actively participates in hacking events, trying paying people to try to get into our vehicles."

The Bigger Problem

The executives' remarks show how driverless taxis on public roads today are still far from being 100 percent autonomous. Tesla quietly paused its "unsupervised" robotaxi rides last week. Right now there don't appear to be any robotaxis with no human "safety monitor" in the driver's seat.

And the risks remain substantial. New National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data suggests Tesla's robotaxis are crashing three times as much as humans—even with human monitors.

Adding a third party—a remote assistance operator based overseas—could make things worse, according to Markey.

"Overseas remote assistance operations may be more susceptible to physical takeover by hostile actors, potentially granting them driver-like control of thousands of vehicles transporting passengers on American roads," he said in a statement. "Heavy and fast-moving vehicles could quickly become the weapons of foreign actors seeking to harm innocent Americans."

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