Advice, not control: the role of Remote Assistance in Waymo’s operations
Our mission at Waymo is to be the world’s most trusted driver, and we are committed to earning the public’s trust through transparency and proven road safety outcomes. As we expand around the world, we are investing in an operations team that matches our global scale, including U.S.-based operations personnel and global operations teams, to ensure seamless, safe, 24/7 operations worldwide.
In 2024 we published a detailed outline describing how our Remote Assistance (RA) works. Though some have compared the function to aircraft dispatch, based on my decade as a U.S. Naval aviator flying F-14s and F/A-18s, I can firmly say that analogy is wrong. Aircraft dispatch is responsible for active flight monitoring, weather routing, and mechanical oversight for the duration of a journey.
Waymo’s service does not rely on remote drivers. RA does not continuously monitor a vehicle or set of vehicles. Instead, they respond to specific requests for information initiated by the Waymo Driver – our automated driving system (ADS) – and provide advice which the system can decide to use or reject. Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.
Waymo RA is composed of different functions, including our Event Response Team (ERT) which is exclusively based in the U.S. Waymo’s ERT is certified for more complex tasks like coordinating with emergency responders and managing post-collision protocols.
Despite differences in role and responsibilities, all RA agents must have and maintain driver’s licenses and are rigorously vetted, including a comprehensive review of their driving history, thorough criminal background checks, initial and ongoing drug testing, and color blindness and spatial recognition assessments. As of February 17, 2026, there are approximately 70 Remote Assistance agents on duty worldwide at any given time, including ERT. For context, Waymo currently has a fleet of 3,000 vehicles. Every week, our vehicles drive over four million miles and provide over 400,000 rides.
Waymo is committed to safety and transparency, and we’ll continue to work with lawmakers and regulators around the world as we scale our service globally. To learn more about how RA works at Waymo, you can view our letter to Congress here.
Comments
It’s interesting that they only have 70 people for this - I can understand the outside the US ones for nighttime assistance and they need to be able to scale for other countries too in the future.
What I’m still wondering is what is limiting the scaling for Waymo - just cars or also the sensor systems? They’ve had their new test vehicles in SF for a while but I still think that most customers only get their Jaguars right now (and still limited on highway driving to specific customers in the Bay Area).
I'm also very curious about this. Probably a mix of many things: training the driver to handle tricky conditions better (e.g. flooded roads), getting more Ohai vehicles imported and configured, configuring the backlog of Jaguar iPace and trucking them out to new markets, mapping roads and non-customer testing in new markets, getting regulatory approval/cooperation in other market (e.g. DC), finding depot space, hiring maintenance team, etc.
If an airplane did not have a human inside the airplane and they only "dialed in" for extraordinary events, then yes I do think we'd call them pilotless.
Anyway Waymo, to my knowledge, doesn't use the terms "driverless" nor "autopilot." They claim that they are creating an artificial driver or that their cars are autonomous. There's something driving the car, it's just not a human driver, ergo it's not "driverless."
The aeronautic equivalent of Waymo is a fully autonomous UAV. A human might be needed to set high-level goals, but all of the actual flying/driving is done by the machine.
I've mentioned to a friend that humans are monkeys, but which are capable of building an Internet. But maybe plenty of us are closer to monkeys...
> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.
That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
Not nearly fast enough for real-time highway remote operation IMHO, but surprisingly fast. That's what I get for underestimating how fast light and electric fields can go.
I've pointed out that these vehicles are quickly become more prevalent, here and (especially) in China. To which the counter is that there plenty of Indonesians to go around.
I know Google and Amazon aren't the same company, but their incentives are.
Although then it says they drive about 4m miles per week, which works out to 57,000 miles per active RA agent per week. A person driving ~25 mph on average 24/7 would do ~4000 miles in a week (and we can assume 24/7 here because they reported active agents, so we assume a team of ~3 people swapping out as driver in this hypothetical).
So that gives you a car/operator ratio of at least 14, and probably more since I bet the average speed is less than 25 mph.
Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.
(I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail. It should then be a simple matter to track down the cause. We can certainly afford to be out of communication for the short time it will take to replace it.)
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r...
-- that's the article. You need to keep the popup open and scroll down to see it. This is about that, not the article underneath when you close it. There doesn't seem to be any other way to link to it, strangely?
To be clear, I think Waymo meets my bar. They appear to be working mostly autonomously and are clear about having assistance. They seem to have stated that from the very start and has been the response to many public questions.
But we waste so much time and money because of that fraud. It breeds distrust in our society and frankly I just don't understand why it's legal or fines are so small. Fraud kills legitimate businesses. It kills those playing fair. It makes people doubt those that do play fair so it just reinforces more fraud.