2/18/2026 at 1:37:16 AM
That it's 70 remote assistance people for 3,000 cars is pretty good counter-evidence to the "they're not driverless, they're remote controlled" claims.by jefftk
2/18/2026 at 2:01:15 AM
70 active on average at any given time per the article, which then lists total fleet size, as opposed to number of active cars on average, so it's not a fair comparison.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.
by actinium226
2/18/2026 at 2:10:10 AM
I think anyone who goes for a drive in Los Angeles can attest that there are way mo than 70 cars active at any point. It's not unusual to see multiple Waymos at intersections.Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.
by oceliker
2/18/2026 at 6:03:14 AM
I see what you did there…by hawaiianbrah
2/18/2026 at 2:10:49 AM
Yeah that sentence struck me as very carefully worded. They also don't mention how often RA is needed or invoked. We'll encounter a lot of these autonomous systems (cars, robots, equipment) that escalate decisions and edge cases to human employees until they are trained enough that reliability goes up.by toddmorey
2/18/2026 at 2:57:15 AM
It's tricky to give a number for "RA required" that isn't wildly misleading, or contextualize one you're given. The common case for most AV RAs is confirmation of what the vehicle already has planned. Does that count as "required"?An AV company can also tune how proactive vehicles are in reaching out to RA for confirmation, which is a balancing act between incident rate, stoppages, RA availability, and rider metrics. There's other ways to tune RA rate by also adjusting when and where the vehicles operate, which comes down to standard taxi fleet management tools (e.g. price and availability).
Waymo chooses a target that they're comfortable with and probably changes it every so often, but those numbers aren't the only possible targets and they're not necessarily well-correlated to the system's "true" capabilities (which are themselves difficult to understand).
by AlotOfReading
2/18/2026 at 4:07:19 AM
One point. This isn’t an article, it’s a blog.by wheelerwj
2/18/2026 at 1:48:02 AM
The remote control claim never made sense anyway. "There is no computer driver, it's all fake, they're paying teams of drivers in India" only sounds plausible to anyone who's never encountered lag in a video game.by CobrastanJorji
2/18/2026 at 2:04:26 AM
Plenty of people believe since Covid is a virus, just like software viruses it was being transmitted by 5G base stations.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...
by netsharc
2/18/2026 at 2:04:50 AM
What is their claim about latency here?> 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?
by Noumenon72
2/18/2026 at 2:15:16 AM
>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?Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go.
by gruez
2/18/2026 at 2:14:17 AM
Their claim is talking about latency, not bandwidth. What you're talking about is throughput, which can usually be solved by throwing more money at the problem.by AlotOfReading
2/18/2026 at 2:15:10 AM
They had to throw something in about speed even though the gating factor is the RA's ability to interpret the situation and decide a course of action.I wouldn't be surprised if actions required agreement between decisions by two independent RAs.
by xnx
2/18/2026 at 2:18:55 AM
You can stream video with milliseconds of latency, provided you have enough bandwidth for the video stream. Videoconferencing and cloud gaming both work on this principle.That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.
by meatmanek
2/18/2026 at 2:30:32 AM
They don’t do human in the loop at highway speeds.Further the cars need to safely stop in an emergency without human intervention. There’s no way for the car to first notice a problem, then send a message to a call center which then routes to a human, and for that human to understand the situation, all fast enough to avoid a collision. Even 50ms is significant here let alone several seconds.
by Retric
2/18/2026 at 10:21:00 AM
That's not an achievement. Even a non intelligent low to mid end compact SUV such as a 2024 Mazda CX30 has cruise control that can detect cars stopped ahead to slow down, stop if necessary, and continue when the car in front starts moving.I'm just saying that "it avoids a collision" by not ramming into people or cars is table stakes and it makes us look incompetent if we tout it as a flagship feature.
by mcny
2/18/2026 at 3:26:51 PM
You say that but we’ve had cars that can do what you describe for a decade and yet actual autonomous driving is still waiting.Not failing due to a software or hardware issue is way more complicated than just usually working.
Avoids a collision is similarly way more difficult than just detecting a stopped car. What needs to happen when a car blows out a tire at speed isn’t just slam on the breaks for example. At scale cars need to adapt to the conditions and drive defensively not just watch what’s directly in front of them.
by Retric
2/18/2026 at 2:21:30 AM
>That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.Right, which is why the blog post is titled "Advice, not control ..." and goes to explain that they're not relying on the "remote assistance" people to make split second judgements.
by gruez
2/18/2026 at 2:38:15 AM
They could get rid of that latency by hiring Americans.by fragmede
2/18/2026 at 2:51:34 AM
Any American within a good distance of a large city to mitigate latency issues can make about 4-5x driving for Uber or delivering food.And latency to small towns in the middle of nowhere is not significantly better than latency to Philippines.
You can expect something in the ballpark of 70ms in both cases.
by fooker
2/18/2026 at 5:39:06 AM
Not realistic but a remote work Uber driver is kinda an interesting (if dystopian) concept.by pythonaut_16
2/18/2026 at 10:21:17 AM
I'm semi-seriously expecting remote-work Optimus driving to be a thing in the near future.Well, more so than it already is.
A factory in the US* staffed entirely by humanoid robots has the same impact on US employment opportunities regardless of if the robots are controlled by AI in the sense of software or in case where the "Actually Indians" meme still applies.
It's just that in the latter case your "illegal aliens" who are "stealing our jobs" are managing to do so without actually crossing the border, making it very difficult to deport them, and denying them access suddenly becomes a freedom of speech issue.
* I'm in Europe, I don't think we'll be tolerating "new" "exciting" "opportunities" from Musk any time soon. I don't think China or Russia will be either. Or indeed more than half of the G20 nations. He'll be told to prove it, and get told "no" a lot because experiments based on his rhetoric and vision are no longer worth the downsides without solid proof both that it works as advertised and that he won't cut things off when he has a hissy fit.
by ben_w
2/18/2026 at 4:24:45 AM
People don't like to work in the middle of the night.by jeffbee
2/18/2026 at 5:28:02 AM
It reminds me of the claims that your phone's microphone is always on and feeding your conversations to Facebook so they can serve you ads, even when the app is closed.Anyone who has experience with apps, permissions, or even basic reverse engineering or network activity monitoring would realize that this couldn't be true without someone having found evidence.
Yet even on HN you find die-hard believers that it's true. I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true. If it's true, it means they were smart enough to see through the facade unlike the other sheep in the world.
by Aurornis
2/18/2026 at 10:26:04 AM
> I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true.It's more than just that, there's also the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, i.e. we talk about something and then notice it mysteriously suggested to us on YouTube or whatever. And then assume this was causal rather than coincidence.
I got that yesterday, though I can't even remember now what the video or the topic of discussion was.
by ben_w
2/18/2026 at 2:12:54 AM
Interestingly, the round-trip latency from the West Coast to continental Asia isn't nearly as long as I'd assumed (60ms to 250ms, depending on who's measuring).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.
by shadowgovt
2/18/2026 at 1:51:27 AM
I've got people in my social network who firmly believe that every car is, in fact, "driven by Indonesians". Apparently a widespread belief.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.
by kakapo5672
2/18/2026 at 2:27:59 AM
After stunt Amazon pulled off, with its shop, being skeptical is warranted.I know Google and Amazon aren't the same company, but their incentives are.
by Ygg2
2/18/2026 at 1:41:18 AM
70 on-duty, that probably translates to 200-300 people on staff.by jeffbee
2/18/2026 at 1:49:46 AM
But presumably most of the 3,000 cars are on the road at any given time? In which case the point stands, namely, that their remote operations people can't be the ones driving the cars because there aren't enough of them on duty at any given time; therefore, the cars really do drive themselves. (Which I would have thought was never in doubt, but I suppose some people are really determined to be skeptics.)by ameliaquining
2/18/2026 at 1:47:24 AM
I wish they included how many active cars they have at any one time so we could make a proper comparison.by jefftk
2/18/2026 at 4:41:37 PM
You can probably infer the average number of active cars from trips and utilization metrics, which are out there (at least for California I believe they report this).E.g. 450,000 trips/week * 15 min/trip / 0.56 loaded:empty miles / (24760) ~= 1200.
by minwcnt5
2/18/2026 at 1:41:54 AM
They’re not “no human in the loop” driverless. They’re just on autopilot, same as any airliner. We don’t call planes that takeoff and land themselves “pilotless”, because there’s humans in the loop. Waymo must be rather defensive about being called out for merely having autopilot cars, which is weird because that’s rather miraculous in historical terms — but certainly the generic term “autopilot” is a much less distinctive claim to success than “driverless”.by altairprime
2/18/2026 at 1:59:45 AM
They are actually "no human in the loop" driverless most of the time.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."
by estearum
2/18/2026 at 2:07:58 AM
Autopilot in planes is much closer to cruise control than it is to a Waymo. This is of course the purported rationale behind Tesla's use of the name for their L2 feature. Both require a human operator available and monitoring at all times.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.
by AlotOfReading
2/18/2026 at 2:12:41 AM
Autopilot in planes does not handle takeoff. Pilots still do that. Traditional autopilot was mostly just to keep the plane flying straight. Capabilities have improved over time, but it still doesn't fly the plane the way Waymo drives itself.by nearbuy
2/18/2026 at 3:26:55 AM
Some planes can land automatically without the pilot's input: https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reporte...Takeoff is probably easier to automate than an emergency landing.
by e44858
2/18/2026 at 5:27:58 AM
Notably, I believe the Cessna stall parachute in certain planes is autonomous by most definitions, not the least of which because it fires without pilot input and because it takes control of the plane away from the human to do so. I recognize this is a rather, uh, odd use of ‘autonomous’ — but it does technically serve as a pilotless emergency landing mechanism :)by altairprime
2/18/2026 at 5:22:20 AM
I like the use of “autonomous” to describe the intended outcome of “pilotless” here:https://newatlas.com/aircraft/airbus-attol-autonomous-airlin... (2020)
by altairprime
2/18/2026 at 2:27:44 AM
787s can both takeoff and land on autopilot. They can't handle taxiing to and from the gate, however.by empressplay
2/18/2026 at 2:14:18 AM
Pilots in a plane on autopilot are never out of the control authority of the plane (by which I mean: "ready to take over at a moment's notice"). Driverless AVs do drive without perpetual eyes-on oversight. The FAA would never allow that for commercial planes.by shadowgovt