In February, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) sent letters to seven US companies working on autonomous vehicle technology with a list of questions. He particularly wanted to know how often the vehicles of these companies — operated by Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo and Zoox — rely on input from remote staff. These they all refused to sayaccording to Markey’s survey results, which were released Tuesday.
The information released by Markey’s office is the latest example of how reluctant autonomous vehicle companies are to share details about how they actually work — despite all experimenting with the technology on public roads.
“This report revealed a stunning lack of transparency from AV companies about their use [remote assistance operators] to help guide their AVs. The investigation revealed a patchwork of safety practices across the industry, with significant variations in operator qualifications, response times and overseas staffing, all without 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 the use of remote assistance workers by these companies and that he is “working on legislation to impose strict guardrails on the use of remote operators by AV companies.”
TechCrunch has contacted each company named. Waymo and Nuro declined to comment. Aurora and May Mobility said they appreciate working with Markey’s office. The others did not respond to requests for comment.
Markey began his investigation in February after a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the future of self-driving cars. During the hearing, Waymo’s chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, talked about how the company’s vehicles sometimes need guidance from “remote assistance” personnel when they get stuck in difficult or unexpected scenarios. Peña also revealed that about half of Waymo’s remote assistance staff is based in the Philippines.
Autonomous vehicle companies have talked about these kinds of remote assistance features over the years. But these discussions were often theoretical, as the technology was still speculative or deep in the testing phase.
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Now that many of these companies have developed commercial robotaxis or, in Aurora’s case, autonomous semi-trucks, attention to their full operation has intensified.
After the hearing, Markey sent letters to those seven companies requesting more information about their remote operations. His office asked each company 14 questions, including how often remote personnel drive autonomous vehicles, how large those teams are, where they are located, how they are licensed and what kind of safety protocols are in place.
The companies’ responses — which you can read in detail here — vary wildly. Neither responded directly to the question of how often their remote staff are tasked with offering guidance on AVs, with Waymo and May Mobility specifically claiming it’s “confidential business information.” Tesla didn’t even include the question in its response letter. It’s unclear why, and the company axed its North American communications team years ago.
Waymo claimed in its letter that improvements to its self-driving system have substantially reduced the number of assistance requests per mile its vehicles send to remote personnel, but offered no details or proof. The company wrote that the “vast majority of requests” sent by its robotaxis to remote assistance staff are resolved by the self-driving system “before an agent even responds.”
Waymo was also the only company to admit to using remote assistance workers overseas. While the company says it ensures those workers have local driver’s licenses, Markey’s office wrote Tuesday that “a foreign location driver’s license is not a substitute for passing the U.S. driver’s license test, as the rules of the road will almost certainly vary by location.”
All companies except Tesla have said they either don’t allow or don’t have the ability for remote workers to directly control these self-driving vehicles. Tesla, meanwhile, said remote assistance workers “are authorized to temporarily take direct control of the vehicle as a final escalation maneuver after all other available intervention actions have been exhausted.”
Tesla said this can only happen if a vehicle in its pilot fleet is traveling at 2 mph or less, and that the remote operator cannot drive the car faster than 10 mph.
“This capability allows Tesla to immediately move a vehicle that may be in a compromised 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.
That’s 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 robot taxis. Waymo has its own dedicated “roadside assistance” team separate from its remote workers, as TechCrunch recently reported. But that part of Waymo’s business was not the focus of Markey’s investigation.
Markey’s office was learning some other information from those companies. His report shows the latency involved in these remote assistance interactions (it varies for each company, with May Mobility citing a worst-case scenario of 500 milliseconds), how some of these companies try to prevent these workers from becoming fatigued, and what precautions they take to protect the data they oversee.
These are questions that autonomous vehicle companies have been grappling with for years, and they haven’t been easy to answer. But with many more commercial developments on the horizon, Markey’s office certainly won’t be the last to ask for — or demand — more details.
This story has been updated to reflect the company’s responses.
