Waymo has 70 remote workers watching 3,000 robotaxis at any given moment. Half are in the Philippines. That number — not the valuation or the airport launch — is the thing that scales awkwardly as the company pushes toward 1 million rides a week.
image from Gemini Imagen 4
Waymo launched robotaxi service at San Antonio International Airport, its fourth airport and first in Texas, but the rollout exposes the gap between 'driverless' marketing and operational reality: roughly 3,000 vehicles rely on just 70 remote assistance workers, with latency ranging from 150-250ms depending on location. Federal investigators are examining Waymo vehicles for incidents including passing school buses with stop arms deployed, while documentation shows at least six cases where first responders had to physically relocate stalled robotaxis.
Waymo started picking up passengers at San Antonio International Airport on Tuesday — the Alphabet-owned robotaxi company's fourth airport overall and its first in Texas, a state that has become one of the most contested corridors for autonomous vehicle deployment in the country.
The launch is a milestone Waymo has been building toward for months. Airport runs are the single most-requested use case from its riders, according to Arica Gately, head of airport partnerships and business development at Waymo. "Providing a safe and reliable ride to and from the airport is one of the most requested uses for Waymo riders," she said in a statement tied to the launch. Passengers can be dropped off curbside at both terminals and picked up in the designated rideshare area. Waymo already operates in San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and Houston — adding the airport connects a city-level network to the one travel use case that reliably generates media coverage and converts skeptics into riders.
But the launch comes alongside a set of regulatory realities that make the "driverless" label harder to maintain. Waymo's fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles is monitored at any given time by around 70 remote assistance workers, TechCrunch reported. Half of those workers are based in the United States; half are in the Philippines. For U.S.-based operations, median one-way latency sits around 150 milliseconds. For workers calling in from the Philippines, it's closer to 250 milliseconds. Neither figure is disqualifying — but both mean a human is in the loop on edge cases, and that human is sometimes wrong.
In at least six instances documented by TechCrunch, first responders had to take physical control of a Waymo vehicle and move it out of traffic during emergency situations. These were not fender-benders. They were moments when a robotaxi became an obstacle that a human driver had to manually relocate. Waymo says it has improved response times and vehicle positioning since those incidents were identified, but the underlying pattern — a vehicle that sometimes stops where it shouldn't and can't resolve itself — hasn't been eliminated.
The regulatory scrutiny around that pattern intensified in recent weeks. Both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are investigating Waymo vehicles for illegally passing school buses with stop arms deployed and lights flashing. One incident on January 12 involved a Waymo in Austin that asked a remote assistance worker whether it could proceed past a school bus that was loading children. The stop sign and lights were active. The remote worker — based in Novi, Michigan — replied no. The vehicle paused. Then resumed travel and passed the bus anyway. It was the 24th such incident involving a Waymo vehicle in the Austin Independent School District since the start of the 2025–2026 school year, School Bus Fleet reported, citing KXAN's reporting. Waymo issued a safety recall covering 3,067 Gen-5 vehicles in December 2025 to update software related to these behaviors.
A separate NTSB investigation is examining a collision in Santa Monica near an elementary school, where a Waymo vehicle struck a child who had run from behind a double-parked SUV into the street. The vehicle was traveling in a zone where the speed limit transitioned from 15 mph to 25 mph roughly 40 feet before the impact point, Santa Monica Next reported. Waymo said the vehicle slowed from 17 mph to 6 mph before contact. The child sustained minor injuries. NTSB has not made a final determination of cause.
Waymo points to a larger dataset to back its safety record. The company says its drivers have been involved in 13 times fewer crashes resulting in serious injuries and five times fewer crashes with airbag deployments compared to human drivers, according to an internal study covering more than 127 million miles. Data from over 127 million miles also shows a ten-fold reduction in serious injury or worse crashes versus human drivers, Waymo said in a February blog post. Those are the numbers Waymo leads with. The incidents described above are the ones that prompted federal investigators to open two simultaneous probes.
San Antonio's specific appeal is a city that wanted the association. "We are building the airport of the future," said Jesus Saenz, airports director for the City of San Antonio, calling the Waymo launch a significant milestone for the city and for travelers. The city is currently midway through a $2.5 billion expansion of San Antonio International Airport. Waymo isn't just attaching itself to an existing transit hub — it's inserting itself into infrastructure being rebuilt around the assumption of smarter, more automated ground transportation.
The commercial logic is straightforward: airport trips are high-value, high-recurrence, and generate the kind of rider stories that spread on social media. Waymo is currently running more than 500,000 paid rides per week across 10 cities, TechCrunch reported. The company is aiming for 1 million rides per week by the end of 2026, co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in February. In that same month, Waymo raised $16 billion in a funding round led by Dragoneer at a $126 billion valuation — a jump from the $45 billion valuation from its October 2024 Series C. "We are no longer proving a concept; we are scaling a commercial reality," Mawakana wrote.
Scaling includes geographic expansion. Waymo has said it wants to launch in around 20 new cities this year, including Tokyo and London — two dense, complex urban environments that will test whether the approach that works in Phoenix's wide, sun-baked streets translates to rain, narrow lanes, and left-hand traffic. The company is also expected to start offering rides in the Zeekr-built Ojai van later this year, a vehicle designed from the ground up for the Waymo stack rather than retrofitted onto an existing platform.
Whether Tokyo and London regulators agree to let a San Antonio-flown robotaxi fleet operate in their cities will say a lot about how far the autonomy-as-marketing has traveled from the remote assistance booth in the Philippines. At any given moment, roughly 35 workers based there are monitoring a portion of Waymo's fleet — with a median one-way latency of 250 milliseconds, and roughly 86 vehicles per worker on their screens — and occasionally making judgments that determine whether a school bus loads its children safely.
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Research completed — 0 sources registered. Waymo went live at San Antonio International Airport March 31 2026 — its fourth airport, first in Texas. Key story: airport ops are a commercial miles
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Headline selected: 3,000 Vehicles, 70 Remote Workers: Waymo's 'Driverless' Reality
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