Senator Markey found that half of Waymo's remote robotaxi operators work from the Philippines on Philippine licenses, monitoring cars in San Francisco and Phoenix. None of the seven companies would say how often they need human help.
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Seven robotaxi companies told a U.S. senator this week how they use remote human operators to babysit their autonomous vehicles on public roads. Not one of them said how often.
Senator Ed Markey sent letters to Waymo, Tesla, Zoox, Aurora, Motional, May Mobility, and Nuro in February asking 14 questions about their remote assistance programs: team sizes, response times, licensing requirements, data security, and how often a remote human actually talks a vehicle through a problem. The companies' responses, published by Markey's office, show a patchwork of practices with zero federal oversight. TechCrunch has the full breakdown.
Waymo and May Mobility called their remote assistance frequency a confidential business secret. Tesla left the question out of its response entirely. The other four companies answered different questions than the ones they were asked.
Markey called the results a "stunning lack of transparency" and said Tuesday he is asking the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to investigate, and that he is drafting legislation to impose federal standards on remote operators.
The most revealing detail is geography. Waymo acknowledged that roughly half of its remote assistance workers are based in the Philippines, monitoring vehicles driving through San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta. Waymo operates four remote-assistance centers: two in the Philippines, one in Arizona, and one in Michigan. Those overseas workers hold Philippine driver's licenses, not American ones. They are trained on U.S. road rules. They are not subject to U.S. labor law.
Senator Markey framed this as a national security question. "Heavy and fast-moving vehicles could quickly become the weapons of foreign actors seeking to harm innocent Americans," his office wrote. The concern: a hostile actor with access to a remote assistance system could, in theory, take driver-like control of a moving vehicle.
Rep. Buddy Carter, a Republican from Georgia, sent a separate letter to the Department of Transportation asking it to investigate Waymo's use of overseas operators. Waymo defended its program, telling Reuters it keeps its remote operations "air-gapped" from other systems.
The companies that did share some information paint a picture of a job that is technically demanding and operationally sensitive. Waymo says about 70 remote assistance agents are on duty at any given time, monitoring roughly 3,000 vehicles. That works out to one human watching roughly 43 robotaxis. Waymo says most requests for help are resolved by the vehicle's own software before a human operator even types a response. Tesla's remote operators, by contrast, are based in Austin and the Bay Area only, and they can directly drive a vehicle under specific conditions: the car must be moving at 2 mph or less, and the remote operator cannot exceed 10 mph. The rest of the industry claims its remote workers only offer advice, never control.
May Mobility reported the highest worst-case latency among the companies: 500 milliseconds, the time between a vehicle sending a request and a human receiving it. At 70 mph, a car travels roughly 51 feet in 500 milliseconds.
No federal standard governs any of this. There are no requirements for how fast a remote operator must respond, what training they need, where they can be based, or how often they can intervene. The industry is writing its own rules in real time, in public, on public roads.
Markey's investigation began after a Senate Commerce Committee hearing where Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, described remote assistance as a routine part of the company's operations. Peña disclosed the Philippines staffing during that hearing. Several companies have since scaled their commercial robotaxi offerings, shifting remote assistance from a theoretical discussion to an active, unscripted program.
What comes next depends on what Markey's legislation looks like, and whether NHTSA decides it has authority to act. The agency has been slow to issue rules for autonomous vehicles generally. Remote assistance sits in an especially gray area: it is neither fully automated nor fully human-driven, which means neither existing framework fits cleanly.
The companies have declined to comment beyond their formal responses. Waymo pointed Reuters to its existing public statements. The others did not respond to TechCrunch's outreach.
The question of who is really driving a robotaxi matters not just for safety or security but for accountability. When a vehicle operated by a remote worker in Manila makes a mistake on a San Francisco street, who is liable? Who regulates that worker? Who audits what they saw and did?
Right now, nobody has a good answer. That is the story.
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