Waymo has been pretty clear about this: they do have remote navigators/coaches who tell the cars what to do if it gets stuck/confused, but they're not directly driving the car, they're telling it where to go, like a navigator in the front passenger seat.
Remote operation is considered dangerous due to possible issues with network connection latency or stability. If it was actually happening, Waymo is big enough now (IIRC they said 50,000 paid rides each week) to where someone would've leaked such a secret.
> they do have remote navigators/coaches who tell the cars what to do if it gets stuck/confused, but they're not directly driving the car, they're telling it where to go
That sounds a lot like remote operation.
Waymo is notoriously tight-lipped about this. Look at the number of journalists and reporters who have, over the years, asked very basic questions, like:
1. How often do remote operators intervene?
2. How many miles are driven per intervention? How does this compare to FSD?
3. How much of a typical ride is remotely operated and not actually driven by the car itself?
Waymo never provides answers, and one can only imagine it is because they are not proud of the answers.
Don't the HN guidelines have something about "assuming good faith"? I can't be arsed to check now because obviously the comment above is not in good faith.
Case in point. Plugging your ears and shouting does not invalidate the question. These are very basic questions that, if Waymo were at all confident about their technology, would not hesitate to answer.
And most of these are just simple numbers! Like stating, the number of miles per intervention is 10. Yet that number is nowhere to be found from Waymo's press relations department.
Having seen how the sausage is made, a lack of confidence in what the numbers show is not why the information is withheld. The numbers are highly relevant to competitors and anything that could potentially be used to build a negative media narrative is very carefully considered before release.
Cruise had their numbers leaked during the incident last year and they came up in several negative media pieces despite being fairly good overall.
I really don't understand why they aren't transparent about this, but judging by the downvotes I'm getting it seems people really, really want to believe they are intelligent and independent self-driving machines. It's so much more futuristic with a "wow" factor that attracts press attention and future investement.
The downvotes are because your suspicions are entirely wrong. There’s no remote “driving” or “take over”. They wrote a blog post on how it works just a few weeks ago: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Surely, it's obvious that Waymo operates in a different safety critical setting? It's a 5000 pound vehicle with pedestrians and other vehicles around it. You can't depend on a network connection to prevent injuries and deaths.
Alphabet has way more money to spend on it than Ukrainians. I was a professional driver in a couple of jobs and as far as I can tell Google Waymo doesn't care about the millions of Americans they want to put out of work, possibly by having cheap foreign labor drive their cars, so you see I can't let it go that easily
Remote operation is considered dangerous due to possible issues with network connection latency or stability. If it was actually happening, Waymo is big enough now (IIRC they said 50,000 paid rides each week) to where someone would've leaked such a secret.