[tialaramex]

This seems to be an incredibly popular belief despite the fact that there's no evidence for it and it wouldn't make any sense.

Waymo's remote support teams can reach into the driver's model of the world to fix things, for example maybe it mistook this stray traffic cone for actual roadworks - but they can't actually drive the car.

If Waymo needs a human to drive the car, they send a human to physically sit in it and drive the car. They have a whole bunch of people for that role. If you were in a Waymo that drove somewhere and there wasn't anybody in the driving seat, that's not because some 10 year old was using a PS4 controller to steer it from Bangalore, that's the Waymo driver software.

[simonw]

Why is it unlikely that Waymo would have the equivalent of a remote control option for getting the car unstuck?

That seems like both an obvious and an easy to implement solution to me, what am I missing?

[yreg]

It's easier to tell the computer instructions to get unstuck than driving with a lag.

When the instructions are specific enough we could call it driving if you want, but it's not done with a steering wheel in real time.

[foobazgt]

What happens when you lose connection mid-maneuver, or there's congestion on the network causing high latency?

The vehicle would have to be smart enough to execute all the tactical parts of driving anyway. Adding remote piloting just adds more failure cases and complexity.

[simonw]

I'm not talking about remote driving all the time - I'm talking about recovering from weird edge-cases, like the car gets confused by a traffic cone on a flat bed truck and stops and needs to be reversed 3 feet and pointed in a slightly different direction to get it running again.