Waymo‘s Chief Safety Officer disclosed Wednesday that some of the remote operators who assist its self-driving vehicles in navigating difficult scenarios are based in the Philippines.
Mauricio Peña, the company’s Chief Safety Officer, confirmed under questioning that the Alphabet subsidiary employs human operators abroad to provide guidance to its robotaxis when they encounter challenging driving situations.
Peña noted that the vehicles remain in control of all driving tasks at all times.
“They provide guidance. They do not remotely drive the vehicles,” Peña told the Senate committee. “The Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input.”
When pressed on how many operators are located outside the United States, Peña said he did not have the breakdown available, escalating frustration from senators.
“It just seems kind of curious that you don’t know that answer,” one senator responded, before asking in which countries the operators are located.
“The Philippines,” Peña replied.
Safety and Security Concerns
The disclosure drew immediate pushback from lawmakers, who raised concerns about cybersecurity vulnerabilities, outdated information relays, and the qualifications of overseas operators.
“Having people overseas influencing American vehicles is a safety issue,” the senator said. “The information the operators receive could be out of date. It could introduce tremendous cybersecurity vulnerabilities. We don’t know if these people have US driver’s licenses.”
The senator also criticized the labor implications, noting that Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are already displacing taxi and rideshare drivers in the United States.
“It’s one thing when a taxi is replaced by an Uber or a Lyft. It’s another thing when the jobs just go completely overseas,” the senator added.
The hearing brought together top executives from both Waymo and Tesla to make the case for the safety of their autonomous driving systems before the Senate committee, with both companies insisting their technology is safer than human drivers despite recent incidents.
Tesla’s Take
Tesla was represented by its Vice-President of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy.
The VP quoted the company’s CEO Elon Musk when he said, over a decade ago, that one of his biggest fears was “the possibility that someone could do, as you described, take over an autonomous vehicle and do something nefarious.”
“Since that day, we’ve been committed to making sure that never happens,” Moravy guaranteed.
“We have many layers of security within our system and similar to what Dr. Peña said, our driving controls, go, stop, steer, are in a core embedded central layer that cannot be accessed from outside the vehicle,” the VP said referring to Waymo’s Chief Safety Officer.
Tesla began operating robotaxis using slightly modified Model Ys in Austin last June.
Since then, the Elon Musk-led company has been expanding both the fleet and geographically as Tesla rolls out the service to more states following the Texas Debut.
The company has recently removed safety operators in Austin, with Musk aiming for an aggressive expansion in the next few years.
Congress is considering how to move forward with legislation to create uniform federal safety regulations for self-driving vehicles, which are becoming increasingly common in major US cities.
Santa Monica Accident
Last week, the US regulators started investigating a January 23 incident where a Waymo autonomous vehicle hit a child near a Santa Monica elementary school.
The incident occurred during school drop-off hours when the Waymo robotaxi struck a child who was running across the street toward the school, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
There were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity at the time.
The company claims that its peer-reviewed model indicates that a human driver in a similar scenario would have hit the kid at a higher speed.
“To put this in perspective, our peer-reviewed model shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph,” Waymo said.
“This significant reduction in impact speed and severity is a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver,” the company added.
The investigation comes weeks after a Waymo robotaxi became trapped on light rail tracks in Phoenix, forcing a passenger to exit the vehicle before an approaching train struck the autonomous car.
