Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) has led the charge for more transparency into the matter. As Wired reports, a series of letters he received from seven different robotaxi companies, including Tesla, Amazon’s Zoox, and Nuro, detail how humans remain a core part of their purportedly autonomous driving ambitions.
Tesla’s response stood out, revealing that its human operators do, in fact, temporarily take control of the vehicle if necessary. That’s in contrast to Waymo’s approach, which involves its team intervening to make higher-level decisions on where the stuck car should navigate next.
“As a redundancy measure in rare cases… [remote assistance operators] are authorized to temporarily assume direct vehicle control as the final escalation maneuver after all other available intervention actions have been exhausted,” director of public policy and business development Karen Steakley wrote in the letter.
The company’s latest admission didn’t impress Markey. He called Tesla’s refusal to share more specific information regarding how many takeovers occur “especially concerning,” since the remote workers “are permitted to teleoperate the vehicle.”
As Wired points out, direct remote control comes with inherent risks, from network latency delaying signals and therefore the remote worker’s ability to react in real time to a lack of complete situational awareness.
George Mason University professor of engineering Missy Cummings told the publication that companies are incentivized to keep their remote assistance operations under wraps “because then it would make it clear how not-capable these systems really are.”
“If people understood how often [the assistants] were interacting, then it would be clear how far away truly autonomous vehicles are,” she added.