Tesla robotaxis aren’t necessarily operating without a human in the loop, and even its small number of unsupervised robotaxis lack safety operators. If you’re a fan of self-driving cars, this reflects a humiliating fact of life about the current state of autonomous vehicles: The companies that operate them still don’t trust them on the roads unless a button is occasionally pushed by a flesh-and-blood human sitting at a desk somewhere.
But Tesla appears to be unique among its competitors when it comes to how dependent its vehicles are on humans at times. That is to say: They sometimes cede control to completely.
Karen Steckle, director of public policy and business development at Tesla, recently revealed this in a letter to Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat representing Massachusetts (as first reported by Wired). The human operator, Steakley wrote, “is authorized to temporarily assume direct vehicle control as a final surge maneuver after all other available intervention actions have been exhausted.”
Competitors like Waymo say they allow humans to play a role in operating a vehicle on the road, but in a more limited role, and they have to work very hard to make up the difference. For example, this was the basis for Waymo’s account of what went wrong when its vehicles suffered a massive malfunction during a blackout in San Francisco last year.
The issue involved a large number of Waymo vehicles encountering four-way stoplights that were closed, and sending an unmanageable number of confirmation requests to human workers with Waymo’s “fleet response” division, which we now know is largely based in the Philippines.
According to Waymo’s online public relations materials, instead of “steering” the vehicle remotely, perhaps with a joystick, fleet response workers view the camera feed and 3D Represent and respond to the situation of a Waymo vehicle in its environment. They just have to click on the answer to a question like Is the road I’m trying to get to closed? Or they might suggest a new way out of the jam, such as pulling off the road to let others pass.
They do it in a way that’s like telling an entity what to do in a real-time strategy video game, except that Waymo emphasizes that the “Waymo Driver” – the hardware and software system that runs the car – can reject human suggestion, meaning it never gives up executive control.
Steakley made it clear that Tesla lacks Waymo’s compulsion to fully seize the car’s autonomy. He told Markey in the letter that Tesla has deployed “remote assistance operators” (RAOs) in Austin, Texas and Palo Alto, California to “quickly relocate any vehicle that may be in a compromised state.” A human can take “temporary control of the vehicle” and drive it remotely at up to 10 mph, he explained.
This only happens “if direct access is provided by Tesla [automated driving system]” However she also notes that if a rider requests help, they can communicate with the Tesla RAO “via bidirectional audio.”
According to Steakley, the RAO should also:
- Must have a “US driver’s license valid for a minimum of 3 years”
- “Maintain a license and clean driving record throughout your employment.”
- “Criminal Background and Motor Vehicle Records Check”
- “Pass US Department of Transportation drug test”
Markey issued a report on Tuesday after receiving similar letters Questions were asked not only about Tesla and Waymo, but also about five other competitors about remote operations in these vehicles. Markey believes the responses reflect “a patchwork of safety practices across the industry, with significant variation in operator qualifications, response times, and foreign staffing, without any federal standard governing all of these operations.”
Gizmodo contacted Tesla and Waymo about these letters and Markey’s report. We will update this article if we get any response.
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