A series of letters sent by autonomous-vehicle (AV) developers to Democratic US senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts sheds the most light yet on the human side of robot vehicle operations. In the documents, submitted to Markey as part of an investigation into self-driving-vehicle technology and released on Tuesday, seven companies, including Tesla, Amazon-owned Zoox, and Uber- and Nvidia-funded Nuro, released new details about their “remote assistance” programs.
All the companies that responded to the senator’s office say they use remote assistants—humans charged with responding to autonomous vehicles when they get confused, stuck, or in emergencies. The programs, experts say, are an important part of any autonomous vehicle company’s safety considerations, a backstop for a technology that’s becoming safer by the year but will continue to run into new situations on the road indefinitely.
In a report also released Tuesday, Senator Markey said the new details were not enough. “Every autonomous-vehicle company refused to disclose how often their AVs require assistance from [remote assistants]—hiding key information from the public about their AV’s true level of autonomy,” he wrote. “This information is critical for lawmakers, regulators, and the public to understand the potential safety risks with AVs.”
Markey called on the nation’s top federal road safety regulator to look more closely into autonomous vehicle companies’ remote assistance programs, and said he would soon introduce legislation responding to the “safety gaps” his investigation found.
Remote-Controlled Robotaxis
The responses from the autonomous vehicle developers show that, in one critical way, Tesla is an industry outlier. Six of the firms insisted that their remote assistance workers, who work across the US and even, in the case of Waymo, in the Philippines, never actually drive the vehicles directly. Instead, the humans provide input that the autonomous vehicle software then decides to use or ignore.
Not so for Tesla. “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,” Karen Steakley, Tesla’s director of public policy and business development, wrote to the senator. The automaker’s remote assistance workers can “take temporary control of the vehicle” at speeds up to or less than 2 mph and can remotely drive a Tesla Robotaxi at up to 10 mph if the vehicle’s software permits it to do so, Steakley said. “This capability enables Tesla to promptly move a vehicle that may be in a compromising position,” she wrote.
Tesla, which has pivoted its business away from making cars and toward autonomous vehicle technology and robots, launched a small ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, last June. In most of the 50 or so so-called robotaxis operating today, human safety operators sit in the front passenger seats, ready to take over or intervene if something goes wrong. A handful of the vehicles reportedly operate without safety operators. The automaker says its remote assistants are based in Austin and Palo Alto, California.
Autonomous vehicle developers usually avoid direct remote control of their vehicles for several reasons. Small delays between what a human remote assistant is seeing and what’s happening on the road in real time, even by just a few hundred milliseconds, can lead to slower reaction times, an issue exacerbated by network latency. This increases the potential for accidents. “Your ability to drive a car without being in the car is only as stable as the internet connection that connects you to it,” a self-driving-vehicle engineer told WIRED last year.
