The Robotaxi companies decline to say how often their self-driving vehicles need remote assistance

In February, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) sent letters to seven US companies working on self-driving vehicle technology with a list of questions. He particularly wanted to know how often the vehicles of these companies — operated by Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo and Zoox — relied on input from remote employees. They all refused to do so, according to the findings of Markey’s investigation, which were released on Tuesday.

The information released by Markey’s office is the latest example of how self-driving car companies are reluctant to share details about the success of their operations — despite the fact that they are all trialling the technology on public roads.

“This report has exposed a stunning lack of transparency by autonomous vehicle companies about their use [remote assistance operators] To help guide their AVs. “The investigation revealed a patchwork of safety practices across the industry, with wide variation in operator qualifications, response times, and offshore personnel, all without any federal standards governing these operations,” Markey’s office wrote in its report.

Markey said Tuesday that he is calling on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to investigate these companies’ use of remote operators, and that he is “working on legislation to impose strict guardrails on autonomous vehicle companies’ use of remote operators.”

TechCrunch has reached out to each named company. Waymo declined to comment. The other six did not respond immediately.

Markey began his investigation in February after a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the future of self-driving cars. During the hearing, Mauricio Peña, Waymo’s chief safety officer, talked about how the company’s cars sometimes need guidance from “remote assistance” employees when they get stuck in difficult or unexpected scenarios. Peña also revealed that about half of Waymo’s remote assistance employees are in the Philippines.

Self-driving vehicle companies have talked about these types of remote assistance operations sporadically over the years. But those conversations were often theoretical, with the technology still speculative or deep in the testing phase.

Now that many of these companies are commercially deploying robotaxis, or in Aurora’s case, self-driving semi-trucks, interest in their full operations has intensified.

After the hearing, Markey sent letters to those seven companies requesting more information about their remote operations. His office asked each company 14 questions, including how often remote employees provide guidance to autonomous vehicles, how large and located those teams are, how they are licensed, and what types of security protocols are in place.

The companies’ answers – which you can read in full here – vary widely. None of them directly answered the question of how often their remote employees are tasked with providing guidance to autonomous vehicles, with Waymo and May Mobility explicitly claiming this is “confidential business information.” Tesla did not even include the question in its response letter. It’s not clear why, and the company ditched its North American communications team years ago.

Waymo claimed in its letter that improvements to its self-driving system have “significantly reduced” the number of assistance requests per mile that its vehicles send to remote employees, but did not provide any details or proof. The “vast majority of requests” its robot sends to remote assistance employees are resolved by the self-driving system “before the agent provides an answer,” the company wrote.

Waymo was also the only company to acknowledge the use of remote help workers overseas. While the company says it makes sure those workers have local driver’s licenses, Markey’s office wrote Tuesday that “a driver’s license in a foreign location is not a substitute for passing a U.S. driver’s license test, as the rules of the road will almost certainly vary by location.”

All companies, except Tesla, have claimed that they either do not allow or do not have the ability for remote assistance workers to directly control these self-driving vehicles. Meanwhile, Tesla said its Remote Assistance workers are “authorized to temporarily assume direct control of the vehicle as a final escalation maneuver after all other available intervention measures have been exhausted.”

Tesla said this can only happen if the vehicle in its test fleet is moving at 2 mph or less, and that the remote operator cannot drive the vehicle faster than 10 mph.

“This capability enables Tesla to immediately move a vehicle that may be in a dangerous situation, thus alleviating the need to wait for a first responder or Tesla field representative to manually retrieve the vehicle,” the company wrote to Markey’s office.

This has recently become a source of criticism for Waymo, which faced tough questions from San Francisco city officials at a hearing this month about its reliance on first responders to move stranded robotaxis. Waymo has its own dedicated “roadside assistance” team separate from its remote assistance workers, as TechCrunch recently explained. But that part of Waymo’s operation was not the focus of Markey’s investigation.

Markey’s office has obtained some other information from these companies. His report explains the latency involved in these remote assistance interactions (it varies from company to company, with May Mobility reporting the longest worst-case figure at 500 milliseconds), how some of these companies are trying to prevent these workers from feeling overwhelmed, and what precautions they are taking to protect the data they oversee.

These are questions that self-driving car companies have grappled with for years, and the answers haven’t been easy to come by. But with more commercial deployments on the horizon, Markey’s office certainly won’t be the last to ask for more details.