Who drives Waymo’s self-driving cars? Sometimes, the police.

Last August, a fire tore through 10 acres of grass on both sides of I-280 in California near Redwood City. Traffic was backed up while firefighters extinguished the blaze, and California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers directed drivers to turn around and go the wrong way to exit the interstate.

Some of these drivers faced a new obstacle: a robotaxi from Waymo.

Footage of the incident shows Waymo AV attempted to pass stopped traffic by driving onto the shoulder, only to end up reversing away from cars coming in the wrong direction, before coming to a complete stop.

The robot did not budge from its place, despite the efforts of the company’s remote assistance team. So, Waymo turned to a resource that had become a trusted problem solver and called 911.

“The Highway Patrol turned everyone around, but unfortunately our car is unable to turn,” a Waymo remote assistance worker told an area 911 dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by TechCrunch in a public records request. The employee wanted officers on the scene to move the robotaxi away and arrange for the passenger to be taken inside.

About 30 minutes after Waymo called 911, a CHP officer got behind the wheel and drove the robo-taxi into a parking lot near the interstate, according to a CHP incident report obtained by TechCrunch. From there, she was turned away by a Waymo “roadside assistance” worker, the company told TechCrunch.

The Redwood City incident can be viewed as an emergency, an inevitable but somewhat embarrassing point in Waymo’s rapidly expanding robotaxi service network.

But this was not an isolated incident. Waymo has relied on taxpayer-funded first responders to navigate its vehicles when they encounter problems, despite the company’s own roadside assistance team. In at least six cases identified by TechCrunch, first responders have had to take control of Waymo vehicles and remove them from traffic during emergencies, including one case in which an officer was in the middle of responding to a mass shooting.

Waymo has recently been criticized by lawmakers for using remote assistance employees, including a few dozen who work from the Philippines, to help its robots decide the best route during complex situations. Its roadside assistance team has received much less attention.

Company representatives never mentioned roadside assistance workers at a difficult March 2 hearing in San Francisco over the behavior of Waymo’s robotaxi that was idle during a massive power outage in December. At the meeting, city officials expressed concerns that stranded autonomous vehicles were hindering or pulling first responders away from their essential jobs.

“What’s starting to happen is that our public safety officers and responders have to be the ones physically moving [Waymos]“To some extent, these vehicles have become virtual roadside assistance for these vehicles, which we don’t think is defensible,” Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, said at the hearing.

Waymo told TechCrunch that its roadside assistance workers removed dozens of stranded robotaxis during the power outages, with a few still needing to be moved by first responders.

“Waymo Roadside Assistance is a dedicated team of professionals who provide additional on-the-ground support to our fleet,” the company said in an email to TechCrunch. “Waymo’s standards for roadside response and quality of service prioritize minimizing potential impacts to the community.”

The company declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about how many roadside assistance workers it employs, or any outside companies it may employ. Waymo also hasn’t said how it plans to scale the team as it races to launch in about 20 more cities this year, expanding beyond its current markets of Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Waymo assistants

Waymo’s robot car provides more than 400,000 paid rides per week, a testament to the company’s many years of developing self-driving technology. Robots rely on humans for help sometimes, and they do so in several ways.

Robotaxis need occasional guidance in complex situations, especially since the company – Waymo claims – is trying to be as careful as possible while expanding its range of services.

Waymo’s automated robot receives this guidance from “remote assistance” workers. At any given time, there are about 70 people monitoring Waymo’s fleet of about 3,000 vehicles, the company said. Half of these workers reside in the United States and the other half reside in the Philippines.

These details, shared in a letter to Congress in February, generated negative feedback for Waymo due to concerns about safety and security. Waymo has defended its use of remote assistants, claiming that workers are well qualified and that there are no significant delays due to their remoteness, whether in Arizona, Michigan or the Philippines.

“The vehicle’s connection to our RA is also as fast as the blink of an eye. The average one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for operations centers in the US and 250 milliseconds for RAs located abroad,” the company recently wrote.

Remote helpers perform some tasks. If a Waymo vehicle encounters a real-world situation that is difficult to navigate, it may send a request to these workers to help determine the best way to navigate it. Waymo is clear that these workers “provide advice and support to [robotaxis] But do not control, direct or drive the vehicle directly. It also responds to lower-priority requests from Waymo robotaxis, such as answering questions about whether the car’s interior is clean.

But this episode isn’t perfect.

The National Transportation Safety Board recently revealed that in January, Waymo in Austin asked a remote assistance worker to confirm whether a nearby school bus was loading or unloading children. A stop sign and flashing lights were posted, but the remote assistance operator wrongly told the robo-taxi that it could proceed. The Waymo vehicle then passed next to the school bus while carrying the children, although the bus’s “stop arms” were still extended, the NTSB said.

Waymo told TechCrunch that it “audits regularly[s] RA responses, including health. If an incident is captured, it is immediately reported for next steps, from additional training to full decertification.

When a Waymo vehicle is involved in a crash, or gets stuck in an emergency, the company relies on its “Incident Response Team.” Waymo says this team is “exclusively based in the US” — though they are still remote — and that they are “certified for more complex tasks such as coordinating with emergency responders and managing post-crash protocols.”

Under this definition, the remote assistance operator who helped CHP transport Waymo’s robotic car away from the Redwood City incident was likely part of the response team for that event, although Waymo has not confirmed this.

There are growing pains here too. Audio recordings from the CHP dispatch, along with an incident report obtained by TechCrunch, show that officers believed for about 10 minutes that Waymo wanted the passenger to drive the robo-taxi away from the fire.

It wasn’t until after the remote worker called 911 a second time that the CHP realized an officer was needed to remove him from the scene. (Waymo declined to answer specific questions about this misunderstanding. The company said it has never asked passengers to take control of its vehicles.)

Then there’s the roadside assistance team. These workers handle “direct scene interaction” work and are often assigned the task of moving a vehicle. Waymo declined to answer questions about how many times these workers drove a robotaxi, how many people were on call at a given time, or how many people were in each city.

Some appear to work for Transdev, an outside contractor Waymo has used in the past, and a few even used to be Waymo drivers or safety monitors, according to their LinkedIn profile information.

The company also told TechCrunch that it “requires[s] Local Towing Partners to maintain the ability to quickly respond to urgent towing requests and strategically position support across our service areas.

“In the event that a Waymo vehicle requires support, we dispatch Waymo Roadside Assistance and/or local towing partners to assist at the scene,” the company said in a statement. “Although we don’t expect first responders to move our vehicles as a matter of course, we know that moments matter in emergency situations. So, we’ve designed a straightforward process that allows first responders to take control of the vehicle within seconds.”

Relying on first responders

While Waymo says it doesn’t expect first responders to interact with its vehicles, it continues to happen, and it’s not clear if it will ever become completely avoidable.

In at least six cases over the past few months, first responders have had to manually navigate Waymo vehicles, including at two active crime scenes.

Earlier this month, an Austin police officer had to move a Waymo out of the way of an ambulance responding to a mass shooting event. In February, a responder in Atlanta had to disconnect a Waymo vehicle after it entered an active crime scene, before it was “recovered” by a company roadside assistance worker, according to the company. And this week, a police officer in Nashville had to manually drive a Waymo robotaxi away after it got stuck in an intersection.

During the March 2 hearing in San Francisco, city officials repeatedly asked Waymo what it would do to reduce reliance on first responders. Waymo never mentioned that it had workers dedicated to moving vehicles during the three-hour meeting.

District Superintendent Bilal Mahmoud, who oversaw the hearing, told TechCrunch in an interview that he felt Waymo did not provide many satisfactory answers.

“I was asking: How are you going to take more accountability to make sure our first responders don’t do this?” He said. “And we didn’t get that answer at the hearing that we were looking for, which is: What are they going to do to ensure that they have greater ownership of the roadside assistance component?”

Sam Cooper, director of Waymo’s incident response team, told the hearing that the company has trained “more than 30,000 first responders globally on how to interact” with its robots. He also praised Waymo’s collaboration with first responders in designing the system that allows them to take control.

“We simply want to give them the ability, in this case, to appropriately move that vehicle from the scene and make that scene safe so they can do their job,” he said.

Waymo has made “improvements to our surge capabilities” so Waymo can be better prepared for larger emergencies, Cooper said. But he did not detail these improvements, and Mahmoud told TechCrunch that his office did not receive the promised follow-up.

Cooper also said Waymo would consider leveraging partnerships like the one it has with DoorDash, which involves cart workers closing robotaxi doors that have been left open, to move the vehicles.

It’s not clear how this will differ from the current roadside assistance staff used by Waymo. But city officials kept repeating the same message. “Our first responders should not be AAA,” District Supervisor Alan Wong said.

This article was originally published on March 25, 2026 at 9:30 a.m. PT.