I have a friend who interviewed at Waymo to be a safety driver. He told me they have a human at command central monitoring the car and the safety driver, talking back and forth. I see no reason why they would remove the human monitor after no longer using safety drivers. For liability reasons at least. My point is I'm not sure Waymo cars can actually be considered self- driving since they have a remote human standing by to take over.
I don't think any operator has a 1:1 correspondence between vehicles and remote operators. Remote operation is intended to be used when a vehicle has realised it can't handle the current situation it's in and needs external assistance.
Seems like Cruise doesn't actually have this. If so, why aren't we hearing a report from the remote driver? Why did the remote driver let the car drag a woman? Why do remote drivers let Cruise cars screw up over and over again, block emergency vehicles, etc...
If I'm right, then Cruise will have to add remote drivers and then we can call them remotely operated cars instead of driver-less cars.
They have this, by their own admission and from my personal experiences in the car. A detail you might be mistaken on - they’re not really fully driving the car remotely. They’re basically sitting in a call center answering questions for the car or plotting a course, or giving it the all clear to proceed if things are uncertain. And generally this only happens if the situation is one where the car can ‘safely’ stop and wait for a response. In situations like the one discussed here, the car doesn’t have time to wait for a response from a human operator, so it just does what it thinks is best locally.
