Waymo has established itself as the autonomous ride-hailing service to beat, operating a fleet of several thousand self-driving taxis across the United States, with active services in ten major metropolitan areas.
That “self-driving” may be due for some extra scrutiny, though. During a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, Waymo’s chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company’s use of Chinese-made vehicles and reliance on overseas workers, as Business Insider reports.
The stakes and public safety implications are considerable. The news comes roughly a week after a Waymo robotaxi struck and injured a child near a Santa Monica, California, elementary school, triggering a federal probe.
After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas operators operate, Peña said he didn’t have those stats, explaining that some operators live in the US, but others live much further away, including in the Philippines.
“They provide guidance,” he argued. “They do not remotely drive the vehicles. Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets an input, but the Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input.”
The admission didn’t sit well with senator Ed Markey (D-MA), who argued that “having people overseas influencing American vehicles is a safety issue.”
“The information the operators receive could be out of date. It could introduce tremendous cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” he argued. “We don’t know if these people have US driver’s licenses.”
“It’s one thing when a taxi is replaced by an Uber or a Lyft,” Markey concluded. “It’s another thing when the jobs just go completely overseas.”
Waymo has been fairly upfront about its human operators. In a May 2024 blog post, the company compared it to a “phone-a-friend.”
“When the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment,” the post reads. “The Waymo Driver [software] does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.”
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