I rode a few in SF and can’t wait for them to come to Seattle. They don’t use actual human remote drivers, and the support person I spoke to when I had an issue had a Filipino accent, so I’m not sure they were even in the usa (although that totally could have been California also). I don’t think they wound need that many people anyways to do live support. Waymo is definitely being cautious, but the cities they move into seem to all be success stories.
They say they don't have drivers, but they do admit to having actual people that solve live issues that the car cannot understand, which seems like a semantic difference to me. If its one support person per 1k cars, its probably a non issue, if its one per 5 cars then its a totally different problem.
