Robotaxi firms refuse to disclose remote-intervention frequency

US robotaxi developers are refusing to disclose how often their vehicles need remote human help, even as they expand commercial operations on public roads. Senator Ed Markey’s office said seven companies—Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo and Zoox—declined to answer a central question in letters sent after a Senate Commerce Committee hearing: how frequently remote staff intervene when autonomous systems get stuck or face edge cases, according to TechCrunch.

The missing metric is not a curiosity; it is the operating cost and safety hinge point. Remote assistance turns “driverless” service into a hybrid model where labour sits offsite and is called in when the software cannot complete a situation. If interventions are rare, the economics look like software scaling. If they are common, the service behaves more like a call-centre business attached to a fleet, with staffing ratios, training, and response-time constraints that scale with miles driven.

Markey’s report describes a “patchwork of safety practices” and “significant variation” in operator qualifications, response times, and whether staffing is overseas, with no federal standards governing the work. Waymo’s chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, told lawmakers that vehicles sometimes need guidance from remote staff, and he said about half of Waymo’s remote assistance workforce is based in the Philippines, TechCrunch reports.

Companies’ incentives to keep the numbers private are straightforward. A high intervention rate would undercut two narratives at once: that the technology is close to general autonomy, and that unit economics improve rapidly with scale. It would also raise uncomfortable questions for regulators about what exactly is being permitted on city streets: a self-driving vehicle, or a teleoperated system with intermittent human control and a new failure mode—connectivity, latency, and operator error.

The responses Markey received illustrate how the industry draws the confidentiality line. Waymo and May Mobility explicitly labelled intervention frequency “confidential business information,” while Tesla’s letter did not even include the question, TechCrunch reports. Waymo said improvements have “materially reduced” help requests per mile and claimed that a “vast majority” of requests are resolved by the vehicle before an agent responds, but it provided no figures.

Markey is urging the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to investigate the use of remote assistance workers and says he is working on legislation to impose guardrails. Until disclosure becomes a condition of operating permits or insurance, the market will keep pricing robotaxi businesses as software—while the labour component remains an unreported variable.

Waymo was the only firm in Markey’s inquiry to acknowledge overseas remote assistance staffing.