Self-driving taxis are actually driven by humans

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These systems are prone to error, so companies often rely on a team of technicians who can remotely operate the machines when needed. That’s what Amazon-owned robotaxi service Zoox does.

Companies have been carefully guarding this secret for years, but now they are finally starting to talk about it.

Only relatively recently, after several major failures in the self-driving car industry, have industry leaders like Waymo acknowledged the role of technicians. But no company has said how many such specialists it employs or how often it relies on them.

In short, we don’t know how deeply ingrained this practice is—it’s entirely possible that the most successful examples of “self-driving” have relied heavily on hidden drivers.

Remote intervention

General Motors’ Cruise unit dealt a blow to the industry’s reputation when one of its robotaxis struck a pedestrian in October 2023, prompting a federal investigation into how common these accidents were, and resulting in all 40,000 of the company’s vehicles being pulled from the streets.

It is partly because of this mistake that we are currently so little told how much the robotaxi industry relies on human intervention.

• Cruise has approximately 1.5 employees dedicated to maintaining the self-driving car, including remote technical assistants.
• Zoox has at least one team of about three dozen people who oversee a small number of self-driving robotaxis.

This seems to undermine one of the economic arguments for robotaxis: that they don’t require humans behind the wheel.

“It might be cheaper to just pay the driver to get in the car and drive,” says Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

It would be remiss to blame robotaxi companies for including these extra safety features. The problem is that they fail to acknowledge that humans are still involved, instead creating a pseudo-facade of complete autonomy: just like the Mechanical Turk, the infamous 18th-century chess “automaton” that actually hid a real chess player.

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In the tech sector, we’ve seen this everywhere, from AI-powered drive-thru cafes — which turned out to be heavily reliant on cheap workers to seamlessly adjust orders — to Tesla’s fully self-driving system, whose cars don’t drive themselves at all.

“That’s how it works in Silicon Valley,” says journalist Cade Metz. “Companies create the illusion of complete autonomy to drum up interest in their technology and attract the billions of dollars needed to build a viable robotaxi service.”