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Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

I would be very interested to see how the Waymo cars fail when RA workers aren't available.

(I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail. It should then be a simple matter to track down the cause. We can certainly afford to be out of communication for the short time it will take to replace it.)

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I believe we already saw something like this happen with the PG&E power outage in San Francisco in December. The waymo post-mortem [1] describes the outage causing a backlog of RA requests, which seems to have resulted in cars blocking roads an intersections. I would imagine they've improved the system after that incident, however.

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r...

I would expect the assistance is typically around environmental hazards, like is it safe to drive in this construction zone. Basically, not the kind of hardware faults that would be resolved by just sending in another car.

That seems to be the example Waymo gives as something that remote drivers help the cars with, but it doesn't go on to say that's typical or the only thing they help the cars with.

Fair. On typing the comment I stopped for a moment to think about other potential examples but I don't know if it's really helpful to speculate. And honestly I'm also just not sure what you could be uncertain about on the road where it's time insensitive enough that pulling over and putting on the four ways is a valid interim option.

I was just in SF last week and there was an intersection where a cop was directing traffic even though the stoplights were still operating overhead. Multiple waymos correctly obeyed the cop, and I assumed that's just something they can do visually, but it might also be a case where they would have a remote supervisor watching the video feed and affirming "yes, that's your signal to make the left turn you want to make" or "no, you can't go that way, turn right instead".

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