Traffic Safety Attorney Amy Witherite: AV Companies Are Expanding Aggressively While Concealing How Much They Still Rely on Human Operators

Like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, autonomous vehicle companies have been hiding an uncomfortable truth: their “self-driving” cars still depend heavily on human operators, and they have refused to say how often. That is the finding of a new Senate report , “Remote Backseat Operators: Revealing the Autonomous Vehicle Industry’s Reliance on Human Remote Assistance Operators,” by Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), and it is exactly what traffic safety attorney and Witherite Law Group founder Amy Witherite has been warning about as safety issues keep piling up.

• San Antonio: A Waymo robotaxi drove the wrong way on a one-way street during morning drop-off at Cambridge Elementary.
• Austin: National Transportation Safety Board investigates another case of Waymo passing a stopped school bus — even after claims that the issue was fixed.
• Los Angeles: Waymo drives the wrong way through a drive-thru.

Sen. Markey’s investigation into seven major AV companies, Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox, found a troubling patchwork of safety practices. Every company refused to disclose how frequently human Remote Assistance Operators (RAOs) intervene in their vehicles’ decisions. Waymo was found to be the only AV company using overseas RAOs, with a substantial share of its operator workforce not holding a U.S. driver’s license. Latency between vehicles and remote operators varied widely across companies, with each firm setting its own threshold for what constitutes a safety risk.

“Autonomous vehicle companies make big promises about safety, but it turns out human workers still play a critical role,” said Sen. Markey. “These operations demand urgent federal regulation.”

Witherite says the on-road record makes the lack of transparency even more alarming:

Waymo vehicles passed stopped school buses 19 times in Austin in a single school year, prompting a recall of more than 3,000 vehicles. An NTSB investigation found that a remote operator may have incorrectly advised the vehicle that it was safe to proceed.

During a San Francisco blackout, hundreds of Waymo robotaxis stalled in intersections and blocked emergency vehicles. The city’s mayor called Waymo’s CEO, demanding the removal of the autonomous vehicles.

A police officer responding to a mass shooting in Austin was pulled off the scene to physically move a stalled Waymo. First responders have intervened in at least six similar incidents.

Federal regulators have logged more than 1,400 incidents involving Waymo vehicles since 2021, including 117 injuries and 2 fatalities.

“Robotaxi companies are racing to expand before the rules can catch up, and now we know they have been doing it without telling anyone how often a human has to step in to prevent a disaster,” said Witherite.

“The public deserves to be served by this technology — not used as its testing ground."

ABOUT WITHERITE LAW GROUP

The Witherite Law Group, founded by Amy Witherite, is one of Texas’s leading personal injury and traffic safety firms. Witherite is a nationally recognized legal commentator and safety advocate who has handled thousands of auto and trucking accident cases.

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