Waymo’s driverless taxis are marketed as cars that can handle the road without a person behind the wheel, yet the system still leans heavily on human labor in less glamorous ways. The vehicles may steer, brake and navigate on their own, but people are quietly closing doors, cleaning cabins, watching dashboards and talking stranded riders through confusing moments. The future of robotaxis, at least for now, is less about replacing humans and more about rearranging where those humans sit in the mobility chain.
Robotaxis that drive themselves, but not by themselves
Waymo likes to emphasize that its cars operate without a safety driver, and that claim is technically accurate in the cities where its service is live. In parts of Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, the company runs a commercial service in which the Waymo vehicles do not carry a human ready to quickly take over driving. That distinction matters, because it separates Waymo from rivals that still keep a trained operator in the front seat, but it can also obscure the broader support system that keeps those cars moving.
Behind each ride sits a web of remote staff, local contractors and operational teams who step in whenever the autonomy stack hits a real-world edge case. Industry observers sometimes talk about “full self driving” as if it were a binary switch, yet the reality looks more like a spectrum of automation wrapped in human scaffolding. Waymo’s own materials describe a layered approach in which the Waymo Driver handles most of the driving while specialized teams provide guidance when the system needs help, a model that keeps the steering wheel in silicon hands but leaves people responsible for everything around it.
Los Angeles as a live experiment in human support
Nowhere is that hybrid reality more visible than in Southern California, where Waymo has turned Los Angeles into a sprawling test bed. The company has about 300 robotaxis roaming the streets of Los Angeles Cou, a scale that makes the service feel less like a novelty and more like part of the city’s traffic. Those cars are not just driving themselves, they are also constantly being repositioned, inspected and reset by people who never appear in the glossy marketing shots.
Residents have already noticed that the vehicles, owned by Waymo, which is in turn owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, sometimes clog narrow streets or idle in awkward spots while they wait for instructions. Complaints about noise, congestion and odd behavior have become part of the local conversation, highlighting how a fleet of driverless cars can still feel very human in its impact. The Los Angeles rollout shows that scaling autonomy is as much a civic and logistical challenge as a technical one, and that challenge is being met by workers who clean, tow and supervise the cars between rides.
The door problem that spawned a new job
One of the strangest examples of human dependence in Waymo’s system is also one of the most mundane. Riders keep forgetting to close the doors. According to reporting that surfaced around Jan, Why the cars end up stranded is simple. Well, passengers step out, leave a sliding door ajar, and the robotaxi cannot legally or safely start driving again until someone physically shuts it.
Instead of redesigning the hardware overnight, Waymo has quietly built a human workaround. The company is using an app to notify Los Angeles tow operators when robotaxis need human assistance, effectively paying people to sprint over and close doors so the vehicles can get moving again. A brief note on the arrangement explains that The company is using an app to dispatch these helpers, turning a basic passenger courtesy into a micro-gig. It is a reminder that even the smartest software can be tripped up by small, very human habits.
Remote “backseat drivers” watching from afar
Beyond the curbside fixes, robotaxis also rely on people who never touch the vehicles at all. Operators sit in control centers, watching maps and camera feeds, ready to step in when the software encounters something it does not understand. Industry frameworks describe this as Remote Monitoring, a form of Continuous observation of vehicles’ performance and operational status that stops short of direct joystick-style control but still gives humans a say in what the car does next.
Other companies have been more explicit about how this works in practice. One major rival, Zoox, has described a system in which remote workers can talk to riders through speakers and microphones, and can also help the vehicle navigate tricky situations such as passing emergency vehicles or dealing with construction. In that setup, They provide verbal assistance and high level guidance while the car still executes the actual driving maneuvers. Waymo’s own description of its fleet response teams suggests a similar philosophy, where humans are there to nudge and advise rather than to grab the wheel.
Inside Waymo’s fleet response safety net
Waymo has given its human support layer a formal name, and that branding reveals how central it is to the operation. The company describes a Fleet response team that steps in when the Waymo Driver encounters unusual situations, from blocked lanes to emergency scenes. According to the company, Fleet response provides the Waymo Driver guidance to make even more room to efficiently clear the street and make way for emergency vehicles, a task that blends local traffic rules, social norms and real time judgment.
Waymo also stresses that its goal is to have the system rely less on this help over time, arguing that each intervention becomes training data that lets the software handle similar scenarios independently in the future. The company’s own blog notes that as the technology improves, the Waymo Driver operates more independently and needs less help, but it does not claim that the need for human oversight will disappear entirely. In practice, that means the safety net is not a temporary crutch so much as a permanent layer of the service, one that will likely shrink but not vanish as the cars get smarter.
Critics who say the autonomy story is oversold
Not everyone is convinced that this blend of automation and human backup is being marketed honestly. Roboticist Rodney Brooks has spent years tracking predictions about self driving cars, and his latest Self Driving Cars scorecard, filed under What I Nearly Got Wrong, argues that the industry has consistently underestimated how hard it is to remove people from the loop. In his view, the need for remote staff, cleaners and on call technicians is not a minor detail but a structural feature of how these systems work.
Brooks has also been quoted pushing back on the broader tech narrative that autonomy is just around the corner. In a recent reflection, Brooks challenges the idea that full autonomy is imminent, pointing to One hole in the fabric of full autonomy that became clear around Dec when a power outage left some advanced systems struggling to cope. His argument is not that self driving cars are impossible, but that the industry should be more candid about the messy, human heavy reality behind the sleek user experience.
Waymo’s own framing: human centered by design
Waymo, for its part, has tried to present its reliance on people as a deliberate design choice rather than a shortcoming. Academic and industry analyses of human centered AI often cite the company as an example of a balanced approach to autonomy. One such framework notes that Waymo has adopted a strategy in which Instead of fully removing human involvement, the company integrates human oversight and intervention into the system architecture from the start.
That philosophy shows up in everything from the in car rider support channels to the way the service handles edge cases. Rather than promising a car that can handle every possible scenario, Waymo emphasizes that its Driver is part of a broader ecosystem that includes remote specialists, local partners and customer support agents. Framed this way, the human roles are not embarrassing patches but essential components of a safer, more resilient network, even if they complicate the simple story of a car that drives itself and needs no one.
Expansion plans that will multiply the human footprint
Waymo’s ambitions extend far beyond its current coastal strongholds, and each new city will require its own web of human helpers. The company has already announced that Waymo plans to bring its robotaxi service to Dallas in 2026, a move that will test how well its model travels to a region with different driving culture, weather and infrastructure. That expansion will not just mean shipping more cars, it will also mean recruiting local partners, training new support staff and setting up additional monitoring hubs.
Dallas will join Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco as another proving ground for Alphabet’s robotaxi ambitions, and the stakes are high. The company’s parent, Alphabet, has poured years of research and billions of dollars into this effort, betting that a mix of software, sensors and human support can eventually deliver a profitable service. Each new market will reveal whether the current balance between automation and labor is sustainable, or whether the hidden workforce will need to grow even faster than the fleet itself.
A broader industry pattern, not a Waymo quirk
Waymo’s dependence on people is not an outlier, it is a snapshot of how the entire robotaxi sector currently operates. Industry overviews of the 2025 surge in autonomous services note that several companies are now running driverless pilots, including Zoox and Waymo, although only Zoox and Waymo provide commercial rides completely free of any human safety driver in the front seat. Even in those cases, however, the cars are backed by remote operators, field technicians and cleaning crews who keep the service running.
Other reporting on Waymo’s operations has highlighted how much of this labor is invisible to riders. One account notes that Waymo‘s robotaxi tech is much more advanced than earlier experiments, but that the company still leans on arrangements like paying people around $20 to close doors or reset vehicles that get stuck. Taken together with the door closing gigs, the tow operator alerts in Los Angeles and the remote monitoring setups used by rivals, a clear pattern emerges. The robotaxi revolution is not about eliminating humans from transportation, at least not yet. It is about shifting their roles into new, often less visible corners of the system.
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