Tuesday, June 10, 2025

You Can't Do It, My Friends

Even with one teleoperator per vehicle (lol), you can't do safety interventions at driving speed.
Self-driving vehicle developers don’t usually love talking about “teleoperation”—when a human guides or drives robot cars remotely. It can feel like a dirty secret. Shouldn’t an autonomous vehicle operate, well, autonomously?

But experts say teleoperations are, at least right now, a critical part of any robot taxi service, including Tesla's Robotaxi. The tech, though impressive, is still in development, and the autonomous systems still need humans to guide them through less-common and especially sticky road situations. Plus, a bedrock principle of safety engineering is that every system needs a backup—doubly so for new robotic ones that involve two-ton EVs driving themselves on public roads.
All of these companies have had teleoperation, but there is a difference between nudging a car that has pulled over and taking over at 30mph.