[OhMeadhbh]

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.)

[jgauth]

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...

[mikepurvis]

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.

[OhMeadhbh]

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.