--- title: "“Self-Driving” Cars Have a Dirty Secret" description: "Those self-driving, supposedly fully-autonomous robotaxis aren't all what they appear to be. Humans, it turns out, are still in the loop." date: "2024-09-14" modified: "2024-09-14" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/self-driving-dirty-secret" categories: - "Advanced Transport" - "Self-Driving Vehicles" tags: - "robotaxis" - "self driving car" - "Self-driving cars" - "the digest" --- # “Self-Driving” Cars Have a Dirty Secret ![Those self-driving, supposedly fully-autonomous robotaxis aren't all what they appear to be. Humans, it turns out, are still in the loop.]() *Las Vegas, USA - August 10, 2023: A Zoox self driving car testing in Las Vegas, NV. Zoox, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon. It is developing autonomous vehicles that provide mobility as a service. \Image: LPETTET / Getty Images\* ## Behind the Screen You may be surprised to learn that "self-driving" cars don't always drive themselves. Because these systems are far from infallible, companies like Amazon's robotaxi service Zoox often depend on a behind-the-scenes team of human technicians to remotely control their cars when they struggle to pilot themselves. Today this facet of self-driving operations is more of an open — but closely-guarded — secret. But as [*The New York Times* reports](), for years these companies avoided mentioning that their supposedly autonomous vehicles were occasionally controlled by humans at all. It's only been relatively recently, following several high profile debacles in the autonomous driving industry, that industry leaders, like Waymo [this May](), have acknowledged the role of human technicians. And according to the *NYT*, none of these companies have shared just how many of these remote-technicians they employ, or how often they depend on them. In short, we don't know how deep this practice goes — and it's possible that the smoothest "self-driving" experiences out there are substantially undergirded by hidden human drivers. ## Remote Intervention General Motors' Cruise division effectively embarrassed the entire industry when one of its robotaxis [injured a pedestrian]() last October, [leading to a federal investigation]() into just how widespread these accidents were — and eventually [the pulling of all 400 hundred of its vehicles]() off the streets. To some degree, we can probably blame that blunder for the small degree of insight we're now afforded into the robotaxi industry's reliance on human intervention. According to the *NYT's* sources, Cruise staffed about 1.5 workers per vehicle, including remote assistant techs. Zoox staffs at least one team of around three dozen people overseeing its handful of fully driverless robotaxis. That seemingly undermines one of the economic selling points of robotaxi services compared to [ride-hailing services like Uber]()**:** that they don't need humans behind the wheel. "It may be cheaper just to pay a driver to sit in the car and drive it," Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Collective Intelligence, told the *NYT*. ## Automotive Turk It'd be remiss to fault robotaxi companies for having these kinds of safety fallbacks. The problem is that they're not upfront about the fact that humans are still in the loop, creating a facade of full autonomy that doesn't actually exist. In the tech sector, we've seen this in everything from [AI-powered drive-thrus]() — of which some turned out to *heavily* depend on cheap, outsourced laborers correcting orders behind the scenes — to the marketing of Tesla's Full Self-Driving system, which doesn't actually fully drive itself, [despite what its name implies](). "That is just how things work in Silicon Valley," journalist Cade Metz, in his [accompanying piece]() about the *NYT* report he co-authored. "By creating the illusion of complete autonomy, companies can fuel interest in their technology and raise the billions of dollars they need to build a viable robot taxi service." **More on self-driving tech:** *[Waymo Giving 100,000 Robotaxi Rides Per Week But Not Making Any Money]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()