Who’s driving Waymo’s self-driving cars? Sometimes, the police.

Last August, a fire ripped through 10 acres of grass on either side of California’s I-280 near Redwood City. Traffic backed up as firefighters extinguished the blaze, and California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers directed drivers to turn around and travel the wrong way to exit the freeway. 

Some of those drivers encountered a new obstacle: a Waymo robotaxi.  

Footage of the incident shows the Waymo AV tried to pass stopped traffic by traveling on the shoulder, only to wind up reversing away from the oncoming wrong-way cars, before stopping altogether. 

The robotaxi wouldn’t budge, despite efforts from the company’s remote assistance team. So, Waymo turned to a resource that has become a reliable problem solver and called 911. 

“Highway patrol turned everyone around, but unfortunately our car is not able to turn around,” one of Waymo’s remote assistance workers told an area 911 dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by TechCrunch in a public records request. The employee wanted officers on the scene to drive the robotaxi away and to arrange transportation for the passenger inside. 

Roughly 30 minutes after Waymo called 911, a CHP officer got behind the wheel and drove the robotaxi to a park-and-ride lot near the highway, a CHP incident report obtained by TechCrunch shows. From there, it was driven away by one of Waymo’s “roadside assistance” workers, the company told TechCrunch. 

The Redwood City incident could be viewed as an edge case, an inevitable, yet mildly embarrassing blip in Waymo’s rapidly expanding robotaxi service network.

But this was not an isolated incident. Waymo has relied on taxpayer-funded first responders to navigate its vehicles when they encounter issues, despite the existence of the company’s own roadside assistance team. In at least six instances identified by TechCrunch, first responders have had to take control of Waymo vehicles and move them out of traffic during emergency situations, including one in which an officer was in the middle of responding to a mass shooting.

Waymo has recently come under criticism by lawmakers for its use of remote assistance employees, including a few dozen who work from the Philippines, to help its robotaxis decide the best path through complex situations. Its roadside assistance team has received far less attention.  

The company’s representatives never mentioned the roadside assistance workers at a testy March 2 hearing in San Francisco about the behavior of Waymo’s robotaxis that became stalled during a major power outage in December. At the meeting, city officials aired concerns that the stuck autonomous vehicles impeded or pulled first responders away from their primary jobs.

“What has started to happen is that our public safety officers and responders are having to be the ones to physically move [Waymos],” Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said at the hearing. “In a sense, they’re becoming a default roadside assistance for these vehicles, which we do not think is tenable.” 

Waymo told TechCrunch that its roadside assistance workers cleared dozens of stuck robotaxis during the blackout, with a handful still needing to be moved by first responders.

“Waymo Roadside Assistance is a dedicated team of specialists who lend extra on-the-ground support to our fleet,” the company said in an email to TechCrunch. “Waymo’s standards for roadside response and service quality prioritize minimizing potential community impacts.” 

The company declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about how many roadside assistance workers it uses, or which third-party companies might employ them. Waymo also didn’t say how it plans to scale the team as it races to launch in about 20 more cities this year, expanding beyond its current markets of Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio, and the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Waymo’s helpers 

Waymo’s robotaxis provide more than 400,000 paid rides per week, a testament to the company’s many years developing self-driving technology. The robotaxis do rely on humans for help on occasion, though, and it does this in a few ways.  

The robotaxis need occasional guidance in complex situations, especially because — as Waymo claims — the company is trying to be as cautious as possible as it scales its service.  

Waymo’s robotaxis receive this guidance from the “remote assistance” workers. At any given time, there are around 70 of these people monitoring Waymo’s fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles, the company has said. Half of these workers are based in the U.S. and half are based in the Philippines.

Those details, which were shared in a letter to Congress in February, generated blowback for Waymo over concerns about safety and security. Waymo has defended its use of remote assistants, claiming the workers are well-qualified and that there is no meaningful lag introduced due to how far away they’re located, whether in Arizona, Michigan, or the Philippines.  

“Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S.-based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad,” the company recently wrote.  

Remote assistance workers perform a few tasks. If a Waymo vehicle encounters a real-world situation that is tricky to navigate, it might send a request to these workers to help decide the best way through. Waymo is clear that these workers “provide advice and support to the [robotaxis] but do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle.” They also respond to lower-priority requests from Waymo robotaxis, like answering questions about whether the interior of a car is clean.

But this loop is not perfect.  

The National Transportation Safety Board recently revealed that in January, a Waymo in Austin asked a remote assistance worker to confirm whether a nearby school bus was loading or unloading kids. The stop sign and flashing lights were deployed, but the remote assistance worker wrongly told the robotaxi it could proceed. The Waymo then drove past the school bus as it was loading children, though the bus’s “stop arms” were still extended, the NTSB said.

Waymo told TechCrunch that it “regularly audit[s] RA responses, including correctness. If an incident is captured, it will be immediately flagged for next steps, ranging from additional coaching to full decertification.”

When a Waymo gets in a crash, or stuck in an emergency, the company leans on its “event response team.” Waymo says this team is “exclusively based in the U.S.” — though they are still remote — and that they are “certified for more complex tasks like coordinating with emergency responders and managing post-collision protocols.”  

By that definition, the remote assistance worker who helped CHP move the Waymo robotaxi away from the Redwood City incident was likely part of that event response team, though Waymo did not confirm.  

There are growing pains here, too. Audio recordings from CHP dispatch, along with the incident report obtained by TechCrunch, show that officers were under the impression for about 10 minutes that Waymo wanted the passenger to drive the robotaxi away from the fire.  

It wasn’t until the remote worker called 911 a second time that CHP realized an officer needed to drive it away from the scene. (Waymo declined to answer specific questions about this miscommunication. The company said it never asks riders to take control of its vehicles.) 

Then there is the roadside assistance team. These workers handle “on-scene, direct interaction” work and are often tasked with moving a vehicle. Waymo declined to answer questions about how many times these workers have moved a robotaxi, how many are on call at a given time, or how many are in each city.  

Some appear to work for Transdev, a third-party contractor that Waymo has used in the past, and a few even used to be safety drivers or monitors for Waymo, according to profile information on LinkedIn.  

The company also told TechCrunch that it “require[s] local tow partners to maintain rapid response capability for urgent tow requests and strategically position support across our service areas.” 

“In the event that a Waymo vehicle needs support, we dispatch Waymo Roadside Assistance and/or local tow partners to assist on-scene,” the company said in a statement. “While we do not expect first responders to move our vehicles as a matter of course, we recognize that moments count in emergency situations. Therefore, we designed a straightforward process that allows first responders to take control of the vehicle within seconds.” 

Relying on first responders  

While Waymo says it doesn’t expect first responders to interact with its vehicles, it keeps happening — and it’s not clear whether it will become totally avoidable.  

In at least six cases over the past few months, first responders have had to manually navigate Waymo vehicles, including at two active crime scenes.

Earlier this month, an Austin police officer had to move a Waymo out of the way of an ambulance that was responding to a mass shooting event. In February, a first responder in Atlanta had to disengage a Waymo after it drove into an active crime scene, before one of the company’s roadside assistance workers “retrieved it,” according to the company. And this week, a police officer in Nashville had to manually drive a Waymo robotaxi away after it got stuck in an intersection. 

During the March 2 hearing in San Francisco, city officials repeatedly asked Waymo what it would do to lessen dependence on first responders. Waymo never mentioned it has workers who are dedicated to moving vehicles during the three-hour meeting.  

District supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who oversaw the hearing, told TechCrunch in an interview that he felt Waymo didn’t provide many satisfactory answers. 

“I was asking: How are you going to take more accountability to ensure that our first responders are not doing that?” he said. “And we did not get that answer in the hearing that we were looking for, which is: What are they going to do to ensure that they are going to take more ownership of that roadside assistance component?” 

A manager on Waymo’s incident response team, Sam Cooper, said at the hearing that the company has trained “more than 30,000 first responders globally on how to interact” with its robotaxis. He also touted Waymo’s collaboration with first responders in designing the system that allows them to take control.  

“We simply want to give them the capability, in that event, to adequately move that vehicle from the scene and make that scene safe so that they’re able to do their jobs,” he said. 

Cooper said Waymo has made “improvements to our surge-staffing capabilities” so that Waymo would be better prepared for larger emergency situations. But he did not detail those improvements, and Mahmood told TechCrunch his office has not received a promised follow-up.  

Cooper also said Waymo would consider leveraging partnerships like the one it has with DoorDash, which involves gig workers closing robotaxi doors that were left open, to move vehicles.  

How that would differ from the existing roadside assistance staff Waymo uses is not clear. But city officials kept repeating the same message. “Our first responders should not be AAA,” district supervisor Alan Wong said. 

This article was originally published March 25, 2026 at 9:30 a.m. PT.