The article doesn't say, but for those of us who are uninformed, what does the cone do? Is it decoration, or does it 'actively' interfere with the navigation sensors?
The vision system recognises the cone, gets confused because a cone on the hood is outside of the normal operating parameters, and refers the problem to a teleoperator. Pulling high-G manoeuvres in the hopes of dislodging the cone obviously isn't an option. The teleoperator can't do anything about the cone, so the car becomes stranded.
Yes, robocabs are annoying, but how would these forms of protest play out in another, less permissive country?
Waypoint controling has its upsides and downsides, and so does direct teleops.
The main upside of waypoint control is you have less strict latency requirements and its easier for operators to "drive," the obvious downside is that it requires the onboard planner to be working.
Direct teleop allows for more granular control, but has stricter latency requirements and is often annoying to actually drive with.
From a business perspective its also more scalable since you can just remotely control the bot with a mouse and a screen (and not need a full gaming setup). Also as you can imagine many companies probably also multiplex single teleoperators over multiple vehicles. Having indirect control facilitates this better since you dont need operators to effectively "drive" bots with their undivided attention one at a time.
5g does make teleops better in general, but its also kind of expensive and still incurs a latency penalty (i.e remote driver action --> bot action feels insanely sluggish). I think as you scale it becomes less feasible to do direct drive, as you said.
Disclaimer: I work at another AV adjacent company so this is just my take on what I think others are doing from hearsay.