So basically Waymo are remote controlled taxis
Remote control like this requires cars to safely deal with hazards on their own. But, it doesn’t require software to be able to solve every problem.
If I were in their shoes, especially given the Cruise debacle, I'd have continuous remote human monitoring of every vehicle. They're already burning billions on this; if having one minimum-wage worker per vehicle just hovering over a big red stop button prevents a gruesome accident and a multi-month pause, it'd be money well spent.
It's the perfect way to integrate RLHF until they've trained out all the kinks.