Waymo Safety Impact
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The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they hit the child at a lower speed than a human would have because of the reaction time.
I would rather be in an area where only Waymo's are allowed than an area where they are banned.
When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.
In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.
Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.
Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.
I still loathe ads though.
Oh, the self driving car business will get there, believe me. This is just the first iteration. Designed to get everybody on board with the idea.
You'll probably never forget that advertisement, which is an exciting business opportunity for Waymo.
They could partner with Spotify and other media content partners so that the Waymo can generate an adrenaline-rush near crash experience when a premium advertiser's ad is playing. /s (hopefully)
Do you drive a lot? I feel like humans take evasive actions like this all the time.
Which isn’t to say that the average driver wouldn’t have hit it, it’s just not obviously superhuman.
It waited at the stop sign like it was making a turn, then suddenly entered the intersection when the Waymo was 5-10 meters away, despite not having the right of way.
Maybe they were trying to commit suicide-by-Waymo?
And Google Pay, imagine my surprise back in 2021 when I signed up for Waymo and realized I had to manually type in my credit card. No Google Pay??? C'mon y'all, you're Alphabet!
To prevent over-reporting, they could even make a system which logs number plates and only reports it if (for example) the same car is involved in incidents 3+ times in a week.
There is a large group of people (maybe even the majority?) who, as soon as they get in a car, MUST immediately turn on the radio or some kind of extra noise source. Is this some kind of a Pavlovian reflex?
I'm always amazed by this, as my car is one of the few places where I have actual control over my environment (unlike on public transport, or at my workplace, or even in my home - neighbours can be noisy...). We are living in a sea of unwanted noise, bombarded by constant ads and "music", so it is nice to have a place of "quiet".
In seriousness, music is one of the small joys of life. Like a morning coffee or the smell of winter. It makes living a little bit more bearable.
I chuckled
I've ridden in Waymos. They don't exactly slap on the blinker and move at the limit of traction like someone about to miss their exit. If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn.
Essentially, a meat driver was waiting at a stop sign to make a turn onto the main road. I was in a Waymo driving on the main road and did not have a stop sign.
When we were 10 meters away from the intersection, the meat driver suddenly started to enter the intersection. I have no idea why.
Full brake would've hit the other car in the driver's side door at 40 km/h.
> under-playing how decent the average human is.
I got to SMFC in CSGO which means I'm in the top 3% of players in clicking on heads within 500 ms of them appearing on my screen. I have never reacted as fast as that Waymo did.
My experience is that for a human driver to react quickly in city driving conditions, style and prep are more important than reaction time: in the case you describe (entering an intersection with another car waiting on a stop sign perpendicular to your path), I'd have my foot hanging over the brake and off the gas pedal — this has helped me avoid hitting many other cars with inattentive/distracted/bad drivers, and even pedestrians running over the road or a red light on a crosswalk. When you are prepared and looking, you slam the brakes much faster!
My reading of all the human crash stats has been that majority of them happen when human drivers are impaired (drunk, drugged or too tired): as this is something we could (in theory, at least) control, I'd like to see and compare with stats for non-impaired human drivers too.
Then, I'd like to see it compared to attentive, non-distracted drivers too (but we won't have crash data for this, as they would avoid most potential crashes).
Note that I am only talking things under every human driver's control, and not things like skill, reaction time, etc.
Also, modern cars (like Waymos) will have a much lower braking distance compared to "average": eg. my Volvo has 35m braking distance from 100km/h or 62mph compared to 50m (45% more) listed as average (excluding reaction distance) — so from 50km/h, it should be around 8m!
I vaguely recall reading at some point that this is something human drivers learn to do around robot cars because the robots are so timid. Is that still the case, was it never the case, or has it stopped being the case?
If it's still the case, one could argue that if you were not in a robot, the situation would never have occurred in the first place! (On the other hand, if you were both in robots, maybe it also wouldn't have...)
The Waymo didn't have the stop sign, the other driver did, at a three way intersection.
The other driver decided to suddenly enter the intersection, when the Waymo was like 5-10 meters away. This was after having stopped at the stop sign.
Either they weren't looking or intentionally trying to cause an accident. Swerving prevented the Waymo from crashing at 40 km/h into the driver's door.
Also, in the case of someone running a stop sign, it is far from a sure bet they are going to hit their brakes at all, so by swerving you increase the odds that you will still hit them, but now it will be while you have exhausted all your adhesion on lateral control. So now instead of a front end collision with all the benefits of airbags and crumple zones, you are at a significant risk of rolling the car or spinning off the road and hitting something immovable with a part of your car lacking crumple zones.
Nobody killed, according to the news, but several taken to hospital in critical condition.
Oh, I say unscathed but our tyre exploded the next day, as apparently we caught a fragment, and again, that’s not a “slam on the brakes” moment, but rather “trundle to a stop on the shoulder and walk to the conveniently nearby tyre shop”.
Even if you're not a panicky human but a optimally regulated control system?
> ...
> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
What?! Is this a generated comment?
https://files.catbox.moe/jdjwy5.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/mh4ivw.jpg
I have included EXIF data in an attempt to prove this really happened and I'm not an AI commenting bot.
I’m way less confident of self driving in the hands of the general public when differed maintenance often results in people and even companies driving with squealing breaks and balding tires etc.
Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle will behave within a relatively narrow operating range.
Cars are very expensive things to buy and own.
There are also new risks that weren't possible before. A software error can send you into oncoming traffic. Hackers can gain control of your vehicle either directly/remotely or by cleverly designed signage placed on the roadside. A disgruntled waymo contractor in the Philippines can remote drive you into a crowd of people. A flashing stoplight can leave you stranded at an intersection. The car may not see or react appropriately any number of uncommon hazards that human drivers would recognize and avoid. Only a relatively small number of these cars have been on the road, in limited conditions, and only for a small number years. There will be failures and risks we haven't even imagined yet.
One of these sets of risk is mostly theoretical (aside from the large scale stoplight outage), one of them is happening often enough that anyone who takes rideshare repeatedly will have a story.
If we limit ourselves to risks that have actually manifested, not hypothetical risks, I'd rather risk getting stuck at an intersection if there is a city wide power outage than deal with the weird conversations I've had on rideshares (not even counting the countless drivers who demonstrated that it is possible to drive a car without crashing for the duration of one rideshare ride without taking your eyes off the phone for more than a few seconds at a time).
They cannot. The remote drivers for Waymo offer "nudges" to the robot driver, but they cannot do full remote control.
They can effectively mark a dot in the middle of a crowd of people on their tablet and say "Your best course of action is to drive here", and the waymo very well might decide to try and follow that suggestion, but they cannot override Waymo's brakes nor coded-in "do not hit humans" mandate, and the waymo would stop before hitting anyone.
> Only a relatively small number of these cars have been on the road, in limited conditions, and only for a small number years.
The average uber driver has driven fewer miles on the road than Waymo's software, and hasn't seen all the conditions either. Most uber drivers have cumulatively like 5-20 years driving experience in the city they're driving in.
Waymo has racked up waaaay more miles than the average single human ever gets, and unlike humans, all the Waymos benefit from improvements to the software.
> There will be failures and risks we haven't even imagined yet.
This is pointless fearmongering. Like, ketchup could cause cancer, but we have no meaningful evidence in that direction, so saying "ketchup has unknown risks we haven't imagined yet" is silly.
We know now that waymo is statistically safer than human drivers, I personally know that I haven't had a waymo driver make me feel unsafe yet, but uber drivers often did, so you know, waymo seems to have some pretty nice improvements already.
I'll wait for actual evidence of these "unimaginable risks and failures" before I evaluate them. At this point, it would have to be a pretty bad failure to change the math though.
If your kids never leave the house, something bad definitely happens to them, they stay kids.
If only Waymo's were on the road I wouldn't worry about bike path dividers at all.
I sometimes pace them to act as a moving shield.
Nothing else comes close, not even eye contact and being waved on by a human. The other autonomous cars that have been introduced are at least just as scary to be around as people.
Yep, similar concept to using pedestrians crossing the road as shields. Cars reliably yield for them, not so much for cyclists.
> not even eye contact
Okay, DO NOT rely on eye contact. Look at what the vehicle and particularly its wheels, are doing.
> being waved on by a human
That's a potential death trap too. Just because one vehicle is yielding to you doesn't mean every other vehicle you're supposed to yield to is.
You're absolutely right!
Was this the case that was featured on here a few months ago? Where they voluntarily "disclosed" it? I seem to remember noticing at the time that they never said this was the only time they hit a child/someone. Which made me wonder how representative this case was. I might be mis-remembering though.
At least with Waymo, it's much less frequent.
Sometimes that person then counter-sues the manufacturer of the equipment if they think it was faulty. I image that would also happen here if there were personal ownership of self driving cars.
It's not like the people building Waymo have never heard of flashing your brights before.
The car saw this dude coming from way down the street, flying, and was like “yeah, better stop.” Probably saved the biker from serious injury, or worse. I wouldn't have seen him if I was driving.
I'm sure if I had just started walking across the crossing it would have reacted perfectly, but I wasn't willing - based on the lack of observable "I have noticed you" cues - to test that theory.
But thank you, I'll google it to know what to look for when I'm next in SF :)
The proper technique for yielding to pedestrians wishing to cross is to start slowing down early, as if you were planning to stop before the crossing. That sends a clear signal to the pedestrian they're good to start crossing. Then you're free to speed back up. This is very comfortable for the pedestrian and the vehicle never needs to stop, so the slowdown is minimal.
That Waymos apparently don't act this way and seem to need to send an explicit signal to pedestrians sounds concerning to me, even if its ultimately safe.
There was a huge fight over it, car drivers in those cities were mad. Plenty of politicians opposed it.
One year later stats were super clear: streets got way safer and the number of fatal accidents dropped to near 0. Time to traverse cities didn't change much, as it was already limited mostly by traffic and lights.
* Unless we're talking about removing a speed limit altogether and regulating unsafe driving using other criteria.
Cops won't pull you over or write tickets if you're not at least 15 mph over, we basically don't have speed cameras, everyone's trying to win the rat race and dehumanizing other cars around them, and it's not considered morally wrong (by most) to break that specific part of the law.
So a single vehicle obeying the law will quickly get a long line of tailgaters and tailgaters of tailgaters trying to "push" the vehicle to go faster.
They can suck it, I'm not late or in a hurry, and my ancient truck, steel bumper, and class 5 receiver hitch will not be badly harmed by your plastic grille. I get better gas mileage and have a longer stopping distance when I drive the limit, and I don't care if others are honking or riding my ass because they think I should drive faster.
The speed limit itself is a separate convention and regulation. In some places you can be cited for obstructing traffic by going the speed limit in the passing lane if you are matching the speed of cars to your right, effectively blocking the road.
"Only 46.5 percent of U.S. drivers consider going more than 15 miles per hour over the speed limit on the freeway to be "extremely" or "very" dangerous — with 40.6 percent openly admitting to doing it at least "a few times" in the last 30 days" [1].
[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/11/30/why-so-many-u-s-drive...
But there are also people who drive in the left lane, who will tailgate you at 1 or 2 meters because you're doing 130 km/h. These people are idiots, but you get these sorts of people everywhere.
On American freeways, you don't have a choice, every lane is doing about 10 mph over the limit (or in LA way under) and it is disruptive or dangerous not to. These freeways tend to be running at full capacity so it actually makes sense since it improves capacity.
Let's take a simplistic model of accidents: that the average driver is at fault in an accident 50% of the time. So a perfect driver would only halve the number of accidents -- they only eliminate the accidents where they would otherwise have been at fault.
But Waymo's numbers are better than the "perfect" driver above. How is that possible? Because in most accidents the blame is not split 0%/100%. You can avoid a lot of accidents with defensive and safe driving.
More than 1/2 of roadway fatalities involve alcohol or drugs. An oversized fraction of fatalities are represented by young men under 24. 1/6 of all fatalities are motorcycles. 1/6 of all fatalities are pedestrians being struck by a vehicle.
On a real world course where the only way to achieve those kind of numbers is to avoid getting hit by those drunk, fatigued and distracted drivers? Very impressive.
But individual driving - you can eliminate all those factors assuming you're a healthy, expericed driver with a new car. Nothing against self driving in principle but the failure cases I've seen look so bizarre - I'm way more comfortable with my limitations.
Unless their message is "if you're drunk turn on self driving" which I could get behind, I sincerely doubt current self driving is better than humans - simply because of the data they chose to compare to. If they were better than professional taxi drivers I'm sure they would tout that data widely.
Like a realistic comparison would be comparing it to taxi drivers/ride share drivers - then you'd see the risk vs using a cab/uber/whatever. Not a drunk 18 year old with a clunker with no brakes.
For a more ecologically conscious alternative, I recommend carrying a handful of sparkplugs.
If you can stick to at least half-decent dedicated cycling infrastructure separated from cars, sure. If riding alongside traffic, I wouldn't be surprised that, depending on the exact route, the gains wouldn't outweigh the risks.
Generally speaking, operating a bike safely is considerably more difficult than a car and the margins of error are tiny.
Crazy thought, I know.
A self-driving car never gets tired and sleepy after driving for many hours straight. A highway-bound Waymo would be safer than a few instances of distant past me who stayed on the road longer than I was safe to. They also never get drunk, and are safer than approximately 100% of impaired drivers.
I genuinely think we'll all be safer when lots of people collectively realize that someone other than themselves should be driving.
Insurance companies will simply price people out of driving. And I welcome it SO very much.
I don't want to have the freedom to go places determined by some faceless multinational, according to my subscription. Or via some "safety" regime.
I'm happy to see this acknowledged, and hope it's a sign that they appreciate the difficulties of winter driving.
They’re preparing to launch and have already been testing in Chicago, detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston, NYC, and London. I think it’s safe to assume they’ve considered winter driving.
For anyone who doesn't know this, in a construction zone if a human is holding a stop sign, it means stay stopped until they flip the sign and suggest you to move slowly. Waymo just handled this as a human would
Maybe that's too much of a statistical stretch.
But would be a good to-the-point number to have on hand for some waymo debates.
"yes they caused some disruption in an intersection in so-and-so scenario, but on the other hand they saved X number of human lives last year"
Also in comparison the cases of disruption/blocking intersections/emergency-services do seem significant - seems plausible in the right circumstances you could lose lives.
Seems they need to 10x their miles before they can start making confident claims about lives saved.
When I drive I have the option to choose to be safe or not. When a computer drives I lose that option. So for 49% of the people, safer than the average human is less safe than before.
I think we need to reach "Safer than the safest 10% of humans".
Also these reports should be done by a government agency.
And this does not even compare the drivers, but simply miles driven.
So I think that 80% of human drivers would likely be safer than Waymo unless they are driving under the influence or extremely tired or distracted.
Note that "13x safer" already implies being in the top 10%, though.
at this point I trust that they have seen me, know that I'm there, and won't behave unpredictably
It wasn't life or death or anything like that, but I was close enough that it was a real "dick move" and I had to get on the anchors a lot harder than I'd have liked. Not sure what sensor or whatever it was missing for that to happen, but I can assure you it did.
(I'm not suggesting my anecdotal evidence says anything particularly worthy around autonomous vehicle safety, just sharing a surprising incident)
If taking a bus becomes easy, reliable and fast, more people will do it, and there will be less cars on the road.
It’s horrible and makes reading harder.
I wanted to see this, but I give up.
I'll take my information from a neutral third party, thanks.
DoorDash has these little cute robots doing delivery. I often seen them followed by a person on a e-bike. This has been going on for more than a year. My recent Lyft driver said one reason is because the Waymo's ignore the other robot and kill them and the bike ensures they don't.
if Waymo can do the same - then partner with insurance companies - they can easily be a $1 trillion dollar company even if they just reduce accidents by 5X.
The insurance market or cost thereof is their market.
Like, could you imagine yourself seeing a self driving car that's perfect in all the ways like that, no dumb quirks, but it crashes twice as often as a human, and saying "well it got the important stuff right"
You have to pick one thing to be more important. Accident rates, or the stuff you listed in your first comment. Which one do you pick?
These cars are not one step forward, one step back. They're five steps forward, one step back. Saving lives is much bigger than the weirdness.
Waymo is trialing in several northeast cities. Search for "waymo trial boston" or "waymo trial nyc".
But beyond the technical issues, there are also political issues. Search for "new york bans waymo".
I guess more realistically, I wish the government would step in demand footage because the cars have records of every law they broke.
If the child lived in a neighborhood where cars went slower (it was a 25mph zone) he wouldn't have gotten hit in the first place. Praising Waymo here is like praising a priest for not molesting a child. Yes it's good that the waymo slowed down more than the average car, but really the whole system should be completely rethought. Instead, we're pouring billions into single occupancy vehicles, when we should've been pouring billions into high speed rail, subways, etc.
I'm hopeful that waymos converge on a more efficient design and improve cities in general. As it stands, they are a way for the rich to commute without having to exchange pleasantries with the underclass.
Did you miss this sentence? How can you read it in any other way?
Yes, I blame the parents or the adults that were supposed to supervise the child (but not the child). I teach my kids not to run into the street. I also watch them like a hawk near streets because kids are dumb.
I agree with you that we have too strong of a car culture. But we do. So until that changes, we need to teach our kids and adults to be vigilant.
But while we do that, I'd still rather have Waymos around than human drivers.
And then throwing all that away for the genius brand name of... "x". Brought to you from the same 50 year old that decided that having car models that spell S3XY is cool.
The benchmark should be the top decile of drivers.
I don’t care about the average driver. I care about the median.
It is not a high bar to expect an autonomous system to be better than 90% of the American drivers.
(Edit: I now think my comment above is wrong)
The only type of car crash that consistently gets some level of enforcement is drunk driving, basically everything else is written off as an accident
The great deal: let's redesign our cities to be car free. Consider the economic boom that amount of renovation would produce. Consider the increased economic activity from happier and more productive people. Consider the increased space for nature, parks, real estate, development.
Cars are the worst thing to have been invented. Optimizing the personal automobile leads to optimizing for a horrible living experience in the city. Let us reconsider all of this. This is bad. We can do better. We must.
I agree with you insofar as I am always in support of making cities more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists, and like the idea of closing off parts of cities to cars.
But to not even acknowledge the benefits to society of a technology which can reduce serious traffic accidents by 90% just feels hopelessly extreme to me.
There's also the classic problem of people wildly misinterpreting statements and getting mad about it. You can say "we should design cities not centred around cars" and people will hear "I'm going to make it illegal for you to own a car". Or my favourite exchange, "Let's improve public transit" followed by "but public transit is bad for me, I can't take it".
I think most Americans just like their cars and are reasonably happy with the status quo. They can be receptive to incremental improvements to public transportation, cycling, and pedestrian infrastucture, but they bristle at the idea of turning their city into a "car free city" (which is what the parent is suggesting) or being told they are wrong for liking their car.
> are reasonably happy with the status quo.
They're not, except for the having a car part. Road maintenance, especially in the suburbs, is hideously expensive and is falling further and further behind. Cars are the least efficient mode of transit, so traffic gets worse and worse. "Just one more lane" always makes it worse (induced demand), but that's the only solution being tried. The only way to make traffic better is to get significant numbers of people to switch to other modes, and you're simply not going to do that with "incremental improvements" because the status quo is so abysmal for anything other than a car. Cars themselves are horribly expensive and yet are required in most US cities; most are in effect paying a tax to car companies to participate in society.
> being told they are wrong for liking their car.
Who said this?
Or, let's not spend trillions of dollars on a behavioural experiment and get pedestrian safety with now-proven kit.
“Waymo is using around four NVIDIA H100 GPUSs at a unit price of 10,000 dollars per vehicle to cover the necessary computing requirements. The number of sensors – five lidars, 29 cameras, 4 radars”
I guess we'll have to wait to one of the two things to happen to really assess Waymo's performance:
1. They need to lose their markings and easily distinguishable features (like a big lidar on top), so they don't get any special treatment from other drivers.
2. They need to be majority of vehicles on the road.
Neither argued that people do not adapt their behavior in the presence of Waymos?
Someone also once said that the Azores are the remains of Atlantis. I simply didn't put any credence in it.
While behavioral changes around a self-driving car are plausible; they're common enough now that, at least where I live in San Francisco, regular human drivers should be pretty well acclimated to them.
The other day a human driver in front of me was doing 30 km/h under the speed limit down the middle of two lanes.
On that same drive, another driver doing around 15 under clipped a roundabout on the way in and on the way out. Guess they couldn’t decide to turn the wheel fast enough.
I refuse to believe everybody is hammered all of the time, but I’m starting to wonder.
It is less than 10km round trip, in the ‘burbs. Driving with humans scares me anymore. Bring on the robots.
I believe Waymos are pretty safe, and that’s a great thing. “Safer than humans (for selected rides inside this area)” is still very good, but it’s not at all “Safer than humans (period).”
I don't doubt Waymos are very safe, but I always irk at these comparisons. Majority of human accidents are due to gross negligence and/or driving under some influence or serious fatigue. A system incapable of alcohol etc. is better than that? Well that is a substantially lower bar than you can possibly imagine. Add to that that all systems have constraints on how and where they are able to go. Combined even Tesla can be made to look good.
Depending on the context and question it might still be the question to pose. But people often make the leap to assume that a typical Waymo is x better than a typical human driver which is an entirely different question entirely.
Waymo is for sure one of the (if not the only) good players out there though, gives me some hope.
Driving conventions vary wildly across states and even within them. And foreign drivers are a thing. A human who gets tripped up by a Waymo acting unusually will also get confused by someone getting used to no turns on right in Manhattan, driving on the right side of the road if coming in from the Commonwealth or adapting from California's protected left turners can turn into any lane, not just the leftmost. They'll also get confused by children and pets, who aren't bound by social custom, and deer, who aren't bound by physics.
Even the best human can't say that, at all times?
But Waymos have driven so many miles by this point, if they are hiding some data that would tip the scales back towards human drivers I have yet to see it. If there is a way to slice the data that makes Waymo’s look less safe I would welcome the correction.
If Waymo truly has 80-90% fewer crashes in the conditions they drove in, then it still has policy implications for places like Phoenix that do have good conditions.
But I also trust that the company wouldn't deploy them in those areas until the quality data they need is available. So perhaps "safer in the environments where they are actually deployed" would be more accurate, but that's also the only thing that matters.
Speculating about what would happen if they were used in ways they are neither intended to be used nor are actually used feels a little silly. Most machines can be unsafe if you use them in ways they're not intended to be used.
If they wanted to cherry pick, would they not omit that admission?
In any case, it seems plausible to me that the routes that Waymo drives are above average in human incidents, given that Waymo is probably overrepresented in high stress/traffic, inner city scenarios.
In the US, we do have access to all the data [1]. They're required to report every incident with an injury or any amount of property damage, and it's all available for download as CSV.
> For another, it at best shows that Waymo is safer than average.
No, it shows that Waymo is 6 to 12x safer than average.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
One cabby pulled out of a t junction to end up alongside me on a motorbike – a Waymo would never do that.
Worth reviewing the methodology, rather than making stuff up.
If I were Google, I'd partner with some insurance carriers to compare the number of claim events normalized to the number of drivers on the road (approximated with Android data) in a city (same time of year, etc) before and after introducing Waymo. If claims per driver decreases, then I would be more inclined to support the claim that they're actually safer and that they don't just "seem safer"
the metric is not some nebulous aspect of skill but the bottom decile of human drivers causing accidents. it is not difficult to believe that an AI can drive better than this group, it is not a high bar, below the 10th percentile are people who should not be driving but cause most of the accidents.
I'm sure it's a combination of both since the latency would mean immediate reactions are impossible, but the presenter raised an interesting point, and that was that the remote drivers are not licensed to drive in the states that Waymo operated in, which would make it illegal.
They are however, very cagy about how often this is necessary.