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

Last August, a fire tore through 10 acres of grass on both sides of California I-280 near Redwood City. Traffic was backed up as firefighters extinguished the blaze, and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) ordered drivers to turn around and go the wrong way to exit the highway.

Some of these drivers encountered a new obstacle: the Waymo robotaxi.

Video of the event demonstrations Waymo AV tried to pass stopped traffic on the shoulder, but kept backing away from oncoming traffic, before stopping altogether.

Robotaxi didn’t budge, despite efforts by the company’s remote support team. So, Waymo turned to what has become a reliable solution to problems and is called 911.

“Traffic officers turned everyone around, but unfortunately our car can’t turn around,” one Waymo employee told a 911 dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by TechCrunch for the record. The operator demanded that the authorities on the scene drive away the robotaxi and arrange for the passengers to be transported inside.

About 30 minutes after Waymo called 911, a CHP officer got behind the wheel and drove the robotaxi to a park near the highway, a CHP report obtained by TechCrunch shows. From there, it was driven by one of Waymo’s “road support” employees, the company told TechCrunch.

The Redwood City incident could be seen as a fluke, an inevitable, but slightly embarrassing one for Waymo’s rapidly expanding network.

But this was not unusual. Waymo has relied on taxpayer-funded responders to drive its vehicles when they encounter problems, despite the company’s support team. In at least six cases known to TechCrunch, first responders have taken control of Waymo vehicles and removed them from the road during emergencies, including one in which a police officer was in the middle of responding to a mass shooting.

Waymo is here soon under criticism and lawmakers on the use of remote assistants, including a dozen who work from the Philippines, to help its robotics choose the best course of action in a crisis. His roadside assistance team doesn’t get much attention.

Company representatives did not mention roadside workers during the March 2 test to hear in San Francisco about the character of Waymo’s robotaxis which was halted during a major power outage in December. At the meeting, city officials expressed concern that autonomous vehicles would hinder or force first responders away from their primary duties.

“What’s starting to happen is that our public safety officers and responders are supposed to be the ones moving (Waymos),” Mary Ellen Carroll, head of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said at the hearing. “In a way, they’re becoming permanent road support for these vehicles, which we don’t think is possible.”

Waymo told TechCrunch that roadside crews removed most of the robotaxis that got stuck during the blackout, with a few still needing to be moved by first responders.

“Waymo Roadside Assistance is a dedicated team of experts who provide additional support to our fleet,” the company said in an email to TechCrunch. “Waymo’s roadside response standards and quality work prioritize mitigation in this area.”

The company declined to respond to TechCrunch’s questions about how many roadside assistance workers it uses, or which companies it may use. Waymo has yet to say how it plans to grow the team as it rushes to launch about 20 other 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 partners

Waymo’s robots provide more than 400,000 paid trips per week, a testament to the company’s years of developing self-driving technology. Robotaxis rely on humans for assistance at times, however, and they do so in a number of ways.

Robotaxis need occasional guidance on issues, especially because – as Waymo says – the company is trying to be as smart as possible in expanding its service.

Waymo’s robotaxis receives these instructions from “remote” operators. At any given time, there are about 70 of these people in charge of Waymo’s roughly 3,000 vehicles, the company said. Half of these workers live in the US and half live in the Philippines.

Most of that was he shared in the letter to Congress in February, which prompted Waymo to withdraw due to safety and security concerns. Waymo has defended its use of remote agents, saying the workers are well-qualified and that no delays are caused by their remote locations, whether in Arizona, Michigan, or the Philippines.

“Our car connection to RA is also as fast as the blink of an eye.” Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for US-based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for outsourced RAs,” the company recently said. he wrote.

Remote assistants perform several functions. When a Waymo car encounters real-world situations that are difficult to navigate, it can send a request to these operators to help them choose the best route to take. Waymo notes that these employees “provide advice and support to (robotaxis) but do not directly control, operate, or drive the vehicle.” They also respond to important requests from Waymo robotaxis, such as answering questions about whether the interior of the vehicle is clean.

But this loop is not perfect.

National Transportation Safety Board recently to be revealed that in January, Waymo in Austin asked a remote assistant to confirm whether a local school bus was picking up or dropping off children. A stop sign and flashing lights were installed, but the remote operator mistakenly told the robotaxi to continue. Waymo then passed a school bus carrying children, even though the bus’s “stopping arms” had been added, the NTSB said.

Waymo told TechCrunch that it “regularly evaluates RA responses, including accuracy. If an event is received, it is immediately addressed, from additional training to full validation.”

When Waymo has an accident, or even just an accident, the company relies on its “response team.” Waymo says that the team is “only in the US” – although it is still far away – and that it “has a history of very difficult tasks such as coordinating with emergency workers and managing post-crash procedures.”

By that interpretation, the remote worker who helped the CHP move Waymo’s robotaxi away from the incident in Redwood City may have been part of the response team, though Waymo has not confirmed.

There are also growing pains here. Audio recordings from CHP dispatch, along with a report obtained by TechCrunch, show that police had an idea for about 10 minutes that Waymo wanted the passenger to drive the robotaxi away from the fire.

It wasn’t until a remote worker called 911 a second time that the CHP realized an officer had to chase it from the scene. (Waymo declined to answer direct questions about the dispute. The company said it does not ask riders to control its vehicles.)

Then there is the road support team. This employees “on-scene, direct interaction” works and often has a driving role. Waymo declined to answer questions about how often the workers have moved the robotaxi, how many are making calls at any given time, or how many in each city.

Some appear to be working for Transdev, a third-party contractor Waymo has used in the past, and a few have become Waymo security guards or managers, according to LinkedIn profiles.

The company also told TechCrunch that it “requires (a) local team to be able to quickly respond to requests and deploy support throughout our community.”

“If a Waymo vehicle needs assistance, we dispatch Waymo Roadside Assistance and/or local partners to assist in the event,” the company said. “While we don’t expect first responders to move our vehicles as they are, we recognize that time counts during emergencies. Therefore, we developed a streamlined system that allows first responders to be on the move within seconds.”

Reliance on first responders

While Waymo says it doesn’t expect first responders to come into contact with its vehicles, it does happen — and it’s unclear if it can be avoided.

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

Earlier this month, Austin police Sgt they had to get Waymo out of the way of an ambulance that was responding to a mass shooting. In February, the first responder in Atlanta was due confuse after Waymo was driven to the scene of the violation, one of the roadside workers “couldn’t bring them back,” according to the company. And this week, a police officer in Nashville manually piloted a Waymo robotaxi remotely stuck at an intersection.

At a March 2 meeting in San Francisco, city officials repeatedly asked Waymo what it could do to reduce its reliance on first responders. Waymo has not said it has employees committed to moving cars during the three-hour meeting.

District Attorney Bilal Mahmood, who is overseeing the case, told TechCrunch in an interview that he felt Waymo had not provided many satisfactory answers.

“I ask: How are you going to respond to the fact that our first responders are not doing this?” he said. “And we didn’t get the answer we wanted, which is: What are they going to do to make sure they get the road support part?”

Waymo’s first responder manager, Sam Cooper, said at the conference that the company has trained “more than 30,000 first responders around the world on how to interact” with its robotaxis. He also encouraged Waymo’s partnership with first responders to develop a system that helps them stay in control.

“We want to give them an opportunity, if that’s the case, to move the vehicle safely to the site and make the site safe so they can do their jobs,” he said.

Cooper said Waymo has made “improvements to our operational capabilities” to make Waymo better prepared in the event of an emergency. But he did not elaborate on the changes, and Mahmood told TechCrunch that his office had not received a follow-up.

Cooper also said Waymo might consider promoting a partnership like the one it has with DoorDash, which involves gig workers closing robotaxi doors that are left open, to move cars.

How this will differ from Waymo’s roadside use is unclear. But the city officials continued to repeat the same message. “Our first responders don’t have to be AAA,” said county manager Alan Wong.

This article was originally published on March 25, 2026 at 9:30 am PT.