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

Last August, a fire tore through 10 acres of grassland on both sides of California’s I-280 near Redwood City. Traffic was backed up while firefighters battled the blaze, and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) ordered drivers to make a U-turn to exit the freeway.

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

Footage of the incident shows that the Waymo AV attempted to pass a traffic stop by walking on the shoulder, even backing away from oncoming traffic, before coming to a complete stop.

The robotaxi did not move, despite the efforts of the company’s remote support team. So, Waymo turned to a source that has become a trusted troubleshooter called 911.

“The traffic police turned everyone around, but unfortunately our car can’t turn around,” one Waymo remote operator told a local 911 dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by TechCrunch in a public records request. The worker wanted the police on the scene to chase away the traffic light and arrange transportation for the passenger inside.

About 30 minutes after Waymo called 911, a CHP officer got behind the wheel and drove the robot through a parking lot and onto a highway, a CHP incident report obtained by TechCrunch shows. From there, it was driven away by one of Waymo’s “roadside assistance” employees, the company told TechCrunch.

The Redwood City incident could be considered a fringe incident, an inevitable, but slightly embarrassing incident for Waymo’s fast-growing robotics service network.

But this was not an unusual occurrence. Waymo relies on first responders paid by taxpayers to guide their vehicles when they encounter problems, despite the presence of the company’s roadside assistance team. In at least six cases identified by TechCrunch, first responders had to maneuver Waymo vehicles out of traffic during emergencies, including one where a police officer was in the middle of responding to a mass shooting.

Waymo has recently come under fire from lawmakers for its use of remote assistance workers, including several working in the Philippines, to help its robotaxis determine the best route through complex situations. Its roadside assistance team has received very little attention.

Company representatives did not comment on roadside assistance workers at a March 2 test hearing in San Francisco about the behavior of Waymo’s robot that was stopped during a major power outage in December. At the meeting, city officials expressed concern that parked private vehicles could hinder or distract first responders from their primary duties.

“What has started to happen is that our public security officers and those who will respond must be the ones who move [Waymos],” said Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, during the hearing.

Waymo told TechCrunch that its roadside assistance crews removed dozens of robots that were stuck during the power outage, with a few still needing to be moved by first responders.

“Waymo Roadside Assistance is a dedicated team of experts who provide real-time additional assistance to our fleet,” the company said in an email to TechCrunch. “Waymo’s standards of roadside response and quality of service prioritize minimizing potential impacts to the community.”

The company declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about how many roadside assistance workers it employs, or which third-party companies it may hire. Waymo also did not say how it plans to scale the group 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 Assistants

Waymo’s robot provides more than 400,000 paid rides per week, a testament to the company’s years of developing self-driving technology. Robotaxis relies on humans for help from time to time, however, and it does this in several ways.

The robotaxis needs to be guided from time to time in complex situations, mainly because – as Waymo says – the company tries to be as careful as possible as it measures its service.

Waymo’s robotaxis receives this guidance from “remote” workers. At any given time, about 70 of these people monitor Waymo’s roughly 3,000 vehicles, the company said. Half of these employees are based in the US and half are based in the Philippines.

Those details, shared in a letter to Congress in February, set Waymo back on safety and security concerns. Waymo has defended its use of remote assistants, saying the workers are well trained and no significant shortages have been introduced because of how far away they are, whether in Arizona, Michigan, or the Philippines.

“Our vehicle-to-RA connections are 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 overseas-based RAs,” the company recently wrote.

Remote support workers perform several tasks. When a Waymo vehicle encounters a real-world situation that is tricky to navigate, it can send a request to these operators to help determine the best route to take. Waymo is clear that these employees “give advice and support to [robotaxis] but do not directly control, direct, or drive it.” They also respond to less important requests from Waymo robotaxis, such as answering questions about whether the interior of the car is clean.

But this loop is not complete.

The National Transportation Safety Board recently revealed that in January, Waymo in Austin asked a remote worker to make sure a nearby school bus was loading or unloading children. A stop sign and flashing lights were used, but the remote operator told the robotaxi to continue. Waymo then passed the school bus while it was loading children, even though the bus’s “stop arms” were still extended, the NTSB said.

Waymo told TechCrunch that it is “constantly evaluating[s] RA responses, including accuracy. If an incident is captured, it will be immediately flagged for the next steps, from further training to full certification.”

When Waymo crashes, or gets stuck in an emergency, the company relies on its “event response team.” Waymo says the team is “solely based in the US” – albeit far away – and that it is “authorized for complex tasks such as communicating with emergency responders and managing post-collision protocols.”

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

There are growing pains here, too. Audio recordings from CHP dispatch, as well as an incident report obtained by TechCrunch, show that police had an idea for about 10 minutes that Waymo wanted a passenger to drive the robot away from the fire.

It wasn’t until the remote worker called 911 a second time that the CHP realized the officer needed to be removed from the scene. (Waymo declined to answer specific questions about the inaccuracy. The company said it never asks passengers to control its vehicles.)

Then there is a team of traffic assistants. These workers handle “on-site, direct contact” work and are often tasked with moving a vehicle. Waymo declined to answer questions about how many times the workers have moved the robot, how many are on call at any 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 become security drivers or security guards for Waymo, according to profile information on LinkedIn.

The company also told TechCrunch that it “needs[s] local partners to maintain the ability to respond quickly to emergency towing requests and to strategize support in all our service areas.”

“In the event that a Waymo vehicle requires support, we dispatch Waymo Roadside Assistance and/or local partners to assist in the area,” the company said in a statement. “While we don’t expect first responders to move our vehicles as a matter of course, we recognize that time counts in emergencies. Therefore, we have designed a straightforward process that allows first responders to take control of a vehicle in seconds.”

Reliance on first responders

While Waymo says it doesn’t expect first responders to interact with their vehicles, it continues to happen — and it’s unclear whether it will be entirely avoidable.

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

Earlier this month, an Austin police officer had to move a Waymo out of the way of an ambulance responding to a mass shooting. In February, the first defendant in Atlanta had to pull Waymo out after it pulled into a crime scene, before one of the company’s roadside assistants “retrieved it,” according to the company. And this week, a Nashville police officer had to manually pilot a Waymo robot after it got stuck in an intersection.

During a March 2 hearing in San Francisco, city officials repeatedly asked Waymo what it would do to reduce the reliance on first responders. Waymo never said that there are employees dedicated to transporting cars in this meeting that lasted for three hours.

Regional manager Bilal Mahmood, who oversaw the hearing, told TechCrunch in an interview that he felt Waymo did not provide many satisfactory answers.

“I was asking: How are you going to do more accountability to make sure our first responders don’t do that?” he said. “And we didn’t get that answer in the trial that we wanted, which is: What are they going to do to ensure that they’re going to take more ownership of that portion of the road aid?”

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

“We just want to give them the ability, if it happens, to properly remove the vehicle from the scene and make the scene safe so they can do their job,” he said.

Cooper said Waymo has made “advances in our operational capabilities” so that Waymo is better prepared for major emergencies. But he didn’t specify that development, and Mahmood told TechCrunch his office has yet to receive the promised follow-up.

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

How that will differ from the roadside assistance operators used by Waymo is unclear. But city officials kept repeating the same message. “Our first responders don’t have to be AAA,” said district manager Alan Wong.

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