Business
How Self-Driving Cars Get Help From Humans Hundreds of Miles Away
In places like San Francisco, Phoenix and Las Vegas, robot taxis are navigating city streets, each without a driver behind the steering wheel. Some don’t even have steering wheels:
But cars like this one in Las Vegas are sometimes guided by someone sitting here:
This is a command center in Foster City, Calif., operated by Zoox, a self-driving car company owned by Amazon. Like other robot taxis, the company’s self-driving cars sometimes struggle to drive themselves, so they get help from human technicians sitting in a room about 500 miles away.
Inside companies like Zoox, this kind of human assistance is taken for granted. Outside such companies, few realize that autonomous vehicles are not completely autonomous.
For years, companies avoided mentioning the remote assistance provided to their self-driving cars. The illusion of complete autonomy helped to draw attention to their technology and encourage venture capitalists to invest the billions of dollars needed to build increasingly effective autonomous vehicles.
“There is a ‘Wizard of Oz’ flavor to this,” said Gary Marcus, an entrepreneur and a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University who specializes in A.I. and autonomous machines.
If a Zoox robot taxi encounters a construction zone it has not seen before, for instance, a technician in the command center will receive an alert — a short message in a small, colored window on the side of the technician’s computer screen. Then, using the computer mouse to draw a line across the screen, the technician can send the car a new route to follow around the construction zone.
“We are not in full control of the vehicle,” said Marc Jennings, 35, a Zoox remote technician. “We are providing guidance.”
As companies like Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Cruise, owned by General Motors, have begun to remove drivers from their cars, scrutiny of their operations has increased. After a series of high-profile accidents, they have started to acknowledge that the cars require human assistance.
While Zoox and other companies have started to reveal how humans intervene to help driverless cars, none of the companies have disclosed how many remote-assistance technicians they employ or how much it all costs. Zoox’s command center holds about three dozen people who oversee what appears to be a small number of driverless cars — two in Foster City and several more in Las Vegas — as well as a fleet of about 200 test cars that each still have a driver behind the steering wheel.
When regulators last year ordered Cruise to shut down its fleet of 400 robot taxis in San Francisco after a woman was dragged under one of its driverless vehicles, the cars were supported by about 1.5 workers per vehicle, including remote assistance staff, according to two people familiar with the company’s operations. Those workers intervened to assist the vehicles every two and a half to five miles, the people said.
The expenses associated with remote assistance are one reason robot taxis will struggle to replace traditional ride-hailing fleets operated by Uber and Lyft. Though companies like Zoox are beginning to replace drivers, they still pay people to work behind the scenes.
“It may be cheaper just to pay a driver to sit in the car and drive it,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Collective Intelligence.
Waymo and Cruise declined to comment for this story.
While those companies use traditional cars retrofitted for self-driving, Zoox is testing a new kind of vehicle in Foster City, just south of San Francisco, and in Las Vegas, not far from the Strip.
After testing the vehicles with Zoox employees, their family members and friends, the company plans to make the service available to the public this year. But this robot taxi, like all others, will lean on human assistance.
In Foster City, the company operates what it calls a “fusion center,” where employees monitor robot taxis operating both locally and in Las Vegas, several hundred miles away. From their computer screens, these workers can track live feeds of the road from cameras installed on the cars as well as a detailed overhead view of each car and its surroundings, which is stitched together using data streaming from an array of sensors on the vehicle.
The workers can provide verbal assistance to riders via speakers and microphones inside the cars. They can also assist a car if it encounters a scenario it cannot handle on its own.
Jason Henry for The New York Times
“These are situations that don’t necessarily fit the mold,” said Jayne Aclan, who oversees a team of Zoox technicians that provide cars with remote assistance.
Self-driving cars can reliably handle familiar situations, like an ordinary right turn or a lane change. They are designed to brake on their own when a pedestrian runs in front of them. But they are less adept in unusual or unexpected situations. That’s why they still need the humans in the fusion center.
But even though self-driving cars have remote assistance, they still make mistakes on the road.
After reviewing the incident, Zoox indicated that its car had struggled to recognize the fire trucks because they were yellow, not red. “We continue to test and refine our driving software,” Whitney Jencks, a company spokeswoman, said.
Zoox will also continue to lean on human assistance.
“We think that computers should be able to replicate humans and replace humans in all ways,” Dr. Malone, the M.I.T. professor, said. “It is possible that might happen. But it hasn’t yet.”
Since the war with Iran broke out, the average American household has spent an extra …
$190.47 on gasoline.
For many households, that is the equivalent of a month’s electricity bill.
Or a week’s worth of groceries for a couple.
The gasoline calculation is part of an analysis conducted by researchers at Brown University as they and others try to assess the economic costs of the prolonged fighting.
Calculating the cost of war — a skipped meal or a drive not made — is an imperfect science. But these estimates can offer a sense of how fighting far away can change behaviors large and small each day, disrupting American life.
Discomfort has not been spread evenly. As the price of gasoline has shot up, the national average is now …
$4.55 a gallon
In Illinois, it is more expensive …
$4.99 a gallon.
In California, it’s …
$6.13 a gallon.
Diesel, which is used to power factories and move most goods around the country, also quickly climbed.
Taken together, the amount of extra money Americans have collectively spent on gasoline and diesel since Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel attacked Iran, is staggering:
$0.0 billion
Hunting for cheaper gas, Americans are going to Costcos and Sam’s Clubs more often to fill up their tanks.
Drivers visited Sam’s Club gas stations 18 percent more in the last week of April than the same time last year.
They are filling their tanks with less gas.
One gallon fewer at a time.
They are riding more subways and commuter trains.
They are using bike shares more often.
People rode more buses in March than before the war:
45 million more rides.
People are spending less on essentials.
More than 40 percent of people in a recent poll said they were spending less on groceries and medical care.
They are putting less into savings.
Richer households are spending a relatively small share of their income on gas:
2.7%.
Poorer households are spending far more:
4.2%.
This is not the first time in recent years that the economy has been shocked by war.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, oil prices spiked, sending gasoline soaring. At its peak, the national average was …
$5.02 a gallon.
Where things go this time around is anyone’s guess. When the war does end, it will still take weeks or months for energy supplies to level off.
Nearly three out of four goods move across the country by truck.
Many of those trucks are powered by diesel, making them much costlier to drive, and what’s inside them costlier for consumers.
Last month, a tomato cost …
40% more
than it did the same time last year.
More expensive fuel isn’t the only culprit for rising costs. Extreme weather, tariffs and other factors have forced prices up for many industries. Gasoline also becomes more expensive as the summer approaches.
But inflation last month rose at its fastest pace in nearly three years, and gasoline was among the fastest rising categories.
The layoffs bludgeoning the tech industry continued this week as artificial intelligence reshapes the industry.
Mountain View-based Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, on Wednesday said it was laying off 17% of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees, as part of its restructuring to cut costs and invest in artificial intelligence.
The company said it had slowed down due to “too many organizational layers” and the cuts will simplify the organization to become a “faster, leaner, more focused company.” Intuit said it will close its offices in Reno and Woodland Hills and incur an estimated $300 million to $340 million in restructuring charges.
“We believe we can serve more customers and deliver breakthrough products that fuel our customers’ success by reducing complexity and simplifying our structure,” Sasan Goodarzi, chief executive of Intuit, said in a memo shared with employees.
Intuit announced the layoffs on the same day it reported its third-quarter results, in which revenue jumped 10% from a year earlier, to $8.56 billion.
Intuit adds to the count of more than 114,000 tech-sector employees laid off this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
Meta laid off 8,000 workers on Wednesday, as the company cuts costs to ramp up investment in AI agents and infrastructure. The ever-expanding list of tech companies that have cut jobs includes Coinbase, Amazon, LinkedIn and more. Some have cited productivity gains enabling fewer workers to accomplish more with AI, while others pointed out restructuring and cost-cutting to prepare for the AI disruption.
In an earnings call, Intuit‘s chief financial officer, Sandeep Aujla, said the cuts were intended to make the organization leaner, and weren’t tied directly to Intuit’s AI use.
“AI is an important part of how we’re evolving as a company, but these decisions were not driven by AI replacing employees,” an Intuit spokesperson reiterated in an email .
Best known for its TurboTax platform, Intuit has branched into accounting with QuickBooks, credit scoring through Credit Karma and email automation via Mailchimp. Facing increased competition for AI-driven tax solutions, the company is integrating AI across its entire portfolio.
“Our AI agents are delivering value at scale, with our accounting AI agents powering recommendations across more than 50 million transactions each week, and business tax AI agents identifying millions of dollars in deductions,” Goodarzi said in the earnings call.
The restructuring will reduce overlapping roles in TurboTax and Credit Karma as the company integrates both into a single team.
A deep sense of anxiety has settled in the tech job market, propelled by consecutive layoffs and coding tasks being automated by AI.
Tech leaders have portrayed the role of human software engineers as a human in the loop, overseeing and verifying AI agents that do the work of coders.
By 2027, software developers are expected to see a 3% job contraction due to AI coding capabilities, according to Labor Automation Forecasting Hub by Metaculus, a popular website where forecasters predict how AI will reshape the workforce.
President Trump on Thursday announced that grocery stories and air conditioning companies will be allowed to keep using high-polluting refrigerants for longer than they would have under a law he signed during his first administration.
“This was a tremendous burden, a tremendous cost,” said Trump, surrounded in the Oval Office by executives from supermarket chains including Kroger, Fairway, Neimann Foods and Piggly Wiggly. “It was making the equipment unaffordable, and the actual benefit was nothing.”
The move loosens rules meant to restrict hydroflourocarbons, a class of climate-damaging chemicals used in cooling equipment. HFCs are known as “super pollutants” because their impact on climate change can be tens of thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide during their shorter lifespans.
In the move Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency extends the deadline for companies to comply with a 2023 rule transitioning refrigerators and air conditioners off HFCs and onto new cooling technologies. Reducing these chemicals and moving to cleaner refrigerants has long been a bipartisan issue.
Trump is also proposing exemptions from a rule requiring leak repairs on large-scale refrigeration systems.
The administration framed the changes as part of its effort to bring down high grocery costs. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the actions will save $2.4 billion for Americans and safeguard 350,000 jobs.
“Americans who wanted to be able to fix their equipment were instead being required to buy far more costly new equipment and that just doesn’t make any sense,” said Zeldin.
David Doniger, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the move will not only harm the climate, but U.S. competitiveness in global refrigerant markets as well.
“The EPA is catering to a small group of straggling companies by derailing the shift away from these climate super-pollutants,” he said. “The industry at large supports the HFC phasedown and has already invested in making new refrigerants and equipment, currently installed in thousands of stores.”
Danielle Wright, executive director of the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council, an environmental nonprofit, said any perceived near-term savings from the rollbacks will be outweighed by the future costs.
“Business owners are far more worried about the escalating cost of keeping aging, high‑global-warming-potential equipment running than they are about the cost of installing new, compliant systems,” she said.
Trump dismissed the climate concerns, saying his changes “are not going to have any impact on the environment.”
He said he wants to get rid of the technology transition rule entirely in the future.
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