> Waymo has published videos about how their remote operator system works.

Although not, as far as I've been able to find, videos that actually show the control center. Just semi-animated videos of the advising process. The number of customer support people per vehicle is not disclosed.

Employee stats are available.[1] Unclear how accurate they are. According to Unify, Waymo has 2,406 employees. Headcount is up only 6.6% since last year, even though the number of vehicles deployed has reportedly tripled. So they seem to have a big fixed labor cost in engineering, and but a low variable cost per car. Which means this scales well and becomes profitable.

[1] https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/waymo

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Zigurd 3 days ago | parent [-]

The relatively low headcount growth enables estimating values for the number of remote operators per vehicle. It takes four FTEs to fill one seat in the remote operation center 24/7.

If the ratio of remote operators to vehicles is 1:10, and the fleet size is 2500, that's 1000 FTEs. That's more than 5X the headcount growth.

If all of the headcount growth goes to remote operations, it would be one seat for 50 vehicles. I'd guess it's more like one to 100.

That fits with the relative rarity of seeing Waymos stopped waiting for instructions.

	▲	leoc 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Do we know that the remote operators (all? mostly?) show up in that data as employees, though? Waymo's development has presumably reached the point where it would want to start filling remote-assistance seats with contractors. (There's also offline but relatively labour-intensive work like updating maps, adjusting routes and the like.) One remote assistant per 50 or 100 vehicles would also seem to put Waymo now far ahead of where Cruise was in 2023, when according to the NYT's sources Cruise's remote assistance staff "intervened to assist the vehicles every two and a half to five miles", though I suppose it's not especially hard to believe that 2025 Waymo is beating 2023 Cruise handily.