What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.

Latency makes this hard even with local connections, it’s essentially impossible due to physics to do it offshore.

And I believe Waymo remote access only allows providing high level instructions (like pull over, take the next right, go around this car, etc) precisely because full direct control with a highly and variably latent system is very hard/dangerous.

And in an emergency situation you’re likely to have terrible connectivity AND high level commands are unlikely to be sufficient for the complexity of the situation.

I suspect that in a large scale disaster/emergency the communications systems may be disrupted and it may not be possible to remotely control the vehicles.

Perhaps in such cases they can pull over in a safe place, or if they have an occupant ask them if they wish to continue the journey or stop.

Perhaps they already do this, I have no experience with autonomous vehicles.

This very scenario could involve no cell signal.