I really don't understand why they aren't transparent about this, but judging by the downvotes I'm getting it seems people really, really want to believe they are intelligent and independent self-driving machines. It's so much more futuristic with a "wow" factor that attracts press attention and future investement.
The downvotes are because your suspicions are entirely wrong. There’s no remote “driving” or “take over”. They wrote a blog post on how it works just a few weeks ago: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Surely, it's obvious that Waymo operates in a different safety critical setting? It's a 5000 pound vehicle with pedestrians and other vehicles around it. You can't depend on a network connection to prevent injuries and deaths.
Alphabet has way more money to spend on it than Ukrainians. I was a professional driver in a couple of jobs and as far as I can tell Google Waymo doesn't care about the millions of Americans they want to put out of work, possibly by having cheap foreign labor drive their cars, so you see I can't let it go that easily
