Comment by AlotOfReading

There are some pretty major differences between what Waymo does and what a remote driving service (like the Vegas deployment by Vay mentioned upthread). Imagine that the car has a remote connection to a human while driving and the human misses that another vehicle is about to hit T-bone the taxi. Whose responsibility is it to stop?

With Waymo vehicles, it's the car's responsibility to sense the issue and brake, so we say that the car is driving and the human is a "remote assistant". With Vay, it's the human's responsibility because they are the driver.

This ends up having a lot of meaningful distinctions across the stack, even if it seems like a superficial distinction at first.