Remote Assistance, Teleoperation, and the Gap Between What Congress Investigated and What Is Running on American Roads

August 2026

Why This Brief Exists

In February 2026, Senator Edward Markey opened an investigation into how autonomous vehicle companies use Remote Assistance Operators (RAOs), the human workers who guide self-driving vehicles from outside the vehicle when the automated driving system (ADS) hits a situation it cannot resolve on its own. He sent oversight letters to seven companies. He got a report out of it in March. He referred the issue to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and said he was working on legislation.

Four months later, none of that has produced a rule.

This brief picks up where that investigation stopped. It checks what the seven companies told Markey against what they have filed with federal regulators since. It maps how fourteen states have written, or failed to write, any law addressing a human driving a vehicle from somewhere else. And it follows one vendor, the company supplying remote-driving labor to an autonomous trucking firm operating on American highways today, through its corporate structure, its funding, and one real incident that already happened in the exact legal vacuum this brief documents.

Every finding below is sourced to a primary document: a company’s own letter to a US Senator, a state’s codified statute, a federal crash filing, a company’s own SEC disclosure. Where something could not be confirmed, that is stated plainly rather than smoothed over.

Part I: What Congress Found, and What Happened After

On February 3, 2026, Markey wrote to Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox. Fourteen questions each, covering intervention frequency, RAO location, qualifications, latency, and cybersecurity. His March 31 report, Remote Back Seat Operators, made five findings: every company refused to disclose how often its RAOs intervene, Waymo is the only company using overseas RAOs, Waymo is the only company with RAOs who do not hold a US driver’s license, latency varies widely with no federal standard, and every company claims its automated driving system would reject dangerous advice from an RAO despite a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) finding that a Waymo vehicle passed a stopped school bus after following bad guidance from one.

Aurora is the only trucking company in that group of seven. Its response to Markey, dated February 17, 2026, states plainly that its remote assistance specialists cannot drive the vehicle. They are limited to advice. All of them work from Aurora facilities in Coppell, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Aurora requires five years of clean driving history, a motor vehicle record check, and drug and alcohol screening before hiring one.

Waymo told Markey something different. Its RAOs operate from four locations, two in the US and two in the Philippines. Roughly half its RAO workforce is overseas. Waymo’s overseas RAOs hold a local Philippine license, not a US one. The company argued physical distance matters less than network distance, then reported its own numbers showing overseas latency at 250 milliseconds against 150 for its domestic centers, a two-thirds increase.

Tesla told Markey its RAOs can take direct control of a vehicle at up to 2 miles per hour to reposition it, escalating to 10 miles per hour if the automated system grants access. No other company disclosed anything close to that level of direct control. Federal crash filings confirm why that distinction matters. Tesla has reported three crashes since July 2025 in which a remote operator took control of a stuck vehicle and then crashed it: a fence in July 2025, a construction barricade in January 2026, and a tree stump in Houston in May 2026. The pattern repeats each time. The automated system gets stuck, a human takes the wheel remotely, the human crashes it.

Markey referred the RAO issue to NHTSA on March 31 and said he was drafting legislation. NHTSA’s next major package on autonomous vehicles came out July 30 and 31, covering brake standards and a commercial exemption process for robotaxis. Nothing in it addresses remote operator standards. As of this writing, there is no visible public record of NHTSA acting on the referral at all.

Source: Office of Senator Edward J. Markey, Remote Back Seat Operators: Revealing the Autonomous Vehicle Industry’s Reliance on Human Remote Assistance Operators (March 31, 2026); company response letters to Senator Markey dated February and March 2026; NHTSA Standing General Order 2021-01 Incident Report Data, ADS file, accessed August 2026; Electrek, “Tesla remote operator crashed a ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston, NHTSA data shows,” July 20, 2026.

Part II: What the Trucking Industry Does

Markey investigated one trucking company. Nine companies build autonomous trucks. The other eight were never asked a single question about remote operator practice, and their public postures on the subject range across the entire spectrum.

Waabi’s own Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment states that its driverless autonomy mode operates without any remote autonomy connection at all. No RAO, no fallback human link, nothing. That is the most conservative posture of any company checked.

Bot Auto’s one verified driverless commercial run, a 231 mile Houston to Dallas haul in April 2026, is documented with no safety driver, no in-cab observer, and no remote human feedback of any kind.

Torc Robotics and Gatik both build in-house remote assistance capability, advice only, the same model Aurora described to Markey. Both companies actively recruit engineers specifically for remote assistance software.

But Gatik’s own federal filing complicates that picture. Its one publicly reported incident, a minor mirror contact with a third-party tractor trailer in Lowell, Arkansas in June 2026, is coded in Gatik’s own submission to NHTSA with a Driver / Operator Type field reading “In-Vehicle and Remote.” Not in-vehicle alone. Gatik’s own report to a federal safety agency documents a remote component in the one incident it has on file, a detail that does not appear in the narrative text of that same filing and would only surface by pulling the structured data field directly.

Kodiak sits at the far end of the spectrum. Its Assisted Autonomy feature, built in partnership with a vendor called Vay Technology, is true teleoperation: a Vay-supplied Remote Driving Station equipped with an actual steering wheel, pedals, and brakes, used for launching and landing trucks at customer facilities, interpreting law enforcement hand signals, and other low-speed scenarios. Kodiak’s own fiscal year 2025 annual report, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), describes the arrangement in detail. Kodiak’s Chief Technology Officer has said publicly that the underlying automated system still sets limits on what a remote driver can do, but the physical interface is a real one, not an advisory prompt.

No other autonomous trucking company uses a comparable outside vendor for true remote driving, as far as this research found. Volvo Autonomous Solutions runs on partner software, Aurora’s or Waabi’s, and does not appear to maintain an independent remote assistance posture of its own.

Source: Waabi, A Scalable Approach to Safety, Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment Version 1.1 (November 2023); Bot Auto press release, April 30, 2026; NHTSA Standing General Order 2021-01 Incident Report Data, ADS file, incident 30451-15790, accessed August 2026; Kodiak AI, Inc. Form 10-K / Annual Report, FY2025, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission; Vay and Kodiak partnership press release, June 25, 2025; Yahoo Finance interview with Kodiak CTO Andreas Wendel, June 25, 2025.

Part III: The State Patchwork

Fourteen states were checked for statutory language addressing a human driving a commercial vehicle from outside it. Three distinct approaches emerged, and none of them was written with a company like Vay in mind. The labels below, Model A, Model B, and Model C, are this brief’s own shorthand for grouping the pattern. No statute, agency, or industry body uses these terms.

Model A: the remote driver is the legal operator. Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama each passed a version of this in 2019, drawn from the same source, the Uniform Law Commission’s Uniform Automated Operation of Vehicles Act finished that year. Each defines a remote driver, requires that person to hold a proper license, and holds them accountable exactly as if they were seated in the vehicle. Florida’s version goes further, requiring the remote operator to be physically located in the United States. Louisiana’s makes a remote driver subject to the same accident-scene reporting duty as anyone else, and under Alabama’s identical language, a remote driver can be charged under the state’s criminal code for conduct behind the wheel even while sitting in a different state entirely.

Model B: the automated driving system itself is the legal operator, and no license is required of any human involved. Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina all use this structure. Arizona and Georgia state outright that a person is not required to hold a driver’s license to be responsible for the vehicle under this framework.

Model C: silence. Ohio, Nevada, and Tennessee have no provision addressing remote driving in either direction.

Michigan sits between B and C. Its statute acknowledges that “remote or expert-controlled assist activity” exists, but folds that activity into the automated driving system’s legal operator status rather than creating a separate license requirement, and the provision is scoped to one pilot program, not general commercial operation.

Here is the finding underneath all three models. Florida’s own codified definition of “remote human operator” requires that the vehicle be “equipped with an automated driving system.” Louisiana’s works the same way: its remote driver and teleoperation system definitions sit inside a chapter scoped entirely to “autonomous commercial motor vehicles,” itself defined as requiring an automated driving system. Every Model A state checked requires autonomy software to be present before its teleoperation provisions apply at all.

A vehicle with no automated driving system at all, one where a human is doing one hundred percent of the driving and simply is not physically present, does not fit inside the strict model, the loose model, or the silent one. It is a structural assumption built into every version of this law checked so far, written in 2019 by people picturing a human as a backup to an artificial intelligence (AI) system, not as the entire system with no AI involved.

One live counterexample is worth noting on the positive side. California Vehicle Code Section 38751 requires a remote human operator to be reachable within 30 seconds of a request from emergency responders, with the technical authority to move or immobilize the vehicle, and requires a built-in two-way communication link for responders to use directly. That is binding state law. It predates, and is stronger than, NHTSA’s own July 30, 2026 letter on the same first-responder access problem, which named no company and set no enforceable standard.

Source: Fla. Stat. Section 316.003(96), 2025; La. Rev. Stat. Section 32:400.1, 400.6, 400.7, 2024; Ala. Code Section 32-9B-6, 2025; Tex. Transp. Code Section 545.454; Ariz. Rev. Stat. Section 28-9702; Ga. Code Section 40-8-11, 2024; N.C. Department of Transportation, Fully Autonomous Vehicle regulatory summary; Ohio Revised Code Chapter 4511 and 4506; Nev. Rev. Stat. Chapter 482A; Tenn. Code Section 55-8-202, 2021; Mich. Comp. Laws Section 257.665b; Cal. Veh. Code Section 38751; Uniform Law Commission, Uniform Automated Operation of Vehicles Act (2019).

Part IV: The Vendor Underneath It All

Vay Technology was founded in Berlin in September 2018 by Thomas von der Ohe, Fabrizio Scelsi, and Bogdan Djukic. It has raised roughly 185 to 200 million dollars across four rounds, including a 95 million dollar Series B in December 2021 led by Atomico, a 34 million euro venture loan from the European Investment Bank in October 2024, and a 60 million dollar strategic investment from Grab Holdings in November 2025. That last figure comes with a potential additional 350 million dollars in earn-out payments tied to consumer revenue growth milestones. That is a contingent structure, not committed capital, and should not be quoted as 410 million dollars raised.

Vay’s core business is a passenger car rental service in Las Vegas, Nevada, launched January 2024. As of April 2026 the fleet had grown to 175 vehicles and passed 60,000 rides, supported by an 8,500 square foot production facility in Henderson and a Remote Driving Center newly opened inside the Zappos corporate campus downtown. Vay’s Las Vegas operation alone employs more than 100 people. The company’s US corporate presence otherwise runs through Portland, Oregon.

Kodiak’s own SEC annual report discloses the Vay relationship without hedging: a Vay-supplied station with steering wheel, pedals, and brakes, redundant low latency communications, and connectivity powered by Verizon. This is not a hidden dependency. Kodiak told its own shareholders exactly what it is doing. Nobody has yet checked that disclosure against the state law questions in Part III.

On April 3, 2026, a Vay remotely-driven passenger car ran a red light in front of a taxi near the Sphere in Las Vegas. Vay’s own internal investigation, reported to a local news outlet, confirmed the remote driver caused it. This is the same company, the same city, the same Remote Driving Center model that also serves Kodiak’s trucks. Vay’s core technology has no automated driving system in the loop, a human is driving the entire time, which means it likely falls outside Nevada’s autonomous vehicle (AV) statute the same way it would fall outside Florida’s, Louisiana’s, or Alabama’s, each of which requires an automated driving system to be present before its teleoperation provisions apply. The first real-world test of that exact gap already happened. Nobody had connected it to anything until now.

Grab’s own capital history includes both SoftBank, its largest shareholder at 18 percent, and Didi Global, the Chinese ride-hailing company, which holds under 3 percent as a diluted historical position. Grab itself is Nasdaq-listed and majority controlled by its founder through super-voting shares. That chain is real and traceable. It is also thin. State it plainly and do not oversell it: a minority, non-controlling historical stake in a publicly traded company is not the same thing as foreign control, and no public source shows whether Kodiak’s active work with the US Department of Defense has ever been reviewed against this vendor relationship at all.

Source: Vay company profile and funding history, PitchBook and Sacra, accessed August 2026; Kodiak AI, Inc. Annual Report, FY2025, SEC filing; Vay press releases, January 2025 through April 2026; Fox5 Las Vegas, “VIDEO: Remote-operated car runs red light in front of taxi, says Las Vegas cab driver,” April 3, 2026; Grab Holdings Ltd. SEC Form SC 13G, 2021; Yahoo Finance, “With 31% ownership of the shares, Grab Holdings Limited is heavily dominated by institutional owners,” April 2023.

Part V: Where This Leaves One Truck

Follow a single Kodiak truck through this brief and the gap stops being theoretical.

The truck operates in the Permian Basin of West Texas, a Model B state where the automated driving system is the legal operator and no human involved is required to hold a license, regardless of who takes the wheel.

The person capable of remotely steering that truck through a Vay Station sits in Las Vegas, Nevada, a Model C state with no statute addressing remote driving in either direction, and one where Vay’s own technology likely falls outside the existing AV law entirely, since there is no automated driving system involved in a Vay-driven vehicle.

Kodiak has stated its intent to expand this same operational model into Ohio, a second Model C state, where DriveOhio has run federally funded truck automation pilots since 2019 with no state answer to who is legally driving if one of those trucks is ever teleoperated rather than platooned with a driver aboard.

Three states. Three different gaps. One continuous act of driving a truck. Every company involved has disclosed what it is doing, in SEC filings, in press releases, in letters to a US Senator. The gap here was never concealment. It is that no single regulator, statute, or reporter was ever positioned to look at all of it stacked together at once, and the technology moved faster than the legal categories written to describe it.

What Remains Open

Alabama’s exact statutory language on whether its teleoperation provisions require an automated driving system to be present was inferred from its shared 2019 template with Florida and Louisiana, not independently confirmed word for word against the codified text.

Whether NHTSA has taken any non-public action on Markey’s March 31 referral could not be confirmed. No visible rulemaking docket or public statement exists as of this writing.

Whether Kodiak’s relationship with Vay, or Grab’s investment in Vay, has ever been reviewed in connection with Kodiak’s work for the US Department of Defense could not be confirmed either way. No public source addresses it.

Sources

• Office of Senator Edward J. Markey. Remote Back Seat Operators: Revealing the Autonomous Vehicle Industry’s Reliance on Human Remote Assistance Operators. March 31, 2026.
• Aurora Innovation, Inc. Response to Senator Edward J. Markey, February 17, 2026.
• Waymo LLC. Response to Senator Edward J. Markey, February 17, 2026.
• Tesla, Inc. Response to Senator Edward J. Markey, March 26, 2026.
• Zoox, Inc. Response to Senator Edward J. Markey, March 3, 2026.
• Motional. Response to Senator Edward J. Markey, March 3, 2026.
• Nuro, Inc. Response to Senator Edward J. Markey, March 3, 2026.
• May Mobility, Inc. Response to Senator Edward J. Markey, March 3, 2026.
• Office of Senator Edward J. Markey. Letter to NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison, March 31, 2026.
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Standing General Order 2021-01 Incident Report Data (ADS), accessed August 2026.
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Standing General Order on Crash Reporting, program overview, accessed August 2026.
• Electrek. “Tesla remote operator crashed a ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston, NHTSA data shows.” July 20, 2026.
• Waabi. A Scalable Approach to Safety, Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment Version 1.1. November 2023.
• Bot Auto. “Houston, We Don’t Have a Problem” press release. April 30, 2026.
• Kodiak AI, Inc. Form 10-K / Annual Report, fiscal year 2025. US Securities and Exchange Commission.
• Vay and Kodiak Robotics. Partnership press release. June 25, 2025.
• Yahoo Finance. Interview with Kodiak CTO Andreas Wendel. June 25, 2025.
• Florida Statutes Section 316.003(96), 2025 edition.
• Louisiana Revised Statutes Section 32:400.1, 400.6, 400.7, 2024 edition.
• Alabama Code Section 32-9B-6, 2025 edition.
• Texas Transportation Code Section 545.454.
• Arizona Revised Statutes Section 28-9702.
• Georgia Code Section 40-8-11, 2024 edition.
• North Carolina Department of Transportation, Fully Autonomous Vehicle regulatory summary.
• Ohio Revised Code Chapters 4511 and 4506.
• Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 482A.
• Tennessee Code Section 55-8-202, 2021 edition.
• Michigan Compiled Laws Section 257.665b.
• California Vehicle Code Section 38751.
• Uniform Law Commission. Uniform Automated Operation of Vehicles Act. 2019.
• Vay company profile and funding history. PitchBook and Sacra. Accessed August 2026.
• Fox5 Las Vegas. “VIDEO: Remote-operated car runs red light in front of taxi, says Las Vegas cab driver.” April 3, 2026.
• Grab Holdings Ltd. SEC Form SC 13G. 2021.
• Yahoo Finance. “With 31% ownership of the shares, Grab Holdings Limited is heavily dominated by institutional owners.” April 2023.