It might be a good thing for robotaxis to take another crash course. As robotaxis roll out across cities, experts say self-driving car companies could learn from the early mistakes of military drones, where remote supervision posed serious safety risks. Axios shared some perspectives from Missy Cummings, a former Navy fighter pilot and autonomous vehicle researcher. She highlighted a few key challenges that impacted UAV operations and are now likely to impact robotaxi deployments: low-latency communication delays, confusing operator interfaces, overwhelming workloads, insufficient training, and poor contingency planning. Some of these issues are already impacting vehicles, like Waymo cars receiving outdated traffic-light data or autonomous shuttle buses suffering from mode confusion. Cummings argues that remote operators are a critical safety system, and improving their training, placement, and emergency protocols will be essential as autonomous vehicles scale. If remote operators’ days look anything like a typical wfh-er’s day, I see Cummings point.