The assistants don't have access to the gas pedal or steering wheel input. The car is the only thing actually piloting the car i.e. self driving

* Unless it gets super stuck, then a human drives out and gets into the physical driver seat and takes over

Which is certainly better than just having a human remote drive.

But it’s still not the impression they’ve been giving. It’s been an impression of full automation (ignoring getting stuck) and if it’s not navigating on its own that’s disingenuous.

The car will always get stuck every now and then.

This approach has two benefits: it can be unstuck without sending out a physical driver and while collecting training data, and it efficiently lets m humans control n cars with a wide range of acceptable m and n values.

It's intended for the ratio of m:n to smoothly shrink as the software gets better, but m will always be greater than zero.

My assumption is they can provide input such as "you should make a left/right lane change" to get out of a "stuck" location.

So when the car's systems prevent it from taking a specific action, they can override it for a single instance.