At least in SF, there’s both a phone number and a QR code on a sticker on the driver-side window, and per what’s linked from https://waymo.com/firstresponders/ it seems like that’s a dedicated phone line.

I wonder quite what the priority matrix looks like for support requests; I’d expect something like:

1. First responders 2. Human-initiated in-vehicle 3. Autonomous-initiated vehicle

But I of course don’t know.

Buttons are something that seem inherently obviously (both internal and external), but I’m also never sure quite how useful they’d be: a lot of the things that have gathered press have involved vehicles driving when it was unsafe to do so, and then any external button is of minimal use.

I also expect they have some level of concern about anything external having an abuse potential? (e.g., deliberately walk in front of an AV just to stop it in the road)

Something like “give first responders some mobile app which provides some level of direct control” feels like it should be doable (authentication there seems unlikely to be harder than the various “educational” authentication gates that Alphabet has in many products) — though of course that doesn’t scale with more AV operators, and thus maybe this just falls into the category of “this should be standardised” (by whatever SDO).

And some can clearly just leverage existing datasets — many jurisdictions have ways to publish things like “this road is closed from X to Y”, and you can imagine a slightly broader case of “close a radius of Z from point A” being something you might want, especially in the AV case (imagine a “police incident” closing an intersection, such as the one a Waymo drove through a few months ago — you probably want to close a bit beyond the interaction itself in all directions!).

And sure, to some extent things can be handled by AVs getting better at understanding their surroundings, but we’ll always have the question of whether they’re good enough, especially when they fail in non-human like ways.