Two companies are making progress in Las Vegas on using remote driving to deliver cars to customers who will drive them. While the cars feature some basic self driving to deal with special situations, they instead primarily depend on human drivers and redundant 4g or 5g cellular signals to handle the driving task. This is simpler than solving self driving and within the grasp of smaller companies.
Halo.car announced this week that they are removing safety drivers from their service in Las Vegas. This means the cars will move with nobody in them on the city streets, driven by a remote driver over the cellular networks. Halo is offering a “whistlecar” service where a car comes to you without anybody in it, and you then take the wheel and drive it normally. This service is essentially very convenient carshare or car-rental, and without the cost of a driver during the trip can be cheaper than an Uber or taxi. It’s an early stage product, easier to do and thus available sooner. I wrote previously about Halo, before they removed safety drivers.
European company Vay announced earlier in June that it also was expanding similar service in Las Vegas, and has opened an office there. Vay had previously operated with no safety driver in Hamburg. Actual service in LV may not appear until next year.
There are different types of Whistlecars that can make sense. Car delivery is simpler than driving around passengers. When delivering a car, there is no risk of injury to passengers if there is a failure. Of course, you must keep others on the road perfectly safe, but you can deliver at conservative speeds, and take routes that are safer and longer — which can annoy passengers actually in the car. This makes it easier to do a self-driving whistlecar even when you aren’t ready to do full speed passenger operations. It also makes it easier to do remote driving for many of the same reasons. You can also assure the cars only drive where there is very good data connectivity and just avoid any zones of poor signal.
To do full remote driving, both companies make use of multiple cellular radios. Halo promises their cars are connected to T-Mobile 5G, but also have connections to Verizon and AT&T. They constantly evaluate the connection and switch to the best performing network. In addition, if all networks fail, their system can drive itself to a “safe stop” though it’s not clear whether that could involve blocking traffic.
While some companies have worked at doing remote driving — where a human driver sits in a simulated driving station with multiple screens and a wheel and pedals — the self-driving companies like Cruise and Waymo have deliberately avoided any use of that, opting instead for “remote assist” where remote operations staff can see out the sensors but only give the cars strategic advice, like what lane to take, or when to back up. The car is required to execute the plan. It’s a bit like telling the driver what to do from the back seat.
Car sharing company Upshift, which I wrote about earlier, is currently delivering cars with a real driver who has to then somehow get to their next job another way. They plan to use remote delivery or self-delivering cars as soon as they can.
Readers may be interested in this video program I hosted about tele-operation and remote assist issues. It was produced by DriveU, a technology provider in the space.
This has been chosen as a long term strategy, but it’s possible the companies are having some regret about this decision. Both companies are being conservative in what their remote operators do and what they ask the cars to do under their advice. This means the cars are sometimes taking too long — sometimes way too long — to resolve confusing situations, resulting in blocked traffic and very bad optics, and this has often angered city officials and first responders in San Francisco. If they had a reliable way for a remote driver to resolve the confusing situations with full human skill, they would probably have resolved some of these situations more quickly. Long term they don’t want to rely on that, but today it might be worth doing.
Remote driving requires paying a human driver, though the car doesn’t need nearly the level of expensive hardware and sensors a robocar does. While you pay the driver while moving the car, it’s much more efficient than having drivers in cars, as the drivers don’t sit around idle waiting for rides as Uber drivers do — they can “teleport” into the next car they have to drive instantly.
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