The road to fully self-driving cars is long and fraught with technical challenges, from the cost of developing the technology and deploying it commercially to concerns about public acceptance and safety — and that’s if people ever want to stop driving in the first place.
But there’s one thing that could help with this transition and bridge the gap between self-driving believers and skeptics: remotely operated vehicles.
We’re not talking about toy cars – these are real, adult-sized, remote-controlled automobiles. In this article, we explain how these cars work, their commercial and technical implications, and whether they may help point the way to a future of autonomous vehicles.
What is a radio-controlled car?
Essentially, a remote control car is a vehicle that can be operated by someone who is not physically sitting inside the car.
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Instead, the person piloting the vehicle is located remotely, but can see the road just as if they were driving. As well as on-road applications, remotely operated vehicles are also used by the military in scenarios where having a driver away is the safest option.
How remote car sharing works
Imagine this: you book a car through an app, and instead of having to go find it yourself, someone in a command center remotely collects it and drives it to your front door. When you start driving, you have full control of the car, and when you get out, the remote operator resumes control and drives the car to the next customer.
How remote car sharing is capturing people’s imagination
People don’t like change, especially when they’re used to the convenience of just walking out the door and hopping in a car. Who wants to walk to a car share a few blocks away when it’s raining or you’re juggling groceries, kids and luggage? That’s what remote-controlled car sharing is all about, an advantage over the more common smart rentals.
While many people would like to move away from cars, the reality is that car purchases are steadily increasing in Europe, despite city planners trying hard to develop micromobility schemes and public transport infrastructure.
For example, in Germany, statistics show that in 2021 there were 580 cars per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to 517 ten years ago. During this period, the proportion of households owning two cars also increased from 23.4% to 27%.
And if we look at the practicality of the cars these individuals buy, despite their love of driving, most of them only drive their cars for around an hour a day, leaving them parked for the remaining 23 hours.
Car sharing offers an alternative to personal car ownership, reducing the need for households to own one or more cars. It also saves drivers money by eliminating annual registration fees, insurance, repair costs and charging costs.
Another big benefit is that drivers can try out different vehicles based on the transportation needs of each trip. For example, if you need to transport a group, you can choose a people carrier. If you need to move something, you can choose a van. Additionally, car sharing can offer an opportunity to experience driving an electric vehicle for the first time. This is a great litmus test for people who traditionally worry about range anxiety, and it means fewer gas-guzzling cars on the road.
Drivers will also be able to understand the true cost of each trip, which will motivate them to choose other modes of transportation for shorter journeys.
There’s a more mundane reason, too: Many people drive because they love driving and can’t imagine a future where they don’t have the opportunity to get behind the wheel at least sometimes. Remote car sharing isn’t going to eliminate this, at least not yet.
Cities also benefit from these plans as they reduce the need for parking infrastructure such as garages, parking lots and on-street parking strips.
Commercial opportunities for remote car sharing
Car sharing is the bridge between car ownership and a future of on-demand, fully autonomous vehicles. Add remote control operation into the mix and things get even more interesting.
But here’s an important point to reiterate: when you order a remote-controlled vehicle, it’s an actual human being piloting the car, not an AI.
A remote operator at the wheel. Image courtesy of Vay
The car is driven by an operator in a control room, who sits at a console with a steering wheel and appropriate pedals, and is driven to the driver, who watches a screen broadcasting a 360-degree view of the road. Radar and audio sensors transmit data, such as the sounds of road traffic and warning signals from emergency vehicles, to the driver’s headphones in a remote location. This is done in real time over 4G (and 5G in some cities).
Elmo’s car will come to you with the remote control.
According to Enn Laansoo Jr, co-founder of Estonian remote care-sharing company Elmo, all of this adds up to one thing: safety. No one drinks and drives or speeds. And there’s less risk of distraction, because the driver isn’t doing anything other than driving. Compare that to a taxi driver, who may be multitasking by using an app, looking up an address, and talking on the phone.
And distraction is the enemy of reactivity. He explains the challenge of human latency: If you see something, you have 800 milliseconds to react. “But if you’re checking your phone at that exact moment, it takes you more than a second because you’re not concentrating.”
Wei is on a mission to bring remote-controlled driving to Germany
We also spoke with Vay co-founder and CEO Thomas von der Ohe, who previously worked at Amazon’s Alexa and robotaxi startup Zoox, who told us that his six years working on self-driving cars in the Bay Area have taught him about the technical, regulatory and industry challenges that will bring self-driving cars to the mainstream.
He sees the value in still having a human involved: “Because a human is always in control, you don’t have to solve those edge cases where you have to validate billions of kilometers to understand what’s going to happen.” Vay is currently testing remote-driving vehicles in Berlin and aims to launch in Europe and the US next year.
But if there’s one region in the world that’s leading the way when it comes to remote car sharing, it’s Eastern Europe.
Hoping for the future of mobility in Estonia
Starship’s remote food delivery has been successfully deployed in Estonia for a number of years. Image credit: Starship
Estonia is a country that has embraced the role of technology in mobility and serves as a testbed for innovation: the country is the birthplace of autonomous delivery robot maker Starship Technologies, ride-sharing giant Bolt, and Iseauto’s autonomous robo-shuttle.
For remote-operated vehicles, we have Elmo and Clevon, who remotely operate medium-sized delivery vehicles.
Elmo’s Ransau said the move to transport people in remote areas started five years ago, when the economy minister began analysing existing road regulations and realised that “the traffic law says that the car must have a driver, but it doesn’t say where the driver must be.”
This was quickly seen as an opportunity “from the government level to start-ups to local residents” and a number of market-ready solutions were born.
Elmo currently operates remote-controlled vehicles in Estonia. Its vehicles have completed 20,000 rides, which Laansø says is good enough for Estonia, but the company needs to match that in cities in France and Germany to meaningfully scale up. The company has attracted interest in those countries, as well as in Finland, Switzerland and the US.
While Estonia forges ahead, several other companies are also trying to get into the remote car-sharing space: Berlin has the aforementioned Vay, Imperium Drive is trialling a similar service called Fetch in private properties and sports stadiums in Milton Keynes, and Las Vegas has Halo.
One of the most interesting companies is London- and Malta-based Trilvee, which is developing a small electric three-wheeled scooter (technically classified as a motorcycle) that recently showed off a prototype at Slush in Helsinki and is now considering trials in the UK and Malta.
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Remote control applications also exist in the industrial transport and logistics sector, where companies such as Fernride (Germany) and Einride (Sweden) are researching this.
An industry still in its infancy
But remote car sharing is still in its early stages, so there are still unknowns. For example, Laansoo raised the issue of remote operator fatigue. There is currently not enough data to determine the optimal duration of a work shift, the best chairs, screen sizes, and other infrastructure.
Then there’s recruitment: What makes a good remote driver? Laansoo suggests it could be anyone “from a 60-year-old truck driver to a virtual rally driver.” But there are a ton of questions that need to be approved, including liability issues and making sure remote drivers aren’t distracted or intoxicated.
Furthermore, the remote nature of operations may give rise to disputes in local cities if providers relocate operations overseas, and licensing must take this into account.
With regulations already in place, Estonia and Germany are likely to be the first countries to fully deploy the technology, and Elmo is already looking to license its technology to other ride-sharing operators in Europe.
But if remote-controlled cars are seen as a stepping stone towards fully automating ride-hailing vehicles, how exactly will they connect to one another? It’s not entirely clear. Will a self-driving car come to you and you’ll be at the wheel? Ranson questions the economic merits, suggesting that “it only really makes sense in taxis, where the driver’s salary accounts for 50% of the total cost.”
By comparison, von der Ohe sees his company’s product offering expanding into increased automation, leveraging the data generated by the vehicle fleet over time.
In fact, we’re still at Level 4 when it comes to commercial vehicle automation. Even Starship, with its small fleet of robotic delivery vehicles, still requires a remote safety driver in the background, just like the autonomous robotic vehicles on the roads today.
The reality is that autonomous vehicles are complex and expensive, and we need fewer cars on the road. Furthermore, all the existing ones will need to complement and coexist with public transport, micromobility, autobikes, e-bikes, and in the future, eVTOLs and hyperloops.
Self-driving cars will come along one day, but it remains to be seen when that will happen, but what remotely operated vehicles can do is help bridge this gap and help people get used to the concept of such vehicles and have them work seamlessly with other modes of transportation.
All we know for sure is that the future is human-machine collaboration, and we can’t wait to see it happen.
