In Las Vegas, you can now see cars on the road without a driver behind the wheel. They are not self-driving cars, but rather, remote-driven cars.
Vay cars are different from self-driving companies like Waymo because they have remote drivers. Vay is a German teledriving company that launched its first fully driverless fleet in Sin City.
"The biggest difference is that the human makes the decision and not the computer…[it] is basically an end-to-end, door-to-door mobility service. Don’t have to walk to the car and don’t have to park it, but you drive it yourself," said Vay CEO Thomas von der Ohe.
When you order a car, a teledriver uses cameras and sensors to guide it to your location. When you’re done using it, the teledriver takes over and brings the vehicle back to Vay’s headquarters.
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"A different mobility service, it’s about providing an alternative to car ownership, rather than robotaxi service," said von der Ohe.
The company also has safeguards in case of emergencies.
"If the electricity goes down here in the teledrive center and our backup generator also fails at the same time…" von der Ohe said. "So there’s all these safety cases you have to keep in mind, if that happens, the vehicle can come to a safe stop by itself."
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Vay teledrivers also receive training before they're allowed to take the wheel.
"Started with theory training, which is verbal, going through the slides learning what the terms were and stuff like that, and then went through a few weeks of private ground training. So we went to a private lot and trained there, and then more training when it came to driving on the public street," said Vay teledriver Antonella Rosa.
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Transitioning from normal driving to teledriving is not always seamless.
"The biggest issue I had was the lack of feedback. You know when you step on a throttle, you feel the car go back and stuff like that. We don’t have that here, but we do have these lines that appear to kind of show us the G-Force instead of feeling it, so just kind of switching those two things around," Rosa said.
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Vay plans to expand to the majority of the Las Vegas metropolitan area this year, with hopes to bring their cars to the Strip soon.
