Completely unmanned passenger transportation on the streets is still an unattainable goal, but progress doesn’t stand still. In Las Vegas, the German service Vay, which operates in conjunction with local startup Halo.car, has begun operations. Both companies are engaged in teledriving – the provision of cab services with the partial involvement of a human driver.
The idea is to reduce the time a human behind the wheel to minimize costs. But entrusting a robot with the entire driving process is dangerous and unprofitable – it cannot react to abnormal situations, it will get confused, make wasted laps and burn fuel. Saving money is extremely important, so human drivers use remote control to bring transportation to the client, and then the client gets behind the wheel and goes about his business.
The benefit for drivers is that they work from the comfort of an office, and the work process is like a video game for them. There is no risk of getting hurt in an accident or being robbed, there is no need to stay in the same car with a passenger, any physical contact is excluded. The driver does not worry about the state of transportation and does not look for orders, he switches between different cars as requests come in and remotely moves them from point A to point B.
