Can Teledriving Go Mainstream after Las Vegas Success?

• Teledriving startup Vay plans to expand operations to other cities after a successful launch in Las Vegas, and is also looking at business-to-business use cases including last-mile delivery.

• The service uses a remote driver to bring cars to Vay app users when summoned, with users then proceeding to drive themselves, as with a rented car, with a remote driver taking over when the trip concludes.

• Vay's value proposition to users of its ride-hailing service is that teledriving costs are about half of Uber's, while also projecting similar savings to future business users in the sphere of cargo delivery.

Teledriving may not be a buzzword as ubiquitous as robotaxi at the moment, but this curious off-shoot of the ride-hailing sphere is seemingly gaining momentum.

The concept is fairly straightforward and doesn't actually employ autonomous driving software, even though the sensor suite is similar for safety purposes. Teledriving is effectively a ride-hailing service where you drive the car yourself once it shows up at your doorstep, but to get there it is driven remotely by a human.

Once you're done with the car, another human remotely takes over and drives the car to the next person who requested it via an app. As with robotaxis, a human driver to shuttle you around is therefore out of the picture, and so are the various associated costs, with the company instead utilizing a group of remote drivers sitting in an office.

Teledriving startup Vay, which has been operating in Las Vegas on a limited basis, is now aiming to expand its operations, while also rolling out its business-to-business offerings, letting firms use its teledriving technology for logistics, car rental services, trucking, chauffeuring, and other fleet uses.

The value proposition is effectively the same: Why pay a human driver a full-time salary (and various benefits) to do the work if a Vay employee can do so remotely?

Vay is betting this equation will make sense to some businesses, and has already been working with French automaker Peugeot on integrating its teledriving tech into the automaker's vehicles, exploring the use cases for last-mile delivery and car rental scenarios.

"The business case for teledriving is multi-industry, beyond the consumer service we are running in Las Vegas," said Justin Spratt, Chief Business Officer at Vay. "Teledriving technology is scalable and available now for corporates—helping reduce the cost of fleet maintenance, keeping vehicles on the road longer, and getting the best value out of your driver operations."

Vay has also recently secured a €34 million loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB), aimed at developing door-to-door car sharing in Europe, as well as more cities in North America.

Teledriving's closest competitors are still human ride-hailing gig drivers and robotaxis, but Vay's advantage, the company says, is that door-to-door teledriving offers half the cost of traditional ride-hailing.

Teledriving may also face different regulatory barriers than SAE Level 4 robotaxis, which continue to improve but still face strict scrutiny from city residents, business groups, local politicians, and state regulators, with tech giants like Waymo parent company Google being one of a handful of players worldwide that can afford to engage the various stakeholders while not worrying about immediate profitability.

Time will tell if teledriving has the potential to go mainstream, but it's clear that several types of technologies are battling each other at the moment to replace human drivers, whether it's driving a mining truck in a remote part of Australia or an EV hatchback in a major city.

Will teledriving become a major alternative to human-driven ride-sharing apps and robotaxis, or will this be an evolutionary dead-end on the route to Level 4 robotaxis? Please comment below on the tech's potential.