Imagine driving to a restaurant on a Saturday night with your family, you have a reservation, a good wife, a good-paying job. The ideal life. But you can’t find a parking spot. You spend a whole hour looking to find one and when you finally step into the restaurant they tell you that your reservation is gone. Well not anymore because this startup is building cars that can be driven remotely.
The startup, called Halo (how did they get that name approved?) plans to make cars that can drive you to your destination and then drive itself back without needing to find a parking space. Neat right? But your next question would be that wouldn’t a self-driving car like that have risks of crashing? No, because the cars will be remotely driven by a person. Like a video game or a remote-controlled car.
The cars will be driven by a person back at the company’s office. Hopefully, they won’t be driving like me in GTA V. The main idea is to make car rentals less stressful. Nobody wants to park a car they don’t own. The company also wants to get people to trust self-driving car technology more because, to be honest, Tesla isn’t doing a good enough job. People overestimate their car’s autopilot system and that results in frequent car crashes.
The company is being backed by T-Mobile so I guess there won’t be any latency issues. They have plans to launch in Las Vegas later this year. The car’s system consists of nine cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors. All of these are built into the body of a modified Kia Niro EVs. The company has been testing its cars in Las Vegas streets. Halo’s technology is different from other autonomous car platforms like Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox.
There is a human factor in between all the self-driving stuff so that should keep crashes or accidents to the minimum. There is no information about the pricing of the service but it is rumored to be competitive with other ride-sharing apps. According to CEO Anand Nandakumar, “The car disappears. You don’t have to worry about parking”. Anand is also concerned with how long it’s taking to develop truly autonomous vehicles.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see just how this new car service plays out.
