Mobility takes a step forward today with the launch of Halo.Car’s first fleet of battery-electric vehicles transported to renters via remote control.
Halo.Car already provides car rentals delivered right to the customer’s door, but in the new program launching today in parts of Las Vegas, a rental vehicle no longer will have a driver inside as it is being delivered or collected and returned to the company’s central depot.
Instead, the Halo.Car vehicles all will be piloted entirely remotely from the Las Vegas control center. The launch of the driverless delivery program follows four years of testing in which safety drivers rode along in the vehicles during drop-off or pick-up.
Initially, remote-pilot delivery will be available only in downtown Las Vegas, but more areas of the city are expected to be covered by the program in coming months. In the meantime, if a remote-piloted vehicle is dropped off outside the current delivery area, Halo.Car will pick it up using an onboard driver.
Halo.Car has 20 vehicles available for remote piloting, but it will increase that number as it expands the service to more markets in 2024.
Halo.Car currently offers Kia Niro and Chevrolet Bolt BEVs for rent for $12 per hour, according to its website. It has been offering remote delivery of its vehicles to customers with safety pilots onboard since 2022.
For the remote-pilot program, cars are retrofitted with cameras, modems, antennas and other custom-developed components and connected to the command center primarily via T-Mobile 5G cellular service, with AT&T and Verizon cellular used for additional stability. The added equipment appears well-integrated into the vehicles, which mainly are identifiable on the outside only by the Halo.Car graphic on their side panels and a small lidar sensor mounted on the roof just above the windshield.
Halo.Car says it has developed proprietary algorithms so the data streams use the strongest network connection available at any given time. The company also developed what it calls its Anomaly Detection System, which brings the car to a stop if it detects any connectivity issues during remote operation.
“Rolling out driverless delivery is a huge step towards our goal of offering ubiquitous carshare on-demand,” says Halo.Car founder and CEO Anand Nandakumar. “We want to make it so easy to get a car on-demand that you no longer need to own a car or use a rideshare service – you just call a car to drive when you need to go somewhere. Driverless delivery is critical to making this vision of on-demand vehicles economically viable.
“This commercial launch of driverless delivery is a landmark achievement not only for our company, but for the entire transportation industry,” he adds. “We are really pushing the boundaries of what people believed was possible.”
Among Halo.Car’s backers are At One Ventures, T-Mobile Ventures, Earthshot Ventures and Boost VC.
