Driverless cars are it is often marketed as a safe and convenient means of travel that allows customers to watch movies, scroll through TikTok, or take a nap, all without worrying about taking control. Either in a personal vehicle (which to remind everyone, there are currently no personal self-driving cars for sale) or a ride-sharing service like Cruise either waymoThe big selling point is that you don’t have to drive.
aura has a different approach. The Las Vegas car-sharing startup is working toward autonomy for fleet vehicles. The problem is that customers will not have access to autonomous driving features. Instead, the technology is only used as a valet service for people looking for a short-term rental.
Halo is like Car2go, ZipCar, Gig Share and other car sharing services with the added benefit that the vehicle is delivered to the customer’s destination through a teleoperations system that allows a human to pilot the vehicle through the streets of the city from a remote location.
Image Credits: aura
Well eventually. Currently, most of the vehicles in the fleet are being delivered to customers by human drivers. But the company is testing its remote control system with a small subset of vehicles in Las Vegas and hopes to expand that pilot to customers in June or July of this year. (The company had previously planned to remove the human safety operator behind the wheel and only use its remote controller system. at the end of 2022.)
To handle human-free (sort of) implementations, Halo has built its own remote driving system. A person in the office pilots a vehicle on a platform similar to what high-level iRig players use, but with a real car on the other end that has a top speed of 25 miles per hour.
Navigating towards profitability
Autonomous vehicles have been at the core of many failed efforts. One of the biggest disasters was when Uber invested heavily in the technology. before eventually selling his autonomous division aurora Autonomous Ubers were supposed to be the path to company profitability. Instead, it proved too difficult and expensive.
Halo CEO founder Anand Nandakumar is under no illusions that the technology is just around the corner.
“What I found was that it will take another 15 years for autonomous (technology) to be commercially ready as an actual commercially viable product,” Nandakumar told TechCrunch.
Delivering electric vehicles to customers is less about showing what the company can do and more about optimizing the business for the long term. Currently, a driver handles four to five in-person deliveries a day. Once these drivers go remote, that number increases to 10 deliveries per day.
The idea is that Halo will lose money while delivering the vehicle, but will then recoup those losses and more when the customer drives the car for $12 an hour. That’s cheaper than Uber or Lyft deals and delivery times should be on par with ride-sharing services.
By distributing its vehicles in a metropolitan area (in partnership with local authorities), Halo aims to deliver a car to a customer in six to seven minutes. After that, “the customer keeps the car for several hours. So we get a good chunk of the margin in the time the customer keeps the car,” Nandakumar said. At that point, the vehicle can be remotely navigated to where it is needed or deployed into a parking space.
In the future, to bring Halo even closer to ride-sharing services, it hopes to introduce one-way rentals. Currently, all rentals are round trip. Delivery and collection are made in the same place. Picking up the vehicle at one location and dropping it off at another means customers don’t need to find parking. In theory, they can just get out of the car and let it drive itself.
“What we are saying is that people don’t mind driving their own cars,” Nandakumar said.
A new fiscally sound world
Halo is trying to grow while avoiding some of the pitfalls, like runaway costs and parking restrictions, that have plagued other ride-sharing and car-sharing companies.
Nandakumar notes that the company has been operating efficiently since its inception four years ago. They have a small team, and instead of expanding quickly, Halo has focused on making sure what they’re selling works well in Vegas. The remote-controlled vehicles will be deployed in downtown Las Vegas with a small fleet.
Nandakumar believes Halo can launch with a fleet that is 1/10 the size of what a traditional car-sharing company needs. He’s also working closely with the city to secure parking spaces, a seemingly small but critical detail that has upended the ambitions of car-sharing companies in other cities.
And don’t expect Halo to become a stand-alone transportation service. The company’s income comes from customers who drive the vehicle on their own. Nandakumar points out that a robotaxi business plan would not be profitable. Instead, autonomous driving and remote drive technology can be used to move vehicles remotely around the city for optimal deployment.
hardware and aftermarket
A quick ride in one of the company’s remote-controlled Kia Niro electric vehicles is mostly uneventful. Sitting behind the wheel communicating with the actual driver in Las Vegas, Nandakumar only takes control once to navigate around a bollard. With a self-imposed top speed of 25 miles per hour for all remotely piloted vehicles, it’s a very slow and very boring experience.
The EV itself is equipped with six roof-mounted cameras that offer a 360-degree view of the world. The front of the vehicle uses five cameras for a 210-degree view of the world. Essentially, the remote driver can see more of the world than the people inside the SUV.
Everything is bolted on, including the antennas for three of the major cellular networks. The idea is to have network redundancy. If one connection goes down, there are two more to fall back on. Halo also has partnered with T-Mobile to give vehicles higher priority access to the carrier’s network. This should, in theory, help keep vehicles running during times of high network usage.
Halo plans to add the Chevy Bolt to the fleet. Of course, he will have to hurry since GM has decided final production of that vehicle at the end of the year.
As for future vehicles, Nandakumar talks about adding EV trucks. Most people only need the hauling capacity of a truck for a few hours, he mused. Why not offer them one that gets delivered to their house and then leaves after the trip to Home Depot?
What’s really interesting is that all of these hardware additions to the vehicle can be removed. No wires are cut and there is no drilling involved. Essentially, Halo’s EVs can be returned to their original state without much of a problem, allowing Halo to sell the vehicles when they’re done with them.
Another way Halo is being fiscally responsible in a highly volatile market. All of these auto related businesses have been a gamble. Halo’s approach is to use what works now rather than wait for what’s on the horizon. Also, if you’re going to gamble on car sharing, it might as well happen in Vegas.
—————————————————-
Source link