Driverless but not Autonomous - UK Robocar Hire Service Fetch - Imperium Drive's CEO Koosha Kaveh

Imperium Drive is the British startup behind Fetch, a new on-demand car-hailing service using remote-controlled driverless vehicles. Fetch is the world’s first commercial car rental service enabled by remote driving technology.

"The definition of autonomous, for us, means there's still a human involved," Koosha Kaveh, Imperium Drive's CEO, tells Auto Futures.

The technology it's developed gets retrofitted into a normal electric car and uses cameras as its main sensors. The car can then be remotely controlled by a human from a control centre.

Imperium Drive chose to develop remote driving technology as it believes fully autonomous vehicles on public roads are still some way off, 

"We decided to keep humans in the loop as opposed to completely get rid of them. And that's what makes a service possible and scalable."

This is how the service works. Customers can hire a car through the Fetch app, stating when they need it and for how long. An electric vehicle, which is remotely controlled by an operator, is then be delivered to them. The customer then drives the car themselves to their destination and when the rental period is up, the remote vehicle operator takes over and pilots the car back to base or to the next user.

"Why pay all the costs of having a car on your drive when you can just pay for one to arrive when you need it. For short trips, the service offers the same convenience as a ride-hailing or taxi service, but with the ability to cover greater distances at less than half the cost of services like Uber or Bolt," he says.

Kaveh says his company's ultimate mission is to replace private cars with shared cars.

"The potential is huge. Today we have about 30 million passenger cars in the UK. If all of those cars were shared amongst people who only need a 10th of it, that's about 3 million cars. Think about all the impact that can have on the environment, congestion, pollution, parking spaces."

Making Life Easier For Its Users

For last four years, Imperium Drive has been developing and testing the driving technology so it can guarantee a safe service on public roads. To ensure the safety of occupants and other road users, the cars have multiple cameras attached to them, giving the operator a 360-degree view, and the operating system uses computer image algorithms to detect anything near the car.

Fetch already has customers who are using the service on a regular basis. Kaveh says they're enjoying the experience.

One user, Sharon Thorogood, who hailed a Fetch car to take her 83-year-old mother to the doctor, comments: “The car arrived on time at my location and the service made everything so simple, with no need to get a taxi or a bus. I had a quick demonstration, and then away I went. It made my life so easy.”

Kaveh adds: "They're loving it. The pricing is great, because they're essentially able to get to places at half the price of an Uber or a taxi. That's our main value add for the customers. Those who don't own car or share a car use us quite regularly." 

A Practical Approach To Autonomy

Although remote driving is a stepping stone towards fully autonomous transport, Kaveh believes that a number of significant challenges remain.

"Autonomy in closed environments is a completely different story, but on public roads we don't see autonomous vehicles happening at scale anytime in the next two decades."

"AI today, with all the advancements that we hear these days about generative AI, is still not capable of driving a car through many weather conditions, through many driving scenarios, and still isn't anywhere as capable as a human to take decisions," he adds.

"Our cities are still not ready for a robot to be employed at scale to drive cars around... Regulations and legislation also come come into the picture as well."

Finally, we asked Kaveh how the autonomous sector will develop over the next few years.

"Over the next five years we're building slowly, with more autonomous driving functionalities into our stack. The difference between our approach and others is that we're doing that slowly over time, as opposed to what everybody else wanted to do and failed, which is overnight."

"Humans will never disappear from the equation of autonomous vehicles. That's essentially a more practical way to approach autonomy," concludes Kaveh.