Driverless Delivery of EVs in Las Vegas and Beyond - Halo.Car’s CEO, Anand Nandakumar

Anand Nandakumar founded Halo.Car as an alternative way to deliver affordable, on-demand electric transportation. Rather than wait for AVs, or have to purchase an EV, with Halo customers can rapidly shift to electric 'trips' because of the short term nature of Halo bookings.

"We’ve developed technology to enable remote driving of electric vehicles, by streaming video and sensor data from the vehicle to a trained 'remote pilot'," Nandakumar, Halo.Car’s CEO, tells Auto Futures.

The Las Vegas startup retrofits its fleet of EVs with cameras, modems, antennas, and other custom-developed components to enable remote driving of the vehicle. Trained ‘remote pilots’ at a Halo.Car operations center use video and sensor data streamed from the vehicle to remotely drive the vehicle.

When they complete a remote delivery, they hand over control of the vehicle to the customer and connect to the next vehicle awaiting remote delivery or collection. 

"With Halo, when you need a car you hop on our website and book a car for delivery to your address. At the requested time, we’ll deliver the vehicle to you - driverless. You claim and unlock the car and then you are on your way! When you are finished with the vehicle, you can park anywhere legal in Las Vegas. We’ll remotely lock the vehicle and collect it. If you are in a driverless zone, that collection will be done remotely," says Nandakumar. 

"It’s a huge time saver for customers to get a car delivered, rather than needing to get a ride to go and pick up a carshare vehicle or go to a rental location. Equally, the freedom to end the booking anywhere, rather than having to return the vehicle to the same location saves time as well. Insurance is included in the booking, and you don’t need to charge the vehicle before returning it. The whole experience has been designed to be as easy and seamless as getting into an Uber," he adds.

Having previously worked at Uber ATG, the unit responsible for developing self-driving cars and truck, Nandakumar witnessed the insurmountable difficulty and cost of the challenge of developing Level 5 autonomous vehicles. Hence the decision to use remote pilots.

"Full autonomy that works across geographies is still decades away. Rather than joining that moonshot race, with the billions of dollars that has been spent - remote driving is a substantially easier problem to solve as it does not depend on superintelligent systems. Building highly reliable video streaming, and vehicle controls, is a shorter path to enabling low-cost vehicle delivery, and getting our vision of carshare on-demand into the world faster."

The Halo Effect

In June, 2023, Halo.Car announced the removal of safety drivers from its remote-piloted vehicles in Las Vegas. The driverless launch comes following four years of testing where safety drivers were present inside its vehicles during remote piloting.

"Safety of road users is critical to us at Halo. We have tested our technology extensively in Las Vegas over thousands of hours with no safety incidents. We use a combination of T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon to provide maximum stability for our network connection to the vehicles," explains Nandakumar.

"We have hundreds of happy customers in Las Vegas, with return users who rely on us to provide a second car for their household - including customers who book with us weekly! For users, getting a car delivered and collected is a huge time saving convenience that just isn’t affordable with other services."

Expansion Plans

The roll-out of driverless deliveries in Las Vegas follows Halo.Car’s funding in 2022 from climate tech investor At One Ventures, with T-Mobile Ventures, Earthshot Ventures, and existing investor Boost VC also participating.

"Halo.Car is offering driverless deliveries in Downtown Las Vegas with availability in more areas of the city in the coming months. We plan to grow our fleet in Las Vegas to hundreds of vehicles before expanding to more cities in 2024," says Nandakumar.

Finally we asked him when does he predict fully autonomous vehicles on US roads.

"Predictions 5 years ago targeted 100,000 AVs on roads this year, and predictions today target 1 million AVs by 2030. Autonomy will progress slowly, rather than with an explosive inflection point moment. We expect to see more cities, conditions, and times of day enabled year by year over the coming decades," he concludes.