Vay rolls out remote-driven rental cars in Vegas

Car sharing is great until you spend fifteen minutes walking to the vehicle and another twenty looking for street parking. Fully autonomous robotaxis promise to fix that, but between high hardware costs and safety headaches, scaling them has turned into a marathon.

Berlin-based startup Vay is taking a clever detour. On January 17, the company officially rolled out its commercial teledriving service in Las Vegas, offering a middle ground between car rental and autonomous taxis.

Remote delivery, human driving

Vay is initially launching the service around the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) and the Arts District. When you order an electric car through the app, a remote driver sitting at a dedicated station in a control center steers the vehicle straight to your curb.

Once the car arrives, you take the wheel and drive yourself to your destination. When you arrive, you do not have to bother with parking. You simply get out, leave the vehicle, and a remote driver takes over to either park it or send it off to the next customer.

Pricing is strictly by the minute. Users pay thirty cents per minute while driving and three cents per minute for stopovers, such as running into a grocery store. Vay claims this structure makes it significantly cheaper than existing ride-hailing alternatives.

Automotive-grade remote cockpits

Putting cars with empty driver seats on public streets requires serious safety engineering. Vay had already removed in-car safety operators in Europe and Nevada back in late 2023.

The company’s remote driving stations look like high-end racing simulators, equipped with automotive-grade steering wheels, pedals, and vehicle controls. Multiple camera feeds are beamed in real time to panoramic displays, while vehicle microphones route ambient road noise and emergency sirens directly into the remote driver’s headphones.

Vay built the platform around automotive functional safety (ISO 26262) and cybersecurity standards (ISO 21434), backed by positive validation from third-party auditor TÜV Süd. All operators must graduate from the company's internal teledrive academy.

Why it matters

While the autonomous vehicle industry spends billions attempting to solve the elusive long tail of AI driving, Vay picked a refreshingly pragmatic shortcut.

For riders, it delivers the dream of door-to-door car sharing without the parking headache, at a fraction of the cost of Uber or Lyft. You get privacy and flexibility without paying for a driver while you are on the road.

For the mobility sector, teledriving represents a bridge technology that can generate real revenue today. By keeping a trained human in the loop for delivery and retrieval, Vay bypasses the immense liability and regulatory hurdles holding back Level 4 robotaxis.

We think the real question mark lies in operational unit economics. Because remote drivers handle deliveries on a one-to-one basis, labor costs do not vanish. Cellular latency and bandwidth consistency across varying city blocks will also pose real operational challenges as the footprint expands.