Remote rental car delivery startup Vay looks to further expand its Las Vegas operation after recently adding a Southern Nevada vehicle production facility.
The company has served over 10,000 riders since it kicked off its Las Vegas operations a little over a year ago out of its Southern Nevada operations hub in downtown Las Vegas.
“It’s very exciting to see how that service got adopted by the residents,” Thomas von der Ohe, CEO and co-founder of Vay told the Review-Journal. “Our focus is residents in the local community, not so much tourists.”
The company recently opened an 8,500-square-foot production facility in Henderson where it can outfit up to 16 cars per week with Vay’s hardware and software needed to remote-drive the vehicles to rental clients.
Vay’s “teledriving” fleet has grown from the two vehicles at UNLV to 50 vehicles in the Las Vegas Valley, with plans to expand its fleet of 100 cars this year, made possible by their Henderson facility.
“We’ve stared to see the first vehicles come off the production line, and we’re excited to grow our vehicle fleet to about 100,” von der Ohe said.
How it works
The door-to-door car service allows a customer to order a vehicle via Vay’s smartphone app and have it remotely delivered to them within a designated operations area.
The area includes portions of central Las Vegas, downtown, UNLV, portions of the Strip and Chinatown. Vay says it adjusts its coverage zone by user requests and tries to balance demand and the abilities of the company.
“We don’t have thousands of vehicles yet, so we’re trying to find a good balance between a dense geofence where there are many vehicles, so that the customer always has a good experience,” von der Ohe said.
Driverless delivery and pickups through Vay occur between 6:30 a.m. and 10 p.m., seven days a week. Customers 21 years and older can opt to pick up or drop off cars in Vay’s geofence 24/7, with a non-delivery service for those under 21 available between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.
The vehicle is driven to the customer by what Vay calls a “teledriver,” who remotely navigates the car without a driver in the vehicle. The customer takes over the vehicle and drives it themselves and is free to drive anywhere, even outside of the Las Vegas Valley. The maximum time a person can have a car rented out is 12 hours.
A customer can use it for a quick trip to the store or to run an errand or take their child to school. Customers can also opt for a longer trip or ones with multiple stops, though they will have to alert Vay that they intend to continue to use the vehicle after they have parked it.
The ability to do stopovers is why 50 percent of customers have chosen to use Vay’s service, according to the company.
“People love that they get the car delivered. They use it with their stopovers and use the app to lock the car if you want to run into the supermarket, do some sports (events), or go to a restaurant and keep the car outside,” von der Ohe said. “It waits for you while you do something, then you come back and unlock the car and continue the ride.”
The service has seen some regular customers take over 100 trips each since their Southern Nevada operations commenced.
Once a customer is finished with their vehicle, they need to drop it off in a Vay remote driving operating zone, where a teledriver will then retake over the vehicle and drive it back to headquarters.
Cost of service
The pay-per-minute service costs 35 cents per minute and 5 cents per minute during a stopover, according to Vay’s app. The goal is to offer a cheaper, more flexible option to ride-hailing services, von der Ohe said. He said the company’s goal is to be half the cost of a traditional Uber or Lyft ride.
Example rides listed on Vay’s app show a trip from UNLV to Chinatown, a 15-minute trip of just over 5 miles, would cost $5.25. An 82-minute round trip to Hoover Dam and back from UNLV, with a one-hour stopover, is estimated at $32.40.
If a customer finds that their trip was not half the price an Uber or Lyft ride would’ve cost, they can email Vay support and request reimbursement for the difference.
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Remote drivers
Vay has 15 teledrivers on staff who operate the vehicles from their downtown hub, driving the vehicles from afar in stations that resemble a video game set-up.
There is a driver’s seat with a steering wheel and pedals, with three large arched screens providing a real time view of the vehicle’s location on the road. Three rear view cameras offer a glimpse behind the vehicle, with one on top of the middle of the three large screens, mimicking a rear view mirror and the other two on the top right and left corners of the two other screens, acting as side view mirrors.
A computer screen to the teledriver’s right also provides a GPS view of the route the vehicle is taking.
All remote drivers go through a training course, which features safety drivers in the vehicles while they are on the road, as the teledrivers get comfortable operating a vehicle while not physically being inside of it. Vay is actively looking to hire new remote drivers as their fleet of vehicles expands, including plans to add trucks into the rental mix in the future.
Unlike autonomous vehicles, which rely on various technologies such as cameras, radar, LiDAR (a remote sensing technology) and other sensors, Vay’s vehicles only rely on cameras, which are located around the outside of the vehicle. Those lenses serve as the eyes of the remote drivers.
“We are just camera-based and the human makes the decision for us,” von der Ohe said. “The human is in full control … that results in a very reduced sensor set. Cameras are the cheapest sensors, compared to LiDAR for example, which are very expensive. Instead of the $150,000 range for a robotaxi, we can be in the thousands (of dollars).”
Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on X.
