We tested Halo.Car’s remote piloted carshare program, which just launched in Las Vegas

Published

2 years ago

January 16, 2023

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During my time at CES in Las Vegas, I got the chance to visit the local HQ of Halo.Car – an EV mobility solutions provider that specializes in rental cars that are dropped off and picked up using remote pilots. Company founder and CEO Anand Nandakumar personally showed me around and explained how Halo.Car’s remote piloted technology looks to bridge the gap between car sharing, autonomous driving, and quicker EV adoption.

Halo.Car is a relatively young startup focused on much of the same segments or nascent technologies that others are, but is approaching them with a different solution. Rather than develop yet another carshare program that requires designated parking areas or customers to pick up and return their rented vehicle somewhere, Halo.Car will drop off and pick up the vehicle wherever you are.

Since viable autonomous driving technology continues to perpetually feel two years away (10 if you ask the Halo.Car team), the company has adopted a different strategy that uses remote drivers at its HQ who are authorized to operate the vehicles using video and sensor data streamed from proprietary software and hardware retrofitted onto the company’s fleet of Kia Niro EVs.

This process will eventually enable a remote pilot to drive your rental car to you in Las Vegas and unlock it allowing you to enter, take over control, and drive away. You can then rent the EV for an hour, a day, or weeks at a time. Simply decide when you’re done, exit the vehicle and it will drive off.

This process is partially underway in the streets of Vegas, but with several failsafes in place to ensure the safety of everyone inside and outside of a given Halo.Car EV. Nandakumar walked me through Halo.Car’s four phases to reach the future of mobility, then we went out for a ride of our own as you’ll see below:

We see the four-step process being important to launching the first city while gaining considerable learnings from it. It’s an act of balancing risk management with speed and revenue.

Watch a Halo.Car EV pick us up and pilot us back to HQ

As previously mentioned, Halo.Car fully intends to one day deliver remotely piloted EVs to customers, but in order to remain safe to start, there were a couple failsafes in place. For instance, we had a chase car behind us with a human driver, and a passenger in their front seat holding a kill switch for our EV in case anything went wrong (it didn’t).

Secondly, we had a human in the driver’s seat of our remotely operated Kia Niro, who was simply there to step in if needed. As you’ll see in the videos below, that was not the case for our visit, but Halo.Car hasn’t been operating on roads in Las Vegas too long, so it’s understandable that they are making passenger and pedestrian safety the number-one priority.

To begin, we rode in the chase car and watched a separate EV depart from Halo.Car HQ without anyone present in the vehicle. I’m sure one day we will all become accustomed to this sight, but it’s still pretty surreal to not see a driver, at least for myself.

After driving a few blocks, both EVs pulled over so Nandakumar and I could hop into the “dropped-off” Kia Niro. In a typical Halo.Car exchange, this would be when the customer takes over and drives the EV like a normal rental, but to experience Halo.Car’s sensory technology and remote piloting up-close, we sat in the car and watched while the remote driver took over, simulating the end of a rental, and return to HQ. Here’s some footage of that drive back.

After our trip, Nandakumar walked me through the back shop of Halo.Car HQ to show me the next EVs being retrofitted with the company’s technology. I couldn’t take any photos, but was quite impressed at how small of a footprint Halo.Car’s tech took up in the trunk. Better still, Nandakumar told me the next generation of technology will be even smaller.

Another interesting fact I learned was how simple it can be to restore the original EV back to stock by removing Halo.Car’s technology. The CEO explained that it can remove any evidence of piloting driving tech and resell the EV used without issue. That could come in handy as the company looks to eventually swap out EVs and implement additional models into its fleet – some smaller, some larger.

The current Halo.Car fleet is about 15 Kia Niro EVs, but the company is already planning to ramp up, dspecially now that its carshare service is up and running in Las Vegas. If you happen to be in Las Vegas, you can test out Halo.Car yourself by booking your appointment here.

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Environment

Oil giant Saudi Aramco posts 15% drop in third-quarter profit but maintains dividend

Published

4 hours ago

November 5, 2024

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Oil giant Saudi Aramco posts 15% drop in third-quarter profit but maintains dividend

Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura oil refinery and oil terminal

Ahmed Jadallah | Reuters

Saudi state oil giant Aramco reported a 15.4% drop in net profit in the third-quarter on the back of “lower crude oil prices and weakening refining margins,” but maintained a 31.05 billion dividend.

The company reported net income of $27.56 billion in the July-September period, topping a company-provided estimate of $26.9 billion. The print is also a 5% drop from the previous quarter, which came in at $29.1 billion, as lower global oil prices, weaker demand and prolonged OPEC+ production cuts led by Saudi Arabia continue to impact crude prices.

The average selling price of oil for the second quarter of 2024 stood at $85 per barrel, but dropped to $78.7 per barrel during the third quarter, according to Saudi-based bank Al Rajhi capital, as non-OPEC supply volumes grew.

The oil firm said its year-on-year decline was partly offset by a “reduction in selling, administrative and general expenses primarily driven by a gain from derivative instruments, and a decrease in production royalties largely reflecting lower crude oil prices and a lower average effective royalty rate compared to the same quarter last year.”

Aramco’s dividend includes a base payout of $20.3 billion and an atypical performance-linked one of $10.8 billion. The Saudi government and the kingdom’s sovereign wealth vehicle, the Public Investment Fund, are the main beneficiaries of the dividend, holding stakes of roughly 81.5% and 16% in the company.

The remaining shareholding trades freely on Saudi Arabia’s Tadāwul stock exchange, with the company having finalized its second public share offering back in June.

Aramco’s earnings before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) came in at $51.45 billion in the third quarter, down 17% year-on-year. Aramco’s capital expenditure guidance was brought up 20% to $13.23 billion.

The company was trading at 27.45 riyals following the announcement, down 0.18% on the previous day.

The earnings align with a broader trend across oil majors, whose third-quarter profits have also suffered from declines in crude prices and refining margins. Aramco said it achieved average realized crude price of $79.3 per barrel in the third quarter, compared with $89.3 per barrel in the same period of last year.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter who produces roughly 9 million barrels per day of crude at present, serves as the de facto leader of the OPEC+ oil producers’ alliance, a subset of whom agreed over the weekend to delay a planned December output hike by one month.

OPEC chief says delayed December output hike is 'nothing unusual'

“Aramco delivered robust net income and generated strong free cash flow during the third quarter, despite a lower oil price environment,” CEO Amin Nasser said in a statement. “We also progressed our upstream developments, strengthened our downstream value chain, and advanced our new energies program as we continue to invest through cycles.”

The revenues will be a boon to the Saudi economy, which is currently undergoing a diversification process under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s legacy Vision 2030 scheme spanning a slew of high-cost infrastructure “gigaprojects.”

Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance cut the kingdom’s growth forecast to 0.8% in 2024, in a steep decline from a previous projection of 4.4%, and raised the outlook for the national budgetary shortfall to roughly 2.9% of GDP, from a prior indication of 1.9%.

Environment

Cybertruck backlog runs out, Model S gets stuck, GM hits a sales milestone

Published

10 hours ago

November 5, 2024

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Cybertruck backlog runs out, Model S gets stuck, GM hits a sales milestone

On today’s episode of Quick Charge, Tesla’s Cybertruck is now available in Canada – and, like in the US, there’s no waiting! Plus, we’ve got an “actually” smart summon Tesla that’s actually stuck, GM reaches a sales milestone, and we get a brand-new title sponsor!

Today’s episode is the first with our new title sponsor, BLUETTI – a leading provider of portable power stations, solar generators, and energy storage systems.

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New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Sunday). We’ll be posting bonusLucid proves than an EV company can keep its promises while Xiaomi teams up with Chevrolet and Honda to prove – at least conceptually – that records are made to be broken. audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news!

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Environment

This ‘supercharger on wheels’ brings fast charging to you [update]

Published

12 hours ago

November 4, 2024

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This 'supercharger on wheels' brings fast charging to you [update]

Mobile car care company Yoshi Mobility launched a DC fast charging EV mobile unit that it likens to “a supercharger on wheels.”

November 4, 2024 update: Yoshi Mobility will only be charging EVs on the side of the road now – it announced today that it’s selling its fleet fueling operation to EZFill Holdings (Nasdaq: EZFL).

It was originally founded as a direct-to-consumer, mobile fueling business in 2016, but now it’s going to focus on mobile EV charging, virtual vehicle inspections for partners like Uber and Turo, and onsite preventative maintenance.

Bryan Frist, Yoshi Mobility’s CEO & cofounder, said, “By spinning off our fuel business and focusing all of our energy on solving hair-on-fire problems that fleet owners face, we are meeting the changing needs of enterprise customers while making the future of transportation safer, cleaner, and more sustainable.”

May 22, 2024: Yoshi Mobility saw that its existing customers needed mobile EV charging in places where infrastructure has yet to be installed, so the Nashville-based company decided to bring the mountain to Moses.

“We recognized a demand among our customers for convenient daily charging, reliable private charging networks, and proper charging infrastructure to support their fleet vehicles as they transition to electric,” said Dan Hunter, Yoshi Mobility’s chief EV officer and cofounder.

The company says its 240 kW mobile DC fast charger, which can turn “any EV” into a mobile charging unit, is the first fully electric mobile charger available. It can provide multiple charges in a single trip but doesn’t detail how they charge the DC fast charger or who manufactured it. (I asked for more details, and they replied that they won’t disclose client names or the manufacturer of its DC fast charger yet.)

Yoshi is launching its mobile charger on two GM BrightDrop Zevo 600s and will introduce additional vehicles throughout 2024. It aims for full commercialization by Q1 2025. (I wonder if the Zevo 600 ever charges itself? Yes, I asked that too.)

Yoshi Mobility says it’s already deployed its EV charging solutions to service “major OEMs, autonomous vehicle companies, and rideshare operators” across the US. Its initial customers are made up of large EV operators managing “hundreds” of light-duty vehicles requiring up to 1 megawatt of energy per day that don’t yet have grid-connected EV chargers. I’ve asked Yoshi for details of who it’s working with, and will update if they share that info.

The company says pricing is based on location and enterprise charging needs. Once under contract for service, the service will be deployed to US-based customers within 10 days.

To date, Yoshi Mobility has raised more than $60 million, with investments from GM Ventures, Bridgestone, ExxonMobil, and Y-Combinator in Silicon Valley.

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