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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Warm weather is nearly here, and there’s no better way to get your swimming pool ready than with the Fanttik Aero X Cordless Robotic Pool Cleaner. Developed by a core R&D team with DJI lineage, led by the former product lead of DJI FPV (First-Person View), it brings drone sensor technology to the world of pool-cleaning robotics.
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OKLAHOMA CITY — Amazon and Nvidia told a room of oil and gas executives this week that all options are on the table to power artificial intelligence including fossil fuels such as natural gas.
The tech and energy industries gathered in Oklahoma City at the Hamm Institute for American Energy to discuss how the U.S. can meet the growing energy needs for AI data centers.
The Big Tech companies have invested mostly in renewable power in an effort to slash their carbon dioxide emissions, but they are now navigating a changed political environment. President Donald Trump has ditched U.S. commitments to fight climate change as he seeks to increase fossil fuel production, particularly natural gas.
There is now growing public acknowledgment from the tech industry that gas will be needed, at least in the near term, to help fuel AI.
“To have the energy we need for the grid, it’s going to take an all of the above approach for a period of time,” Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, said during a panel discussion Thursday. “We’re not surprised by the fact that we’re going to need to add some thermal generation to meet the needs in the short term.”
Amazon remains focused on slashing its carbon emissions, Miller said. It is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and is investing in advanced nuclear and carbon capture technology to reduce the environmental impact of its energy consumption, the executive said.
But those advanced technologies will not come online until the 2030s and Amazon needs steady and secure power now, Miller said.
“We’re very explicit that meeting customers’ demands for capacity is first and foremost in our priority list, and so having access to power is first and foremost what we focus on,” Miller said. “And we have a goal to be net-zero carbon as a company by 2040 and are very focused on that.”
Nvidia is also focused on environmental impact but wants “all options on the table” as AI faces an energy crunch, said Josh Parker, the chipmaker’s senior director of corporate sustainability.
“At the end of the day, we need power. We just need power,” Parker said at the panel. “We have some customers who really prioritize the clean energy, and some customers who don’t care as much,” the executive said.
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark called for data center developers to be realistic about the energy sources that are currently available. Anthropic estimates that 50 gigawatts of new power is needed by 2027, equivalent to about 50 nuclear reactors. AI demand can help drive the development of “new and novel sources” of power over the longer term, he said.
The idea of using coal, however, was met with unease. Trump recently signed an order that aims to boost coal production, citing demand from AI. The Amazon and Nvidia executives did not answer directly when asked during the panel whether they thought coal had a role play in powering AI.
“You have a broader set of options than just coal,” Clark said. “We would certainly consider it, but I don’t think I’d say it’s at the top of our list.”
Global renewable developer and energy giant RWE has halted its US offshore wind operations “for the time being” because of the “political environment” the Trump administration has created.
RWE, Germany’s biggest electricity producer, said in March that it had dialed back its US offshore wind activities. But now, CEO Marcus Krebber said in a speech transcript, which he’ll deliver at the company’s Annual General Meeting in Essen on April 30, that its US offshore wind business is now closed (but it wasn’t all bad news):
In the US, where we have stopped our offshore activities for the time being, our business in onshore wind, solar energy, and battery storage has so far been developing very dynamically. At the start of this year, we reached an important milestone when our US generation capacity hit the 10 gigawatt mark. The construction of a further 4 gigawatts is secured.
He went on to say that renewables have created regional value and jobs, but that the company remains “cautious given the political developments.” RWE has introduced more stringent requirements for future US investments:
All necessary federal permits must be in place. Tax credits must be safe harbored and all relevant tariff risks mitigated. In addition, onshore wind and solar projects must have secured offtake at the time of the investment decision. Only if these conditions are met will further investments be possible, given the political environment.
About half of RWE’s installed renewable capacity is in the US, where it’s the third-largest renewable energy company through its subsidiary, RWE Clean Energy. RWE holds the rights to develop US offshore wind projects in New York, Louisiana, and California.
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RWE paid $1.1 billion for the New York lease area in 2022, where it’s meant to develop the 3 gigawatt (GW) Community Offshore Wind with the UK’s National Grid. Community Offshore Wind was projected to come online in the early 2030s and expected to power more than a million homes.
The developer paid $5.6 billion for the Louisiana lease in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023 as the lone bidder for development rights, and the Canopy Offshore Wind project off Northern California was not expected to be completed for another decade.
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