This startup has a different take on driverless cars. Now it’s launching in the U.S.
Vay operates what’s called a “teledriving” service, where a car is driven remotely by a human rather than by a computer.
Vay
German startup Vay on Wednesday launched its so-called “teledriving” solution in the U.S. for the first time, putting the company into direct competition with more richly funded and valuable American firms in the mobility technology space.
The company, which has so far received $110 million in funding from investors including Swedish investment giant Kinnevik, U.S. fund Coatue and French private equity fund Eurazeo, said its new service is now live in Nevada, Las Vegas.
Vay’s service will enable people to get cars delivered to them directly by drivers in remote spaces operated by Vay. When they’re done with the trip, they can choose in Vay’s app to let one of the company’s teledrivers take over, and then park the car. The car is then driven back by Vay’s teledriver.
The company has already conducted tests on public roads in Europe and the U.S. with remote drivers and no one behind the wheel. It has worked to get the tech past regulators on either side of the Atlantic.
Vay, for its part, says that its service is designed with safety in mind and that drivers have to take rigorous tests and evaluations before they are deemed appropriate to become a teledriver on its network.
“We develop our teledrive technology in order to fulfill applicable safety requirements and to provide customers a reliable mobility service,” Thomas von der Ohe, Vay’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC.
“With teledriving, a human is in charge. This allows us to handle complex maneuvres such as unprotected left turns, emergency situations and road works based on human perception and decision-making ability.”
Von der Ohe added that Vay’s system was built in compliance with local laws, and that the company has made sure authorities in Nevada were on board with its technology before rolling it out.
Different take on Tesla-like self-driving
Vay is much smaller in scale compared with Tesla. But it hopes that its take on “driverless” cars, where the vehicle is driven by an actual driver based in a remote location somewhere else, will take off as demand for alternative mobility options increases.
What Vay offers is a car rental service that lets users order a car, have the car driven to them by one of its qualified drivers who drive the cars out to them remotely, and then take the car to drive it themselves to their intended destination.
The idea is that, once the Vay app user is done with their journey, they can then select in the app for a trained “teledriver” to take over and leave the car parked in a parking space at the end.
Von der Ohe told CNBC he believes the company’s solution is a more effective alternative to the robotaxis companies such as Tesla, Google’s Waymo, and General Motors’ Cruise.
Last year, he said, was a difficult year for the robotaxi industry, with General Motors, a major player in the San Francisco self-driving car scene, slashing spending on its Cruise self-driving unit by 50% after its robotaxis were involved in a number of accidents, including a crash with a fire truck.
“2023 was a tough year for robotaxis,” von der Ohe told CNBC. “Technically, it’s very difficult to operate a robotaxi service. There’s not many companies out there that can do it,” he added, citing Waymo as an a rare example of a company that’s getting autonomous fleets right.
It also doesn’t work out from a cost perspective, von der Ohe added, saying: “If they become available, they have to be priced at Uber prices.”
“Right now, they’re far away from that efficiency in terms of operational costs and capex costs,” he said.
“These are challenges that they have we come at in a completely contrarian way. It’s not we say they’re doing it wrong or we do it better, we just do it different,” he said, adding that Vay will offer a service that’s a lot cheaper than ride-hailing.
Technology
Amazon was questioned by House China committee over ‘dangerous and unwise’ TikTok partnership
Amazon logo on a brick building exterior, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Amazon representatives met with the House China committee in recent months to discuss lawmaker concerns over the company’s partnership with TikTok, CNBC confirmed.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered on a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to link their account with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The Select Committee conveyed to Amazon that it is dangerous and unwise for Amazon to partner with TikTok given the grave national security threat the app poses,” the spokesperson said. The parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
Representatives from Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s future viability in the U.S. is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services would be prohibited from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could rescue TikTok from a potential U.S. ban. He promised on the campaign trail that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the app.
In his first administration, Trump had tried to implement a TikTok ban. He changed his stance around the time he met with billionaire Jeff Yass. The Republican megadonor’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass has a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
Technology
Amazon launches fixed pricing for treatment of conditions such as hair loss. Hims & Hers stock drops 15%
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
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