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ITS World Congress 2021: Vay launches electric tele-shuttle service

Mobility partnership enables on-demand service where a teleoperator drives up and parking is not required. Fully electric and highly utilized fleet is expected to reduce traffic.

Self-driving Shuttle: The Vay-Niro arrives with a teleoperator driving and is parked by them at the destination. | Photo: Vay
Self-driving Shuttle: The Vay-Niro arrives with a teleoperator driving and is parked by them at the destination. | Photo: Vay
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Johannes Reichel

The Berlin-based tele-driving company Vay and the city of Hamburg have launched a fully electric tele-shuttle service around the ITS World Congress, which aims to combine the benefits of automated driving with low costs from the first quarter of 2022. The provider promises that high utilization will also reduce traffic and pollution. After ordering via the app, Kia e-Niro vehicles are supposed to arrive at the user's location within a few minutes. The user then independently drives the vehicle to their destination and hands over the search for a parking space back to the tele-driver.

The provider assures that the personnel requirement ratio will be far lower than 1:1. The camera technology in the vehicles is expected to cost only a few thousand euros, a fraction of the sensor costs of fully automated vehicles. The project will start in the Bergedorf district outside the city center and is expected to gradually expand to other districts. Additionally, integration into public transport (ÖPNV) and the mobility app "switch," which combines train, bus, car sharing, and on-demand services, is aimed for.

Lower Costs and Development of Outer City Areas

The door-to-door mobility service aims to provide an alternative to private cars in the mobility of outer city areas due to its low costs. Since the fully electric fleet can achieve high utilization, it will reduce the number of vehicles and air pollution, and the sharing nature will reduce parking pressure. The goal is to offer a complement to public transportation, for example, for the commute to work, especially in Hamburg's outer districts. According to Anjes Tjarks, Hamburg's Senator for Transport and Mobility Transition, the Hanseatic city aims to underscore its role as a model city in Europe in the transportation sector with the globally unique mobility service. It strengthens Hamburg as an innovation hub and creates highly qualified jobs.

"Additionally, the new mobility service contributes multiple times to the mobility transition: the electric car-sharing fleet covers areas in the outer city that are not yet fully served by public transport, offering a convenient and fast alternative to private cars and thereby reducing road traffic, noise, and CO2 emissions," believes Tjarks.

From his point of view, the mobility transition will be won outside of inner cities. For Thomas von der Ohe, founder of Vay, the service offers the potential to provide citizens with a service that comfortably, environmentally, and affordably takes them to work, the nearest bus or train stop, or their chosen destination. The remote drivers work from the Hafencity in Hamburg, but they could also work from up to 100 kilometers away. The remote driving system is equipped with redundancies throughout, such as the simultaneous use of multiple 4G mobile networks, network cards, and emergency stop systems, and it has been tested on public roads in Berlin and Hamburg for two years, currently still with safety drivers behind the wheel.

The company further announced that they aim to complete the approval process for a service without a driver in the car with the city of Hamburg by the start of next year. Compared to fully automated and driverless systems like the Moia Shuttle, which Volkswagen's subsidiary plans to launch in Hamburg in 2025, the remote driving system is less prone to errors, claims the provider.

"As long as algorithms are not perfect, humans are needed to make decisions," explained Vay's chief engineer Daniel Buchmueller at the project launch.

The company was founded in September 2018 by Thomas von der Ohe, Fabrizio Scelsi, and Bogdan Djukic, with many employees coming from Tesla, Google, Waymo, Zoox, Byton, Argo, Amazon, Uber, as well as Audi, BMW, and Daimler. Vay has been financed in the past with over 28 million euros from leading European investors, including Patrick Pichette (Partner at Inovia Capital, Chairman of the Board at Twitter, former global Chief Financial Officer at Google), Cristina Stenbeck (Board member at Spotify, Chairwoman at Zalando), and Formula 1 Champion Nico Rosberg. The company has offices in Berlin and Hamburg, as well as in Portland, Oregon.

Translated automatically from German.
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