When Thomas von der Ohe was building self-driving shuttles in Silicon Valley in 2017, everyone believed that within three years, driverless vehicles would be widely available. “It was like, ‘In 2020 there will be self-driving cars everywhere in San Francisco and in the entire world,’” says the German co-founder and chief executive officer of Vay, a driverless mobility startup. “This three-year window always moved out, every year, by a year, and it has now been almost a decade with little to show for it.”
But then von der Ohe had an idea. Instead of waiting for autonomous vehicles to be perfected, why not introduce clean and efficient car-sharing using vehicles controlled remotely by a “teledriver?” He quit his job, moved back to Europe and joined forces with two other European engineers, Fabrizio Scelsi and Bogdan Djukic. Together they founded Vay in Berlin.
“Our goal was to build a global deep-tech company at the heart of Europe,” says von der Ohe. “Not to simply copy and paste from China or the United States, nor to play catch-up with other companies, but to build something new.”
How ‘teledriving’ works
A user can hail a car through Vay’s app, and a trained teledriver remotely drives the vehicle to the customer’s location. Once the car arrives, the user takes manual control and drives it like a regular vehicle. After completing the trip, the user ends the rental in the app and exits the car, as the teledriver handles parking or drives the vehicle to the next customer. This system offers sustainable, door-to-door mobility, with the unique advantage of a human driver remotely controlling the vehicle in real time.
“We believe in a future where humans and computers collaborate,” von der Ohe says. “We’re pursuing a strategy of gradual rollout of autonomous driving, instead of going directly from ‘100% human’ to ‘0% human and 100% computer.’ We see this as the right approach from a societal acceptance perspective and a technological perspective.”
Vay
Coming to Europe
In January 2024, Vay launched its first commercial service – in Las Vegas, where regulations for driverless vehicles are currently less stringent than in Europe. The technology was installed in 20 Kia Niro electric vehicles, and the service covers about a quarter of the city. The company plans to scale up the Las Vegas service, and to introduce it across Europe.
Developing the technology and scaling up the service is expensive, but the company raised money fast. “We have fantastic investors. We raised our first pre-seed in three days – €1.1 million,” von der Ohe says. Eight months later, the company secured an additional €12.5 million, and in 2021, an additional €95 million. “Having the experience from Silicon Valley helped,” he adds.
In September 2024, the European Investment Bank signed a €34 million venture-debt investment, supported by InvestEU, to help Vay accelerate the development of its service and technology.
“The European Investment Bank helped by giving us good financing terms to take our technology to the next step,” von der Ohe says. “It helps us roll out our technology in more markets, especially across Europe.”
Given von der Ohe's European ambitions, it's notable that Vay became the first and only company in Europe to drive on public streets without a safety driver, when it received authorisation from Hamburg to operate a driverless car in the city’s streets in 2023.
“That’s the big step change – taking out the physical driver,” says von der Ohe. “Even in the US, only Waymo has achieved this, and they’re owned by Google, which invests billions of dollars every year to develop that technology.”
Developing partnerships
In June 2024, Vay announced that it was partnering with Poppy, a car-sharing operator in Belgium, to introduce remote driving there.
The company is also developing B2B partnerships with car manufacturers, trucking firms, public transport operators and car share and rental companies. For example, the company signed an agreement with the French carmaker Peugeot to develop three services:
- a driverless car-sharing service
- remote-driving technology to be installed on personal cars
- remote-driving technology for delivery vans
Vay is proposing to integrate its remote-driven vehicles in the fleet of Free2Move, Peugeot’s car-sharing fleet – one of the largest in Europe.
Installing Vay’s technology on personal cars and car-sharing fleets would allow customers to have on-demand services. “A remote chauffeur could drive you home in your own car after a party if you’d had something to drink. You also wouldn’t have to park the car, as a valet on demand could just show up – or teleport into your car and park it for you. Other services can include taking your car to be charged, or exchanging the winter tires,” says van der Ohe.
The third branch Vay and Peugeot are exploring is installing Vay’s technology in trucks and vans. That way, last-mile delivery services could benefit from teledriving and become more efficient.
“There could be a myriad other uses in logistics,” says Khalid Naqib, the senior investment officer for cleantech at the European Investment Bank responsible for the investment in Vay. “For example, instead of truckers being far away from home for several nights a week, they can be in a fixed location, near their home, and drive their vehicle remotely.
An alternative to private cars
For the European Investment Bank, Vay’s technology is attractive because one of the Bank’s goals is to improve transport efficiency, decarbonise transport, and improve air quality. The Bank invests in sustainable public mass transport systems around the world and also in other solutions, such as car-sharing projects using electric vehicles.
“It’s about how we can find an alternative to private cars,” says Stephane Petti, a senior engineer who specialises in technology-enabled mobility at the European Investment Bank. “For us, the true advantage of this operation is the shared mobility angle. We’ve financed many car-sharing schemes, because it’s a better use of the vehicle: Your personal car is used about 3% to 4% of the time. It’s complete nonsense from an economic point of view. And yet, we all have a car.”
“Shared mobility would allow to make the best use of the energy that goes into making a car,” he adds. “With many more users per car.”
But classic car-sharing services have some disadvantages. They take up parking space when the cars are unused, and vandalism is rampant. In addition, the customer needs first to locate an available car nearby, then go pick it up, and later, at their destination, find a free space to park and charge it. Vay’s solution solves these impracticalities.
Vay's remote drivers are totally immersed in their drive. Camera sensors reproduce the car’s surroundings and transmit them to the screens of the teledrive station. Road traffic sounds, such as emergency vehicles and other warning signals, are transmitted via microphone to the teledriver’s headphones. In addition, the teledrivers undergo rigorous training and evaluations before they are allowed to operate commercial services.
Vay
How important is the technology?
“The technology is extremely important,” Petti says. “It’s more than simply, ‘put a camera on the car and sit in front of an Xbox wheel.’ It’s much more complicated than that – it’s pure robotic technology. The more you provide the car with the ability to be autonomous, the more the human cognitive burden is reduced, and the more cars can be operated by one pilot,” Petti explains.
The expectation is that eventually, one remote driver will be able to control more than one vehicle at a time. For example, if one teledriven car is cruising on a straight road outside the city, it will be able to temporarily go into autopilot mode, like an autonomous car. Meanwhile, the teledriver turns their attention to the trickier job of parking another car.
Vay’s founders are not concerned about the eventual arrival of fully autonomous cars on the market.
“If robotaxis emerge, for the foreseeable future they will be priced very similarly to taxis or ride hailing – maybe 10% cheaper,” says von der Ohe. “Our service, on the other hand, is about half the price of that, because you drive the car yourself. And you can also take longer trips – two-hour, three-hour trips.”
