Hello, Halo: This Car-Share Service Remotely Drives Its Vehicles to You

pcmag.com:

LAS VEGAS—I used my phone to summon a car this week, but the Kia Niro that met me at the Downtown Container Park here featured a few differences from an everyday Uber or Lyft: A trio of puck-shaped antennas on the top, tiny cameras mounted around its exterior, and Nevada autonomous-vehicle license plates.

But this battery-electric vehicle operated by Halo(Opens in a new window) did not rate as a robotaxi either. I’d have to do the driving—and the car did not drive itself to me either. Instead, it had a remote driver sitting in front of a giant monitor at Halo’s offices, plus a human up front as a safety check during this startup’s beta-test operations(Opens in a new window).

A better comparison is not autonomous-vehicle operators like GM’s Cruise or Alphabet’s Waymo but car-sharing services such as the now-defunct(Opens in a new window) car2go. With Halo, however, you don’t have to walk, bike, or take transit to a shared car because the car comes to you.

HaloPilot technology(Opens in a new window), developed with T-Mobile as part of that carrier’s efforts to jump-start 5G development, fuses inputs from cameras and other sensors to provide a 210-degree view for its "remote pilot" on a 39-inch curved monitor while operating a steering wheel and pedals.

Halo launched service in late July with two cars in a trapezoid-shaped “service area” consisting of downtown Vegas and some surrounding neighborhoods. Would-be drivers can put their names on a waitlist, but the company provided a code to skip that while I was in town for the MWC Las Vegas wireless-industry gathering.

Creating an account had seemed too simple. I only had to provide my full name, birth date, email address, and phone number, with authentication handled by