Dawn of remote car renting: new service follows 18-month trial

A car rental service has been launched that delivers a remote-controlled vehicle to the user.

The Fetch vehicle system has been tested for 18 months in Milton Keynes and will now be available to customers.

The infamous New Town with a reputation for roundabouts, concrete cows and seemingly little else has turned into an unlikely haven for innovative projects and tech entrepreneurs in recent years.

Imperium Drive, the company behind the service where cars are driven by an office worker, claimed it was the first of its kind in Europe.

Chief executive, Koosha Kaveh, said, “It’s driverless but not yet autonomous.”

Multi-million pound trials took place on private land around the MK Dons football stadium, as it resembles a small-scale town, with a retail park, hotel and crossroads, as well as pedestrians and cyclists.

The remote control of the car has a 360-degree view of the roads using cameras built into the vehicle, as well as anti-crash safety systems in the control software.

Customers can hire the electric cars through an app and, although they drive them normally, the vehicles are delivered by a third-party operator to any location within a 4-mile radius of Milton Keynes city center.

When the rental period ends, the operator takes control and returns the vehicle to base.

The cars have been tested on the city’s roads for the past 18 months, completing more than 1,000 miles of journeys without a single collision, Imperium Drive told the BBC.

Mr Kaveh said: ‘There is still a human involved, but they are in a control center and operate the vehicle in the same way as a drone.

“If fully autonomous, we think this system has the potential to replace private car ownership in the UK.”

The Fetch car system has the backing of both the government and Milton Keynes City Council, who see such rental systems as a way to reduce the number of cars on the road.

The council said it “supports any new technology that can revolutionize the way we travel, making it more sustainable.”

Driverless cars are just one of the solutions we’re looking at, along with larger shuttles using similar technology. The idea is to make shareable transport more attractive,’ said the authority.

With an open-minded local government, a fast-growing 5G network and a healthy dose of government funding, autonomous vehicle developers have set up shop in Milton Keynes in the hope that they will be the first to crack the code and open wider the floodgates to autonomous driving. cars worldwide.

Last year, MailOnline briefly stepped into this futuristic world to find out how it fared during a real-world test when reporter Jacob Thorburn took the Aurrigo AutoPod for a 15-minute test drive in his hometown.

A combination of its 5G connection, 360-degree cameras scattered around the exterior of the vehicle, and its LiDAR – the same technology used by the military to map a battlefield – makes the AutoPod a fully autonomous vehicle that able to respond to its environment in real life. -time

The route our reporter Jacob Thorburn took on the Aurrigo last year at Stadium MK

At that time, people returned to the road en masse after the Covid-19 pandemic. Figures from navigation app Waze showed that leisure, travel and errand trips surpassed pre-Covid levels, rising by an average of 130%.

Coventry-based Aurrigo engineers developed the vehicle and software for their AutoPod – a battery-powered self-driving vehicle with a top speed of 15 mph and a range of 62 miles.

Residents of Milton Keynes are already well versed in understanding the benefits of self-driving vehicles. A fleet of more than 200 six-wheeled Starship Robots are often seen cruising the city’s winding sidewalks

Partners include Amazon, Thales and Vodafone and they are growing rapidly with their sales operations already doing business in Australia, Canada and the US.

A combination of its 5G connection, six 360-degree cameras scattered around the exterior of the vehicle, and its LiDAR – the same technology used by the military to map a battlefield – makes the AutoPod a fully autonomous vehicle capable of reacting to its environment in real time.

The Starship robots are loaded with groceries before being taken to a member of the public’s home, and saw huge popularity during the Covid pandemic [File picture]

Residents of Milton Keynes are already well versed in understanding the benefits of self-driving vehicles.

The city has become accustomed to watching autonomous six-wheeled Starship Robots traverse the city’s winding sidewalks, known as red roads due to their distinctive color.

The fleet of little white robots that run errands and deliver food to the town’s estates has now grown to more than 200, and many residents admit they can’t imagine life without them.

This appears to be a particularly relevant time for manufacturers to get into the autonomous vehicle industry, as the global self-driving car market is expected to exceed £407 billion by the end of 2026.

In the future, users will be able to load the Aurrigo app, call their autonomous ride, and then continue their journey.

The company already has a fully electric 10-seater shuttle that will be considered for road use in the near future.