New ‘driverless’ car share service coming to downtown Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) - Starting Thursday, there’s a chance you will see a “driverless” car cruising around downtown Las Vegas.

You can request a ride through Halo Cars’ online website and a pilot driver will bring a car to you, and that is when you will be able to get inside of the car and take it to wherever you want to go.

For three years, CEO and founder of the Halo Car company Anand Nandakumar has been working out all the details to make his vision for an electric car share company come to life..

“I saw that electric cars make a big transportation impact because transportation is one of the biggest carbon emitters and I said what if we could just do this,” said Nandakumar. “What if we can do this on a larger scale. No one will think about buying a car anymore.”

For $15 an hour, anyone in the downtown Las Vegas area can request a car by clicking HERE.

The trained remote pilot driver will then deliver the car to you, and you can then take the car wherever you want, but it must be returned to the designated zoning areas, which right now is just the downtown area.

Drivers licenses will be scanned before getting into their vehicles.

“Drive however much you want,” said Nandakumar. “Do your daily trips or hourly trips and when you are done bring it back and drop it off and walk away and then the car is gone.”

Halo Car works with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to make sure there is a strong and safe connection between the remote pilot driver and the car.

We asked what happens if all three networks were to go out.

“The car has the intelligence to come to a safe stop all by itself,” said Nandakumar.

We also asked Nandakumar how they will handle those who have been drinking and request to drive one of their cars.

“We are not monitoring whether they are drunk or not. It is like a rental car service,” said Nandakumar. “When you go to a rental car service right now, they don’t ask you if you are drunk. The reliability is on the customer.”

Nandakumar said though they are only starting out with three cars in the Las Vegas area, they have plans to expand

“We will start scaling the city to about 30 to 50 cars by the end of the year target and then next year is a big growth plan for us. We already have lots of states that are reaching out to us,” said Nandakumar.

You can request a Halo Car starting Thursday morning in the downtown arts district area.

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