F*ck robots, they're letting gamers drive cars remotely in the EU

Let me ask you a question, dear reader. What would you do if you were faced with a difficult problem of, let's say, self driving cars? Would you take the usual approach and set up an AI, log millions to billions of driving kilometers to get appropriate amounts of training data, keep figuring out how to navigate those pesky seagulls that keep stopping your cars in the middle of the road and make the cars hit more cyclists, not less, or would you hire some gamers and let them drive the cars remotely and just tell customers the cars are driving themselves?

In the end, both things reach the same conclusion which is cars that move on public roads without someone in the driver's seat. Now guess which one of the aforementioned solution is working right now, and which is not really in Europe.

You guessed right! Several companies are now hiring people to drive cars remotely. People are sitting at a desk with a steering wheel and a bunch of screens connected to a computer which connects to a car in the real world. This works, because the remotely controlled cars are equipped with a load of camera's and are easy to move and control because of the software driven electric drive train. It's like playing Forza Horizon, but the car that's being raced around in the game, is also moving in real life.

At this point only a hand full of companies in Belgium (Poppy), Finland (Elmo), Italy (Niulinx) and Germany (Vay) are using 'teledriving' - which, let's be honest here, sounds like they're still using dail-up modems to connect to the internet - to move around rental cars between customers and parking spaces, usually at airports or places like that.

And it seems to just work fine. People are controlling cars remotely at the fraction of the costs it would take to even build an AI-controlled driverless taxi. And it does not take any of our jobs in the process. Even better: taxi drivers can work from home in the future!

At the same time the risk of getting hit by an AI-controlled self driving car in Europe increases by the day. Tesla got approval to let people use (not so) Full Self-Driving in the Netherlands, which already is leading to discussion around safety in the rest of Europe. Tesla is trying to use the approval as a gateway to get FSD into the rest of the EU, which countries like Sweden and Norway are not that keen on, because they can see disasters happen on snowy roads already.

At same time the real driverless taxi's are getting rolling in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Local startup Verne was given permission to run a fleet of 10 Chinese Arcfox Alpha T5 EV's from BAIC Motor in the city. All of them are using Chinese autonomous-driving software from Pony AI.

Now you'd think that's a good thing, since the Chinese are way ahead of us in term of technology as a whole, but even more so on the driverless stuff. You'd only be partially right. Chinese companies have been found cutting corners and the government of the country has been applying the brakes on the usage of self driving technologies, because people keep dying in horrible crashes caused by the software.

But even though I'm still a bit sceptical about the advancements in self driving technology (I've been driven around in Waymo's a lot and it's fine, not great), I have to be honest: if I could take a Verne to work tomorrow and not have to get into a train or other forms of smelly public transport or have to queue for hours in a single line file on the motorway while just staring at the car in front of me, I'd do it. Perfectly knowing that I'd probably encounter a crash with a cyclist and getting stuck behind a seagull that wont get out of the road, or getting tangled in some chains along the way. I mean, they're offering rides at only two euro's. Nothing can beat that level of cheapskate out of me.

In other news:

You know those cheap electric second hand cars nobody wanted a few months ago? Yeah, the ones you could get a good deal on because they sat on the lot for way to long. Yeah, those are more expensive now. Seems like dealers are not quite stupid yet. People are flocking to EV's right now because petrol is quite expensive, so somehow now it makes sense to spend thousands on a new car to safe money. Either way, getting a car that doesn't have to fuel up anymore will cost about 7.5 percent more since last month, thanks to the big orange mad American.

Fun times in a Bugatti hit a bit different than fun times in a Arcfox Alpha T5 EV from BAIC Motor.

Well, well, well, now the monkey gets out of the sleeve. It looks like Flash Charging your BYD will get the battery way to hot for comfort. Almost to the point at which catastrophic thermal runway (fire, bad) can occur. That's what a tester found when he put some temperature probes on and around the battery of a BYD while charging at a Flash Charger. It could be perfectly safe since the cooling worked fine. But it does indicate higher battery degredation will probably be an issue for cars that can charge really, really fast. Don't say I didn't warn you...