A white Kia Nero electric vehicle cautiously turns the corner. It rolls to a stop in front of the English Hotel, and I’m ushered inside, taking the shotgun seat while my hosts ride in the back. There is no one in the driver’s seat.

Today I’m riding in a car belonging to Vay, a Berlin-based company that has established its U.S. headquarters in Las Vegas. Vay is a service that rents electric cars on demand, driving them remotely to your pick-up spot and to the next driver after you’ve completed your trip. Meaning: I could summon one of these vehicles to my Downtown home via the Vay app; drive it myself to, say, the Smith Center; and then watch it roll away, remotely piloted, to its next customer, or back to its Arts District headquarters. And the cost at 35 cents a minute, approximately half of current rideshare rates, will likely encourage me to do just that.

But that’s not happening today. Today, I’m savoring my first ride in a car with no driver at the wheel. It’s a relatively short trip around the block: we roll northbound on Main Street to Bonneville Avenue, cut over to Casino Center, head south to Hoover Street and return to Main. I film the empty driver’s seat as if someone is about to materialize in it, but no one does: Yulieanna Duran, our driver, is in an office, seated in an interactive driving rig that a Gran Turismo player would stan on sight. The wheel makes slight adjustments as we roll; at one point we drive around a pickup truck and trailer that’s illegally parked in the middle of the road, no rhyme or reason.

Yulieanna Duran remotely drives a Vay electric car from the company headquarters in Downtown Las Vegas. Photo by: Steve Marcus

I remark to my fellow passengers that it feels good to know that someone, somewhere, is as annoyed by that nonsense as I am, and decided to drive around it.

“We’ve heard that from users several times, that it’s reassuring to know that human decision is involved in this,” says Silvia Avanzini, Vay’s head of communications. “Vehicles parked in the middle of the street, construction work, detours—these things can be easily addressed by humans, obviously. But it takes longer to train autonomous vehicles for that.”

Las Vegas is witnessing the proof of that now, as driverless vehicles become increasingly common on our roads. Amazon subsidiary Zoox has been testing its robotaxis on Valley streets since 2019, and it intends to launch fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Vegas later this year with a series of local partnerships that include Resorts World and Area15. Motional, an AV collaboration between Hyundai and Aptiv, continues to test on our streets, as does Google subsidiary Waymo. Electric vehicle maker Lucid, working with autonomous technology company Nuro, is reportedly testing a robotaxi on a closed Vegas track; Uber has invested $300 million in the project. And the City of Las Vegas is working with the Regional Transportation Commission to bring an automated shuttle bus, provisionally titled GoMed, to the Las Vegas Medical District next year.

We’re about to vault to the head of a line that, somewhat paradoxically, has no humans standing in it. Las Vegas has become ground zero for an explosion of autonomous and remote-driven vehicles. Our city is encouraging nobody to take the wheel in a big way.

“We chose to launch in (the City of) Las Vegas because they welcomed us with very open arms,” says Vay co-founder and CEO Thomas von der Ohe. “They loved the innovation aspect of what we do. The sustainability of it.”

STREET HASSLES

A Tesla electric car heads into a tunnel during a tour of the Vegas Loop at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Photo by: Steve Marcus

Las Vegas, a sprawling metropolitan area seemingly built by private cars for use by private cars, is experiencing a rare blossoming of public transportation modes. The RTC is constructing a bus rapid transit line on Maryland Parkway that will connect several important locations—Sunrise and UMC hospitals, Symphony Park, Filipino Town, UNLV, the Bonneville Transit Center, Harry Reid International Airport and more—via state-of-the-art coaches running a route with minimal stops. The Boring Company’s underground Vegas Loop now connects the Las Vegas Convention Center with Encore, Resorts World and Westgate, and plans are in the works for a station just a few blocks north of the airport, with stops along the way at Hughes Center, UNLV and Virgin. And it’s not impossible to imagine autonomous vehicles in those tunnels someday; Tesla’s Cybercab and Robovan projects are still moving ahead.

Several years from now, the Brightline high-speed rail line (see sidebar, page 20) will begin spilling car-less overnight visitors into town. They’ll go to Raiders, Aces and Golden Knights games; to concerts, festivals and events; to the Arts District, Fremont Street and Chinatown. Maybe they’ll hop onto the RTC’s double-decker Strip buses, one of the busiest routes in America; perhaps by then, the Vegas Loop will meet Brightline where it stops. But those future passengers will still need help covering that last mile—the distance between a Loop or BRT station and the door of a restaurant or Airbnb. That’s an AV job.

Autonomous vehicles may prove to be the heroes of Vegas’ increasingly unorthodox transit grid. They could handle passengers the way computer hard drives handle data-—they’re constantly looking for the next task, constantly trying to maximize their efforts with minimal resources. And if integrated with Vegas’ existing bus grid, AVs could handily cover the first-and-last-mile problem: the distance between your home and an express bus stop, or the distance between a bus stop and your ultimate destination.

David Swallow, deputy CEO of the RTC, can imagine a future in which AVs are integrated with the Valley’s transit network.

“This is just talking hypothetically, but if most of our Valley is built on a one-mile grid network, you could assign an autonomous vehicle to be kind of an on-demand platform that serves one square mile, or however many square miles we set that up for that,” Swallow says. “Say you want to go to a coffee shop, but it’s mile away from your house, maybe a little too far to walk. It’s accessible by bike, but not everybody rides bikes or wants to ride a bike. … How do you bridge that distance without someone having to have a car? This is where you can have a more micro transit service, serving that need.”

GoMed, the Las Vegas Medical District shuttle that the RTC is creating with a Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, might provide empirical proof for that hypothesis. Leaving from a stop at the Bonneville Transit Center, a group of Ford Transit vans—converted to AV by Orlando-based Beep—will begin servicing nine stops in the Medical District late next year. Swallow suggests a scenario where someone could take an express line into the city—the Centennial Express out of the northwest, say, or the Boulder Highway Express from Henderson—and hop on the Medical District shuttle to be delivered to the Lou Ruvo Center or UMC, both just within a mile of the Transit Center.

“It’s not replacing anything,” Swallow says. “It’s more complementary to the vision we have for continuing to evolve our transit network. This would just be another layer of service that we would add into it to make the larger system more accessible.”

AVs are splendidly cooperative. They won’t mind running a two-mile Medical District loop all day long. They don’t care if a pickup is inconveniently located, or if a fare is too low to be worth their while. They just get the call and show up. Rideshare and taxis will still exist; they’ll just be one choice among several. Even the Mandalorian can choose between landspeeders driven by humans and droids.

And there’s another possible benefit to AVs, though it’s even more hypothetical and requires a level of buy-in Vegas may never be quite ready for. If people use AV transit en masse, forgoing their private cars, it could mean fewer cars on the Strip and Downtown. It might even spell the end of Vegas’ ocean-sized parking lots, jam-packed street parking and massive concrete garages.

“That’s something that, in planning, we talked about for a long time. (Autonomous vehicles) could completely change the paradigm of how and where cars get stored right in the middle of the day,” says Ray Delahanty, a traffic engineer and urban planner whose 359,000-subscriber YouTube channel, CityNerd (youtube.com/@citynerd), smartly and restlessly contemplates an America that’s less dependent on privately-owned cars. “With autonomous vehicles, that means a car drives you to the center of the city, and then it drives off. It either goes home, or maybe, if it’s part of a taxi service, it goes and finds the next ride somewhere else, or it goes to some off-site location far away.”

In Delahanty’s estimation, the ideal use of driverless vehicles is to have “fewer cars doing more work.” And though they rely on remote human drivers, Vay’s operational model fits neatly into that description. Vay CEO von der Ohe even has a snazzy way of describing it.

“What it basically is, is teleportation,” he says. “You teleport a human into one car, and that human drives that car to a customer. Then the remote driver can teleport to another car on the other side of town, or maybe in another city.

“Our vision is to create livable and safer cities, right? And livable means that we get rid of all these parked cars that are blocking our streets,” von der Ohe continues. “What we want to achieve with this new mobility category is to offer a real alternative to private car ownership, which is extremely expensive in Nevada, with its high insurance rates. … What we offer is a on-demand, kind of short-term car rental that you don’t have to walk to, and you don’t have to park, at very affordable prices.”

Robotaxi provider Zoox would also like to serve a private car-less Vegas, acting as an accessory to existing transport modes. “Our goal is to provide another option for those getting around Las Vegas. We’re not looking to replace rideshares or public transportation,” said Zoox’s director of fleet operations, Justin Windus, to the Weekly last January.

Reasonably priced autonomous vehicles could also be a boon to seniors, who want to get around without the hassle of parking or maintaining a car, and to anyone who’s leery of getting into a car driven by a stranger. We just need to get past the psychological hangup of getting into a car driven by no one, to convince ourselves that it’s safe. Delahanty thinks that may happen sooner rather than later.

“I feel like the technology is basically there,” he says. “There’s going to be some hiccups … but my impression that they’re much better drivers than humans.”

THE THING WE’RE AFRAID OF

Zoox at Resorts World Photo by: Courtesy

When I meet Yulieanna Duran, the Vay employee who conducted me on my first driverless ride, I pepper her with questions about her remote driving station. It’s an impressive rig, with a trio of curving monitors providing a full field of vision and a secondary monitor providing navigation, lane indicators drawing a path in front of the vehicle and sensors reporting real-time conditions. Duran drives with headphones on, listening to the audio from the car, completely locked in. She’s probably paying more attention to the road than we do. We’re out there looking at our phones, eating drive-thru, taking long drags on vape pens—emphatically not watching the road.

I spot a giant red button to the left of the wheel and ask Duran what it does, even though I’ve already got a pretty good idea.

“If there’s any kind of system error—if my screen goes black—or if I feel unsafe or uncomfortable, I will go ahead and slam on the button,” she says. “It’ll bring the vehicle to a full and complete stop within three or four seconds.”

And Swallow says the Medical District AV shuttle will have a safety driver when it rolls out in 2026.

“If anything happens, the driver can just take over seamlessly, not a problem,” he says. “But also, as a public transit provider, there’s nothing that beats having a human interface. Someone who is on the vehicle, who’s aware of what’s going on, interfacing with passengers, making sure they have a good customer experience.”

That may be the biggest obstacle we need to overcome regarding AVs: fear of the unknown. I think of the relief I felt when I perceived Duran’s hand on the wheel, cutting around that parked truck and trailer. But AVs can do the same thing. They’ll continue to get smarter and more task-oriented. Perhaps more task-oriented than I’ll ever be behind the wheel.

I suggest to Delahanty that there could be 100 ride share accidents in Las Vegas every week, but the second one AV runs a curb, it’ll be headlining news.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “It’s a human psychology thing, right? Everybody feels like, ‘Oh, if it’s a human in control, at least a human can be accountable.’ … When it’s a computer driving, there’s no explaining it. It seems random, and that’s scary.”

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