US ride-hailing provider Halo has begun offering commercial driverless car services in Las Vegas powered by the T-Mobile 5G network. With Halo, visitors and residents can quickly summon a sleek, driverless all-electric Halo via a few taps on a mobile app. A driverless Halo then arrives at the pick-up location and the rider hops in and drives to their destination.
Halo has operated on the T-Mobile 5G network since it began driving on Las Vegas’s public roads earlier this year. Halo is collaborating with local municipalities to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) to address traffic congestion and carbon emission challenges by connecting public transit systems to on-demand, driverless cars. The company expects to begin offering rides to customers later this year with service initially available in urban parts of the Las Vegas Valley. When fully deployed in the city, Halo has the opportunity to replace the need for thousands of personally owned cars, creating a more traffic-free, carbon-free, blue-sky world.
“Fueling this kind of startup innovation is part of why we’ve built the biggest, fastest and most reliable 5G network in the country,” said Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile. “Innovation and driving change for the better is our DNA at the Un-carrier, and we’ve unleashed a 5G network that will transform industries and change our world for the better. I can’t wait to see what comes next as we work with startups, developers and entrepreneurs like Halo building the next big thing in 5G!”
With its proprietary RemotePilot technology, Halo trains in-house drivers to remotely operate the driverless car over T-Mobile’s 5G network. Halo has developed an Advanced Safe Stop mechanism enabling its cars to immediately come to a full stop if a potential safety hazard or system anomaly is detected. Using an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm, the car also learns in the background while humans control the vehicle, building a unique feedback loop to achieve Level 3 capabilities over time.
“Driverless vehicles require a network with high capacity, broad coverage and low latency, making T-Mobile 5G a perfect match for developers such as Halo,” noted John Saw, EVP of Advanced & Emerging Technologies at T-Mobile. “There is a lot of work to do on the path to full autonomy, and Halo is taking a unique and intelligent approach to get there.”
“Full autonomy is a massive challenge from both a technical and social trust perspective that won’t be solved for years to come,” added Anand Nandakumar, Halo CEO and founder. “But Halo has been designed to address these challenges by building automation over time starting with a solution that consumers will feel comfortable using today.”
Halo, a graduate of the 5G Open Innovation Lab co-founded by T-Mobile, is an early leader in driverless and autonomous car technology. Founded by executives from Uber, Cruise Robotics, Proterra, Amazon and more, Halo is poised to serve a global US$2.5tn transportation market creating local jobs with an innovative, on-demand car-sharing model.
T-Mobile is America’s 5G leader with the largest, fastest and most reliable 5G network. Its 5G network is a platform for innovation that covers 300 million people with nearly twice the geographic coverage of AT&T and four times more than Verizon. And with Sprint now part of T-Mobile, the Un-carrier is widening its lead, lighting up Ultra Capacity 5G across the country, bringing fast 5G speeds to more places than anyone else. Ultra Capacity 5G can deliver speeds around 325Mbps with peaks of 1Gbps, and now covers 150 million people.
