Very nice work; I can well imagine the proposed system to work and address a need.
According to most studies, an individually owned car sits idle on the driveway for about 90-95% of the time. To make matters worse, this car is usually one that tends to meet the worst case scenarios, e.g. transport the whole family with lots of luggage, or go to the builders yard. So why are most people hesitant to sell this car, get only a small one for the most common use case (driving alone), and use a taxi service or a rental car for the rare cases? Because the car rental process is inconvenient: after ordering your car, either somebody needs to get the rental car to you or you need to get to the rental car company; all of that two times, quite some hassle and inconvenience.
That being said, getting a rental car to people's home and back (or somewhere else) using tele-operation, together with financially attractive plans, could well be filling a gap. Once an appropriate vehicle for every task can be delivered hassle-free to the user, there would be no need for people to own these kind of cars, or any car at all. The hurdles to get the vehicle on the premises is removed by tele-operation. If I am not mistaken, https://ree.technology/ is working on concepts to run remotely controlled vehicles, https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2019/07/12/ree-technology-remote-control-robots/ , even though I have the impression they still plan to operate a taxi service.
Why tele-operation and not an autonomous vehicle? Having been involved in the development of autonomous vehicles for several years now, I can confirm that replicating the driving capabilities of a human driver is a very hard problem. It will take a significant effort to get that to work and may be many years away. Tele-operation, on the other hand does seem to be more accessible: fit a vehicle with multiple cameras, up-link to nearest driver centre, driver interface, downlink to drive-by-wire. Provided the latency of multiple video streams is negligaeble in comparison to the time constants of the vehicle (which is speed dependent) all that should be possible with 5G.
On a wider scale, if mankind wants to address climate change and reduce carbon emissions, we need to step back and revisit personal mobility and how it can be delivered. Individual car ownership, as proposed in the 1950s as a way to realise freedom of locomotion is neither scalable nor sustainable, and not possible using electric vehicles either; there are not enough resources on the planet to replace every ICE vehicle with an electric one. We can try to change urban design in order to avoid mobility needs, promote walking, cycling and public transport. There would be significant gains there.
Back to cars: we need fewer cars not more; tele-operated vehicles could well be one way.
