Hm, how about people-powered cars that drive you…remotely?

My brother-in-law, Andy, and I love to bat around ideas for new inventions.  On our way back from Fry’s today (he’s a technology junkie like me, but actually knows about technology unlike me who pretty much just plays with it and talks about it, so I try to tag along any time he goes to Fry’s or Best Buy), we started talking about cars that drive you ala the Google car.

A lot people are scared of cars that drive via a computer because it takes the human element out of the equation.  While we’d all admit the human element sometimes ends up resulting in road rage tantrums and, upon occasion according to Google images, scenes like the one to the right, there’s also the ability for people to react to situations the way that a computer just can’t.  After all, we do have the world’s most powerful computer in our heads.

So, we started wondering why you couldn’t have a person driving your car…from a call center in another country?  Think about it, with the ability to control your car (accelerate, brake, turn, etc.), and a car equipped with cameras all over it, why couldn’t someone be able to effectively, and remotely, drive your car for you?

Then we started wondering, why do you even need cameras?  Couldn’t you just have someone that has access to a real-time satellite view of your car?  Having that, you wouldn’t need cameras because the birds eye view would actually allow you to make all the decisions you’d need to make.

A person with a birds eye view could see traffic miles ahead, re-route you immediately to a better path, etc.  If you think about it, its really the preferred view to drive a car whether you’re in the car or not.

Then we went even further to suggest that maybe each remote driver could have a zone that they covered.  In that zone, they’d know when traffic typically built up, where problem areas are, heck even where the cops are, and then as you go from a zone to another zone, you’d be passed to another remote driver.

Assuming you can build cars that can be remotely driven (heck, OnStar can unlock your car, I guess that’s a start), and assuming you’d have the ability to access real-time satellite imagery, the question becomes how you get a service like this off the ground.  It would have to be a subscription service and a lot of people would have to sign up day one to make it happen, so that seemed like a dead end (pun intended).

Ah, but what about the taxi industry?  Instead of paying taxi drivers $15/hour, you could pay someone half that (or less) to remotely drive your taxi’s.  They’d get places quicker because of their ability to access technology.  Your taxi’s would smell a lot better (Seinfeld: How LONG are those shifts!?).  If you started with a service that people already pay for, and you improve that service by getting them to their destinations quicker (and less smelly), then you’d be able to prove out a model to take the service main stream.

There’s a lot of IF’s in there, granted, but still seems like a really cool idea.  Figured I’d throw a blog post out there in case anyone wants to drop $50 million into the idea so we can get started ;)

We then started talking about how, after Jobs figures out how to dominate the living room, he’s going to figure out how to dominate the automobile, and how we’d both be the first in line to buy those Apple-powered cars.  But that’s a blog for another day.