Nexar and Vay Partner to Bring Predictive AI Safety to the World’s First Commercial Remotely Driven Fleet

Early design partnership integrates Nexar’s BADAS incident prediction model into Vay’s remote driving platform, adding a proactive layer of safety as the service scales

Nexar, a leader in AI-powered mobility solutions and one of the largest distributed vision networks on U.S. roads, and Vay, a leading provider of automotive-grade remote driving technology, announced an early adoption design partnership. The partnership is aimed at integrating Nexar’s BADAS (Beyond ADAS), a foundation model that redefines how the industry approaches vehicle safety and autonomy, directly into Vay’s remotely driven fleet. This integration will follow its initial implementation into their engineering fleet and will add a new, proactive layer of AI-powered safety to one of the most advanced mobility services in operation today.

“Remote driving puts humans and machines into a shared control loop, and safety has to work at that same level,” said Zach Greenberger, CEO of Nexar. “BADAS was built to understand how real people actually drive—not how simulations behave. Partnering with Vay lets us prove, in a demanding real-life environment, that predictive intelligence can meaningfully reduce risk and support safer mobility at scale.”

Vay operates the world’s first remotely driven car rental service, where vehicles are delivered and parked by professionally trained human Remote Drivers located at Vay’s Remote Driving Center—without a safety driver inside the car.

From the outset, Vay has designed its technology to meet the highest safety and security standards, with the objective of making remote driving safer than conventional driving. Remote Drivers operate in a controlled, professional environment free from distractions, and their driving behavior is continuously monitored, and structured break schedules are implemented. Together, these measures address the primary reasons for fatal road accidents, including distraction from mobile devices and other sources, fatigue, driving under the influence, and excessive speed.

By embedding BADAS into Vay’s remote driving operations, Vay is taking a step forward in its safety approach: the two companies are demonstrating how predictive AI—trained on billions of miles of real-world driving—can help anticipate risk before an incident occurs, supporting safer decisions by human operators in complex, live traffic environments.

Traditional vehicle safety systems are largely reactive, responding only after a dangerous situation has already formed. Nexar’s BADAS model takes a fundamentally different approach—proactively identifying risk before incidents occur, using AI models trained on real-world driving behavior.

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Powered by Nexar’s Real-World Data Engine, BADAS learns from ground-truth driving behaviors captured across one of the largest distributed vision networks on U.S. roads, which records more than 100M+ miles of road data every month. This scale allows the model to recognize shifts in real-world driver behavior and identify real-world edge cases that never appear in simulations.

For Vay, this means Remote Drivers gain augmented, AI-powered operational capabilities thanks to augmented safety features and vision-based data services—helping them anticipate risk earlier and operate more safely in live traffic environments.

“Safety is the foundation of everything we do at Vay,” said Thomas von der Ohe, CEO and Co-Founder of Vay. “As we scale our service, we need safety systems that are proactive, not just reactive. Integrating Nexar’s BADAS model into our system equips our Remote Drivers with advanced, augmented capabilities, enabling them to better anticipate risk.”

This collaboration will mark the first known deployment of a large-scale, real-world incident prediction model designed specifically to support Remote Drivers operating vehicles on public roads. By combining Nexar’s AI-powered road intelligence with Vay’s remote driving platform, the companies are addressing safety at the intersection of humans, machines, and live traffic.

Vay has been operating its remotely driven car rental service in Las Vegas since January 2024, allowing customers to request an electric vehicle to be remotely delivered to their location. When it arrives, the Remote Driver disconnects from the vehicle, and the user takes over, driving it like a regular car. At the end of the trip, they exit the vehicle, and a Remote Driver resumes control, eliminating the time-consuming search for parking.