Remote Drivers Handle Depot Edge Cases

This shows autonomous trucking is becoming a hybrid labor model, not a pure software model. The hardest miles are often not highway miles, but the slow, messy movements around depots, yards, and handoffs where trucks back into tight spaces, deal with workers and equipment nearby, or face unusual road conditions. That makes remote drivers a practical layer that helps autonomous systems move freight through the parts of the job where full self driving still breaks down.

• Vay is building this as a product, not just an internal ops tool. It launched teledriving-as-a-service in September 2024 for trucking, delivery, and fleet operators, and is hiring remote Class 8 truck drivers in Las Vegas, which shows trucking is a planned software revenue line.
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• Kodiak is a strong fit because its core system is built for long highway runs, while yards and depot moves are a separate operational problem. Kodiak has been scaling truckport and customer deployments, so adding Vay lets it cover low speed handoffs without needing autonomy to solve every edge case before commercial rollout.
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• This mirrors a broader pattern across autonomy. Human teleoperators remain part of the stack even in highly automated systems, because rare exceptions still need judgment. In practice, that means autonomy companies can ship sooner by narrowing the autonomous domain and using humans for the weird parts instead of waiting for full end to end autonomy.
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The next phase is likely a split architecture where software drives the repeatable highway segment and remote humans handle the short segments around pickup, drop off, fueling, charging, and recovery. That pushes companies like Vay toward becoming infrastructure suppliers for fleets and AV developers, with remote operations sold seat by seat, site by site, and vehicle by vehicle.