Avicar is a private motorsports league with plans to build 11 “remote reality” electric cars for real-life racing.
09 March 2023 at 11:00 a.m. ET
If the lines between reality aren’t blurred enough for you yet, say hello to Avicar. This new private motorsports league wants to combine the worlds of simulation and real-life racing into something called remote reality. In short, you drive a real car on a real race track. But instead of being in the car, you’re thousands of miles away in your living room with headphones and controllers.
If you’re a little confused right now, that’s understandable. There’s still a lot to come on all of this, including actual vehicles for people to drive. Right now, we can tell you that Avicar is planning a series consisting of 11 cars, designed and built in conjunction with Siemens Advanta North America. The exact size of these cars is unknown, but they will be designed with electric motors and have a top speed of more than 100 mph. Nor will they have any provision for humans, be it seats, windows or doors. All driving is done remotely, using a process called Remote Reality.
You might think this sounds like driving a big car with a radio, but apparently, it’s not that simple. According to an Avicar press release, Remote Reality involves numerous live cameras in the car that transmit feeds via a high-speed Wi-Fi, 5G or satellite connection to a headset worn by the “driver”. Apparently computer lag isn’t an issue because Avicar says the speed of these connection methods has “increased dramatically.”
Either way, this allows members of the private racing league to log in and drive their cars remotely from anywhere in the world. Once set up, drivers will enjoy a real-life experience complete with “microsecond real-time reactivity and tactile feedback” while the vehicles are in motion, potentially thousands of kilometers away.
Avicar doesn’t detail exactly how touch response works, nor is there information about security failures for when connections to cars are lost. There is also no information about the tracks where the race takes place. Presumably this is a special network of circuits dedicated to this series, as we see around two million red flags for sending a remote-operated car around an open racetrack at high speed. And in an ironic twist, Siemens Advanta North America is tasked with creating simulations to test and develop the real-world cars people will drive…in a simulator-like environment.
It’s true that we seem a little confused by this idea. There are a lot of pieces that still need to fall into place before Avicar comes out, but the concept is interesting. Sim racing has grown in popularity over the past few years, and the seemingly endless advancement of technology has made these sims more and more realistic. Would driving a real car with real sounds and images bring a new level of realism to the virtual world?
That’s the question that remains unanswered, and it will remain so until Avicar has a real car for people to virtually test drive. Unfortunately, there’s no timeline on when that might happen, so for now, keep us intrigued but skeptical.
