Even in the middle of the day, the 50-mile trip from San Francisco to San Jose is a pain. Like a toddler, Bay Area driving toggles between slumber (rush-hour slogs) and frenzy (passing-happy speeding). It’s enough to make one eager for the day when robots rule the roads. And it’s more than enough to make me envy Evan Livingston, who doesn’t have to show up in person for this meeting, held in a Lincoln MKZ sedan roaming downtown San Jose.

No, Livingston is sitting comfortably in his office in Portland, Oregon, when he appears on the screens inside the car and announces he’ll be our teleoperator this afternoon. A moment later, the MKZ pulls into traffic, responding not to the man in the driver’s seat, but to Livingston, who’s sitting in front of a bank of screens displaying feeds from the four cameras on the car’s roof, working the kind of steering wheel and pedals serious players use for games like Forza Motorsport. Livingston is a software engineer for Designated Driver, a new company that’s getting into teleoperations, the official name for remotely controlling self-driving vehicles.

Teleoperations is a little discussed but vital element of putting self-driving tech into the world. The serious players in this space aren’t about to let their robots into the world without the ability to drive, or at least direct them from afar. Waymo, General Motors’ Cruise, Nutonomy, Zoox, Drive.ai, Uber, and Nissan are all quietly developing teleoperation systems. California law says vehicles without drivers inside them must allow for remote control. Florida, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington are considering similar rules. US senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) has said he wants similar language in AV Start, the would-be federal law governing self-driving tech that has been languishing in Congress for nearly two years.

The actual setup for the remote driver will evolve, but for now Designated Driver is using a bank of six screens that display the feeds from various cameras on the car and a map of the area. Designated Driver

Designated Driver sees a market there. Autonomy is a vast space, including ride-hail cars, trucks, shuttles, tractors, mining equipment, sidewalk robots, and more. Surely not every company will have the time, resources, or patience to develop their own remote control system. That makes them potential customers. “We’re still struggling with voice control, right?” says CEO Manuela Papadopol. “The reality is that communication is a challenge.”

Papadopol and the company's Chief Technology Officer, Walter Sullivan, aim to capture 20 percent of the teleoperations market in the next couple of years by solving that challenge, and offering the resulting hardware, software, and logistical know-how to anyone with a robot and a checkbook. Just what that market’s worth remains to be seen, but even a tiny slice of an industry expected to be worth trillions should do just fine.