Kia Starts a Remote-Driven PV5 Car-Share Pilot in Pangyo

Kia started a remote-driving car-sharing pilot in Pangyo, South Korea, on Thursday, using PV5 electric vans that a remote operator delivers to the customer and collects afterwards. The pilot runs to the end of 2026, with expansion planned for 2027.

Electrek reported the launch on Oct. 16. Customers reserve a van in an app. A remote driver, working over a 4G or 5G link, drives it to the requested spot with nobody aboard. The customer drives, parks where they finish, and a remote driver moves the van back to its garage. Electrek gives no fleet size, price or network latency, and Kia's own July 23 agreement announcement does not give a latency figure either.

Remote driving is not autonomous driving

The distinction decides the economics. An autonomous vehicle drives itself and a remote operator steps in on exceptions. In this pilot a human drives every empty leg, live, through a control centre. Kia's agreement text describes the technology as an external control centre operating an unmanned vehicle over 4G or 5G, and Kang Ju-yeop, executive vice president of Kia's New Business Planning Office, framed it as a stepping stone, saying in the release (in translation from Korean) that Kia plans a roadmap running from remote driving to autonomous driving.

That makes the unit of cost the remote driver's time. Each rental needs two remote legs, delivery and return, and the customer's own driving time in between does not use the operator at all. The number that matters here is not the van count but the ratio of vans to remote drivers. Neither Electrek nor Kia published it, so the pilot's cost per trip cannot be worked out from public material.

Who runs what

Party	Role in the pilot	Source
Kia	Supplies PV5 vans, oversees the project	Electrek
SUM	Develops the remote driving solution	Electrek
Mobiops	Handles service operations	Electrek
Korea Road Traffic Authority	Assists with regulatory reviews	Electrek

Gyeonggi Province, KT, UMOS ONE, the Next Generation Convergence Technology Research Institute and the Gyeonggi Automobile Rental Business Association support the project, according to Electrek. KT's part under the July agreement is the network: communications infrastructure and quality management.

How it got here

Kia ran a public-road remote-driving demonstration with the PV5 in November 2025, according to its July release, and the same month formed a Remote Driving Consortium with Socar, KT and SUM, Electrek reports. Electrek also says Kia received a remote-driving regulatory sandbox exemption in April. The three-way agreement with KT and SUM was signed on July 23, 2026, at Kia's Yangjae headquarters, with a target of a PV5 remote-driving service by the end of the year. The pilot arrives roughly three months after that signing.

Kia's July release lists other uses it wants to test: delivering a car to a user's door and then moving it to a separate space to ease urban parking, mobile unmanned shops or libraries in areas short of infrastructure, and backup transport when an autonomous vehicle malfunctions. The car-sharing pilot covers only the first.

For comparison, the site has covered the self-driving route to the same end: Waymo's Toronto plan and Rivian's point-to-point autonomy early access.

What is still unknown

The release and the Electrek report leave out how many vans are in service, what a rental costs, and how fast the link must be to drive safely. Those are the figures that would show whether the model scales past a pilot zone. Kia has set one checkpoint: the pilot's end at the close of 2026, when the 2027 expansion plan will meet its first data.