Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: In Gangneung, Visitors Drove a Car 300 km Away

Press the accelerator in Gangneung, and a vehicle nearly 300 kilometers away in Daegu moves. Turn the wheel, and the real vehicle – on a real road, in a different city – changes direction. Visitors at the 2026 ITS World Congress got to try exactly that on October 19, at Lotte Innovate’s exhibition booth, and the line between driving simulator and driving got very thin.

The demonstration was the headline act of opening day at the 32nd ITS World Congress in Gangneung, South Korea, an event often called the Transport Olympics. Some 108 institutions and companies set up 428 exhibition booths at the Gangneung Oval, with around 60,000 people from about 90 countries expected across the October 19-23 run. Automakers like Toyota and Honda, suppliers like Hyundai Mobis and chipmaker Qualcomm all brought their best material. A remote-driving rig still managed to steal the room.

How do you drive a car that is 300 kilometers away?

Carefully, and with a lot of network engineering. Lotte Innovate says the core challenge of remote driving is relaying the vehicle’s movements and surroundings in real time while staying stable when communication delays or interruptions hit. Its answer is a multi-communication network built on 4G and 5G, with particular attention to video transmission quality – because the remote driver sees the road through cameras, any lag or degradation is not an inconvenience, it is the whole safety question.

That framing is honest, and it points at where remote operation actually fits. Nobody serious proposes replacing every driver with a screen in another province. The real uses are narrower and more valuable: moving vehicles in depots and controlled zones, supporting autonomous fleets when a vehicle meets a situation it cannot resolve, and keeping services running where on-site drivers are scarce. A live, public, 300-kilometer demonstration – Gangneung on the east coast to Daegu inland – is a way of stress-testing the link in front of the toughest audience in the industry.

The shuttle outside had no driver’s seat at all

Step outside the exhibition hall and Lotte’s second act was waiting. Attendees boarded the company’s autonomous shuttle, a vehicle with no driver’s seat and no steering wheel. This is not a concept shell. Lotte says the shuttle began trial operations in December 2022 and has been in regular service since February 2023. It carries three LiDAR sensors at the front and rear to detect obstacles, and a monitor inside shows the driving route in green lines, with nearby objects flagged in yellow or red as they get closer, prompting the shuttle to slow or stop.

That service history matters. The autonomous world is full of vehicles that have driven impressively for one afternoon. A shuttle in regular service since early 2023 has survived weather, roadworks, bored passengers and the thousand small surprises of real streets. Lotte also brought the rest of its mobility stack to Gangneung – autonomous shuttles sit alongside its work on cooperative intelligent transport systems, AI smart tolling and charging infrastructure – because the company, the congress’s main sponsor, is selling a system, not a single vehicle. Remote operation, as fleets like the purpose-built robotaxis we covered in EXEED’s factory-built Level 4 robotaxi begin to scale, is the human backstop that makes operators comfortable removing the driver.

Why Gangneung, and why now

Gangneung is one of the smallest cities ever to host this congress, after Seoul in 1998 and Busan in 2010, and it won the right in 2022 against Taipei. Korean officials used the opening to make an export pitch: the country has moved from traffic information and flow management to AI-based prediction and support for autonomous driving, and it wants the world to buy that expertise. Hosting the demos in a small coastal city rather than a capital is part of the argument – if this technology works here, in ordinary streets, it can work anywhere.

There’s a pattern across this week’s transport news: the frontier is shifting from whether vehicles can drive themselves to how the surrounding system supports them. Purpose-built fleets, like the humanoids finding permanent factory jobs in our Hangzhou report, succeeded by becoming part of a workflow. Remote driving is the same logic applied to the road: autonomy plus a reliable human reach-back, wrapped in networks designed for the moment the video feed stutters.

What to take away

For fleet operators, the lesson is to budget for the control room, not just the vehicle. For cities, it is to treat 5G coverage and latency on transport corridors as mobility infrastructure, as real as asphalt. And for travelers in Korea this week, it is simpler: if you are at the Gangneung Oval, go and drive a car in Daegu without leaving the building. Few demos explain the next decade of transport as clearly as a steering wheel that works 300 kilometers from the wheels it turns.

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