An office building the entire floor is half height cubicles. The people inside the cubicles are wearing motorcycle helmets. Their hands are on steering wheels and their cubicle set up looks astonishingly like the drivers seat of a taxi.

These are the drivers of Irkutsk, they remotely drive for some of the best actors, most popular athletes and most powerful politicians in the world.

While the dreams of the first quarter of the 21st century of fully automated cars proved to be too expensive, dangerous and fraught with legal peril; a car driven by a professional driver in a completely perfect real-time virtual setting was the obvious next step. A world class driver based is Siberia with zero accidents on his virtual driving record collects upwards of $50 a day in official salary, but often double or triple that daily in tips via any number of cash apps like venmo, paypal and others.

The largest obvious cost with setting up a digital driving enterprise is setting up the lightning fast Internet connection with multiple redundancies required to safely transport human beings in cities around the world. The power costs are tremendous, and the servers require cooling to such a degree that locating the centers in naturally cold places only makes sense. At first marketing and advertising - simply convincing people that it's safe to get into a car with no driver was considered a non-starter, however; as the roads became more treacherous and dangerous with human drivers paying less and less attention, and cities and states having less traffic control available to support, made this an effectively negligible issue.

Driver training costs are relatively cheap. The virtual training environment can perfectly mimic real-life scenarios as well as allow drivers to virtually drive alongside another more seasoned driver so that the senior driver can take over in case of emergency or failure to comply with rules or policies.

Of course there are additional emergency protocols in place. Should there be some sort of an emergency such as loss of Internet connection the cars can safely self-navigate to a safe parking spot and wait for reconnection or resolution of any issues. And of course, all cars have passenger-controlled emergency stop and escape buttons. 

In interviewing drivers, many say that they feel blessed with the opportunity to work in other cities and visit other places, even if it's only virtually and during the workday. The quality of the video and the ability to interact with the passengers is just as real as being in the car with them and having the added tools made available from augmented reality such as weather and traffic avoidance and warning indicators makes us all better drivers than we could be in real life.

The early idea of having specially designed cars to work in this field, made it only marginally successful and only in the biggest cities what really made this takeoff was the aftermarket conversion kit that you could buy on Amazon for less than $1000 and self installed just by watching YouTube videos.