Russian tech giants Yandex is a new contender to throw their hats into the ring to join the driverless taxi race. Yandex launched its first prototype for self-driving cars back in 2017. In August 2018 they had announced the launch of Europe’s first driverless ride-sharing services in Annapolis and Skolkovo. Yandex. Taxi has unveiled its initiative of self-driving ridesharing that is not only self-driven but also there is no driver behind the wheels at all.
This car possesses a safety engineer to occupy the front seat to ensure its proper function and to record how the system works over a period of time but Dima Polischuck, Head of Yandex claims to remove the safety engineer from the taxi entirely by this year and put 100 vehicles on the road by summer.
This is complicated because it doesn’t depend purely on us. The regulation is not yet here. We hope that all the necessary rules will happen in the next 2-3 years for the general public to be able to use the service with no safety engineer in the car. – Dima Polischuck
Yandex.Taxi is Russia’s human-driven ride sharing and also the parent division for the company’s driverless effort.
Yandex sport two driverless taxies in the city that rides to and from the business centre, Universities and residential areas of Russia’s main tech hub Innopolis and Skolkovo. The ultimate motive of this Russia’s Google is to achieve the functionality that contains no steering wheel, brake pedal or any form of human need required for the car to reach its destination.
Automobile and technology companies are working together to foster the future with less need for individual vehicle ownership. To provide a new edge over other competitors in the emerging level 5 cars, this company takes the lesson learned from its own services Yandex. Navigator and Yandex.Maps.
The team has equipped Toyota Prius with three radar units, six radar units and six cameras, as well as GNSS sensor and the software, were most of the work has done was built on top of the Linux operating system that was claimed to have developed for its self-driven car in the house.
At present, this company is testing the car in all weather conditions to provide more challenges weather environment than just the sunny deserts where other Americans test their cars. They have showcased its self-driving car during the largest show in the world on consumer electronics – CES 2019. They prepared the car for demonstrating in CES 2019 in less than a month.
Yandex had also offered its driverless demos to the attendees of Russian tech conventions to collect the feedback from the passengers. The footage posted by the Yandex of the passengers riding in a totally driverless vehicle illustrates the thrill experienced by them.
Although the Yandex driverless services have never been in a collision, Dima Polischuck claims that the expansion of their services beyond tech hubs purely depends on external approval. Once they are able to expand their driverless program within Russia, they hope to launch their service in other countries.
This is complicated because it doesn’t depend purely on us. The regulation is not yet here. We hope that all the necessary rules will happen in the next 2-3 years for the general public to be able to use the service with no safety engineer in the car. – Says Yandex driverless taxi technical head
Yandex driverless ride-sharing services are facing stiff competition in the fight in filling the city with driverless cars. Indeed, It is no accident that the world’s largest search engine companies Alphabet, Yandex and Baidu are developing driverless ride-sharing services as they are racing to upend the industry.
This is something that will upend the automobile race but still, it’s unclear how autonomous cars will fit into the environment that is legally designed for human-driven vehicles.
