Self-driving cars of Russia’s Yandex join million-mile club

Bloomberg

Yandex NV, Russia’s largest internet firm, said its self-driving cars have passed 1 million miles in fully autonomous driving since it started testing the technology in December 2017, joining an elite group in the emerging robotaxi industry.
The milestone matters for Yandex’s quest to compete with the likes of Alphabet Inc’s Waymo for a share of the market, which UBS Group AG says could exceed $2 trillion by 2030. Getting to 1 million indicates the company is on its way to verifying its technology — showing that it’s reliable and safe. That’s key for getting regulators to accept cars in the streets with no person at the wheel. Most of the company’s mileage was driven on public roads in Moscow, including in the snow and rain, Yandex said in a statement.
The company already runs Russia’s largest ride-hailing service, Yandex.Taxi, which posted 16.4 billion rubles ($260 million) of revenue in the first half of 2019 and turned profitable in the second quarter. The other large players in the self-driving industry include Waymo, GM Cruise, Baidu and Uber.
Yandex plans to expand its self-driving fleet to 1,000 cars within two years from about 50 now, which will enable it to run 1 million miles a week, Dmitry Polishchuk, head of Yandex’s autonomous business, said in an interview.
Polishchuk, 34, moved into the division’s top job three years ago after heading Yandex’s browser division and overseeing Navigator, its geolocation app. He is a graduate of the Russian Federal Security Service’s institute of cryptography, communications and computer science.
Yandex is working with regulators to allow a pilot project in two cities — Innopolis and Skolkovo — to test rides with no engineer on board, he said.