Yandex announced the start of testing an unmanned taxi in the Moscow region of Yasenevo. Yandex began large-scale testing of drones on the streets of Moscow back in 2019. According to the company, the cars will carry passengers in the Yasenevo area in the south of the capital, in the vicinity of the Yasenevo, Novoyasenevskaya and Bitsevsky Park metro stations.
Yandex said that at the first stage, a limited number of people will be able to use an unmanned taxi. To test such a taxi among the first, users can fill out a questionnaire on the website.
In the questionnaire, the user needs to indicate whether he is 18 years old, leave his phone number and e-mail address. You also need to answer questions about how often the user is in the Yasenevo area, what routes he takes around the area, with whom he plans to take a taxi. At the end of the questionnaire, the client is asked to tell about himself: where he studies, where and by whom he works, and also why he wants to try an unmanned taxi.
In September last year, Yandex separated the direction of unmanned vehicles into a separate company, Yandex Self-Driving Group (Yandex SDG). Previously, this direction was part of a joint venture between Yandex and Uber – Yandex.Taxi, 38% of which belonged to Uber.
On August 31, Yandex announced that it would fully buy out Uber’s shares in Yandex.Eda, Shop, Delivery and drones. The deal should be closed by the end of the year, its amount is estimated at $ 1 billion. Yandex will buy 4.5% of the shares from Uber, whose share in the joint venture will grow to 71%. Within two years, the company can consolidate the entire enterprise.
Yandex’s drones are based on Hyundai Sonata. During the year, the company brought about 100 such cars to public roads in Russia and the United States, part of the fleet is intended for the service of unmanned taxis in Innopolis (Tatarstan). Last December, Sberbank also began testing its drones on the roads of Moscow.
Since 2018, drones can be tested on public roads in Moscow and Tatarstan. In March 2020, the government expanded the list of such territories. It includes St. Petersburg, Leningrad, Moscow, Vladimir, Nizhny Novgorod, Novgorod and Samara regions, as well as Krasnodar Territory, Chuvashia, Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrugs. The experiment will last until March 1, 2022.
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