Yandex – Robotic dark horse.

Yandex is closer to robotaxis than Tesla.

• Yandex’s subsidiary is expanding its reach into the taxi industry in Russia which provides a route to market for its very promising autonomous driving solution.
• Yandex’s subsidiary, MLU (in which Uber owns 35%), is paying around $204m to acquire Vezet, one of its chief taxi rivals that operates in 123 regions within Russia with orders taken over the phone or using an app.
• This is clearly a move by Yandex to extend its reach into the taxi and ride-hailing industries in Russia which it can then use to bring its autonomous driving solution to market with a robotaxi business model.
• I continue to have a positive view of Yandex’s autonomous driving solution based on anecdotal data and experience, but this remains caveated by the fact that Yandex has yet to provide any hard data.
  • First, CES 2019: At CES 2019, Yandex was head and shoulders above its rivals with the demonstration of its solution.
  • The demonstration was on 1 of 2 fixed routes but these routes were on live roads and Yandex was confident enough to have no-one in the driver’s seat with only a safety engineer in the passenger seat and a big red button.
  • The driving style was good enough such that one was not able to tell the difference between a human and the robot.
  • Ironically, Yandex claimed it had used Moscow taxi drivers as the training data to create the driving style.
  • Second, commercial launch: Yandex is hoping to go fully autonomous in two sites in Russia this year.
  • These sites are Innopolis and Skolkovo which are already under testing but with humans sitting in the passenger seat.
  • The hope is that this safety driver will no longer be needed but there will still be scope for human intervention remotely should a vehicle get into difficulty.
  • These services will be highly geofenced and a Google Maps inspection (see here and here) reveals that these are very simple locations where there is unlikely to be much traffic or random events.
  • However, the fact that Yandex is hoping to let the vehicles loose on their own is an indicator of the confidence it has in its offering.
• Yandex remains quite a long way from offering an autonomous taxi service in the centre of Moscow but critically, I think that it is on par or pretty close to its rivals in Silicon Valley and China.
• From what I can see, Yandex is comfortably ahead of Tesla although Tesla’s implementation of its solution is much more elegant than a boot (trunk US) full of processors.
• Consequently, I can see Yandex being in a position to put robotaxis on the streets of the USA before Tesla is although it will face stiff competition from Waymo, Cruise, Pony.ai, Nuro and Zoox.
• I suspect that it will have more problems with regulators fearing the Russian bogeyman which may hold up a USA launch for more time than any technical issues.
• My optimism on Yandex’s autonomous driving is also supported by RFM’s finding that Yandex is a strong player in AI where it ranks Yandex as global No.3 behind Google and Baidu.
• Yandex remains the dark horse in autonomous driving which looks like it may surprise many commentators when it comes into the light.