Yandex Self-Driving Cars Complete 1 Million Miles
Today marks an incredible milestone in our mission to make roadways safer with universal and scalable self-driving technology — we reached one million autonomous miles driven on public roads. This number represents more than a distance; it represents two years of impressive progress in the development of our platform against challenging real-world weather and road conditions.
We first started operating on public roads in December 2017, making us a relatively recent addition to the autonomous driving market. However, completing one million miles in less than two years is remarkable progress in a short span of time. We laid the groundwork for our progress during the initial stages of development by putting our expertise in machine learning, navigation, mapping tools, and cloud technologies to the test in challenging driving conditions.
Our vehicles navigated the first million autonomous miles in Moscow, Tel Aviv, Las Vegas, Skolkovo and Innopolis, Russia, where we have been running our robo-taxi program for over a year with no one behind the steering wheel. Of those locations, we completed the vast majority of our autonomous miles in Moscow and Tel Aviv, two locations that were recently ranked among the twenty most congested cities in the world at 5th and 19th place, respectively.
Within a mile in Moscow and Tel Aviv, our self-driving cars must navigate a diverse set of driving challenges. Vastly different from a mile in suburban towns, a mile in these hectic urban environments includes assertive drivers, jaywalkers, traffic jams and weather that ranges from snow and ice to intense heat. By completing over a million autonomous miles in our demanding testing locations, our self-driving program rapidly advanced in a relatively short period of time.
As our self-driving technology grows more innovative and we expand our fleet of vehicles, our progress has been explosive. Currently, we are driving over 80,000 miles per week (100,000 km) — nearly twice the miles we completed in all of 2018. By growing our fleet to 50 vehicles, we completed 310,000 miles (500,000 km) in just the last month. Looking at the road ahead, doubling the size of our fleet to 100 by the end of 2019 will significantly increase the sophistication and safety of our platform as we gain more experience and gather more data on the roads.
Real-world experience in challenging conditions ultimately drives innovation and ensures we are continuing to build a platform meant to safely operate among other vehicles and pedestrians. The next step is expanding our fleet to hundreds of cars, so we could drive 1,000,000 miles in a week and evaluate all the improvements. Our partnership with Hyundai Mobis is a major part of our expansion strategy. Recently, we announced a self-driving Sonata, which will be part of the new Hyundai Motor Group vehicles we add to our fleet.
We look forward to the next million miles to advance in our journey to make roadways safer!
