Russian robo-taxis to come to US for test drive

Russian internet giant Yandex will bring its driverless cars to the Detroit Auto Show next year to hold the largest demonstration of its robo-taxi fleet to date in the US.

The Russian equivalent to Google will deploy 10 sedans for guest rides during the North American International Auto Show 2020, one of the major auto events of the year. The automated cars will drive with fixed stops in Detroit’s business center.

The show will run from June 7 to 20, but the cars will stay in the US after to continue tests.

Yandex teamed up with Hyundai Mobis as well as Lawrence Technological University to provide the robo-taxi service. In July, the Russian internet firm and the South Korean car parts company released a prototype of their joint autonomous car based on the Hyundai Sonata 2020 model. 

Yandex self-driving vehicles can already be seen on the streets of Moscow. It has earlier vowed to expand the experiment and deploy up to 100 cars in the Russian capital and other testing territories, including some foreign ones. At the beginning of 2019, Yandex began test drives in Israel. While at first it required an engineer, in June the company said that the cars can already be left on their own.  

The Russian tech firm has ambitious plans for further expansion of its self-driving fleet. In August it revealed that it is eyeing a ten-fold increase to have a thousand automated cars.

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