On the heels of becoming the latest investor in Ola, today Hyundai announced another key deal to further its ambitions in next-generation automotive services. Yandex, the Russian search giant that has been working on self-driving car technology, has inked a partnership with Hyundai to develop software and hardware for autonomous car systems.
This is Yandex’s first partnership with a carmaker, and specifically, Yandex will be working with Hyundai Mobis, the car giant’s OEM parts and service division, where the plan is “to create a self-driving platform that can be used by any car manufacturer or taxi fleet.” Mobis supplies Hyundai as well as its partly-owned Kia and fully-owned Genesis subsidiaries, along with other automakers.
“This is our first partnership, and a clear validation of the intensive development of our self-driving platform. We have already performed thousands of rides in our autonomous taxi service fulfilled without a driver in the driver’s seat,” Dmitry Polishchuk, who heads up Yandex’s self-driving car efforts, said to TechCrunch in an email. “We are excited to combine the experience of Hyundai Mobis in the automotive industry with Yandex’s technological achievements. This should help us to accelerate the pace of self-driving tech development.” In terms of future partnerships, Yandex notes that the agreement is “not exclusive, and we are open to work with other partners.”
The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a Yandex spokesperson told TechCrunch. To give some context, Hyundai Motors is the third-largest automotive company in the world, and it describes Mobis as the sixth-largest OEM. In addition to the $300 million stake it announced earlier today in India’s ride-sharing upstart Ola, it’s forged financial and strategic partnerships with a string of other companies building technology for autonomous systems, including WayRay, SoundHound, and Aurora.
Yandex, meanwhile, has been working on self-driving car tech since 2017, equipping Toyota models for a series of pilots in closed-campus environments in Russia, Tel Aviv and most recently Las Vegas, Nevada (during the CES show, where cars-as-the-latest-hardware has become a dominant theme). Yandex said that its pilots so far have been so-called “robotaxi” efforts: that is, there are safety engineers sitting in the driver’s seat, but the cars have been operating autonomously otherwise.
Yandex — similar to Baidu in China and Google, well, globally — initially made its name in search but has diversified into a variety of areas over the years, including maps and ride-sharing services.
Yandex.Taxi is now active in 15 countries — Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Israel, the Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, Uzbekistan, Finland, and Estonia — and that service is one obvious application for this partnership. Similar to Uber (which handed off some operations to Yandex in 2017), Yandex is looking at self-driving technology — which is part of the bigger Yandex.Taxi operation — as one way of expanding its fleet in the years to come.
Although Hyundai, similar to other automakers, has been chipping away at self-driving with multiple partnerships with third parties, this deal is breaking new ground for Yandex, which has been in many ways pigeonholed as “Russia’s Google” but has for years been looking for ways to expand its profile and reach into more countries outside its home market.
“Our self-driving technologies are unique and have already proven their scalability. Yandex’s self-driving cars have been successfully driving on the streets of Moscow, Tel Aviv and Las Vegas, which means that the fleet can be expanded to drive anywhere,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex. “It took us just two years to go from the first basic tests to a full-fledged public robotaxi service. Now, thanks to our agreement with Hyundai Mobis, we will be able to move even faster.”
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