Yandex selects Ann Arbor, Michigan as next testing location for its self-driving cars

August 6, 2020 | AUVSI News

Yandex has selected Ann Arbor, Michigan as the third urban testing ground for its self-driving cars. 

A variety of factors make the city of Ann Arbor an ideal testing place, Yandex says, including the city’s wealth of research and engineering facilities and many bright young minds, and the state’s “very progressive and supportive” regulatory environment for the development of self-driving cars.

Ann Arbor joins Moscow and Tel Aviv as Yandex’s other self-driving testing locations. According to Yandex, it will have more autonomy in Ann Arbor than it does in Moscow and Tel Aviv, as those two locations require engineers to be behind the wheel of self-driving vehicles at all times.

“We are trying to use our testing locations to the fullest. For example, Innopolis is the only testing location in Russia that allows self-driving cars to transport passengers without regulations requiring that an engineer be present behind the driver’s wheel. This is where we launched Europe’s first robotaxi service two years ago and, since then, have made thousands of trips without a driver behind the wheel,” says Dmitry Polishchuk, head of Yandex Self-Driving Cars.

“Ann Arbor, with its bigger size and more progressive regulatory environment, will enable us to take this experience a step further.”

With a goal of creating a technology “that will be used to accomplish different transportation and logistical tasks globally, in varying road and weather conditions,” Yandex says that a critical step in achieving that goal is expanding its testing locations to areas that provide new and different situations. 

“We have already seen how the experience that we have gathered in existing sites helps us adapt to new conditions in others,” the company says. “New territories bring new challenges and new opportunities, and we are excited for the ones we see in Ann Arbor.”