Motional , the joint venture between Aptiv and Hyundai, has decided to expand its activities in California . The company & agrave; plans to start road mapping and testing of robotaxis in Los Angeles already; starting this month. Currently, Motional & egrave; committed to testing its self-driving cars in Boston, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Singapore. The trial in Los Angeles will take place; on the streets of Santa Monica with a driver on board both for safety reasons and because the company & agrave; does not yet have permission to drive cars without anyone on board.
Los Angeles traffic & egrave; particularly chaotic and therefore Motional's cars will be able to be tested within a particularly difficult environment. This is a great chance to fine-tune the autonomous driving platform . To better support the new project, Motional is also upgrading its R&D facility in Los Angeles. In addition, an operations center is opening.
The company & agrave; opened its offices in Santa Monica in 2016 where some team members work who are involved among other things in the development of machine learning of the autonomous driving platform.
ROBOTAXI SERVICE IN 2023
The new road tests will be fundamental in order to launch a robotaxi service in the main cities in 2023; American thanks to an agreement with Lyft. Motional has stated that it will use; the Hyundai IONIQ 5 (Here to our test) completely electric that will become; the center of gravity of its future transport service for people. The car will be modified with the hardware (LiDAR, radar and cameras) and software necessary to be able to drive alone. The date of 2023 seems too close to offer a safe and reliable system. From this point of view it is not possible to do is wait for further information from Motional.
Surely there will be updates over the next few months. However, it is likely that in 2023 the transport service will be limited to only a few very specific short routes.
The best of OnePlus? OnePlus 9 Pro, buy it at the best price from Amazon at 839 euros .