Comment by sam_goody
2 years ago
The only time I ever saw a car without a driver was on a visit to Israel.
On the highway to Tel Aviv (intercity - not a side road), there was a car with Yandex Auto Drive (in Hebrew) plastered all over it, driving in the lane next to ours. We had plenty of time to look - there was no driver at all, or they were sitting so low they would not have been able to see the road.
Made me realize that some companies fly under the radar and then seem to show up out of nowhere. I never thought of Yandex as anything but search till that moment.
They also own largest Taxi service in Russia (Yandex Taxi), largest food and home goods delivery service (Yandex Lavka), and largest car sharing service (Yandex Drive). Yandex Taxi has been testing self-driving cars in Moscow for years.
Interesting to note is that all of these lines of business were created as in-house startups, not through acquisitions. In the local business community they are famous for doing the internal sandboxing and investing just right.
However, Yandex has mixed results outside of the Russian market, as far as I'm aware. E.g. former two services are driven locally by extremely low wage workforce from ex-Soviet countries, I'd guess their business model has this ingrained, and just does not work the same in markets with more expensive labor.