Motional Driverless Robotaxis Log ‘80 Trips Around the Earth’ Accident-Free, to Launch Commercial Service in Las Vegas by Year-End

Las Vegas (U.S.) — Reporter Kim Hak-jae.Hyundai Motor Group (HMG)’s autonomous driving joint venture Motional will put its driverless robotaxi service into commercial operation in Las Vegas, United States, at the end of this year.
Having conducted pilot operations of driverless robotaxis in the area earlier this year, Motional has decided to fully roll out a robotaxi service that features Level 4 autonomous driving capabilities while placing a strong emphasis on safety.
After several years of preparation, Motional has completed more than 2 million miles (about 3.2 million kilometers) of autonomous driving without any at-fault accidents—equivalent to circling the Earth more than 80 times—and has also built up a vast dataset from over 130,000 customer rides.
Motional plans to build on this competitiveness in the robotaxi field and apply it to the development of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDV), Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), and other autonomous driving technologies across HMG.
On the 8th (local time), Motional held a press briefing at its Technical Center in Las Vegas, United States, to share the current status of its autonomous driving technology development and its future strategy, and announced these plans.
Motional also unveiled a strategy to advance autonomous driving based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and confirmed that it will begin full-scale commercialization of a driverless autonomous driving service in Las Vegas by the end of this year that meets Level 4 standards under SAE International (Society of Automotive Engineers, SAE) criteria.
Motional’s decision to select Las Vegas—with its demanding conditions for validating autonomous driving technology—as the first city to offer robotaxi services is seen as a clear expression of confidence in its technological capabilities.
Since 2018, Motional has been conducting pilot operations in major cities such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Singapore, and has prepared for commercialization by partnering with Uber and Lyft to offer services such as ride-hailing and food delivery.
Regarding the scale of the commercial launch planned for year-end, Motional President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Laura Major said, “We will first expand around Las Vegas and also plan to expand in Pittsburgh.” On the possibility of introducing the service in Korea, Executive Vice President Kim Heung-soo, Head of Hyundai Motor Group Global Strategy Office (GSO), said, “Based on the technological capabilities and competitiveness accumulated through the successful commercialization planned for the end of this year, we are exploring the introduction of the service in various regions, including Korea, from multiple angles.”
Motional also unveiled its mid- to long-term autonomous driving technology roadmap, presenting a technological roadmap for building an end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving system. Unlike conventional autonomous driving architectures that separate perception, decision-making, and control into multiple modules and then connect them, the new approach uses AI and machine learning to learn and output, in an integrated manner, the entire decision-making process required for driving in a single step.
According to the company, this kind of integrated learning through an E2E autonomous driving system enables immediate responses even in diverse and unpredictable road and traffic situations, thereby allowing autonomous driving performance to be refined to a much higher level.
In this context, HMG stated that it is considering combining Motional’s Level 4 autonomous driving operational know-how and safety validation framework—accumulated through the commercialization of robotaxis in Las Vegas—in a complementary way with the SDV advancement roadmap currently being pursued by 42dot.

hjkim01@fnnews.com Kim Hak-jae Reporter