Yandex’s self-driving car unit has accelerated through the coronavirus pandemic, becoming one of the world’s top 3 companies for the number of miles driven by automated vehicles.
In a conference call with investors Tuesday, the Russian technology giant said its fleet of 130 vehicles had passed four million miles in autonomous driving. The mile count has doubled since the previous update in February, and its global ranking has climbed from fifth — when the company hit the one-million-mile landmark in October 2019 — to third, deputy chief executive Tigran Khudaverdyan said on the call.
Yandex, however, is still well behind market leader Waymo, a project run by Google’s parent company Alphabet. In its latest public update in January, Alphabet executives said Waymo cars had hit 20 million miles driven on public roads.
Yandex invested almost 1.5 billion rubles ($21 million) in self-driving cars in the first six months of 2020 according to financial results published Tuesday — almost triple the unit’s losses in the same period last year.
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