After nearly two years of facing crisis, self-driving car company Motional is restarting its ambition with a new development strategy, putting artificial intelligence at the center and aiming to launch a commercial self-driving taxi service in Las Vegas (USA) by the end of 2026.
Motional was established from a 4 billion USD joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv. However, Motional once missed the plan to deploy self-driving taxis with Lyft, leading to Aptiv's withdrawal and Hyundai had to pour an additional 1 billion USD to maintain operations. The company also went through many layoffs, including a 40% personnel cut in May 2024, causing the labor scale to decrease to less than 600 people.
Faced with existing pressure, Motional decided to temporarily suspend commercial operations to restructure technology. According to Ms. Laura Major - Chairwoman and CEO of Motional, the company found that previous self-driving systems, although safe, were not capable of expanding at a reasonable cost. Temporarily suspending operations is considered a preparatory step to accelerate in the next phase.
Motional's new strategy is to shift from traditional robot models to comprehensive artificial intelligence-based control architecture. Instead of operating multiple machine learning models and programs based on individual rules, the company is building a unified artificial intelligence "bowel" system from beginning to end. At the same time, maintaining smaller models for flexibility in development.
According to Motional, this approach helps self-driving cars easily adapt to different cities and traffic scenarios without having to rebuild the entire system. Thereby, significantly reducing deployment costs and expanding scale.
Currently, Motional has opened a self-driving taxi service with a supervisor for internal staff and plans to provide it to the public through a ride-hailing partner this year. By the end of 2026, the safety supervisor will be completely removed, marking the stage of real commercial operation.
During test drives in Las Vegas, Motional's self-driving cars have been able to handle complex areas such as hotel pick-up and drop-off points - this situation previously required intervention to ensure safety. However, the company admits that there is still much work to be completed, from the interface displayed in the car to the ability to handle complex traffic situations.
Motional said that the unit pursues a long-term vision, not only stopping at self-driving taxis but aiming to integrate level 4 automatic driving technology into personal cars in the future.
