Motional puts AI at center of robotaxi reboot as it targets 2026 for driverless service

Nearly two years ago, Motional found itself at a crossroads when it came to autonomous vehicles.

The company, born from a $4 billion joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, had already missed the deadline to launch a driverless robotaxi service with its partner Lyft. The company had lost Aptiv as one of its backers, prompting Hyundai to bring in another. A billion dollar investment to keep it going. Several layoffs, including one Restructuring reduction of 40% by May 2024, the company had reduced its workforce from about 1,400 employees to fewer than 600. Meanwhile, advances in AI were changing the way engineers developed technology.

Motional was going to have to evolve or die. He everything paused and chose option #1.

Motional told TechCrunch that it has rebooted its robotaxi plans with an AI-driven approach to its autonomous driving system and a promise to launch a commercial driverless service in Las Vegas by the end of 2026. The company has already opened a robotaxi service – with a human safety operator behind the wheel – to its employees. It plans to offer this service to the public with an unnamed partner later this year. (Motional has relationships with Lyft and Uber.) By the end of the year, the human safety operator will be removed from the robo-taxi and a true driverless commercial service will begin, the company said.

“We saw that there was enormous potential with all the advancements in AI; and we also saw that even though we had a safe, driverless system, there was a gap to get to an affordable solution that could become widespread and scale globally,” Laura Major, president and CEO of Motional, said during a presentation at the company’s Las Vegas facility. “So we have made the very difficult decision to suspend our business activities, to slow down in the short term so that we can accelerate.”

This meant abandoning its classic robotics approach to an AI foundation model approach. Motional has never been without AI. Motional’s autonomous driving system used individual machine learning models to manage perception, tracking and semantic reasoning. But it also used more rule-based programs for other operations within the software stack. And individual ML models have made it a complex web of software, Major said.

Meanwhile, AI models originally designed for language have begun to be applied to robots and other physical AI systems, including in the development of autonomous driving. This transformer architecture made it possible to create large and complex AI models, ultimately leading to the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT.

Motional looked for ways to combine these smaller models and integrate them into a single framework, enabling an end-to-end architecture. It also kept the models smaller for developers, which Major says gives Motional the best of both worlds.

“It’s really key for two things: One is to generalize more easily to new cities, new environments, new scenarios,” she said. “And the other is to do it in a cost-optimized way. So, for example, the traffic lights might be different in the next city you go to, but you don’t need to redesign them or reanalyze them. You just collect data, train the model and it’s able to operate safely in that new city.”

TechCrunch got a first-hand look at Motional’s new approach during a 30-minute self-driving ride around Las Vegas. A single demo cannot provide an accurate assessment of an autonomous driving system. It can, however, identify weaknesses and differences from previous iterations and assess progress.

Progress is what I saw as the Hyundai Ioniq 5 I was riding in navigated autonomously from Las Vegas Boulevard and into the Aria Hotel pick-up and drop-off area. These busy areas are notorious in La Vegas, and my experience was no different: The autonomous vehicle slowly drove around a stopped taxi and unloaded passengers, changed lanes, then returned, passing dozens of people, giant flower pots, and cars along the way.

Motional previously operated a ride-sharing service in Las Vegas with partner Lyft, using vehicles that could autonomously handle parts of a trip. Parking lots, hotel valet areas, and app support areas have never been part of these operations. A human safety operator, still behind the wheel, would take over navigating parking lots or busy hotel lobbies pick-up and drop-off points.

There is still progress to be made. The graphics displayed to drivers in the vehicle are still under development. And while there was never a disengagement during my demonstration—meaning the human safety operator takes over—the vehicle took its time moving around a double-parked Amazon delivery van.

Nonetheless, Major says Motional is on track for safe and cost-effective deployment. And its majority owner, Hyundai, is in it for the long haul, she said.

“I think the real long-term vision, you know, for all of this is to put Level 4 on people’s personal cars,” Major said, referring to a term that means the system handles all driving without any human intervention. “Robotaxis is the number one step, and the impact is huge. But ultimately, I think any OEM would like to integrate that into their cars as well.”