Motional is putting AI at the center of its robotics reboot as it targets 2026 for driverless service

For nearly two years, Motional has been at the crossroads of self-driving cars.

The company, born from a $4 billion joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, has already missed the deadline to launch a driverless taxi service with partner Lyft. It lost Aptiv as one of its financial backers, prompting Hyundai to team up with another party Investment of $1 billion To keep it going. Several layoffs, including A.J Reducing restructuring by 40% In May 2024, this led to the company downsizing from its peak of about 1,400 employees to fewer than 600. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence were changing how engineers developed technology.

The movement had to evolve or die. He – she Stop everything I chose option number 1.

Motional told TechCrunch that it has restarted its robotaxi plans with an AI-first approach to its self-driving system and promised 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 — for its employees. It plans to offer this service to the public with an unnamed partner in the field of passenger transportation later this year. (Motional has existing relationships with Lyft and Uber.) By the end of the year, the human safety operator will be retired from robotaxis and a true commercial driverless service will begin, the company said.

“We saw that there was huge potential with all the advancements that were happening in AI; we also saw that while we had a safe driverless system, there was a gap in access to an affordable solution that could be rolled out and scaled globally,” said Laura Major, president and CEO of Motional, during a presentation at the company’s facilities in Las Vegas. “We have therefore made the very difficult decision to pause our business activities and slow down in the near term until we can accelerate.”

This means moving away from its classic robotics approach to one based on an AI foundation model. Motional has never been AI-free. Motional’s self-driving system used individual machine learning models to handle perception, tracking, and semantic reasoning. But it also used more rule-based software for other operations within the software package. The individual ML models made it into a complex network of programs, Major said.

At the same time, AI models originally designed for language are beginning to be applied in robots and other physical AI systems, including the development of autonomous driving. This transformer architecture made it possible to build large, complex AI models, which eventually led to the emergence and widespread use of ChatGPT.

Motional looked for ways to combine these smaller models and integrate them into a single backbone, allowing for a comprehensive architecture. It’s also maintained smaller models for developers, which Major explained gives Motional the best of both worlds.

“This is critical for two things,” she said. “One is to generalize more easily to new cities, new environments, and new scenarios.” “The other is to do it in a cost-optimized way. So, for example, traffic lights might be different in the next city you go to, but you don’t have to redevelop them or re-analyze them. All you have to do is collect some 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. No single demo can provide an accurate assessment of a self-driving system. However, it can identify weaknesses and differences from previous iterations and measure progress.

Progress is what I saw as the Hyundai Ioniq 5 I boarded autonomously navigated its way from Las Vegas Boulevard to the pick-up and drop-off area at the Aria Hotel. These are notoriously bustling areas of Las Vegas, and my experience was no different as the self-driving car slowly made its way around a parked taxi and dropped off passengers, changed lanes, and then back again, passing dozens of people, giant flower pots, and cars along the way.

Motional previously operated a ride-hailing service in Las Vegas with partner Lyft using vehicles that could autonomously handle portions of the trip. Parking, hotel valet pickup areas and the app were not part of those operations at all. A human safety operator, always behind the wheel, will take care of navigating parking lots or crowded pick-up and drop-off points in hotel lobbies.

There is still more progress to be made. The graphics shown to passengers inside the car are still under development. And while there was absolutely no disengagement during my test ride — which means the human safety operator takes over — it took a while for the car to propel itself around a parked double Amazon delivery truck.

However, Major believes Motional is on the right track for safe and cost-effective deployment. She said Hyundai’s majority owner would stay in the company for the long term.

“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 the driving without expecting human intervention. “Robots are the number one stop and they have a huge impact. But in the end, I think any OEM would also want to integrate that into their vehicles.”