"Starting Friday, the vehicles will do pickup and drop-offs in the rideshare zones at Resorts World and Encore hotel casinos on the Strip, along with the Westgate, which is next to the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Motional AVs will also handle rides to and from the Town Square shopping center near the city's airport, and curbside in Downtown Las Vegas."
"The launch in Las Vegas is a milestone for Motional, which found itself in real trouble two years ago. Created as a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, the company was behind on its goal of launching a robotaxi service with Uber rival Lyft. Aptiv pulled out of funding the joint venture, leaving Hyundai to decide whether to pick up the financial slack, or cut bait."
"Hyundai decided to plug another $1 billion into Motional, while the wholly-owned AV startup went through a restructuring that resulted in layoffs of about 40% of its workforce. It also reworked how it was building its autonomous vehicle technology. Similar to many other players in the industry, Motional decided to pivot to an approach based more on neural networks."
Motional, a Hyundai-owned autonomous vehicle company, has launched its self-driving Ioniq 5 vehicles on Uber's platform in Las Vegas. The robotaxis operate in five designated areas including Resorts World, Encore, Westgate, Town Square shopping center, and Downtown Las Vegas, currently with safety monitors onboard. Customers can enable autonomous vehicle pickup in the Uber app to increase matching chances, though specific robotaxi requests are unavailable. Uber and Motional plan to expand operations and achieve fully driverless service by year-end. This launch represents significant progress for Motional, which faced financial crisis two years ago when Aptiv withdrew funding. Hyundai invested an additional $1 billion, restructured the company with 40% workforce reductions, and shifted to neural network-based autonomous technology aligned with industry AI advancements.
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