Ahead of our car and from both sides of the road, two women push strollers off the sidewalk into the street. Simultaneously, a cyclist wobbles the wrong way up the one-way road, heading straight for us.

The last time I faced such a basket of traffic hazards was at a fake city called Castle in rural California, where engineers confronted Waymo’s self-driving minivans with a range of tricky scenarios. They used stunt performers as cyclists and pedestrians who functioned as props along our well-controlled route. The vehicles had been developed over a decade by a company that had already driven five million miles of on-road testing, and everyone involved worked for Waymo.

This time, I am on the actual streets of central Moscow, in the back seat of a secondhand Toyota Prius V retrofitted for autonomous operation by a company that only started driving in public last December. The babies in the strollers are not being portrayed by actors.

But it’s just another normal traffic day in the Russian capital, explained Dmitriy Polishchuk, head of self-driving cars at Yandex. “No one [here] is actually following the traffic rules,” he said. “You can restrict the car not to go very close to others, but you can’t drive with [such] restrictions in the area where we are. The car will either be in trouble or it will stop and won’t go, because people always break the rules.”

Car and Driver

Sure enough, while the Prius immediately slows down to let the strollers cross and the bicycle pass, it continues to edge through the crowded intersection. It then signals left at a corner to confront a line of idling cars. “This is a complicated scenario all about human interaction,” said Polishchuk. “If you strictly follow the rules here, these guys to the right just go, go, go.”

The Prius hesitates for a moment, then darts forward, slotting itself into a gap just a few feet wide and clearing a car in another lane by inches. From behind us, I hear the first of many honks on this three-mile demonstration ride, the first in Yandex’s car for any Western journalist.

While Russia is no longer the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that Winston Churchill described, it remains a frustratingly elusive market for Western technology companies. In Russia, Google has a 45 percent market share for search, compared to Yandex’s 51. Tens of millions of people use Yandex’s shopping services and its Alice (pronounced “Aleesa”) voice assistant rather than Amazon’s. And Uber withdrew from the country completely last year, taking a minority stake in a joint venture ride-sharing company controlled by, you guessed it, Yandex.

Yandex may take its inspiration from Western rivals, but this Prius suggests it is far from a mere copycat. In a world where most cities have traffic that looks more like the controlled chaos of Moscow than the calm streets of Mountain View or Tempe, Yandex’s self-driving car could be its killer app for global expansion. If it can just avoid killing anyone.

Challenging Environment

Russia is not a safe place to drive. According to a 2013 report by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Russia has about eight times as many road deaths per vehicle mile traveled as comparable cold-weather American states such as Wisconsin or Michigan and seven times more fatalities than the United States as a whole. In my three days in Moscow, I saw a significant crash, or its immediate aftermath, every day.

Cars veer between lanes at will, official vehicles speed with impunity, and Muscovites seem to cross the city’s streets with a cavalier fatalism. “The hardest thing is to know [someone’s] intention, because no one is actually following the rules,” said Polishchuk. “So we have a really strict restriction on pedestrians—we just stop.”

Car and Driver

I see this over and over again in the busy Khamovniki neighborhood near Yandex’s office campus. People leap out of cars into traffic or walk into the roadway to avoid construction on the sidewalk. There is virtually no litter in Moscow, which probably helps, although a legion of street-sweeping vehicles and tractors spraying water on the streets add their own risks.

While the Prius blithely ignores speeding scooters or cars zipping past within inches, it reliably detects and slows for pedestrians. “Other people don’t care; they can do small mistakes,” said Polishchuk. “But we can’t break the traffic rules. If we do, we’re in trouble. So we’re a little slow in traffic. Some people say the car drives like their mother.”

If their mother is Danica Patrick, perhaps. The Prius is far more confident, even aggressive, than any of the U.S.-developed self-driving cars I have ridden in. It rushes from junction to junction, slips into turn lanes without hesitation, and is the first car off the line when a traffic light changes. It’s also still very much a work in progress. We have two disengagements during the drive, failures of the system that require that our safety driver, Alexey, take control of the car. One is on an apparently simple right-hand turn; the other is when a pedestrian steps out in front of us with even more disregard than usual.

“The car was slowing down, but the driver helped a bit at the end,” said Polishchuk. He explained that Yandex restricts the level of braking the car can apply. Otherwise, occasional false detections would see the car slamming on the brakes and causing its own hazard. “You have to brake responsibly,” he said. “It’s like the Uber accident [in Arizona in March]. The car saw the pedestrian, but the system didn’t apply braking because it was in a special mode where the driver is responsible. This is the normal thing to do when the system is not yet polished.”

(Although Uber has its joint taxi venture with Yandex, the companies are not cooperating on autonomous technology. Yandex said it has had no accidents or traffic tickets so far.)

On another occasion, we are stuck behind a street sweeper as it dodges in and out of parked cars. Eventually, the Prius gets up the nerve to drive past it, but not before another barrage of honks from behind. “Other cars can hate us when we’re slow to make decisions,” admitted Polishchuk. “But sometimes we get this [sound] even before the green light!”

Car and Driver

Like all 10 of Yandex’s self-driving cars, the Prius is named after an android in the HBO series Westworld—in this case, Teddy. It has six small video cameras, six Bosch and Continental radar units mounted beneath body panels, and a Velodyne VLP-32C spinning lidar on its roof that cost more than the car itself, said Polishchuk. Surprisingly, given Teddy’s ability to slide past vehicles within inches, there are no short-range infrared or ultrasonic sensors.

The car does have GPS and GLONASS (its Russian equivalent) navigation systems, but these are only used as a last resort. “The problem in Moscow is that there are certain areas where they spoof GPS, where there are special radio frequencies emitted that tell the system that you are not where you are,” said Polishchuk. No one knows exactly who is doing the spoofing, he said, but it’s noteworthy that the problem is most evident near Red Square and the Kremlin.

Even in unaffected parts of the city, satellite navigation cannot locate Teddy with the 5-cm (2.0 inch) precision it requires. So, like most other self-driving-car developers, Yandex has made its own high-resolution maps using lidar. “They’re pretty robust to small changes in the environment,” said Polishchuk. “For example, when we started doing this map last winter, there was lots of snow and no leaves on the trees. And when the snow melted, the maps were still reliable.” Teddy has also been tested at night and in the rain.

“The area that Waymo picked in Phoenix has very simple conditions compared to this area,” boasted Polishchuk. “Once we have cars driving from A to B randomly in Moscow, it wouldn’t be that difficult to build the system for any other city.”

For high-speed, difficult, or dangerous testing, Yandex has a closed-course fake city called the Polygon, on the outskirts of Moscow. There, the company has built intersections and facades that simulate city conditions. Its ultimate aim is to build a Level 5 vehicle requiring no human input beyond stating a destination.

Car and Driver

Polishchuk said the car will deploy in some limited fashion this year, probably with Yandex.Taxi, the company’s ride-sharing and taxi app, although he is also open to licensing the technology to automakers. Lada is still Russia’s leading car brand, but there is also domestic production of BMW, GM, Renault, Volkswagen, and Ford vehicles.

“We’re evolving pretty fast,” said Polishchuk. “We still have to drive way more autonomous miles, but I’m not afraid of competition. If we bring our car to the U.S., it would be our disadvantage. But vice versa, I think we will be able to build faster than Google a more reliable system to operate here and in certain [other] areas.”

Andrey Sebrant, Yandex’s product marketing director, sees self-driving technology as a way for Yandex to grow beyond its traditional Russian-speaking markets. “Our taxi app is already more successful in international expansion than Yandex itself,” he told me. “We are not going to fight with Google face to face in old areas like search, but in areas where machine learning is a core technology, like self-driving cars, there we can compete.”

But before its global ambitions can be realized, Yandex will need to succeed in Russia. Initially, Yandex met resistance. “If you modify a car mechanically or electronically, you have to certify the changes,” said Polishchuk. “But we had problems certifying the cars because everyone is scared of this autonomous thing. It’s easier now because we’ve talked with them a few times, but they still reject us sometimes.”

It probably helped that Vladimir Putin made a highly publicized visit to Yandex for the company’s 20th anniversary last September, during which he was given a demonstration of the self-driving car—although he declined to actually ride in one. Yandex is now lobbying for new regulations that explicitly allow testing and deployment of highly automated vehicles.

Like many successful companies in Russia, Yandex has significant links to the state. In 2009, Yandex sold a “golden share” to Sberbank, a state-owned company. This enables the government to block the sale or hostile takeover of the company. In 2011, when Yandex listed on NASDAQ, it revealed that it had passed customers’ information to the Russian security services. A couple of years later, it sold a majority stake of its Yandex.Money payment service to Sberbank, which has been accused of allowing the Kremlin to freeze payments to opposition leaders. In 2017, Yandex closed offices in Ukraine following allegations by that country’s intelligence agencies that it had illegally collected Ukrainian users’ data.

“It’s complicated,” admitted Sebrant. “When it comes to the state-owned transportation system and state-controlled companies, we need data from them. [And] whenever you are part of a big state-run initiative, it’s two-way traffic. But at the same time, we are a public company listed on NASDAQ. We are very careful that we cooperate with the state within our local legal frame. So whenever we have a request from our FSB [the successor to the KGB] or police or whatever, we only follow the letter of the law.”

Car and Driver

For now, at least, it is not politics but technology and money that are holding Yandex back. Like every company developing self-driving cars, Yandex is struggling to build a system that makes financial sense at scale. “Right now, human drivers are cheaper,” said Polishchuk. “We are looking at how we can make the system cheaper by limiting the amount of sensors and not limiting the area we can sense.” For Polishchuk, that might mean investing in the next generation of lidar, in particular high-power, long-range devices made by the U.S. company Luminar.

As we pulled in to Yandex’s parking lot at the end of our ride, Polishchuk was already planning Teddy’s next drive. It will be giving completely driverless rides the next day, on a closed course at Yandex’s annual conference in Moscow. And Teddy will be back on city streets again on Friday, when Yandex offers employees a weekly opportunity to see how the system is improving.

“This is very valuable for us, because sometimes we have an issue with the car not stopping very slowly or comfortably,” said Polishchuk as we climbed out. “People always notice this and say we should make it more smooth.”

Having a self-driving car less than two years old operate safely in such a challenging urban environment as Moscow is impressive enough. That Yandex is already focusing on passenger comfort suggests these Westworld androids might be nearly ready for prime time.

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