Page 164 - RusRPTJan23

o Introduced shared taxi drives in select big cities, which allow users to save on average 30%. In some cities, there is an 85% probability to find a co-passenger due to the high penetration of Yandex.Taxi.
· In maps, the company is working on improving visualization, in order to bring the objects closer to reality in shape and color, add more visual details to the roads in some cases. This plan is to start roll out with central Moscow area in early 2023, and gradually expand it across all Russia over several years.
· Yandex also highlighted its development of own warehouse robots in e-commerce, Yandex.Check (self check-out at the restaurants), Yandex.Rent (aimed to simplify apartment rentals), technological improvements in its media content businesses.
Throughout 2021, Russian companies developing unmanned vehicles have been preparing for a big breakthrough. The main obstacle was removed - in January 2022, the government finally approved the legal regime. It would make it possible to launch the first drones on the streets of cities, which would not even be driven by a safety driver. It took a long and difficult time to reach this decision in Russia: the responsible ministries spent the whole of 2020 in disputes (we talked about this in detail in our past large article about the Russian drone market).
The experimental legal regime agreed by the government (EPR) allowed the launch of an unmanned taxi service on 18 streets of Moscow's Yasenevo, in Innopolis and Sirius. In Moscow, it was possible to drive without an engineer behind the wheel (he had to sit in the passenger seat) and take money for the service. And in two other locations, the drone could drive completely autonomously. This program was designed for Yandex, but then other market participants could join it.
The approval of this EPR in early 2022 seemed like a big win for the market. Yandex planned to start with a few dozen cars, and over the next three years to grow an unmanned fleet of taxis up to a thousand robo-cars. For drones, they came up with a special sign: a white triangle with a black letter “A” - “autonomous driving”. SberAvtoTech, a subsidiary of Sberbank, which is developing a competing drone, then said that it was also preparing an unmanned taxi, and it might be testing the technology together with the Citymobil taxi aggregator, which was part of the bank's ecosystem.
But after the start of the war, the Yandex service, the launch of which was expected in Moscow for almost two years and planned for March, never appeared. The company itself has remained silent ever since. And Sberbank, which owned Citymobil in half with VK, decided to close the service a few weeks after the start of the war, and then sold its assets.
164 RUSSIA Country Report January 2023 www.intellinews.com