Riding in a Driverless Taxi at CES 2019!

Riding in a Driverless Taxi at CES 2019 showcases Marques Brownlee experiencing a fully autonomous taxi from Yandex as it navigates Las Vegas streets without a human driver. The video opens by contrasting concept cars with real autonomous hardware, highlighting how the interior design of autonomous vehicles is being reimagined as a movable room with glass-heavy spaces and touch surfaces. The presenter explains that the Yandex car is a retrofitted Prius equipped with radar, lidar, and camera arrays to map surroundings, while a safety engineer sits in the passenger seat with a kill switch as a precaution. During a roughly 15-minute loop through real traffic with pedestrians and other cars, the car operates entirely without a driver, relying on the sensor suite and predetermined routes mapped for the area. The back-seat experience is enhanced by real-time sensor visualizations on an iPad Pro, which translate the car’s perception into green and red path options, showing how the system evaluates current road conditions and predicts safer trajectories. The video captures the reactions of bystanders and even Las Vegas police, who seem amused by the spectacle, and Brownlee reflects on the optimism and practicalities of driverless mobility, noting that the underlying technology and mapping are the core drivers of autonomy. By the end, he invites viewers to consider if they would ride in such a taxi and provides links for more information, underscoring a hopeful outlook for autonomous transportation while acknowledging the novelty and potential limitations of the early tech on display.

Topics · technology · autonomous-vehicles · ces-2019 · mobility · robotics · innovation