For years, Motional has led the industry in developing and deploying global fleets of safe, reliable, and accessible autonomous vehicles (AVs). Just last month the company announced that starting in 2023, it will launch its first fully driverless commercial passenger robotaxi service in Las Vegas, with other cities to follow.
Motional will deploy an all-electric IONIQ 5-based robotaxis to fulfill on-demand food orders with Uber Eats, marking the first entry into autonomous delivery.
Motional’s focus remains on developing the world’s safest and most advanced AVs. While robotaxis are the largest market opportunity in driverless technology, the autonomous delivery market has grown rapidly over the last couple of years. Expanding into this adjacent market strengthens the go-to-market strategy.
The combined U.S. market for driverless robotaxi and food delivery services is expected to exceed $115 billion by 2030. Demand for food delivery has doubled since the start of the pandemic, and the use of mobile food delivery apps is up more than 20% this year.
In addition, increasing the versatility of the robotaxi platform allows us to operate vehicles more efficiently, maximizing the amount of time they are on the road in revenue-generating service. Ride-hailing services experience peaks and valleys in demand, and rather than having a robotaxi idle while waiting for the next fare, they can make deliveries. As an additional benefit, the more vehicles are operating on the road, the more data they can collect, which enables the company to capture more edge cases and more quickly train the system.
On-demand delivery presents the greatest market opportunity while being most closely aligned with Motional’s existing robotaxi technology.
Along with today’s milestone, the company recently announced significant investments in the U.S. operations, including expanding our East Coast (Boston) and West Coast (California and Las Vegas) operations. Not only will these investments help support initial market launches, but they will also enable the company to scale up operations to meet growing demand.
While they are launching commercial robotaxi operations in Las Vegas, the company has laid the groundwork to scale globally. Motional will be operating in a double-digit number of cities by the mid-2020s. This growth will result in many high-tech sector jobs, ranging from software and mechanical engineers and fleet maintenance technicians to remote customer service and data analytics roles, across the supply chain.
2022 will be an exciting year for Motional. The company’s team has spent decades preparing for this moment, developing validating driverless technology to ensure vehicles make roads safer than they are now. Driverless technology is the future of mobility services, and this announcement is another proof point that Motional is prepared to lead the way.
