Hyundai-Backed Motional Bringing Automated Vehicles To Santa Monica

Automated driving system development company Motional is expanding its operations in California. Motional was formed in 2020 as a joint venture between Hyundai and supplier Aptiv

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. In 2018, Motional (then under the Aptiv brand) started one of the first commercial ride-hailing services using automated vehicles in partnership with Lyft

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in Las Vegas. By the end of 2021, it will have vehicles running in the Santa Monica area. 

Motional has had an office in Santa Monica since 2016 where engineers have been working on machine learning and hardware for the automated systems. The new expansion will add a vehicle service depot and bring a test fleet to the area for the first time. Motional test drivers will begin collecting data to build high-definition maps of the area this month and the goal is to have vehicles operating in automated mode in the next few months. 

Motional also has vehicles operating in Boston where it is based, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Singapore. The Singapore effort is part of a pilot program to provide first mile/last mile services that connect local residents to transit stations and has been operating since 2016. In Las Vegas, anyone using the Lyft ride-hailing app will get the option to select an automated vehicle if one is available nearby when a ride is requested. 

The Santa Monica test fleet will consist of the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric vehicles that Motional recently began deploying in Pittsburgh and Las Vegas. The Ioniq 5 is the first production model based on Hyundai’s new E-GMP EV architecture and it will be the basis of the driverless robotaxi fleet that Motional plans to deploy in multiple cities with Lyft beginning in 2023. 

At this point Motional is not confirming whether Santa Monica will be one of the cities included in that commercial driverless launch. However, given the experience the company will have by that time and the generally favorable weather conditions, Santa Monica, Las Vegas and Singapore all seem like probable locations for operations. 

Motional has also added its first office in the San Francisco bay area. Unlike many of the other companies in the automated driving sector, Motional has no current plans to begin vehicle testing operations in northern California. The Silicon Valley office will instead focus on design and development of the production compute platform that will power its robotaxis. 

Motional isn’t providing any specifics of what chips it will use in its compute platform, but has previously acknowledged that earlier generations of its development platform used both CPUs and GPUs along with application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and systems-on-chip (SoC). These probably include chips from Intel

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and Nvidia

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and potentially other vendors like NXP. Since many of the companies likely to be supplying the silicon used by Motional are based on San Jose and Santa Clara area it makes sense to have the engineers integrating these components working nearby. 

Unlike many of its competitors including Waymo, Cruise and Argo AI that are all preparing to scale up operations for commercial launches of automated vehicle services, Motional hasn’t indicated any immediate plans to raise more capital. The company got a $1.6 billion injection of capital at its formation in 2020. In most cases, much of that capital will be required to fund the purchase of thousands of vehicles and setting up depots to begin scaling commercial operations. It’s not yet entirely clear if Motional will own and operate its robotaxi fleet or if Hyundai or other partners will handle that. If it is Motional, they may have to raise more funds between now and the end of 2022. .