Uber has added another company’s autonomous vehicles to its growing robotaxi network. Motional’s autonomous version of Hyundai-owned Ioniq 5 is now available for rides to and from five areas around the city — for now with an in-car safety screen.
Starting Friday, vehicles will pick up and drop off at the transaction zones at Resorts World and Encore hotels on the Strip, along with Westgate, which is adjacent to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Motional AVs will also operate routes to and from the Town Square Mall near the city’s airport and the downtown Las Vegas boardwalk.
Uber and Motional said Friday that they plan to expand the area of operation in the future, but did not offer details. As in other cities, there is no way to specifically request a ride with a robot. Customers will increase their chances of being matched with one by enabling autonomous vehicle pickup within the Uber app.
The companies said they expect to be able to run a fully driverless service in Las Vegas by the end of this year.
The Las Vegas launch is a milestone for Motional, which ran into real trouble two years ago. Formed as a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, the company was back on track to launch a robotaxi service with Uber rival Lyft. Aptiv pulled out of the joint venture funding, leaving Hyundai to decide whether to pick up the slack or cut bait.
Hyundai decided to plug another $1 billion into Motional, while the wholly-owned AV startup went through a restructuring that led to layoffs of about 40% of its workforce. It also overhauled the way it built its autonomous vehicle technology. Similar to many other players in the industry, Motional decided to switch to a more neural network-based approach.
“We saw that there was huge potential with all the advances that were happening in artificial intelligence, and we also saw that while we had a safe driverless system, there was a gap to get to an affordable solution that could be generalized and scaled globally,” Motional president and CEO Laura Major said during a presentation at the company’s Las Vegas facility during 2026 Consumer Electronics. “And so we made the very difficult decision to stop our trading activities, to slow down in the short term so that we can accelerate.”
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Demo units at the big tech conference in January looked promising, even if some of the consumer-facing software still felt a little lacking. Motion has been running a robotaxi service for the past few months in Las Vegas for its employees. It has previously shared plans for multi-city launches with both Uber and Lyft.
For Uber, Motional is one of several global autonomous vehicle partners. The ride-hail giant has spent the past two years signing deals with more than 25 companies around the world to bring autonomous vehicles to its platform. Just this week, Uber announced plans to add self-driving Nissan Leaf electric cars to its network in Tokyo (powered by UK self-driving tech startup Wayve) and Zoox robotaxis to its Las Vegas app later this year.
