At CES 2026, Hyundai and Motional unveiled their driverless robotaxi service and announced plans to bring operations to Las Vegas later this year, signaling a major milestone in their autonomous-driving partnership.

The plan includes supervised pilot programs in early 2026, with full driverless commercialization in Las Vegas by year-end, and aims to weave robotaxi services into broader mobility ecosystems through partnerships with a global ride-hailing platform.

Motional, Hyundai Motor Group's autonomous driving venture, intends to commercialize a fully driverless Level 4 robotaxi in Las Vegas by the end of 2026, emphasizing a Safety First approach and end-to-end AI motion planning.

Driving data will be central to improvement, using a feedback loop from real-world operations to server-based validations and model refinements to enable rapid updates and scalability.

Motional is shifting from a modular autonomous stack to an end-to-end motion planning system that integrates perception, decision-making, and control into a single learned process, targeting Large Driving Models trained on massive driving data.

The Hyundai IONIQ 5 robotaxi serves as Motional's platform for data-driven acceleration toward commercialization, with data collection and continuous learning fueling performance gains and refined internal benchmarks.

A safety-first framework underpins the rollout, adhering to FMVSS standards, independent validation from bodies like TÜV SÜD, phased validation, large-scale simulation, closed-environment testing, and gradual public-road deployments to build trust and readiness.

Motional’s evolution is framed as a shift from traditional robotic solutions to AI-driven approaches that enable scalable, citywide autonomous taxi services.

Motional CEO Laura Major notes the company’s operational history of 130,000 rides on Lyft and Uber networks and over two million autonomous miles with zero at-fault incidents, while steering toward neural networks, large language models, and vision-language-action models to generalize to new environments and reduce costs.

Motional, once a joint venture with Aptiv, paused operations in 2024 after six years of development and then pivoted to advanced AI technologies to accelerate deployment of autonomous driving.

The collaboration among Hyundai's Advanced Vehicle Platform Division, Motional, and 42dot leverages SDV roadmaps and shared data/infrastructure to accelerate safety validation and scale toward broader deployment, with Las Vegas serving as a real-world testbed.

Hyundai’s involvement intensified in 2020, when it became the majority owner of Motional, financing the venture and supplying the Ioniq 5 Robotaxi for testing and deployment.