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[00:00.46] Hey, what's up guys, MKBHD here, still in Las Vegas, and I've seen a lot of self-driving tech so far here at CES, like if you walk through any of the halls with cars in them, there's tons of like open room concepts and things like that, but they feel kind of useless, you know, like as long as they're still in a concept phase, they don't really feel real yet.

[00:33.40] So then I got an email from a company called Yandex, you may know them as a Russian tech company, and they said, hey, come check out our autonomous car at CES.

[00:35.79] I'm kind of thinking, okay, well, I've seen a lot of autonomous concepts and things like that, how could this be much different?

[00:38.18] But then they said, listen, we have a fully autonomous driverless car hitting the streets of Las Vegas with all the other regular cars right now, you can go for a ride, you in?

[00:48.01] So I'm super in, let's do it.

[00:51.73] So the car itself is a retrofitted Prius, on top is radar, lidar, and camera array for the car to map out its surroundings.

[01:00.23] I think as someone who's used the autopilot from a Tesla, it helps me to not be as nervous in the backseat, but it's still crazy not having anyone in the driver's seat at all as the car navigates the streets.

[01:13.24] There's a safety engineer in the passenger seat, which had a kill switch next to him for if anything happened to go wrong or it needed to be interrupted, but we did about a 15 minute loop around real streets, real drivers, real people, and everything went smoothly and it was kind of still trippy the whole time.

[01:29.44] This really feels like the future, I gotta say.

[01:31.30] It might not be this crazy self-driving interior that everyone else is talking about, but this tech part is cool to me.

[01:39.01] The details are that this is a small area in Las Vegas that was already mapped by this company, so it was a predetermined route and the car knew where it was going to go, but everything else, road conditions, the other cars, the pedestrians, the traffic lights, the turns, speed changes, all of that was decisions made by the car, but all that makes sense for a taxi.

[01:59.99] I mean you map the town or city you want to be in, you have predetermined routes for pickup and drop off, and then the taxis are driverless and they just go from there.

[02:08.76] And the even cooler, nerdier part is these iPad Pros you're seeing, that's a visualization of what the sensors on top of the car are seeing in real time.

[02:15.40] So the radar, lidar, and cameras are all combining to identify what is other cars on the road, what's pedestrians, what is a stationary object, and seeing things up to 250 meters away in every direction.

[02:30.01] So things 6, 7 cars away were on the iPad that I couldn't even see in real life out the windows.

[02:35.05] So there are some red paths, and when we start driving you're going to see some green paths.

[02:39.57] And basically what I'm seeing here is, it's evaluating what's currently happening on the road and what's about to happen.

[02:45.68] Red paths, no good. Green paths, good.

[02:49.66] And it takes the green path, and it has a predetermined destination, we're on a left turning lane, so you can see way up ahead where it wants to go, and it's just going to follow where it can.

[03:03.74] Based on the cars around us, you can't really merge right now, so those paths are red, but it has a green path, and it has a bunch of other possible paths to take if it wants to switch it up.

[03:08.79] But right now, it's all green. And the best part is the reaction from other people on the road was pretty great.

[03:13.57] There's people pulling out their phones to record the driverless car, people kind of stare a little bit at stoplights when they realize what's going on, and apparently Las Vegas cops think it's pretty funny too.

[03:22.60] But overall, the 15 minutes we spent in this car were a lot of fun, I learned a lot just looking at these iPads and what they were seeing as the car drove around, and this gave me sort of an optimism for the future of self-driving tech.

[03:33.22] So that's pretty much it, I figured I would share my experience.

[03:37.48] Would you let yourself get driven in a driverless taxi like this?

[03:40.40] Maybe share this video with other people you think would be interested, and I'll leave some links below with some more information so you can look it up if you want to see that too.

[03:47.83] Either way, thanks for watching, see you guys in the next one.