Russia’s Yandex to expand its driverless car fleet to 1,000 vehicles within the next two years

Yandex, a Russian equivalent to Google, said it is considering expanding its fleet of self-driving cars to up to 1,000 within the next two years in order to speed up tests on the fledgling technology, Reuters reads.

Yandex hopes to start testing more than 100 of its self-driving cars on roads by the end of this year. It already has a fleet of 90 cars, 35 of which are being tested on Moscow’s roads with a Yandex engineer present.

“We plan to further increase the fleet, by as much as even a thousand cars. We can produce the first thousand cars fairly quickly within one and half and two years,” Dmitry Polishchuk, head of Yandex’s self-driving car division, told Reuters in an interview last week.

Yandex has not disclosed how much it has invested in self-driving technology, but Polishchuk said a single car cost 6.5 million roubles ($98,000). He said the price had fallen from the 9.5 million it had cost to build the company’s first prototype.