[10] In 2020, Yandex.Taxi was reportedly developing AI-infused proprietary hardware and software for its vehicles that monitors drivers’ attention levels, as well as a facial recognition system that determines the identity of the person behind the wheel.

[13] In February 2018, Yandex acquired Uber's businesses in Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus and Georgia.

[14] In August 2021, Yandex acquired Uber's stake its self-driving car division and food delivery business in a $1 billion transaction.

[19][20] In October 2018, Yandex acquired Partiya Edy ("Food Party"), a meal kit service that operates in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which was renamed Yandex.Chef.

[5] The online service relies on small warehouses across Moscow and St. Petersburg stocked with about 2,000 items and uses bike couriers to deliver orders.

[23] The prototype vehicle was a Toyota Prius hybrid hatchback equipped with an Nvidia GTX graphics processor and a LiDAR optical distance sensor by Velodyne.

[25] In November 2017, Yandex released a video of its AV winter tests, in which the car drove successfully along snowy roads of Moscow.

[27] In June 2018, a Yandex driverless car completed a long-distance test ride in fully autonomous mode, traveling 780 km in about 11 hours.

[28] Yandex's robo-taxi service was launched in trial mode in August 2018 in the university town of Innopolis in the Republic of Tatarstan.

[29] The Yandex driverless car was presented to the international public at the CES 2019 innovation conference in Las Vegas.

[30] At the end of 2018, Yandex obtained a license[31] to use these vehicles on public roads in Nevada, one of the few American states where driverless cars are allowed.

[32] In December 2018, the company got a permission from the Israeli Transportation Ministry to test its driverless car on public roads without a human safety driver at the wheel.

[36] In October 2019 Yandex announced that its self-driving cars had passed 1 million miles in fully autonomous driving since it started testing the technology.

[39] Ten Yandex self-driving sedans will provide public rides in downtown Detroit during the Autoshow in June 2020.

As part of the initial testing phase, a fleet of Yandex.Rover is operating on the Yandex campus in Moscow, transporting small packages from one building to another.

The company claims that using its own lidars will help Yandex save up to 75% on the cost of sensors, which are currently one of the most expensive parts of an autonomous vehicle.

[42] In March 2020, Yandex announced plans to launch a worldwide fleet of robotaxis using its driverless car software within the next few years, with a licence to begin testing in the United States from June 2020.

Just after the Lithuanian launch of Yandex.Taxi on 26 July 2018, the country's authorities warned citizens against using the service in order to protect their personal data.

[64] On April 11, 2022, Yandex Taxi was banned in Estonia due to the Russian government's collection of user data.

[12] Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and IT and foreign trade minister Andres Sutt said the move related to national security, given that Yandex requires the provision of personal data which would be held in Russia and which Russian security services, including the FSB, have the ability to access, following a decision in Russia.

In February 2020, Russian news website Baza reported that Yandex.Taxi had disclosed the travel history of an investigative journalist to Moscow police without a court order.

[81] The company responded that it was legally compelled to hand over the data under Russia's “operative-search activities” law, which does not require a court decision to request ride histories.