Russian company Yandex announced that after test-driving its smart cars in the US and Russia, Israel would be its third test site, Sputnik News reported on Tuesday.
“Today we are excited to announce that Yandex has obtained permission from the Israeli Ministry of Transportation and Road Safety to operate its self-driving car on public roads,” the company said.
Dmitry Polischuk, the head of the Yandex self-driving car project, said in the statement that Israel was “an obvious choice,” as it was one of the first countries where the company wanted to expand testing.
Yandex is the largest technology company in Russia and one of the largest Internet search engines worldwide. It has recently opened the Yandex Initiative for Machine Learning at Tel Aviv University.
Yandex’s founder Arkady Volozh spearheaded Yandex’s funding of the program.