Las Vegas Gambling On Driverless Cars This Year

Las Vegas is about to become the next big proving ground in the robotaxi arms race. Motional – now majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group – says it plans to launch a fully driverless, Level 4 robotaxi service in Las Vegas by the end of 2026, using a fleet of all-electric Hyundai IONIQ 5 robotaxis.

It’s their second shot. Motional hit the brakes on parts of its self-driving program in 2024 so it could rebuild major pieces of the software system that makes the car drive itself. Motional has already been running autonomous rides in Las Vegas with human safety operators for years. Its promo materials talk about offering rides along and outside the strip, and reporting good rider feedback in earlier pilot phases.

They’ve has logged over two million miles and cite a zero at-fault incident track record, which is the kind of safety-stat messaging you lean on when you’re asking rowdy revelers and/or gamblers to get into a car with nobody in the front seat.

What’s changed since their last robotaxi cycle is competition, and the clock.

Rival Waymo is expanding its Vegas footprint and even plans to add the IONIQ 5 into its own fleet mix, as opposed to Jaguar, their current trim in cities like Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Tesla keeps promising its own autonomous future in sin city. But Waymo may win the “first to market” contest in Las Vegas while Motional is aiming for the headline-grabbing “fully driverless by end of 2026” brag.

So why Vegas? It’s ideal for autonomous vehicles with its dense traffic, constant lane changes, aggressive merging, endless hotel drop-offs and tourists doing tourist things.

A CES 2026 ride report described Motional’s IONIQ 5 robotaxi handling chaotic Vegas streets with impressively fluid, human-like behavior—while still needing a human intervention during testing, which is an honest reminder of how hard that “last 1%” really is. That’s the part that worries everyone. People have a lot less tolerance regarding autonomous vehicles when it comes to fender-benders.

Waymo’s projected timeline is summer 2026 for launch, and they’ve got some advantages. It’s the operator with the strongest reputation for turning robotaxis into an actual product people can use, as opposed to demos. Their press coverage has framed Waymo’s progress in terms of scale—big ride counts, multi-city operations and a speed that makes Vegas feel like the next logical dot on the map, rather than a test city.

But going first also means you may fall down and get judged first. Waymo has had highly publicized “awkward autonomy” moments—vehicles getting stuck, needing remote assistance, or behaving in ways that are confusing to humans around them. That doesn’t negate their overall progress, but it shapes public perception in a vital way in that one fender bender can travel farther than a million uneventful miles on the internet.