Laymo Announces San Andreas Expansion: Self-Driving Vehicles to Begin Operations

Los Santos — Laymo, the autonomous vehicle company that has spent the last years quietly convincing residents of other cities that being driven around by a car with no one in it is perfectly normal, announced Friday that it will be expanding its driverless taxi service to Los Santos and the surrounding Roxwood area beginning late spring.

The announcement was made at a press event held inside a Laymo vehicle, which drove journalists in a slow loop around the Maze Bank Arena parking lot for forty minutes while a spokesperson delivered remarks from the back seat. Nobody crashed. The spokesperson noted this unprompted, twice.

Laymo vehicles operate without a human driver, using a suite of cameras, sensors, and what the company describes as "a proprietary decision-making framework built on millions of hours of real-world driving data." When asked what happens when the vehicle encounters a situation outside that dataset — a sinkhole, a police standoff, the intersection at Forum Drive on a Friday night — a company representative said the system was "robust, adaptive, and continuously learning." She did not give an example of what it had recently learned.

The vehicles communicate a destination request through the Laymo app, at which point a car arrives, the door opens, and the passenger is transported to their destination by nobody. Laymo's promotional materials describe this experience as "liberating."

Whether a self-driving vehicle is prepared for Los Santos specifically is a question the company has been careful not to answer directly. The city's traffic fatality rate, its relationship with lane markings, and the general disposition of its driving population toward concepts like indicators and speed limits are all, sources suggest, somewhat outside the parameters of a controlled testing environment.

Laymo's Vice President of Expansion, Todd Geller, addressed this at the press event with characteristic optimism. "Los Santos is a dynamic city," he said, from the back of a car doing eleven miles per hour in a straight line. "And Laymo is a dynamic company." He then looked out the window at a man doing something inadvisable on a moped and did not say anything further.

The Roxwood extension has raised separate questions, given the area's more rural road conditions, inconsistent signage. Laymo confirmed the vehicles would be operating in Roxwood "on a limited basis initially,"

Laymo has not announced pricing for the Los Santos market, though the company says it will be "competitive with existing ride options". The city of Los Santos has issued a statement welcoming the expansion and noting that it looks forward to "working with Laymo on integration with existing infrastructure."