Self-driving cars are edging ever closer to being a regular part of our lives. Walmart will soon deliver to your house using autonomous vehicles and companies like Tesla have been making advances in the tech too, showing that it is capable of working on just about any road. Now, Motional, a company backed by Aptiv and Hyundai, has just received approval from the state of Nevada to launch autonomous cars in Las Vegas. However, this doesn't mean that we'll see a Genesis G90 in Motional branding running about without pilots just yet. But it does mean that when Motional is ready to launch the tech, it already has permission.

As you can well imagine, getting driverless tech polished to the point that it is genuinely safe to use, even with a driver behind the wheel, is not an easy feat, but one of the biggest hurdles in any country and in any state is often that of legislation, followed by approval. Thus, with Nevada's permission for testing to begin, one of the big issues is already out of the way. This means that Motional can soon join companies like Waymo and Yandex in showcasing the new technology and drawing more attention to the brand. As tricky as the whole process is, Motional's CEO, Karl Iagnemma, is confident that we'll see the company's cars testing this year already.

In a statement, Iagnemma said "The coming months will see the completion of a rigorous, self-imposed testing and assessment period... in close partnership with one of the world's most respected safety assessors. This process will include full-driverless testing, on closed courses, this year."

Once this happens, Motional will have a good idea of how much work is still to be done before testing on public roads can happen. However, with a company like Hyundai backing the startup, we have no doubt that Motional will be able to identify any issues early on, get to work on resolving them, and launch the tech for public use soon enough.