Is there some reason why internet search companies are so attracted to self driving cars?
Business diversification. Yandex has its own taxi service (btw they've bought Uber on territory of CIS). Yandex just like Google is an ad selling company (90%+ of their revenue is from selling ads), and tracking users' geo location is the way to sell more expensive ads. They also charge money for rides and take fees, so ad selling + fees = big money if they can scale taxi service in the future.