AUSTIN, Texas — In the last several years, autonomous rideshares have exploded in Texas, particularly in the city of Austin. The Waymo fleet is the most popular and the only one you can regularly book in major cities like Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and even Houston.
The newest fleet to roll out in Austin is an Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company called Zoox. It began deploying its driverless cars in the capital city in March. Testing initially was restricted to employees.
According to the City of Austin, there are six self-driving car companies in the city. ADMT, Avride and Zoox are still in the testing phase; Motional is in the mapping phase; and Tesla and Waymo have been deployed. However, the Tesla-owned robotaxi is not serving everyday customers.
A research scientist at the Center for Autonomy at the University of Texas at Austin said there are two primary reasons companies selected Texas for testing.
“Probably the weather, because a lot of the times, you know, you probably haven’t seen any Waymo cars or Zoox cars deployed in, you know, adverse weather conditions like maybe areas where there’s a lot of snow. So obviously we don’t get any snow pretty much in Texas. So that’s probably one reason. And then the other one is, also because of cost,” said Neel Bhatt.
Self-driving freight trucks in Texas are mainly being tested across three corridors: Dallas-Fort Worth, the Dallas-Houston freight lane and the developing Austin-San Antonio corridor, according to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).
Spectrum News reached out to TxDOT, and a spokesperson left us the following statement regarding self-driving cars:
“Connected and autonomous vehicles are driving significant safety and economic growth advancements across Texas. TxDOT’s role is to work with autonomous vehicle (AV) companies on what is needed to ensure the state’s infrastructure is prepared for the safe and efficient roll out of AVs.”