Austinites used to seeing driverless cars zipping around city streets will now have the added pleasure of witnessing their new rollout — this time literally without drivers (backup or otherwise).
Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, started testing fully autonomous vehicles in Austin neighborhoods Wednesday, according to a social media announcement by Saswat Panigrahi. The company will conduct the testing in 43 square miles of central Austin, including downtown, Barton Hills, Riverside, East Austin, and Hyde Park.
The Silicon Valley company will start providing rides to its employees before opening the service to the public at some point in the future. Waymo has been operating its operating its vehicles, until now with backup humans aboard, in the city since 2015. AV Ride and ADMT Volkswagen also have autonomous vehicles on Austin streets, as did Cruise until it suspended its operations nationwide in October with apparent plans to return after it has "restored public trust" following several reported incidents with its robotaxis in Austin and elsewhere
After Cruise suspended operations, Austin officials discussed the ways in which the city is hampered from enforcing local traffic laws on autonomous vehicles and holding them accountable for traffic violations and other incidents. A 2017 state law strips local municipalities of the authority to regulate autonomous vehicles. Companies that operate them are not obligated to disclose a lot of information that would help address safety and other issues already amply in evidence from initial deployments.
“The Waymo Driver experienced 85% fewer crashes that led to injuries and 57% fewer crashes reported to police than comparable human driving benchmarks over 7.1 million miles of fully autonomous driving” — 17 fewer injuries and 20 fewer police-reported crashes than would be the case for human drivers in the same number of miles — according to the company.
Waymo already has fully autonomous vehicles operating in San Francisco and Phoenix and is testing them in Los Angeles County.
"The Waymo Driver continues to generalize well to new environments. Our maturing operations in Austin builds on over 15 years’ experience we’ve carefully built driving autonomously across the U.S.," said Panigrahi. "Our disciplined deployment in Texas’ capital brings us one step closer to safely delivering the benefits of fully autonomous driving to many more people.
Waymo representatives are scheduled to participate in several SXSW 2024 events next week.
