Editor's note: As of March 4, Uber customers could be picked up by a Waymo autonomous vehicle if they opt in. The company says the fleet of Waymo vehicles in Austin will be small to start, but will scale to several hundred over the next few years.
Eight years after former Austin Mayor Steve Adler declared Austin the “Kitty Hawk of driverless cars,” autonomous vehicles can be spotted all over the city, but most of the public can't ride in them yet.
This is set to change with a collaboration between Uber and Alphabet’s self-driving car company, Waymo, which completed the first fully driverless ride on Austin roads in 2015 and prompted Adler’s remark. Waymo rides have been available to a small number of early testers since October, but more riders will soon be able to hail self-driving cars through the Uber app.
Last week, Waymo announced customers can set their ride preferences to include autonomous vehicles on the app. Joining the "interest" list will increase riders’ chances of hailing a driverless car when the service goes public. Uber and Waymo announced in September that it would be available early this year.
Waymo’s service area covers 37 square miles of the city, stretching from Hyde Park to St. Edward’s University, but it's not the only company with driverless cars on the road. According to Austin Transportation and Public Works, there are five known autonomous vehicle operators here.
Avride, Volkswagen’s ADMT and Amazon’s Zoox are in the testing phase, deploying cars around Austin, typically accompanied by safety drivers, to gather data to improve mobility and safety. An additional company, Motional, is in an early mapping phase.
In a statement announcing its arrival in Austin, Zoox said the city’s traffic light structure, railway crossings and thunderstorms will provide valuable training for its fleet of robotaxis. Austin-based Avride, whose little white robots already deliver food downtown through Uber Eats, plans to roll out robotaxis later this year.
Elon Musk also announced last month that Tesla would be “launching unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service” in Austin this June.
State law prohibits local governments from regulating autonomous vehicles in their cities, but Austin’s Transportation and Public Works Department said it has an “open line of communication” with multiple AV operators in Austin and actively collects information about any public safety incidents.
The department has recorded 79 incidents since July 2023 from city departments and 311 service requests. Twenty-three are classified as “near misses,” 18 safety concerns and 15 reports of blocking traffic.
Fifty-three of these incidents involved Cruise, which released over 100 driverless cars in Austin in September 2022. It operated for a little over a year before halting operations nationwide after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its testing license. General Motors announced in December that it was shutting down the Cruise robotaxi project nationally.
Waymo data show that compared to human-operated vehicles, its driverless vehicles have been involved in 84% fewer crashes strong enough to deploy airbags and 73% fewer injury-causing crashes.
