Waymo starts testing fully autonomous vehicles in Austin

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company, has begun testing its fully autonomous cars in Austin with no driver behind the wheel.

The company started testing fully autonomous vehicles in certain areas of the city on Wednesday. According to an announcement from Waymo's chief product officer Saswat Panigrahi on social media, the cars will continue being tested across 43 square miles of Austin, covering the following areas: downtown, Barton Hills, Riverside, east Austin, Hyde Park and more.

Waymo will start providing rides to its employees before opening Waymo One to members of the public at a later date, a release from the company noted.

The California-based company already has some roots in Austin. In 2015, a Waymo rider made history by becoming the first member of the public to take a ride in a fully autonomous car, which drove down a public street in Austin.

The company already has fully autonomous vehicles operating in San Francisco and Phoenix, and they're being tested in Los Angeles County. Passengers in San Francisco and Phoenix can take rides with no driver in the vehicle with them.

According to Waymo, "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." This translates to 17 fewer injuries and 20 fewer police-reported crashes compared to if human drivers had covered the same number of miles, Waymo noted.

Shortly after the launch of the fully autonomous vehicles in Austin, Waymo will join SXSW next week at the following events:

• Waymo co-CEO, Tekedra Mawakana, will participate in a featured session to discuss what it takes to scale an autonomous ride-hail service in multiple cities, and our exciting next steps in Austin.
• Waymo’s head of User Experience, Lauren Schwendimann, will moderate a panel where key disability advocates will discuss benefits of autonomous vehicles for the accessibility community.

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. Our disciplined deployment in Texas’ capital brings us one step closer to safely delivering the benefits of fully autonomous driving to many more people.

Saswat Panigrahi, chief product officer of Waymo

Another autonomous vehicle company, Cruise, suspended its operations last October, saying it would work to "rebuild public trust" following issues with its driverless cars.

Cruise's fleet made up roughly 80% of the AVs roaming across Austin’s streets at the time.