Autonomous vehicles, or robotaxis, operate through a system of sensors, 3D cameras and mapping technologies and are perhaps more conceivable than the “Woosh” aerial gondola transport system that North Texas claims is totally happening. We first thought they’d come to Dallas in the form of Cruise, the General Motors robotaxi company announced in 2023.
Cruise was scrapped earlier this year, only for Lyft to announce that its autonomous vehicles will be on Dallas streets by 2026. But it appears you may already be able to see a shiny new fleet of autonomous taxis in Downtown Dallas.
Waymo, the robotaxi company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, will begin journeying through Dallas’ “Downtown core” this week, a spokesperson for the company told the Observer. The self-driving cars are already picking up passengers in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, and will launch in Miami, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta later this year.
As for Dallas, though, it may be a while yet before you snag a ride with a robot.
The vehicles are rolling into Dallas as part of Waymo’s road trip training program, where fleets of cars are taken into cities that do not currently have a Waymo program to expose the technology to the diverse weather patterns, city planning styles and quirks of different cities. For now, the vehicles will be manually driven through Dallas to give the cars time to learn the lay of the land.I rolled around in a Waymo as many times as possible this week while in Santa Monica
— Barrett Linburg (@DallasAptGP) September 27, 2024
A truly driverless car 🤯
Five Stars. Will ride again. Hopefully in Dallas pic.twitter.com/Mv3ezKbZeD
Dallas is one of the 10 cities being visited as part of Waymo’s 2025 road trip program. Although the service has been immensely popular in the capital of the Lone Star State, the company tells us there is no imminent plan to roll out a program in Dallas at this time. Waymo will be cruising through downtown through June.
Waymo has been to Dallas before, although this will be the first time its robotaxi product hits the streets of D-Town. In 2023, the company ended a test drive for an autonomous cargo truck program that ran between Dallas and Houston. Unlike this summer’s road trip program, that experiment primarily focused on highway driving.
