- Austin and Miami drivers are sharing their roads with fully autonomous vehicles for the first time.
- Argo AI, a Pittsburgh driverless car company, announced the new fleet on 17 May.
- Phoenix, Arizona witnessed the rollout of fully driverless taxis by rival Waymo in March.
Fully driverless cars without a human safety driver have hit the streets of Austin, Texas. and Miami, Florida, autonomous vehicle tech company Argo AI announced May 17.
The news makes Austin and Miami two early adopters of fully driverless car technology in urban centers.
Pittsburgh-based Argo AI is also currently testing its Argo autonomy platform in four other American cities — Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Palo Alto — and in two German cities, Munich and Hamburg. The firm implements self-driving tech, comprising lidar, sensors, and mapping software, into Ford and Volkswagen vehicles and is backed by the two automakers.
It isn't clear how many people regularly use services that involve Argo AI's vehicles, but the firm says its "service coverage" encompasses 2 million Americans and it has an eventual goal to reach over 15 million customers.
"From day one, we set out to tackle the hardest miles to drive — in multiple cities — because that's where the density of customer demand is," the Argo AI CEO and founder Bryan Salesky said in a statement.
The fully driverless cars in Austin and Miami will operate as part of the company's partnerships with ride-hailing service Lyft and Walmart's delivery service to offer driverless taxi rides and autonomous grocery delivery respectively.
2022 has become the year that several AV companies bring their driverless tech from suburban neighborhoods into major American cities. Argo AI rival Waymo, an Alphabet-owned tech company which leads the field in driverless ride-hailing services, has made similar strides.
In March this year, it announced that its fleet of fully autonomous cars was ready in downtown Phoenix, Arizona for customers in its early rider program, and to San Francisco, California for Waymo employees. Waymo's driverless taxi services have been available in parts of the Phoenix suburbs for several years.
Driverless tech firm Cruise opened its fleet of fully driverless vehicles up to the San Francisco public in February, chief technology officer and cofounder Kyle Vogt said.
Self-driving cars have faced significant scrutiny amid their hype. In 2018, a safety driver was charged with criminal negligence after an Uber self-driving car fatally hit a pedestrian in Arizona, and Uber was found partly responsible by the National Transportation Safety Board. Uber later shut down its AV tech development completely.
Argo AI said that it worked with the safety certifier TÜV SÜD to assess its AV technology. Under Texas law, AV cars are required to have video recording cameras installed and manufacturers can be held responsible for collisions or traffic violations.