By otakuyassine3@gmail.com 
As I went to shake Roger Bonnecaze’s hand after our interview, something strange happened. The autonomous vehicle that had my backpack with my laptop and notebook in it had driven off down a leafy west-Austin street. On day one of my weeklong experiment to use only Waymo to get around in the city, the car had stolen my stuff. Bonnecaze, the dean of the University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering, looked on in fascination.
On day one of my weeklong experiment to use only Waymo to get around in the city, the car had stolen my stuff.
Once I shook off my stupor, I phoned Waymo support. “Um, my car just drove off,” I told the customer service agent. “I was in the middle of a four-stop trip, and it just left me on the second stop.” He calmly told me that he understood what had happened, but I was not guaranteed the same vehicle throughout my journey. “Request a ride, and hopefully, you will get the same car,” he said.
I went into the app and requested a car to complete the rest of my journey. The app slowly loaded. “It looks like you have the same car,” the agent said. “I’m seeing a blue backpack behind the driver’s seat.” He was using the camera inside the car to see my things. I breathed a sigh of relief. Had I not gotten the same car, my backpack hopefully would have turned up in Waymo’s lost and found. That wasn’t a sure thing, though. “You got lucky this time,” the customer service representative informed me. Next time, I’d heed the car’s reminder to take all bags, phones, and wallets before exiting.
Texas has become a fertile testing ground for autonomous vehicles—aka AVs. The state is particularly known for its autonomous freight trucks, which are effectively banned in California, but in recent years it has also become a hub for passenger AVs.
GM’s Cruise, another AV taxi service, chose Houston and Dallas as two of its four cities to relaunch driving tests in. Volkswagen, Zoox, and Waymo ride-hailing vehicles are common sightings in Austin. Elon Musk, who moved Tesla’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin in 2021, announced his company’s self-driving Cybercabs (unlike his not-so-self-driving current vehicles) would be available by 2026.
So when Waymo opened its services for a small group of users in a 37-square-mile zone in Austin, I wanted to see what it would be like to use the vehicles to get around for a week—and I invited some Texans along for the experience. In the process, I’d learn that the vehicles could boost the number of electric vehicles on the road and might make our streets a little safer. But they’re not a clear fix for our broken transportation system. Far from it. Questions remain about how they will interact with first responders and if they will simply add more cars to our roads.
Many point to 2017 as a key milestone for AVs in Texas. A state law authored by state Sen. Kelly Hancock allowed “automated vehicles” to be operated without a driver present in the vehicle. It took a hands-off approach to governing the vehicles, enticing companies to test their technology in the state.
When talking about these vehicles, the two common themes seem to be environmental impact and safety. Hancock, a Republican who represents an area that covers much of Fort Worth, told me he sees the vehicles as an important safety tool in a state that has not gone a day without a death on its roads since Nov. 7, 2000. “I don’t think anything’s gonna have more of an impact than the implementation in some form of autonomous vehicles,” he said. “They’re just safer than somebody reading text messages while they’re coming down [I-35].”
Hancock said he hopes that the 2025 Texas legislative session doesn’t add much regulation to AVs in the state, though recent headlines of AVs causing traffic jams or people putting cones on the cars’ sensors have created backlash and might force the Legislature’s hand.
The politics of AVs in the state don’t seem perfectly defined yet, either. Hancock doesn’t see the vehicles as a partisan issue, and neither does state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat who represents the Austin area and sits alongside Hancock on Texas’ Senate Committee on Transportation. “This is cool,” Eckhardt told me as we drove through downtown Austin. It was her first AV ride.
Eckhardt would like to see the upcoming legislative session address questions around how the vehicles interact with first responders, pointing to examples last year of a Cruise AV coming within 6 feet of an ambulance where medical care was being administered and another nearly hitting a firefighter attending to a car crash in Austin. She noted that the state’s lack of regulations has attracted companies, but said at this point it’s “irresponsible” not to have a “statewide standard” for AVs. However, she added that drivers are increasingly distracted and thus dangerous; AVs could help.
Despite the two state senators’ optimism about AV safety, I wanted to put Waymo to the test. After all, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the company for 22 incidents, and the company recalled over 600 vehicles in June. While Waymo doesn’t allow its vehicles to go on highways in Austin, there are plenty of difficult routes throughout the city’s urban core. A ride through local grocery chain H-E-B’s parking lot on a Sunday afternoon offered perhaps the ultimate test.
Everyone had a question about the car. Using Waymo was likely the closest I’ll ever be to being a celebrity—a role I learned I am not suited for.
As the car eased into the store’s lot, it stopped and started. People darted around with their shopping carts. It moved slowly and announced over the speaker system to me, my spouse, and my brother that it was trying to find a place to pull over. It finally did, and we were approached by an H-E-B patron. “Did that thing drive you?” he asked. “Yup,” we told him. “Nah man,” he said, shaking his head and laughing.
Everyone had a question about the car. Using Waymo was likely the closest I’ll ever be to being a celebrity—a role I learned I am not suited for.
After we got what we needed at H-E-B, we ordered our ride. Once we were in the car, it started to move, but stopped suddenly. A woman had come up alongside. She looked at the car with shock and disdain. “Why?” she repeated over and over. I wasn’t yet sure I had an answer for her, but I hoped that I might after a conversation with University of Texas transportation engineering professor Kara Kockelman.
When Kockelman got in the car with two graduate students from her department later that week, she winced. “I don’t like how it keeps the blinker on, ‘dink, dink, dink’ the whole time I’m sitting there,” she said, imitating the blinker sound as we sat at a light. “My husband leaves the blinker on.” I had noticed the car had a tendency to put on its blinker early. So early that at one point, I had worried the car was going to turn the wrong way on a one-way. I realized it planned to make the turn after the intersection. A Waymo spokesperson said that this was the company’s way of being extra “courteous” to other drivers.
A common criticism levied against AVs is that the high investment into the vehicles could have been put toward proven safe, green alternatives to driving like bike, sidewalk, and public transit infrastructure. AVs also raise the question of whether or not people will be more inclined to use car travel if they don’t actually have to drive.
Kockelman said that while the vehicles will not solve the climate crisis, she would like to see average car occupancy jump from 1.5 to 3 people per car, in part by incorporating a ride-pooling option. The idea of cars driving around without passengers concerns her. According to a Waymo spokesperson, when the cars do not have a passenger, they either park or return to the depot for charging or maintenance. The spokesperson added that the company does not have immediate plans to offer a rideshare service similar to Uber Pool, but that it has not been ruled out.
In terms of the vehicles’ climate impact, Waymo uses electric Jaguar I-PACE cars, which Kockelman noted would require a clean energy grid to minimize the environmental impact. Darran Anderson, the Texas Department of Transportation’s director of strategy and innovation, said that the grid question is one facing electric vehicles broadly. But, to him, the potential impact of AVs on safety is most important.
Anderson referenced the 2017 state law, saying that Texas has created “understandable conditions” for AV companies. With these conditions in place, he noted that Waymo, along with autonomous freight truck companies Kodiak, which made its first driverless delivery in July, and Aurora, which plans to go driverless in April 2025, are furthest along in Texas.
At one point during our interview, we pulled over next to a rail station. A group of students that ranged from elementary school–aged to seniors in high school stared in awe. Anderson hopped out to speak with them and began pointing out the various sensors. “I think it’s important for them to know the future,” he said.
I asked one of the kids, who seemed to be elementary school–aged, if he wanted to drive one day. “Drive this?” he asked. “What’s the point?” When I clarified that I meant drive in general, he said he did want to drive one day. His initial response struck me though. He seemed to have already accepted these vehicles as part of his transportation future.
For all ages, the vehicles inspired a sense of awe. As one of my friends remarked, being in the car watching people react to the vehicle was like seeing an old video of people reacting to their first experience with a new technology, like a television or an airplane. Jaws dropped and question marks seemed to float out of their mouths.
Jay Blazek Crossley, the executive director of Farm&City, a nonprofit that in part focuses on road safety, had never ridden in an AV. Blazek Crossley has been at the forefront of calls for safer roads in Texas, and he doesn’t think the state has taken road safety seriously. “Texas state policy is kind of snowflake policy … we can’t quite look our traffic crash problem straight in the eye,” he said.
He is someone who favors alternatives to car travel, so much so that one time he documented his odyssey using various modes of non-car transportation to get from Austin to San Antonio. (There is only one train per day from Austin, the country’s 11th-largest city, to San Antonio, the country’s seventh-largest city. The two cities are separated by roughly 75 miles.)
Blazek Crossley said that there is an element of fun to the vehicles and that they can be part of the solution to making the state’s roads safer. “As soon as possible, I want as many human drivers or humans who don’t want to drive to be able to ride in vehicles where a human isn’t driving,” he said. “Walking and biking are not inherently dangerous activities at all, but the dangerous part is the humans driving cars, and especially humans driving cars on dangerously designed Texas roads.”
As we drove along Blazek Crossley’s commute, he noted it made some turns he might not have. It seemed to avoid some of Austin’s more gnarly arterial roads with higher speed limits in favor of quieter streets. He said that type of finding could help states and cities understand what roads work well. If an AV, with all its data, favors one road, then it might be telling us something.
By the end of the week, I had taken more than 30 rides. The Waymos had their perks. I could answer emails or do a bit of writing. They didn’t speed or zip through red lights. But I missed being outside, riding my bike. So when the week was over, I took a couple of those quieter streets that the Waymos favored on a bike ride to work. When a Waymo pulled up alongside me, I tried to play it cool—but I couldn’t help myself. I craned my neck to look inside.
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