A white car idles in front of Terry Black’s Barbecue on Barton Springs Road, a narrow two-lane street congested even in normal conditions. It hesitates, like a mouse in a maze, suddenly confronted with a dead end during a lab experiment. Thirty seconds become a minute, then two, as cars accumulate behind it. A frustrated driver honks, but the vehicle is impervious to shaming—because its driver’s seat is empty.
In June, the local barbecue joint shared a video of a driverless Tesla taxi navigating its tight lot just behind a Waymo. “Our parking lot is essentially the final boss,” joked the eatery’s caption, referencing the foot traffic, tight space, and passing cars that baffle the robots. Brisket and autonomous vehicles: a collision of two Texas icons.
Over the last decade, thanks to the city’s tech-friendly vibe and a 2017 Texas law that blocks local governments from regulating autonomous vehicles (AVs), Austin has become a major test site for driverless tech, with no practical way for citizens to opt out. The tech is so ubiquitous here that former Mayor Steve Adler once called Austin the “Kitty Hawk of driverless cars.” Most recently, Tesla rolled out its version of the service in June 2025, and it just might be the most turbulent launch yet. The trend begs the question: How did Austinites become AV guinea pigs in the first place?
Back in 2016, when a tangle of local rules drove Uber out of Texas, state lawmakers intervened to bring the company back, standardizing rideshare regulations in the process. That legislation became the blueprint for a new bill designed to welcome driverless cars.
Senate Bill 2205, authored by State Sen. Kelly Hancock and co-authored by Sen. Robert Nichols, aimed to avoid the kind of regulatory friction that had driven out Uber—while signaling to developers that Texas wouldn’t suddenly pull the plug on AVs. That law prohibited local governments from regulating autonomous vehicles and explicitly allowed driverless cars to operate on Texas roads without a human driver. Other states later adopted similar, innovation-friendly laws, but many companies were already descending on the Lone Star State.
“If we had tried to anticipate everything and then apply it to that bill, I don’t know that [these companies] would have come to Texas to try to work this stuff out,” explains Nichols.
Nichols also contributed to SB 2807, a new law that takes effect Sept. 1, and requires commercial and freight AVs to obtain permits from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles in accordance with a set of yet-to-be-determined standards. For the first time, AV companies must report accidents—a notable shift in a state where they’ve long operated with minimal transparency.
“We studied the legislation we passed in 2017 and realized: We fixed it so nobody can really regulate them,” says Nichols. For him, the new bill seeks to pull back some of the free rein Texas has long given to AV developers.
For years, the driverless car industry has boomed in Austin with little oversight. In 2022, after a successful debut in San Francisco, General Motors dispatched its second fleet of driverless Cruise vehicles to Austin. The diminutive orange-and-white cars were almost aggressively cute, bearing non-human names like “Basil” and “Eggs Benedict”—as if engineered to preempt any comparison to Christine, the 1983 horror film about a murderous 1958 Plymouth Fury.
By then, Google had been testing what would become Waymo (its AV offering and Cruise’s top competitor) in Austin for years. In 2023, Volkswagen launched a pilot AV fleet in the city. But Cruise was first to launch a commercial AV service. The starting pistol had been fired.
Ten months after launching in Texas, a Cruise car hit and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco. Disappearing abruptly from Austin streets, the company recalled 950 vehicles nationwide due to regulatory action. But even before that, the tech startup had been hitting potholes.
Cruise’s AVs were designed with a “better safe than sorry” approach: If something seemed off, they simply stopped rather than risk a mistake. While prudent in theory, this created new problems in Austin’s irregular, traffic-prone streets. Residents reported cars impeding emergency vehicles and blocking construction. Coupled with college-town mischief—students found that touching a handle or tossing a hat over a sensor could freeze a car—it was a recipe for gridlock.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s fleet of sleek Lidar-equipped cars has quietly taken over Austin. Without a public vote or citywide announcement, the cars just arrived. And now, they’re everywhere. By March 2025, more than 20% of Uber trips were by driverless car, sidelining human workers already strained by predatory employment terms. It’s a new kind of displacement, powered by algorithm.
In San Francisco, public backlash has been dramatic, with first responders vocally citing incidents of interference with emergency response and the San Francisco City Attorney filing a legal challenge against the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) decision to expand robotaxi services. However, Austin has seen less resistance to the cars. Locals have grumbled, but there’s been no formal, legal pushback, and rideshare users have been much quicker to embrace Waymos here than in San Francisco, according to data from Bloomberg.
Amid the humorous slipups and stalled vehicles, AV companies operating here have steered clear of major mishaps. But that could soon change. Unlike the rigorously safety-tested Waymos, Tesla’s camera-based self-driving tech has experts worried.
“Tesla is in a class of its own in self-driving cars. It’s really terrible,” says Dan O’Dowd, founder of The Dawn Project, a public safety advocacy group. “There have already been 50 fatalities with the self-driving Tesla cars… Waymo has never caused a serious accident.”
Tesla launched its driverless taxi service in Austin just weeks before a new Texas law regulating autonomous vehicles goes into effect—ignoring a letter from state lawmakers urging the company to delay. Shortly after the launch, a trial began over the death of Naibel Benavidez, who was killed when a Tesla blew through a Florida stop sign while using the same technology powering the Tesla taxi fleet right here in Austin.
And while the new law theoretically gives the state a legal mechanism by which to bar unsafe vehicles from the streets, it remains unclear what distinguishes a road-ready self-driving car.
“Elon Musk is using the public to do his testing,” says O’Dowd. “You have to sign a waiver that you understand it’s your fault if you have an accident, and not the car’s. But the pedestrians didn’t sign off on it. The guy coming the other direction, staying in his own lane and doing everything right, didn’t sign off.”
In the absence of clear state standards, a crowded barbecue joint parking lot is the closest thing Austin has to an official road test.
Road Rules
Autonomous vehicles’ presence in the capital city continues to grow.
59
Fatalities involving Tesla’s self-driving systems, as of August 2025, per tesladeaths.com
20%
Portion of Austin Uber trips taken via Waymo driverless cars.
92%
Reduction in bodily injury claims reported by Waymo compared to human drivers.
120
Number of driverless Waymo and Tesla vehicles on the road in Austin.
Great Job Rose McMackin & the Team @ Austin Monthly Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
