Austin may be fertile ground for Google test

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Google's self-driving cars aren't yet ready to hit the road as robotic taxis. But the rapid rollout of prototypes this summer for testing in Austin, Texas, suggests that the company may be zeroing in on a city for when that day arrives.

Google, which now operates under a holding company called Alphabet Inc., sent an experimental self-driving car to Austin in early July. It was the first extended trip outside California for one of Google's cars, which have now logged 1.2 million miles in autonomous mode since the project began in 2009.

Three months later, Google has brought 14 self-driving vehicles to Austin -- nearly one-third of its current testing fleet, according to the project's monthly report.

That suggests Google may be thinking of choosing Austin for a pilot project that puts its cars in public hands. Residents of the trend-setting state capital and college town have been quick to embrace services such as Uber and Car2Go that Google may emulate with its podlike cars.

Texas has been hesitant to regulate self-driving cars. Google employs hundreds of people in Austin and has used the city as a proving ground. Blizzards, a daunting challenge for self-driving cars, are rare.

And the self-contained nature of Austin may better lend itself to on-demand robocars than a sprawling metropolitan area such as San Francisco, says Thomas Gage, an autonomous-driving expert who is CEO of Marconi Pacific, a technology consultancy in suburban Washington.

"If the goal is to offer mobility as a service," Gage said, "it seems logical that Google would do it the same way Uber has rolled out mobility as a service: market by market."

There are signs of a growing maturity; last month, Google hired John Krafcik, a former president of TrueCar Inc. and CEO of Hyundai Motor America, to manage the project. Still, Google says it hasn't yet decided how to commercialize the technology.

"It remains open exactly how we're going to roll it out," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at a late September press event. "In the near term, there's a real upshot of making it a service, which enables a lot of people to try it out."

To begin testing this summer, Google mapped two small areas near downtown Austin, including Mueller, a 700-acre "mixed-use urban village" built on the site of a former municipal airport. With a whimsical streak, Google has tried to fit into the quirky city, where a popular bumper sticker reads: "Keep Austin Weird."

One day in August, Google parked a self-driving prototype at the Thinkery, a children's museum, and asked youngsters what it resembled. (Their answers, Google says, included an owl, an egg and a turtle.) This month, Google is running an art contest called "Paint the Town," promising to plaster the winning entries on the sides of its prototypes.

Google has set a goal of bringing its self-driving cars to market by 2020, perhaps as autonomous taxis. Consumers would use a smartphone to summon a car that would pick them up, drive them to their destination and whiz off to pick up another passenger.

A human-operated version of that model has worked well for Car2Go. The car-sharing service, owned by Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler AG, used Austin as a test market when it came to the U.S. in 2009 and has its U.S. headquarters there.

Car2Go has 368 Smart ForTwo city cars in a 28-square-mile swath of central Austin, with 55,000 registered users, more than any U.S. city but Seattle. Last year Daimler bought an Austin startup called Ridescout, which helps people plan trips using multiple modes of transportation, including cars, bicycles and mass transit.

"Austin has become a hotbed for mobility services," said Susan Shaheen, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in car-sharing and bike-sharing services. "Some people have started talking about Austin becoming almost like Silicon Valley when it comes to mobility."

When it started testing in Austin, Google said its move was to help engineers improve its cars, because a change of scenery would train them for new conditions.

Austin has a large deer population, for one thing, and it has more rain, snow and hail than the Bay Area. Human driving habits also vary by city, Jaime Waydo, a systems engineer on the project, said at Google's press event last month, and road signs are different, too. Austin mounts its traffic lights horizontally, not vertically.

Yet there are other reasons Google felt at home in Austin.

Google has 200 employees at offices in Austin, according to the Austin Business Journal, and Austin is one of the test markets for Google Fiber, the company's high-speed Internet service.

"When we decided we wanted to expand our testing program to learn and gain more experience outside of California, Austin had lots of really attractive things going for it," said a Google spokesman. "Austin has always been extremely welcoming to Google and to innovation of all kinds."

No bills restricting autonomous vehicles have cleared the Texas Legislature, and regulators have refrained from writing any new rules.

So far, Texas has concluded that its existing regulations are sufficient. The person sitting in the driver's seat is deemed responsible for the car, even if that person isn't actually driving, said Duncan Stewart, a researcher at the University of Texas and a former engineer at the Texas Department of Transportation.

"This is Texas," Stewart said. "There is a general tendency in our state to not get in industry's way if we can help it."