Waymo expands to Texas's biggest cities after New York setback

When one door closes, Waymo opens three. Alphabet's self-driving unit has announced a commercial robotaxi service in three of Texas's largest cities: Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. The move looks like a strategic pivot after the company ran into serious regulatory obstacles trying to enter the New York market.

New York was a cold shower for Waymo. A city that could have been a global showcase for the technology turned out to be a fortress of bureaucratic barriers. New York authorities, taxi unions and community organizations built a multi-layered system of restrictions that effectively blocked a full-scale launch of a driverless service. For a company used to relatively light regulation in California and Arizona, it was a painful lesson: technological superiority does not guarantee market access.

Texas is a completely different story. The state has long cast itself as a territory of technological freedom and minimal government intervention. As far back as 2017 it passed one of the most liberal autonomous vehicle laws in the country, which does not require a human driver in the vehicle and does not impose strict limits on operating zones. Governor Greg Abbott has repeatedly said he wants to make Texas the world capital of driverless transport, and Waymo's arrival fits that strategy neatly.

But it is not only about the regulatory climate. Texas's big metros have traits that make them nearly ideal for robotaxis. Houston, Dallas and San Antonio are cities built around the car: wide multi-lane arterials, huge distances between districts, chronically thin public transit, and a hot climate in which walking is more an ordeal than a pleasure. People here spend more time behind the wheel, on average, than in almost any other region of the country. Demand for convenient transport is enormous, and the road infrastructure is far easier for autonomous systems to navigate than the chaotic streets of Manhattan.

The scale of the expansion is striking. The combined population of the three Texas metro areas exceeds 15 million people. It is the largest simultaneous expansion of Waymo's footprint in the company's history. Until now, the service has operated mainly in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, growing gradually, district by district. The Texas push looks like a fundamentally new approach: an attempt to prove the technology is ready for rapid scaling, not just cautious pilot projects.

For competitors, this is an alarming signal. Cruise, General Motors' subsidiary, has still not recovered from the San Francisco crash scandal and the suspension of operations that followed. Chinese players such as Baidu Apollo dominate their home market but have no access to American cities. Tesla's Full Self-Driving program remains a Level 2 autonomy system that requires constant driver supervision. Waymo, in effect, remains the only player in the US able to offer fully driverless commercial rides at the scale of several major cities at once.

Still, the challenges have not gone away. Texas heat, with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, creates extreme conditions for sensors and electronics. Flash floods that regularly paralyze Houston will be a serious test for navigation systems. And local drivers, to put it mildly, are not known for a conservative driving style: Texas highways are famous for high speeds and aggressive traffic. Every incident involving a robotaxi will inevitably come under the microscope of public attention.

Waymo's Texas strategy reveals a broader trend in the autonomous vehicle industry. Companies increasingly pick not the most prestigious markets but the most convenient ones: those where the regulatory environment is favorable, the infrastructure fits and the population is open to experimentation. New York can wait. The future of driverless transport in America, it seems, will begin not on Fifth Avenue but on Texas freeways, and there is a certain inexorable logic to that.