A fleet of self-driving Volkswagen ID Buzz EVs will launch in Austin, Texas, in July, marking the first autonomous driving test for Volkswagen in the U.S. After the pilot program, Volkswagen wants to keep Austin weird by deploying its self-driving EVs throughout the Texas capital by 2026, including downtown where congestion and traffic are at some of the highest levels in the city.
Depending on the outcome of these tests, Volkswagen says it will use the fleet of AVs for ride hailing and the delivery of goods in Austin within the next three years. The test fleet is made up of 10 Volkswagen ID Buzz vans outfitted with an array of sensors (cameras, radar and lidar) from Mobileye, the company that VW partnered with to develop its self-driving vehicles.
The self-driving vehicles are allegedly ready for SAE Level 4 operation, which is completely self-driving in limited conditions along specific routes or locations. That’s all well and good, except that public roads are unpredictable. And public roads in Texas — certainly Austin — are subject to varying levels of heavy traffic and driver behavior. So, it’s a good thing that the VW ID Buzz EVs will have a human driver aboard at all times, at least, during the initial test starting in July.
Volkswagen’s partnership with Mobileye is a “strategic shift” away from Ford’s self-driving tech company, Argo, according to Reuters, which had been working with VW prior to shutting down. Volkswagen subsumed Argo’s Austin hub, as well as nearly 100 employees from the defunct company, which had already been conducting AV tests in Austin. These resources will form part of a new VW subsidiary that’ll handle the rollout of the carmaker’s self-driving cars in the U.S., based out of Belmont, California and Austin, Texas.
As Reuters reports, part of the reason Austin is such an attractive location for AV trials is that it has some of the least restrictive regulations on self-driving cars. Once testing is underway, Volkswagen plans to expand to “at least four more American cities.”
Maybe San Francisco is one of them, where self-driving cars have caused mayhem and added to the California city’s traffic woes. At least in Austin, the VW pilot program will include actual drivers to make sure the self-driving ID Buzz EVs don’t stall in the middle of the busy, fast-paced Austin roads, or get in the way of emergency vehicles or, worse yet, cause their own accidents.
