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Many have seen the vehicles being tested, and more are coming.
After two months of sharing the roads with Google’s self-driving cars, Austinites seem to have embraced the automated vehicles as part of the city’s “keep Austin weird” identity.
“They seem really cool,” said Jenna Martin, a resident of the Mueller neighborhood in East Austin who said she sees the self-driving cars on her street up to five times on days when she’s home. “They’re here all the time.”
The cars are the first models of the Google self-driving cars to be tested outside of California, where the company has for years test-driven the cars in its Mountain View headquarters and up and down the state’s highways.
In the next few weeks, prototypes of the company’s new,
smaller self-driving cars will arrive in Austin and begin driving on the roads (with humans still aboard in case of the need for manual driving), but the company has been testing its Lexus RX450H SUV models in Austin for some time.
Last week, a Google car was spotted outside of City Hall, where council members Ann Kitchen, Don Zimmerman and Sheri Gallo posed for a picture with it.
The white Lexus SUV models of Google’s self-driving cars look much like any other car on the road, but they have a small spinning dome on their roofs and mounted sensors on all sides of the vehicle. There’s also the Google logo on the side of the car.
They have been spotted in several areas around town — near the Interstate 35 service road downtown, in the Mueller neighborhood, on Oltorf Street in South Austin.
For the most part, Austinites don’t have the fears about automated cars that one might expect. They’re more curious and hopeful about the concept’s potential.
Stephen C. Webster said he saw one of Google’s self-driving cars while sitting behind it in traffic on South First Street a few weeks ago. Google’s vehicle, he said, drove like a “normal car” and accelerated and decelerated more smoothly than others in traffic.
Or as Mihir Kothari, another Austin resident who stumbled upon a self-driving car on the road, said, “They probably drove better than (Austin) drivers.”
Google cars have been in 16 crashes since the company began testing in 2009 — mostly fender benders — and in every case a human driver was at fault, the company told The New York Times.
Each Google car has a Web address etched onto the back of the vehicle for drivers to give feedback on how the cars drove.
Google has pitched the self-driving car as the solution to many woes that have increasingly affected the Austin area in recent years, such as increasing road safety issues and the need for accessible transportation.
Once, while walking his dog in Lake Park in the Mueller neighborhood, Lewis Weil saw people stepping off the sidewalk and into the street to avoid being doused by the park’s sprinkler system. The self-driving car was passing by at the same time, Weil said, and slowed to a crawl when people started walking into the street.
“I felt safer for me and my leashed dog than I do near many drivers,” Weil said.
Google has not said when it will start testing fully driverless cars — without human drivers aboard — but even then, people who have seen the cars on the roads say they would still be comfortable driving next to them.
And though generally accepting of the technology, some Austinites are still adjusting to the fact that they are out there.
“I don’t even think Marty McFly (from the ‘Back to the Future’ films) could have predicted this one,” said downtown resident Faraz Hemani.