Waymo is opening its fully driverless ride-hailing service to the public in Houston, bringing all-electric autonomous vehicles to city streets after more than six months of testing.
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The Alphabet-owned company says a couple dozen fully autonomous vehicles are ready to start picking up passengers across a 25–square-mile service area that includes Montrose, River Oaks, downtown and the Heights. Similar public launches on Tuesday are also rolling out in Dallas and San Antonio.
How the driverless cars “see” Houston
For some people, watching a car roll by with no one in the driver’s seat is still unnerving.
“The cameras everywhere and then the spinny stuff, like, it makes me nervous almost,” said Houstonian Christina Kalonji, who recently spotted a Waymo car on the street.
Waymo says that array of hardware is exactly what’s meant to keep riders and other road users safe. Each vehicle is equipped with:
- 29 cameras
- 6 radars
- 5 lidars
- 4 audio receivers — essentially, the “ears” of the car that hear things like sirens
“This creates a complex but really understandable picture for Waymo in understanding the world around it,” said spokesperson Mark Lewis. “The Waymo driver is always driving, it’s always in control of your routing and destination, it does all those calculations on board.”
Those sensors constantly feed data to onboard computers that make real-time driving decisions, picking routes based on the environment and live traffic conditions.
Built for Texas conditions
One big question in Houston: can the cars handle the state’s fast-changing, often extreme weather?
“As people always say with the weather in Texas, it can change in minutes and be crazy stormy and then sunny,” KPRC 2’s Bryce Newberry asked Lewis during a ride-along. “What kind of training does the car have for that?”
“We understand Texas weather. We’ve been in Austin for more than a year,” Lewis said, adding that the mix of sensors is designed to perform in harsh conditions, with different systems compensating for one another in rain, low visibility or bright sun. “We’re not just relying on cameras like human eyes. We’re understanding through radar. We’re understand through lidar and can oftentimes see through the weather."
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Safety questions and federal scrutiny
Waymo’s expansion in Texas comes as federal safety regulators are taking a closer look at the autonomous vehicles.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating Waymo after video from Austin showed some of the company’s vehicles driving past school buses with stop arms extended — a situation the company says it is addressing through software updates.
“We take those incidents very seriously. Safety is our top priority, especially the safety of children and pedestrians. We’re evaluating every one of those events and developing fixes to address them. And we have already incorporated many changes to our software to dramatically improve our performance. And we are working with the Austin Independent School District to collect data,” Dr. Mauricio Peña, Waymo’s chief safety officer, said during an early February hearing on Capitol Hill.
In Houston, KPRC 2 cameras recently captured Waymo vehicles stacked up at a railroad crossing in northeast Houston. The company says its detailed mapping allows the cars to reroute when they encounter blockages or unusual situations.
“Even though you’re in one vehicle and you encounter something, the learnings from that get applied to the whole fleet,” Lewis said. “That is AI at work,” he confirmed.
Push for national rules on autonomous vehicles
While Texas has become a hotbed for testing and deploying self-driving technology — with public Waymo rides already running in Austin since last year — federal rules are still playing catch-up.
“AVs can’t just stop at Texas’ border,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R–TX), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, during a recent hearing on Capitol Hill. “We need a consistent federal framework to ensure uniform safety standards, liability clarity, and consumer confidence.”
Supporters of autonomous technology often point to the toll of human driving mistakes. In 2023, federal data show:
- 12,429 people died in alcohol-impaired crashes
- 3,275 people were killed in distracted driving crashes
“Autonomous technologies never drive drunk. Autonomous technologies, they don’t text while driving,” Cruz said. “Expanding AV deployment offers real, measurable opportunities to reduce these deadly behaviors and to improve safety on our highways."
Houston reactions: curiosity and caution
Even with the possibility of safer roads, some Houstonians say they need to see how the cars perform before they’ll feel at ease riding in one.
“The idea of a car driving without there ever being any, like, hard-stop human there is a little scary to me,” Kalonji said. “It’s innovative. Houston has never seen it before. I don’t know as a regular rideshare user if I would use it."
Waymo says human help is still close at hand. During KPRC 2’s ride-along, after we lingered in the car at our drop-off location to ask more questions, a member of the company’s support team suddenly came over the in-car audio to check whether everything was OK.
There is a button inside the vehicle that riders can press at any time to reach a live support agent, available 24/7. The vehicles also have a QR code for law enforcement to scan in the event of an emergency.
How to start riding in Houston
To get a ride in a Waymo vehicle in Houston, you’ll need the Waymo app and an invitation:
- People who already have the app or joined the Houston-area waitlist may start receiving invite codes as part of the rollout.
- Waymo says it plans to keep adding more riders every day for months to come, as additional cars are deployed into the local fleet.
For now, trips are limited to the company’s current Houston service area, but Waymo says it expects coverage and capacity to grow as the rollout continues.