The autonomous vehicle story in Fort Worth looks nothing like the one in Dallas, and the difference is cargo.
While four companies compete to carry passengers on Dallas streets, the driverless vehicles that matter most to Tarrant County are trucks. Aurora operates driverless freight routes running from Fort Worth to El Paso and from Fort Worth to Phoenix, alongside lanes connecting Dallas to Houston and Laredo to Dallas.
In May, Aurora signed an agreement with the distributor McLane to run driverless truck routes in Texas, extending the commercial side of that business beyond pilot freight.
Why the trucks came here first
Long-haul freight is an easier problem than city driving. A truck on an interstate spends most of its time in one lane at a steady speed, with no pedestrians, no cyclists, no unprotected left turns and no cars reversing out of driveways. The hard parts, the first and last miles, can be handed to a human driver at a terminal.
Texas also has the routes. The state's autonomous freight testing has concentrated on three corridors: Dallas-Fort Worth, the Dallas to Houston lane, and the developing Austin to San Antonio stretch.
