Before the Robotaxis Reached Dallas, Frisco Ran the First Driverless Pilot in Texas

Long before Tesla and Waymo were competing for riders in Dallas, the first autonomous vehicles carrying passengers in Texas were running in Frisco.

In July 2018, the city's North Platinum Corridor hosted a pilot program with the company Drive.ai, the first of its kind in the state. The vehicles ran a fixed route between Hall Park, The Star and Frisco Station, and over the course of the pilot completed more than 3,000 trips carrying close to 5,000 riders.

That was eight years ago, in a market where the phrase driverless car still sounded speculative.

What has happened since

The technology moved on, and it moved south.

Waymo now runs driverless service in Dallas between Bishop Arts and Love Field. Tesla put autonomous Model Y vehicles into a zone covering Highland Park, Uptown and parts of central north Dallas in April. Amazon's Zoox has been mapping Dallas since March and is testing with safety operators aboard. Uber, with Austin-based Avride, launched there in December.

None of those service areas currently reach Frisco.

Why the pilot still matters

The Drive.ai program was small, fixed-route and heavily supervised. It was not a robotaxi service in the sense that word now means.

What it did was establish that a Texas city could host autonomous passenger vehicles on public roads without waiting for the state or federal government to build a framework first, and that a suburban development corridor was a workable testbed: predictable routes, willing riders and destinations close enough together to make short trips useful.

That corridor between Hall Park, The Star and Frisco Station is denser now than it was in 2018, which is precisely the geography these services eventually want. Frisco proved the concept in a place the industry has not yet come back to.

Sources

https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/07/driverless-car-service-set-begin-north-texas-summer/

https://www.friscotexas.gov/1573/Driverless-Car-Pilot-Program

https://dallasinnovates.com/tesla-launches-robotaxis-in-dallas-and-houston/