It's just a job posting, but the new gig that Ford posted provides a strong hint that the auto giant will bring its self-driving technologies to Austin in the near future.
Ford's job posting, first reported in TechCrunch, calls for "candidates to join our growing autonomous vehicle business team."
Whoever is hired will be tasked with developing the market for a business launch, managing events and supporting local AV media interviews.
That sounds an awful lot like Ford plans to put an autonomous vehicle fleet on Austin streets, as Google and Waymo have done before it.
If realized, Austin would be Ford's fifth city for AV testing. It's already in Detroit, Miami, Pittsburgh and Washington D.C.
The post on TechCrunch suggests Ford would likely have Argo AI, a Pittsburgh company it has invested in, to map the city with AV cars before Ford tests business cases with local companies.
Google has been working on autonomous cars since at least 2009. Austin has been home to self-driving car testing since 2015 when Google announced publicly it had started testing its cars in Austin -- with human drives inside to take over if needed.
A year later, Google revealed that Austin was also home to the first truly driverless car ride -- one that happened without a test driver and on city streets (not a test track). The rider, Steve Mahan, is the former CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center. Mahan, who is legally blind, rode for about 10 minutes.
And there's more the Austin's self-driving history.
Last year, Capital Metro, Austin's bus transit company, announced the city would be home to the nation's first autonomous bus pilot project.
In January this year, the Texas Department of Transportation announced it had created a task force to help manage and oversee autonomous vehicle use in the state. And that follows a chain of autonomous vehicle-friendly policy that has allowed companies to test and drive the cars on state roads as long as they meet a few basic standards, such as having adequate insurance and video-monitoring capabilities.
