Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI announced it is now operating vehicles without human drivers on public streets in Austin and Miami. It marks a major milestone for the company as it readies to scale its AV operations for commercial use around the world in the coming years.
Last year, Argo, Lyft Inc. (Nasdaq: LYFT) and Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) announced that they plan to put driverless taxis on Austin roads in 2022. The debut date for that service has not been announced.
Today's news from Argo puts it as one of just a handful of AV companies nationally that have deployed vehicles on public roads without human operators riding inside of them.
Expanding on that, Argo co-founder and CEO Bryan Salesky claimed that the company is the first to operate AVs without human drivers in either Miami or Austin. Outside of its headquarters city of Pittsburgh, Argo also conducts testing and or maintains engineering centers in Cranbury, New Jersey; Detroit; Los Angeles; Palo Alto, California; Washington, D.C.; and Munich, Germany.
"From day one, we set out to tackle the hardest miles to drive — in multiple cities — because that’s where the density of customer demand is and where our autonomy platform is developing the intelligence required to scale it into a sustainable business," Salesky said in an announcement.
Now, Argo-equipped vehicles will operate without drivers during daytime business hours in Miami and Austin. Both cities have hosted autonomous pilot programs from Argo for several years, the most recent of which being a goods delivery program in partnership with Walmart Inc., a service that is also offered in the Washington, D.C. area.
"Headlines marking technical milestones will come and go, but what I’m most proud of is we’ve got the people, the processes and the products to come together as a powerful and rapidly growing business," Brett Browning, CTO and executive vice president of product development, said in an online post about the news. "So today, we’ll celebrate going driverless. Tomorrow we push on to the next technical milestone and our ultimate goal: to launch the product at scale."
Argo employs about 1,900 workers globally, about 700 of whom work at the Pittsburgh headquarters.
