Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI announced it is now operating vehicles without human drivers in Miami and Austin, Texas. 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.
The development also establishes Argo 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 a press release.
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 a separate 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."
Under current Pennsylvania law, Argo is prohibited from having its vehicles operate on public roads without a human safety driver. A Pennsylvania State Senate bill has been working its way through the legislature since January 2022 that would permit this, and Gov. Tom Wolf has said he's willing to sign it, but a more definitive timeline as to when that could occur has yet to become known. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 10 states explicitly allow AV companies to conduct testing without requiring a human operator to be in the vehicle, while several others don't outright prohibit the ability for these companies to do so.
"Obviously, right now, we all have safety drivers when we are operating in Pennsylvania because it's illegal to not have one there, but it's kind of strange, we're actually the place that's supposed to be this hub of self-driving technology," Argo AI President and Co-Founder Peter Rander said during an AV panel discussion in Pittsburgh on April 21. "We (need) to make that transition and other states have already done that, so (we're) eager to see that happen."
Argo employs about 1,900 workers globally, about 700 of whom work within the Pittsburgh region.
