Dallas has become the place where the autonomous vehicle industry's competing theories are being tested against each other on the same streets.
Four operators are now running or testing here.
Waymo launched driverless service in Dallas and Houston first, with an operating area running from Bishop Arts to just south of Dallas Love Field, and has been moving to fully driverless operation.
Tesla followed in April, putting autonomous Model Y vehicles into a zone of roughly 25 to 35 square miles covering Highland Park, Uptown and parts of central north Dallas.
Zoox, owned by Amazon, has been mapping the city since March and began autonomous testing with a safety operator aboard, running a fleet of about 12 vehicles. It has announced plans for a Dallas depot.
Uber, partnered with Austin-based Avride, launched in December with safety drivers behind the wheel.
The disagreement underneath
The interesting part is not that four companies are here. It is that they disagree about something fundamental.
Tesla's system is vision-only: eight cameras feeding an end-to-end neural network, with no lidar. The company's position is that if humans can drive with two eyes, cameras and sufficiently good software should suffice, and that the sensors its rivals carry are an expensive crutch.
