If you spot a car cruising down a Minnesota road with no one in the driver’s seat, don’t worry—you’re not imagining things. Driverless, autonomous vehicles are on their way to the North Star State, ushering in a futuristic new era of transportation.
While we may not have those flying cars that science fiction writers once predicted would be common by 2025, but driverless, autonomous cars? Yeah, they’re already here in select U.S. cities and could soon be on the roads here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, too.
Driverless Cars Could Be Hitting Minnesota Roads Soon
The high-tech ride-hailing company Waymo says it will conduct tests of its autonomous cars in Minneapolis soon, with the eventual goal of launching a fleet of driverless cars here in the North Star State. Waymo, which bills itself as the ‘world’s first autonomous ride-hailing service,’ was first started as a division of Google back in 2009.
Waymo currently operates driverless taxis in the following cities:
- Austin, TX
- Atlanta, GA
- Los Angeles, CA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Francisco, CA
Along with Minneapolis, Waymo says it hopes to expand its autonomous taxis in 2026 to Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.
Waymo Is Bringing Its Autonomous Taxi Tests to Minneapolis
Here in Minnesota, this TechCrunch story says that Waymo will begin manually driving its robotaxis in Minneapolis in the ‘coming days,’ as the company tests and validates its driverless tech to see how it adapts to different road conditions found here in the winter here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes…