Houston streets, drivers could make it more difficult for driverless cars to fully operate: Experts

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Many of the cars on Houston roads have driverless features, but a truly driverless car that can navigate any location anywhere in the world doesn't exist yet.

University of Houston Engineering Professor Kaushik Rajashekara has a specialty in autonomous systems and said Houston faces its own unique challenges.

"It will take time for everybody to have a self-driving car, but it will come," Rajashekara said.

Houston's aggressive drivers, extreme weather, and poorly laid-out roads mean the technology needed to make the car's decisions will have to think faster than it does right now.

"They have to get the signal from all the sensors, and then it has to go to the computer, and it has to process it, and it has to make the right decision, so everything has to be done very fast," Rajashekara said.

And as that technology advances, the price for a fully driverless car will be steep.

"When computers came, they were expensive. My first computer, where I was with General Motors, we had to buy -- for $4,000 I paid for my laptop. Now, you can get it for $400," Rajashekara said.

Waymo currently offers entirely autonomous taxi services in Austin, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. Frustrations with some of those driverless cars have been widely reported.

But if everyone is one day in a driverless car, as Rajashekara predicts, he says the roads could be safer.

As of now, with pretty few driverless cars on the road, safety data from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration show from September 2024 to August 2025, 862 crashes were reported -- seven resulted in serious injury or .8%, and one in a fatality, which is just .1%.

The latest numbers available for standard vehicle crashes from NHTSA are from 2023 and show 6.1 million crashes happened, with about .6% being fatal.

For more news updates, follow Lileana Pearson on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.