Texas roads aren’t just known for their excessive speeds, they also seem to be a favorable testing ground for experimental automobiles because of our regulatory framework (the rules and regulations which govern the enforcement of our laws). Last week Google tested a prototype car which needs no driver—although the manufacturer required that there be a person sitting in the driver side while someone else sat in the passenger seat. This first ever vehicle—which navigates itself—operates in much the same way that airplanes behave when the instruments are set for automatic pilot.
The company brought the car out here from California and did a test drive from New Mexico to Texas and around Austin as part of Texas’ Department of Transportation Forum held to highlight transportation solutions for the future. There’s still some question about whether the vehicle was “street legal” because neither Austin, nor the state have laws that regulate “self-driving” technology. Three states, California, Nevada and Florida all have laws in place to address such technological innovations, giving new meaning to “who’s in the driver’s seat.”
And if you need oil and gas to run those vehicles, Texas promises to be the place that can help with that too. A recent survey of the oil and gas boom in Texas highlighted that the Lone Star state is responsible for over half of the rigs in the U.S. and more than 1 in 5 rigs in the world is operating out of Texas.
Who would have expected that in the early 1990s as the industry stalled and the Texas economy stagnated? Indeed back then, many political scientists and economists spoke of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction”—the process of change that occurs within economic structures where old and outdated economic forces are destroyed and new ones are created. While Schumpeter was a conservative largely critical of government intervention during the Great Depression and World War II, his economic principles—when old industries die they are replaced by newly emerging ones—became vogue during the dotcom boom and bust in the early 2000s.
In Texas, the rise of information technology (IT) as the oil and gas industry struggled was critical for maintaining Texas’ fiscal health. Now that the oil and gas industry seems to be undergoing a resurgence, it is now IT which may be in need of entrepreneurial re-vamping. ”Fracking” (hydraulic fracturing) is the controversial technique which creates fractures in rock formations by injecting fluid into cracks to force them to open into larger fissures allowing oil and gas to flow out of the formation so it can be extracted. It has increasingly been used around Texas to take advantage of additional gas reserves that have not been fully tapped. Its economic impact is being touted as a way forward in economically difficult times and that it reduces our dependence on foreign oil.
Wonder how long before the self-driving car learns how to fill up at the gas station?
Lone Star News Review 