Waymo is expanding reporting in Austin, Texas, while the Robotaxi competition is heated

(Reuters) -Alphabet's Waymo extends his service in Austin, Texas, on 90 square miles of 37 square miles before, the self -driving unit of the software giant announced on Thursday to protect its top position in the city from rivals like Tesla.

Waymo, which has over 100 vehicles on the Uber platform in Austin, will now cover new districts such as Crestview, Windsor Park, Sunset Valley and Franklin Park.

After Waymo carefully expanded his self-driving taxi services in the United States in the USA, he is now largely seen as the leader in the room. It has about 1,500 vehicles in San Francisco and other cities in Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and others.

The rival Tesla wants to catch up after having carried out a small attempt of about a dozen of SUVs from Model Y last month in a limited area of Austin.

However, Tesla still faces a steep challenge to commercialize this technology on a large scale and clear regulatory hurdles.

The car manufacturer also does not use sensors such as radar and lidar such as Waymo and most rivals. Instead, it depends exclusively on cameras and artificial intelligence.

“Austin is still one of the fastest growing cities in the country, and we help us to grow with it,” said Shweta Shrivastava, Senior Director of Product Management at Waymo.

At the beginning of this week, Waymo's vehicles logged a milestone of 100 million miles without people behind the steering wheel and doubled his mileage in about six months.

(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editor of Sahal Muhammed)