South by Southwest, the giant Austin, Texas, film, music and technology festival that was scheduled to host about two dozen sessions on transportation and future mobility, was canceled Friday because of concerns over the coronavirus.
The gathering, which was to begin March 13, attracts more than 75,000 people to the city each year to catch a glimpse of some of the world’s biggest bands, filmmakers, politicians and business executives.
The automotive industry has become more involved with SXSW as the festival has grown in popularity. Kia is a major sponsor — one tier below the top sponsorship level. And this year’s panel discussions were to cover topics such autonomous vehicle data sharing and collaboration, future automotive cockpit design, designing the Waymo driver, and transportation safety through the airwaves.
Among last year’s SXSW automotive highlights:
- U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao outlined plans to make her department more responsive to new transport companies that don’t fit within its traditional structure.
- The debut of the movie Autonomy, which explores the oncoming era of self-driving technology.
- Ford Motor Co. announced Austin was one of three cities in which it is kicking off a Ford City Challenge, along with Detroit and Indianapolis. Ford pledged up to $100,000 in each city to innovators looking to solve local transportation issues.
“It’s really unfortunate to be canceling South by Southwest; it’s a really important event to our city in a lot of ways,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler told reporters Friday. “I’m proud that we’re making decisions that are data-driven and based on the evidence.”
The event has helped transform the once-sleepy town into a mini Silicon Valley. Dozens of startups and tech titans including Alphabet, Apple and Facebook have opened offices there in recent years. In the past week, many of those companies had canceled their appearances at the conference.
Bloomberg contributed to this report.