Waymo's self-driving car fleet and research shows it can reduce the number of road accidents. An uncompensated partnership between Waymo itself and reinsurer Swiss Re found that Waymo cars resulted in fewer claims than cars driven by people.
Swiss Re analyzed collision liability claims covering 25.3 million miles driven by Waymo's self-driving cars. The study also compared Waymo's liability claims to human driver baselines, based on data from more than 500,000 claims and more than 200 billion miles driven. The results showed that Waymo Driver “demonstrated superior safety performance compared to human-driven vehicles.”
The study found that vehicles driven by Alphabet's Waymo Driver resulted in an 88 percent decrease in property damage claims and a 92 percent decrease in personal injury claims.
Swiss Re also invented a new metric to compare Waymo Driver only to newer cars with advanced safety technologies like driver assistance, automatic emergency braking and blind-spot warning systems, rather than the entirety of those 200 billion miles driven. In this comparison, Waymo still leads with an 86 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 90 percent reduction in personal injury claims.
Of course, there are two glaring problems. First, Waymo currently only operates in cities, which, yes, account for the bulk of crashes in the US, but rural areas account for the majority of crashes. accidents (especially fatal ones) in proportion to their number. (By the way, the study says that including suburban data in the baseline actually lowers Waymo's true safety record.) Second: Waymo simply hasn't been around that long. It is very difficult to obtain an accurate assessment of a system if the period of actual testing has been relatively short.
The numbers may look good for Waymo Driver in research, but they are by no means perfect. Waymo announced a second recall over the summer after one of its robotaxis was involved in an accident. . National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Waymo and found 24 incidents involving accidents or traffic violations.