- Driverless car company Waymo analyzed over 7 million fully driverless miles for a safety analysis.
- The data indicated its cars are 6.7 times less likely to be in injury-causing crashes than human-driven cars.
- This safety report comes at a turbulent time for autonomous vehicles.
Autonomous vehicle company Waymo has done a new safety analysis, and the results are in: peer-reviewed data shows that the company's driverless cars may be considerably safer than cars with human drivers.
The Alphabet-owned company, which used to be called the Google Self-Driving Car Project, said it analyzed 7.13 million miles of fully autonomous driving from three different cities — Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — and compared it to data from human driving. It found that its driverless cars were involved in injury-causing crashes at a rate 6.8 times lower than vehicles driven by humans.
That's an 85% reduction. In instances of police-reported crashes (not necessarily injury-causing ones), it was a 57% reduction.
Translating those percentages to numbers, that represents 17 fewer injuries and 20 fewer police-reported crashes over the 7.1 million miles that Waymo's AVs drove than there theoretically would have been had human drivers with the benchmark crash rate driven the same distance in those same areas.
The company also points out in its report that car crashes involving human drivers are often underreported — like in minor accidents or fender benders — whereas AV companies report even the most minor crashes.
Waymo says that of all the crashes it's reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, only 21% have resulted in a filed police report regardless of which vehicle in the crash was to blame.
However promising, this safety data comes at a fraught time for driverless car companies.
Waymo's main competitor, the General Motors-owned autonomous robotaxi company Cruise, suspended its services nationwide following a series of incidents involving its cars, including striking and dragging a pedestrian beneath the vehicle. The company has said the pedestrian had first been hit by another vehicle, which had pushed the person into the autonomous vehicle's path. Cruise had its permits revoked in California barely two months after it got the go-ahead to expand its services to 24/7 driverless rides in San Francisco.
California regulators said in a statement at the time that Cruise's robotaxis posed "an unreasonable risk to public safety."
Cruise recalled its entire fleet and began layoffs last month. Its CEO resigned soon after, and the new boss reportedly told staff recently that the company had hit an "all-time low."
Waymo, on the other hand, is still operating 24/7 across San Francisco.
"We're working hard to continuously improve our driving behavior across the board," Waymo says in its report. "Through these studies, our goal is to provide the latest results on our safety performance to the general public, enhance transparency in the AV industry, and enable the community of researchers, regulators, and academics studying AV safety to advance the field."
Waymo did not respond to BI's request for comment ahead of publication.