Waymo robotaxis show lower crash rates: IIHS
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Robotaxi image courtesy of Waymo
An independent study finds Waymo's robotaxis are involved in fewer crashes than human drivers — a key milestone for earning public trust.
Why it matters: The research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety offers some of the strongest evidence yet that driverless vehicles can outperform human drivers on safety.
Zoom in: IIHS researchers compared crash rates of human-driven cars and Waymo robotaxis in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin, four cities where robotaxis are prevalent.
What they found: Waymo vehicles were involved in 68% fewer "police-reportable crashes" per mile traveled than human drivers in those cities.
- Waymo had 85% fewer single-vehicle crashes than human drivers.
- Injury crashes were 81% lower on a per-mile basis.
The intrigue: The safety advantage varied by city, ranging from 76% fewer crashes in Phoenix to 35% fewer in San Francisco.
- Austin was the exception, with Waymos seeing a slightly higher crash rate, though researchers said the sample size there was small.
The big picture: The data generally aligns with Waymo's own published research, and with industry-wide messaging about the safety benefits of autonomous vehicles that don't get drunk, drowsy or distracted.
Yes, but: The study also highlights a major blind spot for wider analysis.
Reality check: The nation's patchwork approach to autonomous vehicle safety data makes it difficult to accurately compare crash rates, IIHS argues, echoing a longstanding complaint from researchers and some members of Congress.
- The U.S. requires companies to report incidents involving automated driving systems, but most companies do not disclose how many miles their vehicles travel.
- Without exposure data, researchers can't calculate meaningful crash rates or compare companies.
Between the lines: Waymo is the only major robotaxi operator that voluntarily releases driverless mileage data, allowing IIHS to estimate its safety performance.
- But researchers had to discard roughly 25% of reported AV crashes because they were duplicates, occurred off public roads or weren't true crashes.
- They further narrowed the data to incidents a typical human driver would likely report to police, reflecting differences between human and autonomous vehicle reporting requirements.
The bottom line: IIHS says Waymo's results are encouraging, but the study doubles as a call for better federal reporting standards.
- Without standardized mileage and crash data across the industry, policymakers will struggle to independently assess whether autonomous vehicles are getting safer as deployments scale.
