Autonomous driving tech is under fire in a big way right now. Despite that, Waymo says that it sees a dramatic improvement in driverless car safety when compared to human-driven cars. The study has a number of encouraging figures, including the fact that Waymo recorded only three crash-related injuries over the course of more than 7 million miles.
Any time a company publishes its own safety data it deserves scrutiny. For instance, Tesla also says that its autonomous driving tech is safer than a human, but it doesn’t provide open access to the data it uses to make that assertion. By comparison, this study from Waymo seems quite a bit more transparent.
It compiles data from 7.14 million miles of driverless Waymo rides across three cities, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. In an effort to compare that data to human driving in an accurate manner, Waymo says that it also analyzed human driving data from the same areas.
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Accounting for all data, Waymo claims that its driverless cars experience an 85 percent reduction in injury-causing crashes. They also account for a 57 percent reduction in police-reported crash rates overall. Those figures represent a significant increase in overall safety for those in a driverless Waymo car compared to those driving themselves in the same scenarios.
“These reports represent a good-faith effort by Waymo to evaluate how the safety of its autonomous driving system compares with the safety of human driving. The results are encouraging and represent one step in our evolving understanding of autonomous driving safety,” said David Zuby, chief research officer of The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).
Of course, this data isn’t without its limitations. For instance, Waymo cars themselves are incapable of driving outside of their GPS boundaries. Human drivers don’t report every single low-level incident such as hitting road debris. By contrast, Waymo reports every one of those events and in the end, just 21 percent of those Waymo reports end up with a filed police report.
It appears that some autonomous driving software is getting better at piloting a car than the average human. While none of it appears to be perfect, it does make one wonder why more automakers aren’t pursuing robust and reliable versions of the tech sooner rather than later. It could spell far safer roads.
