An analysis of Waymo data covering nearly 100M driverless miles in four US cities: Waymo cars have far lower crash rates per million miles than human drivers
I recently got called to see a teenager ejected in a rollover car crash. The trauma team rushed him into surgery to stop major abdominal bleeding, but we all knew.
New York TimesJonathan Slotkin
Context & Ripple Effects
Waymo’s safety case has progressed from a 7.14-million-mile comparison to reported results in Phoenix and San Francisco showing fewer crashes and injury-causing crashes than human benchmarks. The nearly 100 million-mile dataset expands that evidentiary arc across four cities.
The new analysis also aligns with a Waymo-Swiss Re claims study and makes the safety debate less dependent on small operational samples. It matters because Waymo’s public performance record is becoming a concrete benchmark for other robotaxi efforts.
First-order effects
The larger dataset strengthens Waymo’s ability to substantiate lower crash rates per mile relative to human drivers, rather than relying on earlier, smaller-mileage comparisons.
It gives riders, partners, and policymakers a more consequential safety reference point for Waymo’s driverless service across multiple markets.
Second-order effects
The results raise the performance bar for rival robotaxi programs; Tesla’s much smaller, safety-driver-reliant Austin operation is more exposed to comparison with Waymo’s demonstrated driverless mileage.
If comparable multi-city records continue to accumulate, robotaxi competition may increasingly turn on auditable safety performance per mile rather than demonstrations or fleet announcements.
The evidence also highlights a durable operating boundary: even a driverless fleet can depend on substantial human support, so safety gains alone may not settle the economics or labor model of autonomy.
The trend: Robotaxi companies are moving from safety promises toward mileage- and claims-based evidence as the basis for trust, differentiation, and eventual scale.
Waymo is delivering 90+% reductions in certain kinds of accidents. The reason it's not 99+% is that other cars are still driven by humans. If every vehicle were as safe as a Waymo we'd save tens of thousands of lives per year. And this is the worst Waymo will ever be.
On self-driving cars: “In medicine, when a treatment shows this level of benefit, we stop the trial early. Continuing to give patients the placebo becomes unethical. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do. In driving, we're all the control group.”
Self-Driving cars will dramatically reduce traffic accidents (which kill 40k people per year in the US). From the article “...When compared to human drivers on the same roads, Waymo's self-driving cars were involved in 91 percent fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and 80
I like Waymo, but the moment that this argument switches, as it inevitably will, from “we have a cool new technology that works and is available everywhere and saves lives” to “you must now be banned from driving your own car,” I will become a foe.
Very nice op-ed by @slotkinjr about how autonomous vehicles with great safety records are actually a great public health breakthrough (~10X lower rates of serious injury or worse per mile driven than human drivers in equivalent driving conditions). As someone with some [image]
@slotkinjr ... I think this is an important re-framing of the issue. There are significant moneyed interests that will make their case against autonomous vehicles in private to politicians. If the story can be framed as a public health issue, it can withstand more political press…
‘In medicine, when a treatment shows this level of benefit, we stop the trial early. Continuing to give patients the placebo becomes unethical. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do.’
I have a guest essay in @nytimes today about autonomous vehicle safety. I wrote it because I'm tired of seeing children die. Done right, we can eliminate car crashes as a leading cause of death in the United States @Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million [video]
This hit me right in the soft spot: @Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles. I spent weeks analyzing it because the results seemed too good to be true. 91% fewer serious-injury crashes. 92% less pedestrians hit. 96% fewer injury crashes at
“There's a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles.” — Would the author say the same about building bike lanes? Installing automatic traffic cameras? Requiring Intelligent Speed Assist? — All of those are proven to save lives — and at …