Waymo's fleet of driverless vehicles is, and a study indicates it can reduce accidents on the roads. He an unpaid partnership between Waymo itself and reinsurer Swiss Re, indicated that Waymo cars generate fewer insurance claims than those operated by people.
Swiss Re analyzed liability claims for collisions covering 41 million kilometers driven by Waymo autonomous vehicles. The study also compared Waymo liability claims to human driver baselines based on data from more than 500,000 claims and more than 200 billion miles of driving. The results found that the Waymo Driver “demonstrated better safety performance compared to human-driven vehicles.”
The study found that cars operated by Alphabet's Waymo Driver resulted in 88 percent fewer property damage claims and 92 percent fewer bodily injury claims.
Swiss Re also invented a new metric to compare Waymo Driver only with newer vehicles with advanced safety technology, such as driver assistance, automated emergency braking and blind spot warning systems, rather than with the entire corpus of those 200 thousand millions of miles of driving. In this comparison, Waymo still came out ahead with an 86 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 90 percent reduction in personal injury claims.
Of course, there are two obvious issues. First, Waymo currently only operates in cities, which, yes, accounts for the majority of accidents in the US, but rural areas account for a large portion of accidents. of accidents (especially fatal ones) proportional to its population. (The study, incidentally, claims that having exurban data included in the benchmark metrics actually flies in the face of Waymo's true safety numbers.) Second: Waymo simply hasn't been around that long. It is very difficult to get an accurate measurement of the system when its real-world testing period has been relatively short.
The numbers may look good for Waymo Driver in the studies, but they're not perfect by any means. Waymo issued its second recall over the summer when one of its robotaxis crashed. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigated Waymo and found 24 incidents involving crashes or traffic violations.
