Waymo’s fleet of driverless vehicles is and a study suggests it can reduce accidents on roads. The an unpaid partnership between Waymo itself and reinsurer Swiss Re, stated that Waymo’s cars result in fewer insurance claims than those operated by humans.
Swiss Re analyzed liability claims from collisions over 25.3 million miles driven by Waymo’s autonomous cars. The study also compared Waymo’s liability claims to human driver baselines, based on data from over 500,000 claims and over 200 billion driving miles. The results showed that Waymo Driver “demonstrated better safety performance compared to vehicles with a human driver.”
The study found that cars powered by Alphabet’s Waymo Driver resulted in 88 percent fewer property damage claims and 92 percent fewer personal injury claims.
Swiss Re also invented a new metric to compare Waymo Driver only to newer vehicles with advanced safety technology like driver assistance, automatic emergency braking and blind spot warning systems, rather than the entire corpus of those 200 billion driving miles. In this settlement, Waymo still came out on top, with an 86 percent reduction in damages claims and a 90 percent reduction in personal injury claims.
Of course, there are two glaring problems. First, Waymo currently only operates in cities, which, while the majority of accidents occur in the United States, occur in rural areas Number of accidents (especially fatal ones) proportional to the population. (Incidentally, the study says that including on-site data in the baseline metrics actually hurts Waymo’s actual safety numbers.) Second, Waymo just hasn’t been around that long. It is very difficult to obtain an accurate measurement of the system when the real-world testing period is so relatively short.
In studies, the numbers for Waymo Driver may look good, but they are by no means perfect. Waymo issued its second recall over the summer when one of its robot taxis caused an accident . The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Waymo and found 24 incidents involving accidents or traffic violations.
