Google’s driverless car division Waymo has published a new study examining hundreds of types of crashes involving vulnerable road users, which it is calling “the largest dataset of its kind in the US.”

Roughly 40,000 people in the US are killed each year in vehicle crashes. But according to a story on the website The Verge, while automakers have become very good at protecting people inside of vehicles, they have essentially neglected the safety of people outside of them.

It adds that the academic community has shown little interest in studying injuries of vulnerable road users (VRUs), so Waymo set out to rectify that, said John Scanlon, a safety researcher at Waymo.

It says the goal was to shine a light on this underexamined area of traffic research in the hopes that the results could help make Waymo’s driverless technology safer — and maybe even help out some of its rivals, too.

Read more here.

(Picture – Yay Images)