According to its new safety data hub, Waymo robotaxis have now completed around 22 million miles of autonomous driving rides. In Phoenix and San Francisco, where 21 million of those miles were driven autonomously, injury-reported-crash rates are almost four times lower than with human drivers. Waymo is the first robotaxi service that offers transparent data of its safety records,
The most recent update shows that Waymo robotaxis have been involved in 84% fewer crashes with airbag deployment, 73% fewer injury-causing crashes, and 48% fewer police-reported crashes than human drivers, says AutoRevolution.
Most notably, Waymo robotaxis proved 3.65 times safer than human drivers in Phoenix and San Francisco, with 0.82 injury-reported crashes per million miles compared to 2.92 for human drivers. Airbag deployment crash rates were 0.23 per million miles for Waymo versus 1.45 for human drivers. This translates into one airbag-deployed crash for every 4.35 million miles, beating Tesla by a considerable margin.
The safety data portal offers granularity, showing local metrics for San Francisco and Phoenix, where Waymo has driven the most miles. This allows for statistically significant comparisons with local human benchmarks and demonstrates how the Waymo Driver improves road safety in each of these cities. Waymo also uses, for the first time, the airbag deployment metric in its crash rate analysis, providing valuable context regarding the severity of crashes with other vehicles.
