A study released by Waymo and Swiss Re found Waymo Driver has better safety performance than human-driven vehicles. 

The study compared Waymo’s liability claims to human driver baselines based on Swiss Re’s data of over 500,000 claims and more than 200 billion miles of exposure, Waymo’s blog says.

Waymo Driver, Waymo’s self-driving car technology, had performed across 25.3 million miles at the time of the study. 

The autonomous technology had an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims, the study says. It says the human-driven vehicle benchmark is 63 property damage claims and 21 bodily injury claims for the same amount of miles driven by Waymo. 

“Auto insurance claims data, traditionally used to assess human driver liability and risk, is a powerful tool in evaluating the safety performance of autonomous vehicles,” said Mauricio Peña, Waymo chief safety officer, in the blog post. “This is a truly groundbreaking study that not only validates the Waymo Driver’s strong safety record but also provides a scalable framework for ongoing assessment of the impact autonomous vehicles make on road safety.”

The study says Waymo Driver yielded nine property damage and two bodily injury claims for a total of 10 unique collisions over 25.3 million miles. Two of the property damage claims and both bodily injury claims are still open and could close without any liability payment, the study says. 

Waymo Driver also outperformed newer vehicles equipped with modern advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), the study says. “Newer model” is defined as vehicle model years between 2018 and 2021. 

According to the study, Waymo Driver had an 86% reduction in property damage claims and a 90% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to the newer models. The benchmark for the newer generation vehicles was 63 property damage and 21 bodily injury claims, according to the study. 

“By comparing against drivers of newer vehicles, we establish a more forward-looking and challenging benchmark that accounts for recent improvements in vehicle safety technologies and potentially more experienced drivers,” the study says. 

Waymo recently released a snapshot of data gathered from 33 million rider-only miles. The miles were driven from the start of the company’s driverless operations to September 2024. 

It says the newest study builds on the previous data analysis, which found Waymo Driver had 81% fewer air bag deployments, 78% fewer injury-causing crashes, and 62% fewer police-reported crashes than human drivers.

Consumer Reports Advocacy released a statement earlier this week asking federal regulators and the incoming administrative to improve a program that requires automakers and autonomous vehicle companies to report serious crashes in vehicles equipped with autonomous technologies.

The statement follows reports from Reuters that the President-elect’s transition team recommended eliminating the program.

IMAGES

Feature image courtesy of Michael Vi/iStock.

Embedded graph courtesy of Waymo.