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Waymo Says Its Self-Driving Cars Reduced Injury-Causing Accidents by 82% (electrek.co) 241

Posted by EditorDavid from the car-talk dept.
Waymo's self-driving car technology "continues to outperform human benchmarks," the company claimed this week. "It was involved in 841 fewer injury-causing crashes — an 82% reduction compared to human drivers."

Electrek reports: We've seen various Waymo crash data before, with Waymo claiming crash reductions. That's all well and good when the company says it, but we've also seen independent data confirming similar (though lower) crash reduction numbers...

Waymo has enough miles that it's ready to start quoting how many injuries it has prevented, and the number is pretty high. Its newest crash data states that it had operated a total of 271 million driverless miles through June of this year, which is 50 million more miles added in the 3 months since its end-of-March update. Over those miles, Waymo says there was an 82% reduction in crashes that caused injury, and a 95% reduction in crashes that cause "serious injury or worse" [compared to human drivers].
Waymo also says that compared to human drivers it's reduced injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians by 93%, cyclists by 86%, and motorcyclists by 82%.

Waymo's analysis comes from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and Phoenix, and its blog post includes video showing some near-misses where it says its automated system prevented an injury-causing collision.

Waymo Says Its Self-Driving Cars Reduced Injury-Causing Accidents by 82% More | Reply

Waymo Says Its Self-Driving Cars Reduced Injury-Causing Accidents by 82%

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  • Yes, probably. And they likely can do even better. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:19PM (#66352346)

    The main argument for self-driving cars is that human drivers are, on average, really bad. And that most of the bad human drivers think they are really good and hence add lack of care to bad skills.

    I would also like to remind everybody that a few years ago, I think the CEO of Ford predicted that self-driving will be eventually enforced by the car insurers, because premiums for humans will become unsustainable. Looks too me like we are nicely on track.

    • Re:Yes, probably. And they likely can do even bett (Score:4)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @04:14PM (#66352410)

      I see no evidence of that. I see claims. Are Waymo's miles directly comparable to human miles? Who knows.

      And human drivers are NOT, "on average, really bad".

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by MrKevvy ( 85565 )

        re: And human drivers are NOT, "on average, really bad".

        Compared to what? It's meaningless without a relative reference. Compared to humans, their "average" (mean or mode?) is going to be "average" but that mean/mode may be significantly lower than something else, something like Waymo.

        One thing humans do tend to do is overestimate how good they are. Average to poor drivers do tend to think they are better and numerous studies have demonstrated this. And if you want to see this in action, try keeping to the

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jhoegl ( 638955 )
          Making claims without valid data.
          Truth is, there is a concerted push to be dependent on tech bros technology, including thumbing the scale on economy and things like Vehicle insurance.
          https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2026/05/14/how-oligarchs-dominate-our-democracies-and-preserve-inequality/ [lse.ac.uk]
          https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice/is-the-us-witnessing-the-rise-of-oligarchy/ [oxfamamerica.org]

          Let me remind you Insurance companies are for profit. If they want to keep their job, they will not price the

        • And if you want to see this in action, try keeping to the speed limit on country roads. You'll quickly find out just how many aggressive, deliberately unsafe drivers whose luck will inevitably run out there are.

          City boy! Your stupid hick model is interesting. Meanwhile I travel a lot on back roads, and I come across a lot of people who drive 25 in a 45. 30 in a 55 zone.

          Since I want to drive around the speed limit, these stupid hicks who drive like the devil is chasing them? They find a safe point to pull over. Then I wave to thank them, and they wave back.

          Are there numbnut hicks that drive too fast? Sure there are those, but the countryside has no monopoly on that, just like they occasionally pull someone o

      • Re:Yes, probably. And they likely can do even bett (Score:5, Informative)

        by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @07:07PM (#66352528) Homepage
        I've yet to know anyone who passed a school bus with the sign out. And yet, waymo's seem to do it often. To the point even the trump admin is investigating. https://www.ntsb.gov/investiga... [ntsb.gov] Note that was not an isolated incident. I believe they are up to around 40 times the bus cameras have caught them doing this. And this is VERY illegal in TX. Very. Like lose your license on the 2nd infraction I think it is.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by canavan ( 14778 )

          The link you provide is a really bad example. Specifically it says In total, six vehicles passed the school bus while it was stopped., and Once stopped, the ADS-equipped vehicle contacted remote assistance with a prompt asking, “is this a school bus with active signals?” [...], a remote assistance agent located in Novi, Michigan, replied “No” to the prompt.

          So first of all, 5 human drivers illegally passed the school bus during this specific incident, and the "autonomous" car was

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        And human drivers are NOT, "on average, really bad".

        That is true, but it's a little more complicated than that.

        The average driver is pretty good, 99.9% of the time. The other 0.1% of the time, they are tired, or angry, or momentarily distracted, or just looking the other direction from where they need to be looking under those particular circumstances. It's those occasional blips of inattention that cause lead to most accidents occurring.

      • The average human is NOT a good driver. most think they are good but on average humans suck as drivers hence how significant accident reductions are. I can't remember the last time I drove to work and didn't see at least several drivers that were doing dangerous maneuvers or tailgating and you can bet every one of them would say they are good driver.

        • I think the difference between people who -think- they are good drivers, versus actually being good drivers is a pretty wide gap. I don't know anyone who thinks they are a crappy or below average.

          Probably the best way to tell is by the amount of wrecks and tickets, however, that metric isn't even good, especially if one is dealing with areas where speed limits vary, and the area has poorly designed roads. Put enough miles in, and statistically something will happen.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Yes. One prime example for the Dunning-Kruger effect is driving skills. For reference just look at accident and injury statistics. No appliance or industrial system with a safety record this bad would even be legal.

            If you want somebody that is a bad driver and knows it, I am one. I never caused any accident, but I stopped driving as soon as it was possible. These days I do not even own a car.

      • Waymo's miles are not comparable to human miles. Waymo avoids a lot of areas. From the article:

        Waymo also tended to operate on lower-speed streets than human drivers, even discounting highways. Half of Waymo’s crashes happened on streets with speed limits under 25mph, whereas only 8% of human crashes happened here. This could account for why Waymo showed lower crash severity than humans, since it was getting into lower-speed crashes. Lower speeds are a good thing, but this could be making Waymo’s crash rate look lower than it is.

      • If you dig through their methodology description what you find is that they're adjusting their numbers based on papers published by people who work for Waymo. And they also promise that they're counting all the accidents where there was any damage or anybody got hurt, because of course they report all of those, doing otherwise would be a crime! Or at least a rule violation. (From their phrasing, I get the impression that there are a large number of unreported, or at least uncounted here, "the Waymo vehicle

      • I see no evidence of that. I see claims. Are Waymo's miles directly comparable to human miles? Who knows.

        And human drivers are NOT, "on average, really bad".

        Claims. Waymo is attempting to prove a negative. Giving an actual number of crashes with injuries they didn't have?

        Seriously this on the same logic level of asking "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suman28 ( 558822 )
      There are many things humans are bad at.

      Humans can't lift heavy objects
      Humans can't drive
      Humans can't go without eating
      Humans can't go on repeating the same task without getting bored
      Humans can't remember exact details consistently
      Humans can't operate continuously without sleep
      Humans can't handle extreme heat, cold, pressure, or radiation
      Humans can't measure things with high consistency
      Humans can't reproduce identical products or results
      etc, etc

      Fortunately or unfortunately if you start replaci

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jhoegl ( 638955 )
        Yeah, the statement is a fallacy to perpetuate a narrative that we should all be dependent on Oligarchs instead.
        If we arent careful, our life will be subscription run.
    • What would cause it to become unsustainable when it currently is? It will definitely be cheaper for a lot of people to get a car that is incapable of manual control, but insurance will also become cheaper for good drivers as a large chunk of what they pay is to cover for the bad drivers. I think future generations will largely avoid learn to drive unless they need to as a part of their job because a long commute isn't nearly as bad if a person doesn't need to operate a vehicle in traffic. But as self-drivin

      • Re:Yes, probably. And they likely can do even bett (Score:5, Funny)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @05:47PM (#66352484)

        but insurance will also become cheaper for good drivers as a large chunk of what they pay is to cover for the bad drivers.

        Bahahahahahaha, someone thinks something will go down in price. Oh you sweet summer child, come sit at the campfire, let me tell you a story about capitalism.

        • Adjusting for inflation, yes that will be the case. The price of insurance can't be less than the cost of dealing with all of the accidents that the insurance policies have to cover. If self-driving cars greatly reduce the rate of accidents then the cost of insurance will fall. I'm sure there will be some companies that are greedy and want to pocket the savings for themselves, but there will be greedy companies that want to poach their customers and who are willing to pocket just a little bit less.

          Would
          • Have you dealt with insurance co's lately. I just sued to get a roof claim paid. State farm, first claim in over 20 years. Everyone has told me the laws changed in I think around 2019 in TX and it has been a field day for insurance co profits. Like to the point the claims dept is now considered a "profit center".

          • No one adjusts for inflation. Mentally people only ever lament about sticker price when talking about how expensive things are.

            But back on point insurance companies don't gift profits to customers. Competition rarely drives prices down in this way. These days insurance prices are higher than they've been in a long long time, and yet insurance companies know more about us than ever and adjust risk accordingly. They do get away with this nicely as well because customers have a tendency to simply not shop arou

    • It's that we force them in the situations where they're guaranteed to cause an accident.

      I got rear-ended years ago by a guy who had just finished a night shift at some shitty fast food restaurant and was on his way to his kids' birthday party. The dude should have gone straight home and gone to bed. Divorced father shitty job long hours fell asleep at the wheel rear-ended me.

      We dismantled our public transportation Network and then when people want to go out drinking we make it very expensive to get

    • How would the premiums for humans "become unsustainable"? If anything the risk goes down for human drivers when all the other drivers are robots.

    • The main argument for self-driving cars is that human drivers are, on average, really bad. And that most of the bad human drivers think they are really good and hence add lack of care to bad skills.

      I would also like to remind everybody that a few years ago, I think the CEO of Ford predicted that self-driving will be eventually enforced by the car insurers, because premiums for humans will become unsustainable. Looks too me like we are nicely on track.

      That's an fascinating prophecy.

      Self-driving cars already appear to be safer than human driven cars. There are all sorts of stats on this, but even if you quibble with that assertion, you might still concede that the safety of self-driving cars is improving faster than that of human driven cars - and that there may be no way to change this. Human driven car safety can be improved a little by driving courses, stricter rules on drunk driving, etc. But the improvements in self-driving can be made at a much fast

      • self driving cars haven't really gotten much safer in the last five years or so.

        • self driving cars haven't really gotten much safer in the last five years or so.

          There are studies that show they have become safer over the last 5 years.
          e.g. 2021–2024 IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) Study: 68% fewer crashes overall for driverless vehicles across all analyzed cities.
          https://eletric-vehicles.com/w... [eletric-vehicles.com]

          I'm not a researcher in this area, so I'd certainly be willing to be persuaded if you have other sources which tell a different story.

        • The edge cases are getting cleaned out. These are not the big ones, but the ones like parking, private lots, reflection and glare, and others. This may not bring around much in the way of news, but it is helping out.

          Where I see self driving cars making an impact is how prevalent they are starting to become. I was surprised how many people are driving vehicles without a hand on the steering wheel in traffic these days, letting the vehicle do the work.

          Of course, there is work to do, but it is getting there

      • Part of self-driving cars being safer than people is that they don't drive "very close together" - they follow at the appropriate following distance and speed for the lines of sight. This alone accounts for a large portion of the improved safety performance of these systems.

        Autonomous cars are actually very good at the driving task. Where they fail is when they encounter situations that are "abnormal" and I think the industry has a problem here; state of the art is either to train specifically for every si

    • People are delusional if they think the public will just allow these companies to ban human drivers. You think banning guns was difficult? Car insurers who try this shit will soon find their CEO's Luigi'd.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ColaMan ( 37550 )

        They won't ban human drivers. One day you'll just discover that self-driving cars will have much cheaper premiums.

        You might also discover a new insurance company has appeared that only insures self-driving cars. That insurance company won't actually be new, it'll just be a separately-branded subsidiary of one of the major players.

        In the end, it might be that the self-driving cohort with their lower payout rate subsidises the "manual" drivers to some extent.

        • I still don't believe that self-driving technology will ever bee available to privately owned vehicles. I think it will all be a subscription service that you will have to buy into in order to have transportation. That's their endgoal.

          • That may be their goal but the technology is now getting simple enough that many people can develop it. There's already free open source models like NVIDIA Alpamayo. Self-driving tech will be too cheap and widely available from enough competitors that it won't be something people need to pay a lot for. It'll be free or dirt cheap like Google Maps.

    • The main argument for self-driving cars is that human drivers are, on average, really bad. And that most of the bad human drivers think they are really good and hence add lack of care to bad skills.

      I would also like to remind everybody that a few years ago, I think the CEO of Ford predicted that self-driving will be eventually enforced by the car insurers, because premiums for humans will become unsustainable. Looks too me like we are nicely on track.

      What is more, they have achieved the amazing data of how many lives they have saved through hypothetical accidents that did not happen.

      In the intel world, that is called not knowing what you do not know.

      There is a solution to the human driver as the dealer of death, the incompetent that must be removed from anything to do with the car. My vehicle has all the safety items needed but the final step. It has emergency braking that works, blind spot sensors, collision and pedestrian avoidance and lane assi

  • Pedestrian or vehicle accidents? (Score:3)

    by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:21PM (#66352350)

    Just wondering, since related topic is Tesla FSD. EU is right now debating on whether to allow FSD across all member states. Some member states have permitted it already, but the big decision is still to be made. There's an interesting report from Belgium where Tesla FSD decided to disobey traffic laws around pedestrian/cyclist zones (going 50 kph in 20/30 kph zones, overtaking cyclists in bicycle lanes, etc).

    https://www.johanna.be/images/... [johanna.be]

    Results start on page 12, but summary include the nice snippet

    "Performance in home zones was similarly concerning. Of the 12 tested home zones, FSD exceeded the 20 km/h legal limit in five cases (42%), averaging approximately 26 km/h. In two-thirds of the tested locations, the system incorrectly isplayed a higher speed limit, typically 30 km/h or 50 km/h. Given that home zones are specifically designed as shared spaces here pedestrians, including children, may occupy the full width of the street, these findings raise significant safety concerns."

    So yeah, I'll just drive myself unless car manufacturer assumes full liability when it decides to run over some kid on their bicycle.

    • Re:Pedestrian or vehicle accidents? (Score:5, Informative)

      by CrankyFool ( 680025 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:40PM (#66352378)
      [ Disclaimer: I'm a Tesla driver, since 2018, and have FSD on my car ]

      Tesla's FSD and Waymo's approach are wildly different, enough so that you can't really compare them. The biggest two differences are: 1) Musk's cheap, so Teslas only use cameras to figure out what's going on around them; Waymos use cameras, ultrasonic sensors, radar, and lidar; 2) Waymos are only deployed on specific roads and streets that have been very heavily surveyed and Waymos have been trained on.

      I trust Tesla's FSD about as far as I can throw it, and while it's been helpful and prevented an accident or two for me when I've been distracted, it's basically a glorified lane assist and cruise control. I'd not hesitate to fall asleep in the back of a driverless Waymo.

    • So the self driving car is expected to go 20 in a 20? Wow, that sucks. They will not only take longer to get places but people and emergency vehicles could get stuck behind them.
  • I believe it is 100% because they don't have a driver that can get hurt!

  • comparable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:28PM (#66352362)
    Does anyone know what numbers they are comparing against? For this statement to be accurate they would have to measure humans actually driving in the exact places they drive and in the weather they drive. Different weather is not comparible, different roads are not comparable. Even if the human is in an older car that is not comparable.

    • They use various vehicle miles travelled bench marks published by state police in the regions the serve: https://waymo.com/safety/impac... [waymo.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Different weather is not comparible

      Across 271million miles it's safe to assume the weather is similar. But even if the answer is something stupid like Waymos don't drive in the rain (which they do, they only stop during really severe storms), ultimately that's still injury avoidance as it just shows poor judgement of the people who drive under dangerous conditions.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Does it though? Waymo can refuse a ride to the emergency room because of a shower, you would not. Sociopathy is not a virtue...unless you're Elon Musk.

        It's never a question whether self-driving should ever even be considered on roads designed only for human drivers. I think it should NOT be. A mile high stack of band-aids piled on top of a software stack that no one understands and that contains a limitless number of bugs that no one will ever fix is not my idea of a foundation to risk my life on, far b

        • That people would take a Waymo to the emergency room because ambulances are so expensive is a separate problem

        • Waymo can refuse a ride to the emergency room because of a shower, you would not.

          I absolutely wouldn't ride to an emergency room. If I needed to go to an emergency room I'd call a professional taxi service by dialling 911.

          The reality is people DO have poor judgement. 99.9% of people on the road are not there because their lives depend on them being on the road at that given time. Add to that "dumb people" statistic, i.e. those who try to drive their cars through flooded rivers and need to be rescued as a result, it all adds up to something awkward we don't want to admit: people are stup

          • considering the number of people on the road every day and the number of accidents, people who are poor drivers are a statistical anomaly. not really even relevant

            • Oh thank god. Let's just keep killing 36600 and injuring 1.5million Americans ever year because fluffernutter thinks that bad driving is an abnormality.

              You're a psychopath.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      I tried to look into this and found no information at all. Waymo doesn't report its mix of driven miles and how it compares to the human data. And what exactly qualifies to get reported? And Waymo can cause an accident without being involved and that would not be reported here, yet a human would be. Autonomous driving has incidents of substantial interference with traffic, there would certainly be incidents of Waymo causing damage to traffic that would not be reported.

      It's easy to reduce traffic injuries

      • Autonomous driving has incidents of substantial interference with traffic

        Oh man, just wait until you hear about these things called "people". They are so bad that we have other people running around issuing fines against them for doing things such as stopping in traffic, parking incorrectly, blocking access, etc.

      • This article does a better analysis than Waymo's official blog: https://electrek.co/2026/07/25... [electrek.co]

        It's still lacking some things.

    • Does anyone know what numbers they are comparing against?

      No, we don't know, because this is self-reported data from Waymo. It's just a business saying "trust us bro."

      Alternative headline: "Business fabricates statistics that make them sound good."

    • Does anyone know what numbers they are comparing against? For this statement to be accurate they would have to measure humans actually driving in the exact places they drive and in the weather they drive. Different weather is not comparible, different roads are not comparable. Even if the human is in an older car that is not comparable.

      If you keep clicking down the rabbit hole, down at the bottom of their Methodology section, Waymo explains they're adjusting the data they're using to account for differences in human and Waymo route selection, variation by locale, etc.... based on peer-reviewed papers published by Waymo employees.

      https://waymo.com/safety/impac... [waymo.com]

    • they would have to measure humans actually driving in the exact places they drive and in the weather they drive. Different weather is not comparible, different roads are not comparable. Even if the human is in an older car that is not comparable.

      They are not comparable. They made adjustments for some things (like driving on freeways), but not all of them (Waymo favors roads with speeds under 25mph, for example). Also, data from Austin showed more accidents with Waymo than with humans, although there isn't much data so the margin of error is too large to support a firm conclusion.

  • Another way Waymo reduces injury accidents (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:40PM (#66352380)

    By clogging streets and preventing other cars from using the roads, Waymo helpfully ensures potential drivers remain uninjured!

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/... [yahoo.com]

  • I can easily believe that they have less accidents. Automatic systems do not get tired, distracted by fighting children, drunk, and can generally be assumed to obey the speed limit. The issue is all of the occasions when they face events that their system cannot handle, like inaccurate maps, bad weather, bad roads, etc. Of course, not driving under those conditions is an option, but people still want to get where they are going. I would like to see how they perform on the dirt country roads around here.
    • they have other problems. they don't get out of the way of emergency vehicles, they run over animals, they drive into flooded roads, they stop in the middle of the road without pulling over safely if they lose network connection. And the people who hit them will be blamed.

      • You're citing basically one-off incidents and acting like it's the norm. They only need to be slightly safer than humans to be worthy of being put on the road. Humans cause 40,000 fatalities annually on the roads. So far nobody has been able to pin even one at-fault fatality on a Waymo, even though the reward for doing so would be millions or possibly billions in a lawsuit. Meanwhile hundreds of people get murdered by humans annually on the streets where Waymo operates. And the numbers were the same even be

        • it is the norm. every car is programmed the same way. when one human screws up, it is one human. when a self driving car screws up, they all will in the same way. furthermore they can cluster together making the same mistakes and clogging traffic.

          • No. You don't understand how it works. You haven't cited the circumstance .. all we can do is speculate. If a Waymo, at-fault, ran over an animal once, it likely resulted from a failure to recognize that particular animal in that environment and lighting condition. In 99% of encountered situations the lighting or environmental parameters would have enabled it to recognize the animal presence. You're an idiot if you think that it running over an animal once means it always just runs animals over. You can't t

  • Sleight-of-hand? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lhowaf ( 3348065 ) on Sunday September 27, 2026 @04:53PM (#66352452)
    1st, comparisons against humans is an easy win. But Waymos aren't humans, they're machines. How happy would we be if refrigerators killed as many people as self-driving cars? Shouldn't we expect NO deaths from a machine? 2nd, being 'involved in' an accident doesn't tell us who's at fault. We need to know how many damage, injury and death accidents were the fault of Waymo. Stop comparing machines to humans isn't relevant.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by maird ( 699535 )
      Agreed on the sleight of hand but I have to say my kitchen fridge freezer has a "child-proof lock" to prevent children opening the doors unless they have the app. The manual says one of the reasons is to prevent children becoming trapped inside and "killed by the fridge". Though it's interesting that the US 1956 refgerator act was designed to prevent fridges from having lockable latches for the same reason (the child-proof lock on my fridge complies by intending to prevent children from opening the fridge i

    • How happy would we be if refrigerators killed as many people as self-driving cars?

      Well given Waymos have killed zero people, and fridge related deaths are hard to come by they have been attributed to fatal house fires and crushing incidents... I'm not sure you're making the point you think you're making.

    • We need to compare them because only the safer one of the two to others should be allowed to drive (eventually).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Alascom ( 95042 )

      How happy would we be if refrigerators killed as many people as self-driving cars? Shouldn't we expect NO deaths from a machine?

      Your logic is backwards - how many people are SAVED from the use of machines that provide refrigeration?
      The CDC estimates that roughly 3,000 Americans die from foodborne illnesses each year, which is a small fraction of historical mortality rates due to the constant use of home and commercial chillers.

      Expanding refrigeration to air conditioning, an estimated 175,000 people die from heat-related causes each year in Europe according to the UN World Health Organization. Use of air conditioning "machines" coul

    • How happy would we be if refrigerators killed as many people as self-driving cars?

      It might be counterintuitive but refrigerators kill people. One example that immediately comes to mind is the Grenfell Tower Fire [wikipedia.org] where a faulty refrigerator ignited and ultimately caused the death of 72 people. I'm not sure that self-driving cars killed that many people, but I don't have the stats...

  • I guess the 18% is when they get hit from behind by a dude.

  • I've said it before and I'm going to keep saying it they admitted it to congress. When the cards have to do something that regular run of the mail modern Lane assist can't do they are pilot at remotely from a call center in the Philippines. The goal here is to outsource taxi cab drivers. Because no matter how little they're paying people it's never too little. Fuck 33% of Uber drivers lose money working. Look it up.

    They're going to be safer when you throw statistics in because they're going to follow al

    • hey are pilot at remotely from a call center in the Philippines. The goal here is to outsource taxi cab drivers. Because no matter how little they're paying people it's never too little.

      With enough people solving "prove you are human by identifying the bridges" captchas we could crowd-source all the "autonomous driving" tasks in real time. Just a distributed Mechanical Turk :-)

  • The two main features of Waymo's are that they get stuck in traffic all the time. There are dozens and dozens of documented cases where they are simply stuck in the middle of the road for no reason and so this is still happening all the time.

    The other feature, which we could implement on EVERY new car and which would definitely reduce traffic deaths is enforced speed limits by the vehicle. Every waymo and every car could simply not be allowed to drive above the speed limit on any road which would give hum

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Niggle ( 68950 )

      For the enforced speed limits to work, cars need to get better at determining what the speed limit is. A map can potentially tell you the normal speed limit, but this might be reduced by roadworks etc. So the car has to actually read road signs. And mine is great at picking the wrong limit from signs. This includes things like speed limit signs that are a bit grubby, not seeing signs that are at a bit of an angle, signs on side roads or parallel roads, and the speed limits on the back of lorries.

  • I've travelled with them a few times and have found the rides to be good albeit a bit pricey (objectively an Uber at half the cost gets me from A to B just the same). The issue with the claim is they do extensive, continuous mapping of the environments they work in, and those environments are relatively controlled (mine have all been in SF, and has included a Freeway trip to SFO). I have profound doubts we'll get the fidelity of mapping done on all roads. And having observed them mapping in London in prepar

  • Google search doesn't support it (Score:3)

    by u19925 ( 613350 ) on Monday September 28, 2026 @01:40AM (#66352782)

    From Gemini:

    The human-operated Uber ride-hail collision rate in San Francisco is 15.5 crashes per million miles.

    Key Context & Comparisons:
      Vs. Autonomous Vehicles: In the same localized environment, Waymo reported 14.1 crashes per million miles, performing slightly lower (safer) than the human Uber benchmark.

    That is pretty much same given the low data points that we have.

  • I will wait for independent confirmation before i start getting excited. i mean there's no reason why a Self driving cab compony wouldn't manipulate statistics to make it's product look better..

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