Waymo says its robotaxis are involved in 80% fewer injury-causing crashes than human-driven cars
Even with an exemplary safety record, Waymo will have to defend itself vigorously each time one of its autonomous vehicles illegally passes a school bus or kills a cat.
After killing a beloved neighborhood cat a little over a month ago, Alphabet’s self-driving car company, Waymo, is once again having to defend its safety protocols.
Last Friday, Waymo said that it’s planning a software recall to prevent its vehicles from failing to fully slow or stop for school buses, in response to the NHTSA launching a probe into the company. The investigation follows several incidents of Waymo cars illegally passing school buses in freshly-fleeted cities Atlanta and Austin.
In an emailed statement, the company said it updated the software “as soon as the issue was identified” on November 17, per TechCrunch, with the autonomous vehicle giant also noting its “strong safety record.”
Buckle up
As detailed in a fascinating essay in The New York Times, data recently released by Waymo in its Safety Impact Report — which covers “nearly 100 million driverless miles” across four American cities — found that Waymo vehicles were involved in 91% fewer crashes causing serious injury or worse, and 80% fewer crashes causing any injury, than human drivers.
While it’s still a relatively small pool of results in very specific locations (and cynics may be quick to point out that the analysis was carried out by Waymo itself), the statistics are pretty staggering, with the NYTimes noting that “other autonomous vehicle companies don’t report or they report incomplete data.”
With Waymo, Tesla, and others making expeditious progress in the race for self-driving supremacy, arguably the biggest obstacle for autonomous vehicles remains psychological, rather than technological, as every heart-tugging, headline-grabbing infraction weighs heavily on the minds of risk-averse would-be riders.
