The long road to autonomous vehicle safety

[mostlylong]

@albaby1

Or to put it another way, the typical human driver in the U.S. gets into an accident (major or minor) every ________ miles. There are lots of different estimates of that number.

The accident rate depends on the driving scenario: interstate, city, specific routes, time of day, driver demographics, vehicle type and age, etc.

When Waymo tries to benchmark the safety of their AV, they attempt to statistically control for these variables in their specific markets (Phoenix, Bay Area, Austin, etc).

Their recent study:

@mostlylong

One statistic: Waymo says their injury rate is 82% lower than a human driving under comparable scenarios.

The data are based on 220 million autonomous miles through March 2026. Their December report was based on 170 million miles, so looks like they are accruing 50 million miles in 3 months, or 200 million miles per year.

waymo safety report