The data coming out from an independent study of Waymo autonomous vehicles is, frankly, amazing.
Swiss Re, one of the largest global insurance firms based out of Zürich, reports that 25.3 million fully autonomous miles drive by Waymo vehicles resulted in a 92% reduction in car crash injuries.
In plain English, Waymo self-driving tech is 12.5x safer than human drivers.
Digging into the Waymo safety data
According to a new study from Swiss Re, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are putting up some impressive safety numbers. The study found that compared to human drivers, Waymo cars saw:
- 88% fewer property damage claims
- 92% fewer bodily injury claims
- All of this over extreme distance, with 25,300,000 miles worth of data analyzed.
Over 25.3 million miles, Waymo vehicles had 9 accidents with property damage and just 2 injury-causing crashes. If those miles had been driven by humans, Swiss Re estimates we’d be looking at 78 property damage claims and 26 injury claims instead.
In other words, by cutting the human driver out of the loop, 69 fender benders were prevented, and 24 folks who would have been injured didn’t receive a scratch. Frankly amazing.
This is a huge win for Waymo and their corporate sponsor, Google, and to their credit, they’ve done all this without a single fatality in their real-world testing. They use LIDAR, rigorous safety redundancies, and a go-slow approach that prioritizes getting it right over getting it fast.
Tesla “Full Self Driving” as a Counterpoint
And then there’s Tesla.
Elon is taking a familiar line in January 2025 when he says in 3 months, his FSD will be as safe as human drivers, and “in due time” it will be safer by a factor of 10.
While Waymo is busy proving self-driving can be done safely, Tesla’s Autopilot and so-called “Full Self-Driving” (which, to be clear, is not actually full self-driving) have been under heavy scrutiny. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has linked Tesla’s driver-assist systems to hundreds of crashes, including 13 fatal accidents that resulted in 14 deaths and 49 injuries. That’s just the incidents they’ve formally investigated.
We would do a soup-to-nuts comparison, comparing Tesla’s claimed recent gains in autonomy to a benchmark like Waymo, but Tesla is actually extremely cagey with the details around self-driving. Standard metrics like miles between critical disengagement and accidents (both fatal and otherwise) seem to slip through the cracks. Once those are available, don’t you worry, we’ll run the numbers exhaustively.
If I’m Driving with No Driver, I Want It to be a Waymo
The contrast is clear: rolling out autonomous tech responsibly takes time, investment, and a willingness to admit that cutting corners could cost lives. Waymo is making the case that self-driving cars can actually be safer than human drivers. Tesla, on the other hand, keeps making the case for better regulations.
So yeah, I’m still a little skeptical of fully autonomous vehicles. But if you ask me which company is proving that self-driving can be done right, it sure isn’t the one sending beta software updates to regular drivers and hoping for the best.
