Waymo's Driverless Cars Crash Less Than HumansHeather Diehl - Getty ImagesDriverless cars are here, and they are apparently better drivers than humans, according to a new report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.The independent safety watchdog organization analyzed the accident rate of Waymo's autonomous rideshare vehicles compared with human drivers and found that the driverless vehicles were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes per mile traveled. Crash data was examined for over 50 million driverless miles and was limited to crashes that were reported to law enforcement. Of course, there are some caveats to these findings.Heather Diehl - Getty Images"The results show that, on a limited scale, these driverless cars are safer than human drivers—who can be impaired or drowsy or suffer lapses in attention," IIHS President David Harkey said. "However, the present data collection system isn't good enough to allow continuous monitoring of a large-scale expansion."AdvertisementAdvertisementIIHS researchers gathered crash reports submitted to NHTSA by Cruise, Waymo, Zoox and others from 2021 to 2024 and cleaned up the data. Redundant records and crashes where the automation was not engaged were culled, eliminating a quarter of the reported crashes. Then, researchers calculated whether the remaining crashes would be severe enough to report to the police if a human were driving. Human drivers are generally required to report crashes that cause an injury or result in more than $1000 in property damage.Crashes in which an airbag deployed were classified as serious enough to report to police. Other factors defined the dataset included the nature of the impact and property damage as well as the types of injuries that were reported. That left only 22 percent of the 736 public-road crashes in which the automation was engaged likely to be police-reportable. All told, 89 crashes involved Waymo vehicles, 50 involved Cruise vehicles, 10 involved Zoox vehicles, and 10 involved other companies. Of Waymo's 89 crashes, only 64 of them occurred with the automation engaged.San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers - Getty Images"Overall, Waymo's crash involvement rate was 68 percent lower than that of human drivers—76 percent lower in Phoenix, 35 percent lower in San Francisco, 71 percent lower in Los Angeles, and 4 percent higher in Austin, where the sample size was relatively small," the study reads. "Waymo vehicles were involved in 85 percent fewer single-vehicle crashes and 81 percent fewer injury crashes per VMT than human drivers."Waymo's SAE Level 4 autonomous rideshare program provides driverless mileage data voluntarily, but most other autonomous operators do not provide such data. As a result, IIHS researchers were only able to compare Waymo's 50 million miles of data to 222 billion miles of human driving data. That means that direct comparison between the crash rates of humans and driverless vehicles is difficult without understanding the full scale of autonomous crashes. Regulators in California and at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration require autonomous operators to report fatalities, injuries, or property damage, but there are slight deviations in data collection. The damage threshold for reporting a human accident varies state-to-state, which also throws off direct comparisons between the crash datasets. IIHS officials say that half of all crashes and a third of injury crashes go unreported.You Might Also LikeIf You Can Only Own One Car, Make It One of TheseThese Are the Most Popular Cars by State