IIHS Claims Waymos Are Safer Than Human Drivers If You Squint Real Hard While Reading The Data

Key Points:

• The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) claims Waymo's driverless cars have a 68% lower crash involvement rate than human drivers, based on data from 2021 to 2024, with significant reductions in single-vehicle and injury crashes per vehicle miles traveled.
• IIHS focused on Waymo because it is the only company that publicly shares autonomous vehicle mileage data, which is crucial for calculating crash rates; other companies like Tesla and Zoox do not provide comparable data.
• The study faced challenges due to limited and inconsistent autonomous vehicle crash data, with only 22% of reported incidents deemed usable after cleaning and applying human-driver comparable reporting standards.
• Waymo's operations are confined to big cities with lower speeds and no highway driving, which may skew safety comparisons, and the autonomous vehicle data sample size is vastly smaller than that of human drivers, raising questions about statistical relevance.
• IIHS acknowledges the limitations of current data collection methods and calls for improved national crash and vehicle miles traveled data for Level 4 autonomous vehicles to enable more accurate safety evaluations in the future.