Waymo Proves Autonomous Vehicles Safer Than Human Drivers

【PCauto】Recently, Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, released a landmark research report revealing that its fully autonomous vehicles had demonstrated significantly superior safety performance compared to human drivers in specific scenarios after accumulating approximately 91.25 million kilometers of driving.

This third-party-verified study marked the first time quantitative data had been adopted to highlight the groundbreaking progress of autonomous driving technology in reducing traffic accidents, while also exposing the real-world challenges that still need to be overcome.

According to a peer-reviewed report published in the Traffic Injury Prevention Journal, Waymo's driverless vehicles have shown overwhelming advantages in 11 common collision scenarios:

• Rear-end collision rates decreased by 40%, while secondary collisions caused by lane changes dropped by 35%;
• Injury rates involving pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists fell by 92%, 82%, and 82%, respectively;
• At intersections—the leading cause of traffic accidents in the U.S.—collision rates decreased by 96%.

These data proved that Waymo Driver's system reaction speed and decision-making logic have surpassed human limits. In addition, the research team pointed out that the vehicles have achieved millisecond-level danger anticipation through LiDAR and multi-sensor fusion technology, with decision-making accuracy exceeding human performance by more than threefold, particularly in extreme scenarios.

Despite the impressive data, the report also revealed that: within the 48-month testing cycle, Waymo vehicles had a total of 48 accidents resulting in injury (including 18 cases of airbag deployment), and 2 suspected cases of serious injuries. Noteworthy, all accidents were deemed to be caused by violations from other road users, and there were no malicious incidents of autonomous vehicles actively colliding with pedestrians.

"Severe injury cases remain statistical outliers and require validation over millions of miles," said Mauricio Peña, Waymo's Chief Safety Officer.

Currently, Waymo has 0.008 injuries per 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) driven, better than the 0.087 incurred by human drivers. However, Waymo has emphasized that only when the test mileage breaks through 16 billion kilometers, can reliable conclusions be made about the probability of serious accidents.

Industrial experts pointed out that Waymo's breakthroughs could reshape traffic regulations and the insurance system. Michael Clamann, a researcher at the Duke University Transportation Research Institute, commented: "This is not only a technical victory, but also a turning point in social trust in autonomous driving."

But skeptics argued that Waymo's testing had primarily focused on low-complexity suburban roads (e.g., Phoenix suburbs), leaving its algorithm's performance in dense urban environments unproven.

Waymo revealed that its next step would be to expand test in congested cities such as New York and Chicago, and explore the upgrade of safety models in mixed-traffic scenarios. With California and other regions issuing commercial permits for autonomous vehicles, the debate over "whether machines can be safer than humans" is shifting from labs to real-world roads.