Waymo, the autonomous driving division of Alphabet, has released a new safety research report saying that its Waymo Driver self-driving car performs significantly better than human drivers. Waymo was developed from Google's self-driving program, which was originally founded in January 2009 and became an independent company in December 2016. Currently, the company's services cover parts of San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
According to the report, its self-driving cars have an accident rate that is 85% lower than that of human drivers. It is reported that Waymo has submitted the research report to scientific journals for peer review, a process that may take several months. At the same time, some academics have seen the study and said there are reasons to be optimistic about the safety of autonomous driving technology.
The release of Waymo's new report comes at a critical time in the autonomous driving industry. Waymo said its vehicles have had only three accidents that resulted in injuries in a total of more than 7 million miles driven in the three cities, two in Phoenix and one in San Francisco. According to Christopher Kusano, a Waymo safety researcher and one of the study's authors, all three accidents were minor.
Another way is to look at the crash rate per million miles driven. Human drivers are 278 accidents. Waymo driverless cars are only 041。In 2022, the company published two scientific articles** that compared the performance of self-driving cars to human driving. The first analyzes the reaction time when a collision is imminent, and the other proposes a novel method to evaluate the ability of an autonomous driving system to avoid a collision.
The new report comes a day after Waymo released another report saying that Tesla drivers had the highest accident rate, which appears to be in stark contrast to the data released by Tesla itself that shows Autopilot is much safer than human drivers.