Waymo is using insurance data to make the case that its self-driving cars are safer than human drivers. The report, a result of the collaboration first announced last year between the Alphabet-owned company and the insurer Swiss Re, is intended to show how driverless vehicles crash less often and damage less property than human-driven vehicles.
From an article in The Verge by Andrew Hawkins.
Waymo’s data comes at a time of increased scrutiny of self-driving vehicles after California regulators voted to dramatically expand the ability of robotaxi companies to operate in San Francisco despite warnings from city officials about driverless vehicles blocking roads and delaying emergency responders.
The study compares Waymo’s liability claims data with those claims filed by human drivers calibrated by mileage and zip code. Based on Swiss Re’s data from over 600,000 claims and over 125 billion miles, “these baselines are extremely robust and highly significant,” Waymo says. The company plans to submit and publish this paper in a peer reviewed journal, according to Waymo spokesperson Katherine Barna.
According to the comparisons, Waymo’s vehicles are safer than human-driven ones. The company’s driverless vehicles, in which there was no safety driver behind the steering wheel, reduced the frequency of bodily injury claims by 100 percent, compared to Swiss Re’s human baseline of 1.11 claims per million miles. That was based on over 3.8 million miles of fully autonomous driving by Waymo in California and Arizona.
This held true for Waymo vehicles in autonomous mode with a safety driver behind the wheel. Those vehicles drove down injury claims by 95 percent for over 35 million miles, logging 0.09 claims versus 1.09 claims per million miles for the human baseline. And Waymo also saw a 76 percent drop in the frequency of property damage claims (a decrease from 3.26 to 0.78 claims per million miles) when compared to human drivers.
For the complete article on the use of insurance data CLICK HERE.
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