Waymo says it's robotaxis are safer than human drivers?

Did a little investigating. Here's what I found (Understanding Ai website). Generally speaking, it's likely that autonomous cars will continue to improve and become safer. Humans...haha...right.

It's also likely that Waymo and eventual competitors will be considerably more profitable for Uber's ridesharing model sometime soon

Based on the latest data, Waymo's autonomous vehicles significantly outperform human drivers in safety across multiple metrics:

Key Safety Comparisons

Injury-causing crashes: Waymo shows an 85% reduction, with 0.41 incidents per million miles compared to 2.78 for human drivers — meaning human drivers have a crash rate 6.8 times higher for injury-causing accidents.

Police-reported crashes: Waymo demonstrates a 57% reduction with 2.1 incidents per million miles versus 4.85 for humans — a 2.3 times higher rate for human drivers.

Most severe crashes (airbag deployment): Through 22 million miles, Waymo had 84% fewer crashes with airbag deployment compared to human drivers.

Vulnerable road users: Crashes injuring pedestrians were 92% less common, while crashes injuring cyclists were reduced by 78% relative to typical human drivers .

Context

These results come from over 96 million fully autonomous miles driven through June 2025 in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin. The methodology has been peer-reviewed and adjusts for the specific geographic areas and conditions where Waymo operates.

Importantly, when reviewing Waymo's serious crashes individually, very few were actually Waymo's fault — most involved human drivers rear-ending stopped Waymos, running red lights, or otherwise entering Waymo's right of way.

The data strongly suggests autonomous vehicles are already substantially safer than human drivers on a per-mile basis.

Waymo says its robotaxis are involved in 80% fewer injury-causing crashes than human-driven cars

ChartR, Dec 8, 2025

After killing a beloved neighborhood cat a little over a month ago, Alphabet’s self-driving car company, Waymo, is once again having to defend its safety protocols.

Last Friday, Waymo said that it’s planning a software recall to prevent its vehicles from failing to fully slow or stop for school buses, in response to the NHTSA launching a probe into the company. The investigation follows several incidents of Waymo cars illegally passing school buses in freshly-fleeted cities Atlanta and Austin.

In an emailed statement, the company said it updated the software “as soon as the issue was identified” on November 17, per TechCrunch, with the autonomous vehicle giant also noting its “strong safety record.”

Buckle up

As detailed in a fascinating essay in The New York Times, data recently released by Waymo in its Safety Impact Report — which covers “nearly 100 million driverless miles” across four American cities — found that Waymo vehicles were involved in 91% fewer crashes causing serious injury or worse, and 80% fewer crashes causing any injury, than human drivers.

While it’s still a relatively small pool of results in very specific locations (and cynics may be quick to point out that the analysis was carried out by Waymo itself), the statistics are pretty staggering, with the NYTimes piece noting that “other autonomous vehicle companies don’t report or they report incomplete data.”

With Waymo, Tesla, and others making expeditious progress in the race for self-driving supremacy, arguably the biggest obstacle for autonomous vehicles remains psychological, rather than technological, as every headline-grabbing infraction weighs heavily on the minds of risk-averse would-be riders.