Google’s Waymo hopes to lure weary passengers with new safety study on driverless cars – NBC Bay Area

Hundreds of driverless cars shuttling passengers are now an everyday part of traffic in San Francisco. But how safe are they and how do they compare to human drivers? Google’s Waymo, one of the largest driverless car companies in the city, just released a new study that attempts to shed light on its own track record.

“It shows that we’re safe,” said Trent Victor, Waymo director of Safety Research and Best Practices. “We’re seeing the fruits of our focus on safety.”

Waymo, in partnership with insurance giant Swiss Re, analyzed crash data from insurance claims in an effort to draw fair comparisons between driverless car collisions and accidents involving human drivers, a complex feat that has repeatedly proven difficult for the autonomous vehicle industry.

“The kind of reporting that is used in insurance is much more standardized than any other kind of collision data that you have around,” said Luigi Di Lillo, head of Products and Partnerships for Swiss Re. “The novelty of this study is to connect the insurance claims data to safety directly.”

The study found car accidents involving property damage occurred 76% more often when humans were behind the wheel compared to Waymo’s driverless vehicles, which currently operate in San Francisco and Phoenix.

“This is an amazing moment,” said Victor, who spoke to the Investigative Unit in his only television interview. “I think this is an opportunity for people to get to know Waymo as something that’s different than our competitors.”

Waymo’s main competition is GM’s Cruise, which recently cut its fleet of driverless cars in half at the direction of California’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV announced its request at the same time it revealed it was launching an investigation into Cruise’s safety record following a series of headline-making accidents, including a collision with a San Francisco fire truck. 

While the DMV continues its investigation, Cruise’s driverless fleet will be capped at 50 cars during the day and 150 cars at night. In August, Waymo told state regulators it possessed a total fleet of 250 driverless cars in San Francisco, of which about 100 are on the road at any given time. Those figures remain largely unchanged, according to a Waymo spokesperson.

Just last month, state regulators with the California Public Utilities Commission granted approval to both Waymo and Cruise to expand their ride-hailing services across San Francisco 24/7, with no limits on how many driverless cars they can put on the road.

Waymo’s new study also notes the company’s driverless vehicles have not been involved in a single crash resulting in “bodily injury,” however, some critics have questioned whether the cars have been on the road long enough to begin making fair comparisons to human drivers. For example, Waymo’s driverless cars have traveled roughly 4 million miles, but human drivers log more than 3 trillion miles each year.

“It’s interesting that we were able to show statistical significance with so little data,” Victor said. “That has to do with two things: one is that we have very robust baselines from Swiss Re, and the other is that we have incredible safety performance.”

Waymo did not release any of the raw data it used to come up with its findings, saying that information is “proprietary.” While leaders at Waymo and Swiss Re said they do plan to eventually submit their study to a scientific journal so that it can be independently reviewed, neither company would say when that might happen.

“We are targeting the right journal,” said Di Lillo. “I’m very picky on that.”

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