In Contrast To Cruise, Waymo Is Touting Its Vehicles' Safety In New Report

Waymo has a new peer-reviewed study (PDF) to share that shows how safe its autonomous cars are compared to cars driven by humans. SFist reports: As the Chronicle notes, the study covers the 1.76 million driverless miles that Waymo's cars have registered in San Francisco so far, along with about 5.4 million miles registered elsewhere. It compares data about vehicle crashes of all kinds, and finds that Waymo vehicles were in involved in crashes resulting in injury or property damage far less often than human-driven cars. In fact, the 'human benchmark' -- which is what Waymo is using to refer to human averages for various driving foibles -- is 5.55 crashes per 1 million miles. And the Waymo robot benchmark is just 0.6 crashes per 1 million miles. The overall figure for crash rates found Waymo's to be 6.7 times lower (0.41 incidents per 1 million miles) than the rate of humans (2.78 per million). This included data from Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The report's 'Conclusions' section is less than definitive in its findings, noting that the data of police-reported incidents across various jurisdictions may not be consistent or 'apples-to-apples.' 'The benchmark rates themselves... varied considerably between locations and within the same location,' the report's authors say. 'This raises questions whether the benchmark data sources have comparable reporting thresholds (surveillance bias) or if other factors that were not controlled for in the benchmarks (time of day, mix of driving) is affecting the benchmark rates.'

Still, the report, one of several that Alphabet-owned Waymo has commissioned in recent months, is convincingly thorough and academic in its approach, and seems to be great news for the company as it hopes to scale up -- starting with the enormous LA market. Waymo, like Cruise previously, has sought to convince a skeptical public that driverless vehicles are, in fact, safer than humans. And this is another step toward doing so -- even if people are going to be naturally wary of sharing the road with too many robots.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.