New: The last gasp of the Lost CauseA Waymo minivan moves along a city street as an empty driver’s seat and a moving steering wheel drive passengers during an autonomous vehicle ride, on April 7, 2021, in Chandler, Ariz. The U.S. government’s highway safety agency has opened …
“At Waymo we currently serve over 50,000 weekly trips for our riders in some of the most challenging and complex environments. We are proud of our performance and safety record over tens of millions of autonomous miles driven, as well as our demonstrated commitment to safety transparency,” a Waymo spokesperson said of the investigation.
The recent investigations have put a damper on what had been seen as progress. Data recorded by NHTSA shows that robotaxi incidents in the first three months of 2024 were cut in half from a year ago, with 69 crashes involving autonomous vehicles compared to 143 in the first three months of 2023. “We are unable to get a true sense of what is happening on the road. We respect the need for protecting confidential business information. However, we have no idea what rubric NHTSA is using to make these determinations,” Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety President Cathy Chase said.
“Let me try to distill it down to one number,” said Waymo’s director of product management, David Margines. “When you take our performance, being better than a human, for each of the miles we drive and then you compare that to the human benchmark and you multiply it out, we estimate that we have reduced more than 25 injury-causing collisions.”