IIHS Claims Waymos Are Safer Than Human Drivers If You Squint Real Hard While Reading The Data

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has released a study claiming that Waymo’s driverless cars are safer than human-driven vehicles.

However, the study’s methodology has been called into question due to the limited and inconsistent data available on autonomous vehicle crashes.

The IIHS had to perform significant statistical adjustments to compare the crash rates of Waymo vehicles to those of human-driven vehicles, including eliminating duplicate records and applying standards for reporting crashes to police.

The study found that Waymo’s crash involvement rate was 68% lower than that of human drivers, with 85% fewer single-vehicle crashes and 81% fewer injury crashes per vehicle mile traveled.

However, the study’s reliability has been questioned due to the small sample size of autonomous vehicle crashes, with only 89 police-reportable crashes involving Waymo vehicles compared to over 24 million reported crashes involving human drivers.

The IIHS itself has acknowledged the limitations of its study, stating that the method of coding narratives is unsustainable and that national crash and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) data collection for Level 4 vehicles needs to be improved for more timely and accurate safety evaluations.