11.35 - Safer
35th edition of the 11th year of SmartDrivingCars eLetter
Waymo's autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than human-driven ones, says new research led by Swiss Re
Company News, Sept 6, "Waymo and Swiss Re, one of the world's leading reinsurers, partnered in 2022 to advance risk assessment methodologies and approaches to evaluating safety of autonomous vehicles.
Today, we're sharing new research led by Swiss Re which shows Waymo's autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than those driven by humans. In the over 3.8 million miles that Waymo drove without a human behind the steering wheel across San Francisco, CA and Phoenix, AZ, there were zero bodily injury claims and a significant reduction in the property damage claims frequency.
While the research community and general public have long asked whether an autonomous driver is safer than human drivers, the industry has faced challenges in developing a robust and well-calibrated human performance benchmark for comparison. This study addresses these challenges by establishing a comparison baseline based on liability insurance claims data.
The study compares Waymo's liability claims data with mileage- and zip-code-calibrated private passenger vehicle (human driver) baselines established by Swiss Re. Based on Swiss Re's data from over 600,000 claims and over 125 billion miles of exposure, these baselines are extremely robust and highly significant.
The findings indicate that in comparison to the Swiss Re human driver baseline, the Waymo Driver — Waymo's fully autonomous driving technology — significantly reduced the frequency of property damage claims by 76% (a decrease from 3.26 to 0.78 claims per million miles) when compared to human drivers. Furthermore, it completely eliminated bodily injury claims, a drastic contrast to the Swiss Re human driver baseline of 1.11 claims per million miles…." Read more
Hmmmm… Compelling findings from folks whose livelihood is focused on assessing safety. As the San Francisco deployment has demonstrated, Waymo passes the proof-of-concept "Turing Test" for safety. However, they have yet to demonstrate that they can pass a proof-of-market test. Alain