Waymo (@Waymo) on X

Our new safety data is in 📈 Over 170M miles through Dec 2025, the Waymo Driver was involved in 13x fewer serious injury or worse crashes than human drivers in those same cities. At our current scale, that means preventing a serious injury crash every 8 days—a real, positive

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Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans.

The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they hit the child at a lower speed than a human would have because of the reaction time.

I would rather be in an area where only Waymo's are allowed than an area where they are banned.

Waymo saved my life in LA.

When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.

In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.

Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.

Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.

I hope you are misremembering. Swerving is most often the wrong choice, and I would be disappointed if Waymo were opting for that. By far the best option is to panic stop. Human or robot, physics is a harsh mistress and swerving is more likely to make you lose control and end up in a much more unforgiving wreck.

> swerving is more likely to make you lose control

Even if you're not a panicky human but a optimally regulated control system?

The optimally regulated system doesn't know the road conditions that well. When the road surface is more slippery, it has the most profound effect on lateral friction, way more than braking.
The Waymo driver can measure the speed and the acceleration of the offending car and calculate, within at most tens of ms, its range of likely future trajectories. And it can calculate its own likely trajectories under maximum braking. And it can track exactly where all obstacles are that would matter if it swerves. All at once. And it can execute that emergency lane change with the control input that is least likely to cause a loss of control and most likely to successfully avoid the other car. It even has processing power to spare to keep playing that Spotify ad!

> The optimally regulated system doesn't know the road conditions that well.

I'd like to introduce you to what autonomous cars were already able to do in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khX0UCqcR3M

MARTYKhana - Aerial View Uncut Footage

YouTube