Self-driving cars are much safer than those driven by people, Swiss Re found

According to a study conducted by insurance company Swiss Re and commissioned by autonomous driving technology developer Waymo, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles cause less property damage and fewer injuries in crashes than human-driven vehicles, The Verge writes.

Image source: Waymo

In the study, Swiss Re analyzed collision claims based on 25.3 million miles (40.7 million km) of Waymo autonomous vehicles driven in four cities: Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles -Angeles and Austin. The data was compared to a baseline of human-driven vehicles based on Swiss Re data from more than 500,000 claims and more than 200 billion miles driven.

Image source: Swiss Re/The Verge

Waymo’s autonomous vehicles were safer than cars with human drivers, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in personal injury claims.

After just 25.3 million miles driven by Waymo’s self-driving cars, the company has only faced nine property damage claims and two personal injury claims. The average person driving a similar distance could have 78 property damage claims and 26 personal injury claims, insurers said.

The last time Waymo compared with Swiss Re’s liability data, its fully autonomous vehicles had driven 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) in California and Arizona. Now the mileage is much higher. The company recently announced that its autonomous vehicles will travel 4 million miles (6.4 million km) in 2024 alone.

The data presented is important because there is still fierce debate about the safety of self-driving cars. Companies like Waymo argue that autonomous cars are necessary to reduce road deaths—about 40,000 such accidents occur a year in the United States alone. The arguments are that driverless cars are never drunk, tired or distracted, and are able to avoid the human errors that so often lead to accidents. Opponents of driverless cars note that current statistics are not enough to say with complete confidence about the safety of driverless cars. Still, there are still far fewer driverless cars on the roads than cars with a person behind the wheel.