Waymo is 2/3 safer than a human driver, says IIHS – with some caveats

This is a road-safety story rather than a home-energy one, but here's the gist. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety looked at federal crash data from 2021-2024 and found that Waymo's self-driving taxis got into 68% fewer crashes serious enough to report to police, compared with the average human driver, over 50 million miles of autonomous driving. Waymo's crashes also tended to be less severe. The pattern held in three of the four cities studied — Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — though Waymo had a slightly higher crash rate than humans in Austin, likely because so few miles had been logged there.

The study has real limits. Waymo avoids highways and drives more often on slow city streets, which can make its numbers look better than a fair side-by-side comparison would. Nearly half its miles carried no passenger, so there was no one inside to get hurt, which also lowers its injury count. And the overall sample size, while large for a robotaxi study, is tiny next to the roughly 222 billion human miles driven in those same areas, so some crash categories only have a handful of incidents recorded.

None of this changes anything about your house or your utility bills — it's simply an update on how self-driving cars are doing on safety, with real numbers but real caveats attached.