According to reports, self-driving companies hope that self-driving technology can reduce road risks. However, so far, no company has been able to fully fulfill the promise of self-driving technology in terms of safety. Researchers at Google's self-driving subsidiary Waymo unveiled a new research method on December 20 that can meaningfully compare the driving performance of human and self-driving systems.
The company said the new approach has shown safety benefits in the three locations where Waymo operates driverless services, with an 85% reduction in crashes that resulted in injuries and a 57% drop in crashes requiring police reports compared to human drivers.
Trent Victor, Waymo's director of safety research and best practices, said: "We are seeing clear results. The self-driving system encounters far fewer collisions than human drivers."
In 2023, Waymo's self-driving cars drove 7.1 million miles (approximately 1,142 kilometers). The company estimates that autonomous driving systems cause 17 fewer injuries than human drivers when driving the same miles.
According to Waymo's estimates, over the 1.76 million miles (2.83 million kilometers) driven in San Francisco, the number of accidents resulting in injuries to members has decreased by 9, and the number of crashes requiring reports to the police has decreased by 7; in the Phoenix (Phoenix), the number of accidents resulting in injuries to 5.34 million miles (8.59 million kilometers) has decreased by 8, and the number of crashes requiring reports to the police has decreased by 13.
While the data released by Waymo is suspected of "glorifying" itself, some outsiders responsible for reviewing the company's research have also sounded optimistic voices.
Carol Flannagan, a professor at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, said: "This is the strongest evidence we have that self-driving cars have fewer crashes than humans. This is actually an important milestone."
In addition, David Zuby, chief research officer of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, also conducted research on Waymo’s report. He said: "These reports represent a good faith effort by Waymo, and these results are very encouraging and represent another step forward in our continuous deepening of understanding."
The researchers culled all crashes involving Waymo's self-driving cars from data reported by Waymo to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which outside researchers used to access the same publicly available data.
Factors such as driving environment, population density, road type and vehicle characteristics all affect crash rates to varying degrees, so Waymo used and compared county-level data in its study.
Flannagan said this is a very important step. "If you're using national data, it's mostly from very safe state highways," he said. "So Waymo took a more in-depth approach and they compared more specific mileage data."
For example, Waymo's research shows that with human drivers behind the wheel, San Francisco has 5.55 accidents per million miles driven, three times the national average. By comparison, Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, averages just 1.88 accidents per million miles driven.
Taking all locations into account, Waymo's self-driving systems had an injury-injured crash rate of 0.41 per million miles driven, compared with 2.78 for human drivers.
Waymo's research comes at a good time for the self-driving industry, which is currently in crisis. In October this year, a self-driving car owned by General Motors' Cruise, one of Waymo's main competitors in the self-driving taxi field, had an accident in California, knocking down a pedestrian. California subsequently suspended Cruise's operating license.
In the wake of the crash, consumers and regulators have renewed a years-long quest to establish accurate metrics for measuring the safety of self-driving cars.
Similarly, other autonomous driving companies do not want regulators and consumers to confuse them with Cruise, and each company is sparing no effort to emphasize the difference between its technology and Cruise.
Victor said: "We want the outside world to use our own indicators to judge us. We have published more than 20 papers, and we are working hard to be accurate and then bring the technology to the market. We hope to let people clearly see the difference between us and other enterprises, so that people realize that we are expanding in a responsible way."
Flannagan said the self-driving industry needs more research, especially as companies like Waymo have driven millions of miles in self-driving cars. The autonomous driving industry is still in its infancy, and questions about the safety of autonomous vehicles will continue to exist.