December 20, 2024 – According to a report published today by Engadget, Waymo, a leading company in autonomous driving, has collaborated with Swiss Re, a renowned reinsurance company, on a study that reveals Waymo’s self-driving cars result in fewer insurance claims compared to human-driven vehicles.
The study conducted by Swiss Re analyzed collision liability claims from Waymo’s autonomous fleet, covering 25.3 million miles of driving data. This was compared to traditional human driver data, which comprised 500,000 claims from 200 billion miles of driving. The findings indicate that Waymo Driver’s safety performance surpasses that of human drivers.
Waymo, citing the research, stated that its self-driving vehicles have reduced insurance claims by 88% for property damage and 92% for bodily injury, compared to human-driven cars.
Swiss Re introduced a new comparison method, pitting Waymo against new vehicles equipped with advanced safety features like driver assistance, automatic emergency braking, and blind-spot warning systems. The data from this standard comparison showed that Waymo reduced property damage claims by 86% and bodily injury claims by 90% when compared to these assisted driving models.
However, the report raises two significant points. Firstly, Waymo currently operates only in urban areas. Although cities are indeed the primary locations for traffic accidents in the US, rural areas have a higher proportion of accidents, especially fatal ones, considering their population. The study notes that including suburban data in the benchmark calculation would actually diminish Waymo’s safety performance. Secondly, as an emerging technology, Waymo has been in operation for a relatively short period, making it challenging to derive an accurate safety assessment from such limited testing data.
Previously, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, had praised Tesla’s leadership in the autonomous driving sector, placing it alongside Waymo as industry frontrunners. “Clearly, Tesla is a leader in this area. In my view, Tesla and Waymo are the top two,” Pichai stated.
