Waymo is so safe that if every car on the road per

Waymo is so safe that if every car on the road performed like a Waymo, about 9 percent of America’s life expectancy gap would disappear. That is the scale of impact we are talking about when traffic deaths, one of the leading causes of lost life years, are reduced this dramatically.

The Rider-Only service has now logged more than 96 million miles through June 2025, with 46 million in Phoenix, 30 million in San Francisco, 16 million in Los Angeles, and 3 million in Austin. Serious injury or worse crashes happen at 0.02 incidents per million miles for Waymo compared to 0.23 for human drivers in the same cities, a 91 percent reduction. Airbag deployment crashes are 0.35 per million miles for Waymo compared to 1.65 for humans, a 79 percent drop. Crashes involving any injury are 0.80 per million miles for Waymo compared to 3.96 for humans, an 80 percent reduction.The results are consistent across cities. In San Francisco, serious injury crashes are 0.07 per million miles for Waymo compared to 0.47 for humans. In Phoenix, the Waymo figure is nearly zero against a human rate of 0.12. Crashes involving vulnerable road users also show striking reductions. Waymo has 92 percent fewer pedestrian injury crashes, 78 percent fewer cyclist injury crashes, and 89 percent fewer motorcycle injury crashes. That translates to 35 pedestrian crashes avoided, 22 cyclist crashes avoided, and 16 motorcycle crashes avoided over the same distance.

Crash severity is another defining feature. Nearly half of Waymo’s reportable collisions involve less than a one mile per hour change in speed. In San Francisco it is about 50 percent, in Phoenix around 43 percent, and in Los Angeles about 44 percent. These are not high energy impacts. The system often reduces what could have been significant collisions into low level contacts that barely matter. Breakdowns by crash type highlight the clearest breakthrough. Intersection crashes, historically one of the most dangerous scenarios for human drivers, are reduced by 96 percent when looking at injury outcomes. Other crash categories including pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, single vehicle, and secondary crashes all show significant reductions as well. Waymo’s advantage is concentrated in the situations that create the most harm on the road.

The way the comparisons are made is also important. Waymo operates mostly in dense urban streets with higher risks, so the human benchmarks are adjusted to match those environments. That adjustment raises human crash rates by 18 to 29 percent compared to raw averages, creating a tougher baseline. Even with that stricter yardstick, the safety gains remain overwhelming. This is not incremental progress. The data shows far fewer serious injuries, fewer crashes involving vulnerable road users, fewer high energy collisions, and many incidents softened into harmless contacts. The conversation has shifted from whether autonomous vehicles can be safer than humans to how much harm can be removed from the system if this safety profile scales nationally.

Source: StockMarket.News