this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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No, they actually have fewer total accidents per mile than actual taxi drivers. Did you read the link you posted? They are involved in 1.5 times more accidents with severe or fatal injuries per mile, but that is comparing Waymos driving in more open cities at higher speeds to taxis in the very slow speed, high traffic city of NYC where the primary use case is different. Also, the only fatal accidents (2 of them) have been the fault of other cars, not Waymos, so it's kinda unfair to include those.
“The researchers compared Waymo’s nationwide crash data with New York City’s for-hire fleet and found the robotaxis had a serious injury or fatal crash rate about 1.5 times higher per mile driven.”
Yes, thank you for quoting exactly what I said??
You are quoting the serious or fatal injury stats. The overall injury accident rate, though, as quoted from the article: "When all injury-causing crashes were considered, Waymo performed better. Its robotaxis were involved in 67% fewer injury crashes per million miles than New York City's for-hire vehicles."
Fatalities and serious injuries sound like a far more important statistic to optimize for in terms of public safety.
They would need to have more of them first for the data to actually be accurate at all. From what I could find, there have been no Waymo caused fatalities - two deaths caused by other drivers though - and four serious injuries, for roughly 220 million miles driven.
While you can then state that the rate of fatalities is 1 per 110 million miles, it's not really useful in any way.
Agreed. I'm just correcting misinformation and giving context.
Looking at the raw data from NYC, in 2025 there were 15 crashes with fatalities and only 3 with serious injuries. To follow your train of thought, I would think the survivability of a serious crash is important to optimize for, and Waymo has a better ratio for that (4 to 2 versus 3 to 15).