Waymo’s self-driving cars are apparently every insurance company’s dream

Waymo’s fleet of self-driving vehicles is and a study shows that this can reduce the number of accidents on roads. The an unpaid partnership between Waymo itself and reinsurer Swiss Re, indicated that Waymo’s cars generate fewer insurance claims than cars driven by humans.

Swiss Re analyzed liability claims from collisions over a distance of 41.3 million kilometers driven by Waymo’s autonomous cars. The study also compared Waymo’s liability claims to human driver baselines, based on data from more than 500,000 claims and more than 200 billion driving miles. The results showed that Waymo Driver “demonstrated better safety performance compared to human driver vehicles.”

The study found that cars driven by Alphabet’s Waymo Driver resulted in 88 percent fewer property damage claims and 92 percent fewer bodily injury claims.

Swiss Re has also devised a new benchmark to compare Waymo Driver against only newer vehicles with advanced safety technology such as driver assistance systems, automatic emergency braking and blind spot warning systems, rather than against the entire corpus of those 200 billion miles driven. In this comparison, Waymo still came out ahead with an 86 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 90 percent reduction in bodily injury claims.

Of course, there are two glaring issues. First, Waymo currently only operates in cities, which, while accounting for the majority of accidents in the US, account for a large share of accidents in rural areas. of accidents (especially fatal ones) that are proportional to the number of accidents. (By the way, the study says that including suburban data in the base statistics actually conflicts with Waymo’s actual safety numbers.) Second, Waymo simply hasn’t been around that long. It is very difficult to get an accurate measurement of the system when the real world testing period has been so relatively short.

The numbers may look good for Waymo Driver in surveys, but they’re not perfect by any means. Waymo issued its second recall this summer when one of its robotaxis smashed . The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Waymo and found 24 incidents involving accidents or traffic violations.