Waymo releases new study with Swiss Re

Autonomous driving technology company Waymo is sharing a new research with Swiss Re, which analyzes liability claims related to collisions from 25.3 million fully autonomous miles driven by Waymo. The study uses auto liability claims aggregate statistics as a proxy for at-fault collisions and expands on the company’s previous research.

According to Waymo, the study demonstrates that as the company scaled operations across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, the Waymo Driver significantly outperforms both the overall driving population and the latest generation of human-driven vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems.

The study compared Waymo’s liability claims to human driver baselines, which are based on Swiss Re’s data from over 500,000 claims and over 200 billion miles of exposure. It found that the Waymo Driver demonstrated better safety performance when compared to human-driven vehicles, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and 92% reduction in bodily injury claims. In real numbers, across 25.3 million miles, the Waymo Driver was involved in just nine property damage claims and two bodily injury claims. Both bodily injury claims are still open and described in the paper. For the same distance, human drivers would be expected to have 78 property damage and 26 bodily injury claims.

The Waymo Driver’s safety advantages are also evident even when compared to newer vehicles (2018-2021 models) equipped with modern safety technology. This includes advanced driver assistance systems such as automated emergency braking, forward collision warning, lane keeping assistance, and blind spot warning. When compared to this group, the Waymo Driver showed an 86% reduction in property damage claims and 90% reduction in bodily injury claims.

“Auto insurance claims data, traditionally used to assess human driver liability and risk, is a powerful tool in evaluating the safety performance of autonomous vehicles. This is a truly groundbreaking study that not only validates the Waymo Driver’s strong safety record, but also provides a scalable framework for ongoing assessment of the impact autonomous vehicles make on road safety.” – Mauricio Peña, Chief Safety Officer at Waymo.

“Our research shows how insurance data can help evaluate autonomous vehicle safety and provide the framework needed to support widespread adoption. By analyzing a larger dataset across multiple cities, we deepened our understanding of how this technology performs in real-world conditions. These promising results help underscore the potential of this technology to create a safer future for our roads.” – Ali Shahkarami, Global Head P&C Solutions at Swiss Re.