Waymo’s self-driving cars are clearly an insurance company’s dream

A number of Waymo’s self-driving cars and studies show that they can reduce accidents on the roads. An unpaid partnership between Waymo itself and the insurer Swiss Re, has shown that Waymo’s vehicles lead to fewer insurance claims than those used by people.

Swiss Re analyzed liability claims from collisions involving 25.3 million miles driven by Waymo’s autonomous vehicles. The study also compared Waymo’s liability claims to a driver base based on data from more than 500,000 claims and more than 200 billion driving miles. The results found that Waymo Driver “demonstrated better safety performance compared to human-driven vehicles.”.

The study found that Alphabet’s Waymo Driver-powered vehicles led to an 88 percent reduction in property damage claims and 92 percent fewer personal injury claims.

Swiss Re also developed a new metric to compare Waymo Driver to only new vehicles with advanced safety technologies, such as driver assistance, adaptive emergency braking and blind spot warning systems, rather than the entire chorus of those 200 billion driving miles. In this comparison, Waymo still came out on top with an 86 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 90 percent reduction in bodily injury claims.

Of course, there are two obvious issues. The first is that Waymo currently only operates in cities, which, yes, cause the majority of crashes in the US, but rural areas have more accidents (mostly fatal) in proportion to their population. (Research, incidentally, says that having outside data included in the underlying metrics actually lowers Waymo’s actual safety numbers.) Second: Waymo hasn’t been around that long. It is very difficult to get an accurate estimate of a system when its real-world testing time is very short.

The numbers may look good on Waymo Driver in lessons but they are not perfect at any time. Waymo issued its second recall of the summer when one of its robots crashed. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration went to Waymo and found 24 incidents involving accidents or traffic violations.