Comparison of Waymo rider-only crash data to human benchmarks at 7.1 million miles.

Objectives: This article examines the safety performance of the Waymo Driver, an SAE level 4 automated driving system (ADS) used in a rider-only (RO) ride-hailing application without a human driver, either in the vehicle or remotely.

Methods: ADS crash data were derived from NHTSA's Standing General Order (SGO) reporting over 7.14 million RO miles through the end of October 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona, San Francisco, California, and Los Angeles, California, and compared to human benchmarks from the literature.

Comparative safety performance of autonomous- and human drivers: A real-world case study of the Waymo Driver.

After several years of public road testing, the commercial deployment of fully autonomous vehicles-or Automated Driving Systems (ADS)-is poised to scale substantially following significant technological advancements and recent regulatory approvals. However, the fundamental question of whether an ADS is safer than its human counterparts remain largely unsolved due to several challenges in establishing an appropriate real-world safety comparison method. As scaling ensues, the lack of an established method can contribute to misinterpretations or uncertainties regarding ADS safety and impede the continuous and consistent assessment of ADS performance.