Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Accident Updates and Claims

TapTechNews June 20th news, the self-driving car subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, Waymo, issued a statement on June 19th, stating that its self-driving cars' ability to avoid crashes is still 200% to 350% higher than that of humans. This is the first official statement from Waymo after a self-driving car of Waymo crashed into a utility pole for no reason, resulting in the recall of 672 cars three weeks ago.

Waymo was established in 2016 and split off from Google's self-driving car division; officially announced the start of testing self-driving car technology in October 2017; launched a self-driving taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona in 2018; and was officially approved to transport passengers in California in 2019. In 2020, Waymo became the first company to provide fully self-driving taxi services to the public, and was officially approved to carry out driverless commercial business in California in 2021.

Waymo's self-driving business has had multiple traffic accidents during testing and operation.

According to TapTechNews' previous report, in October 2020, the public road safety performance data report released by Waymo showed that in the whole year of 2019, Waymo cars drove a total of 6.1 million miles (about 9.82 million kilometers) in Phoenix, among which 65,000 miles (about 105,000 kilometers) were completed under driverless conditions, and a total of 18 minor accidents and 29 near-miss accidents occurred.

As of 2021, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has recorded 150 car accidents involving Waymo vehicles.

In December 2023, two Waymos hit the same truck on the freeway.

In February 2024, a Waymo car collided with a cyclist in San Francisco, causing minor injuries to the latter.

In May 2024, the NHTSA received 22 accident reports from Waymo (including 17 crash accidents) and launched an investigation into the performance of Waymo's self-driving car.

Despite the continuous reports of various accidents, Waymo officials still wrote on X yesterday: New data shows that the WaymoDriver continues to make the roads safer. As of the end of March, the WaymoDriver has driven more than 14.8 million miles, and its performance in avoiding crashes that cause personal injury is 3.5 times higher than that of human drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix, and its performance in avoiding police-reported crashes is 2 times higher than that of human drivers.